Frederick Denison Maurice

FROM-THE- LIBRARY-OF
TRIN1TYCOLLEGETORQNTO

LEADERS OF THE CHURCH

1800 — 1900

EDITED BY

GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL

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OTHERS IN PREPARATION

LEADERS OF THE CHURCH

1800-1900

EDITED BY GEORGE W. E. RUSSELL

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE

BY

C. F. G. MASTERMAN

A. R. MOWBRAY & CO. LIMITED

LONDON : 34 Great Castle Street, Oxford Circus, W.

OXFORD : 106 S. Aldate's Street

1907

112022

NOV 0 3 1982

TO

J. ARMITAGE ROBINSON, D.D.

DEAN OF WESTMINSTER

IN REMEMBRANCE
MARCH, 1899 APRIL, I9OO

GENERAL PREFACE

TT seems expedient that the origin and scope
of this new Series of Biographies should
be briefly explained.

Messrs. A. R. Mowbray and Co. had formed
the opinion that Ecclesiastical Biography is apt
to lose in attractiveness and interest, by reason
of the technical and professional spirit in which
it is generally handled. Acting on this opinion,
they resolved to publish some short Lives of
" Leaders of the Modern Church," written
exclusively by laymen. They conceived that
a certain freshness might thus be imparted
to subjects already more or less familiar, and
that a class of readers, who are repelled by
the details of ecclesiasticism, might be attracted
by a more human, and in some sense a more
secular, treatment of religious lives.

This conception of Ecclesiastical Biography
agreed entirely with my own prepossessions ;
and I gladly acceded to the publishers' request
that I would undertake the general superin
tendence of the series. I am not without
the hope that these handy and readable books
may be of some service to the English-«clergy.
They set forth the impressions produced on

vii

Vlll

the minds of devout and interested lay-people
by the characters and careers of some great
ecclesiastics. It seems possible that a know
ledge of those impressions may stimulate
and encourage that " interest in public affairs,
in the politics and welfare of the country,"
and in "the civil life of the people," which
Cardinal Manning noted as the peculiar virtue
of the English Priesthood ; and the lack of
which he deplored as one of the chief defects
of the Priesthood over which he himself
presided.1

G. W. E. RUSSELL.

S. Mary Magdalenis Day,
1905.

1 See " Hindrances to the Spread of the Catholic
Church in England," at the end of Purcell's Life of
Cardinal {Manning.

PREFACE

HPHIS little Life of a great thinker and
teacher has been written under circum
stances of difficulty. I have been persuaded to
continue it mainly by the knowledge that there
is no other little Life of Maurice in existence,
and that the large volumes of the biography
published by his son are not at the present
time being widely read. If this book will
excite any interest for the further study of
the man and his work, and especially for those
treasures of wisdom and inspiration in the
collected correspondence of a lifetime, I shall
be more than satisfied with the result of its
labour.

My obligations are, in the main, due to The
Life and Letters of Frederic ^ T)enison Maurice, by
Colonel Maurice (Macmillan and Co., 1882),
and to the various works of Maurice issued
by the same publishers. To these I gladly
acknowledge my indebtedness. In personal
assistance, I have to thank most cordially
Mr. and Mrs. C. E. Maurice for placing many
books and documents at my disposal, and for
most kind help in answering questions and pro
viding material for a biography. Dr. Llewelyn

ix b

Davies has also been generous of his time
and sympathy, and in telling his own remem
brances of a friend and colleague in the cause
of reform. Mr. Ludlow has encouraged me
to proceed. Mr. George Russell, the General
Editor of the series, has been most helpful
in advice and criticism. From all I have
met who knew the man and something of his
great qualities, I have been renewed in desire
to contribute what little was possible towards
making those qualities better known ; among
a generation less concerned with the things
of the spirit than the age in which Maurice
lived, and perplexed with the same spiritual
and social embarrassments, for which Maurice
sought and found a remedy.

CHARLES F. G. MASTERMAN.

Easter Day, 1907.

CONTENTS

I. BEGINNINGS - i

II. THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST - 21

III. THE SHAKING OF THE EARTH - - 55

IV. " HE STIRRETH UP THE PEOPLE " - 84

V. A HERETIC 115

VI. IN TIME OF ORDER - 134

VII. QUEM NOSSE VlVERE - 152

VIII. IN TIME OF CHANGE 171

IX. THE MAN} - 199

X. THE WORK - - 216

HAEC • EST • AUTEM • VITA • AETERNA • UT • COGNOSCANT • TE • SOLUM
DEUM • VERUM • ET • QUEM • MISISTI • JESUM • CHRISTUM

Leaders of the Church

1800—1900

FREDERICK D. MAURICE

CHAPTER I
BEGINNINGS

"'T'HE greatest mind since Plato," was
Archdeacon Hare's deliberate verdict
upon his brother-in-law. " The greatest mind
of them all," Tennyson called Maurice in
that Metaphysical Society which gathered in
union all the most distinguished thinkers of
the nineteenth century. " No greater honour
could be paid to any living man," wrote
the author of John Inglesant, "than to ask
him to write upon Mr. Maurice." Mill, in
a doubtful compliment, asserted that " more
intellectual power was wasted in Maurice than
in any one else of my generation." " A man
I always liked for his delicacy, his ingenuity
and earnestness," said Carlyle in softer mood ;
but in scornfuller — " One of the most entirely

B

2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

uninteresting men of genius that I can meet,"
he flared out, " is poor Maurice to me ; all
twisted, crude, wire-drawn, with such restless
sensitiveness and the utmost inability to let
Nature have fair play with him." Ruskin
found him "by nature puzzle-headed and,
indeed, wrong-headed " ; and Froude, going
one better, as always, than the master, wrote
to Clough, "As thinkers, Maurice, and still
more the Mauricians, appear to me the most
hideously imbecile that any section of the world
have been driven to believe in."

The contradictions of these contemporary
impressions are characteristic of a life made
up of contradictory elements. Maurice was
a man of peace. He hated controversy, with
its appeals to passion and prejudice. But
his life was passed in almost continuous
intellectual and theological combat ; and in
reading its record we emerge with scarcely
a breathing-space from one campaign to plunge
immediately into another. He was a man of
humility, with a profound sense of his own
unworthiness, and of the superior intelligence
and devotion of his antagonists. Yet his
polemic advances upon an astonishing stream
of violence and seemingly personal bitterness ;
with such sweeping attacks upon the good
faith and intelligence of his opponents, as give
him often an appearance of prejudice and
arrogance. No controversialist so invariably
excited exasperation ; so that in one dispute

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 3

Mansel was provoked into openly calling him
a liar, and in another Pusey coldly closed a
correspondence with the verdict that the two
were worshippers of different gods.

He was a man of large charity, which burned
with a constant clear flame and extended its
warmth and radiance to all living things. But
the invective and savage irony of his onslaught
upon the religious newspapers of his day,
the dominant Church parties, or the popular
agnosticism which passed for enlightenment,
are staggering to the readers of a less vigorous
age. He would confess in private, and even
in public letters, that the attacks were directed,
not so much against these external opponents,
as against the internal elements of his own
personality which responded to their appeal,
and urged him to actions and opinions similar
to those he was repudiating. It is, perhaps,
not unnatural that the subjects of his violence
found little to console them in such an explana
tion. He was branded as a " Broad Churchman"
by the crowd, which defines its boundaries in
the clumsiest fashion, and demands a label for
every thinker. Even the leaders themselves —
Stanley, Jowett, Colenso and the rest — were
often perplexed at his revolt against their
critical conclusions, and could never understand
why he did not more completely identify
himself with their plea for liberty. But he
differed so fundamentally from their first
principles that the popular identification of

*"J •**!"

4 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

his theology with their lack of it is still hard
to understand.

Perhaps the subject of Maurice's most notori
ous controversy is chiefly responsible for this
misunderstanding. To the Man in the Street,
in the long theological warfare of the nine
teenth century, the question of the future
life and the everlasting punishment of the
wicked formed a convenient test and dis
tinction. In none was he more interested ;
in none were the lines seemingly so sharply
drawn. He could understand the meaning
of endless torment. He could understand
the meaning of a torment which comes to
an end. He placed with the utmost certitude
all the thinkers of the time into one or other
of these two pigeon-holes. Maurice was thus
docketed with the Liberals. In his refusal
to interpret "eternal*' as an interminable
prolongation of the temporal, he was supposed
to be pleading for a less harsh and rigorous
creed than that of the accepted Protestant
theology. His protest, which cost him his
chair at King's College and made him for the
first time generally famous, was, as a matter
of fact, entirely unconnected with the protest
of the Broad Churchmen of the day. While
the one was in the main ethical and emotional,
the other was intellectual and theological. In
the larger discussions of a more general
liberty he was against most of the " Liberal "
theory. But he spoke for its advocates as he

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 5

spoke for any other parties when he thought
he saw them being crushed by the force of
large battalions, authority, and the ignorance
and prejudice of a crowd.

His theological position led him into quite
other ways. His first appearance in con
troversy was to justify the enforcement of
subscription to the Thirty-nine Articles upon
the Undergraduates of the older Univer
sities. He repudiated any elementary educa
tion save that given by the Churches, demon
strating that the State could not even teach in
satisfactory fashion scientific or secular subjects,
and warning it off from a ground too sacred
for its feet. He defended the Athanasian
Creed in its entirety, and thought that the
damnatory clauses were the profoundest ex
pression of an absolute truth. He disliked
and distrusted the new movement of Biblical
Criticism ; and his exegesis remains to-day in
part as a monument of the failure of a man,
supreme in one field of knowledge, to enter
into the inheritance of another.

His influence has been almost entirely in
the strengthening of a movement in the
Church whose leaders he fought unwearyingly
for nearly half a century ; and, as Marie
Pattison said of T. H. Green at Oxford, the
bulk of his " honey " passed into the " Ritual
istic hive."

His work remains ; passionate, disinterested,
enormous in volume ; a tribute to the inde-

6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

fatigable efforts of the nineteenth century
in its thirst after knowledge of ultimate
things. It is often obscure, not carefully
studied, with no particular charm of style.
It is filled with the elements of passing con
troversy as called out by the exigencies of an
almost casual warfare. It is charged also with
a lofty purpose and enduring insight which
will give it a permanent position in the history
of the thought of an age.

Maurice stands to-day as the greatest thinker
of the English Church in the nineteenth
century. Almost alone among its members,
he possessed the wide metaphysical knowledge
and training which enabled him to carry
up the argument from the region of dog
matic theology into the philosophical debate.
He challenges the position of Butler as the
greatest convert that Church has received from
outside its borders. No man gave himself
more unreservedly to the service of its wel
fare. No man loved it with a more unfeigned
affection. " He could still, after Hume and
Voltaire had done their best and worst with
him," wrote Carlyle of Coleridge, "profess
himself an orthodox Christian, and say and
point to the Church of England, with its
singular old rubrics and surplices at All-
hallowtide, Esto perpetua" And Maurice,
amid the strong tides of the nineteenth century
which were submerging all the trodden ways
of the past, could still look out fearless over

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 7

the waste of waters with the cry of Esto
perpetuay to a Church secure from the
fretting of time and all the seasons' change.

John Frederick Denison Maurice was born
at Normanstone, near Lowestoft, on August
29, 1805. Eight weeks later the cannons of
Trafalgar decided that the Revolution should
never come to England ; that the change
towards better things in the political and
social order should be effected in a more
prolonged and less drastic method of reform.
He was the fifth child and only surviving son
of Michael and Priscilla Maurice. His father
was of Welsh descent from a long line of
orthodox Nonconformists ; a pupil of Hoxton
Academy, and subsequently a Unitarian minister.
He was an ardent Liberal, a friend of Priestley,
rejoicing in the fall of the Bastille, respected
by his friends and neighbours, a man of wide
charity. The family, first established at Nor
manstone, subsequently removed to Frenchay,
a little village near Bristol, where Michael
Maurice received pupils and preached at a tiny
Unitarian chapel. The boy grew up here in
an atmosphere of keen thought accompanied
by much disputation. He lamented in later
life a dullness to country scenes and beauties.
" I never knew the note of a single bird," he
confessed, " nor watched the habits of any

one."

Inter

Interest from the commencement was trans-

8 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900

ferred away from the sensible universe. " Any
thing social or political took a hold of me
such as no objects in nature, beautiful or
useful, had." He was carefully guarded as
a child from fiction of all kinds, modern and
romantic. It was a bracing atmosphere of
austere thought, with an air cold and thin,
and its influence enduring to the end of his
days. The concerns of the household were
in religion and the development of the soul.
On such a plane the growing child was witness
of a tragedy none the less poignant because
remote from the normal ways of mankind.
The family unity was breaking up in theo
logical strife, and the children drifting away
from the father's faith. "Those years," Maurice
asserted in after life, "were to me years of
moral confusion and contradiction." His two
elder sisters first repudiated the creed of
the family, and wrote to their father, then
in the same house, " We do not think it
consistent with the duty we owe to GOD to
attend a Unitarian place of worship." The
father's written answer was one of agony and
distress. Ten months later, the wife broke
the news to her husband, also in an elaborate
epistle, that she is passing to the side of the
rebels. Soon afterwards, confronted by the
prospect of death, she "became sufficiently
convinced that she had before made to herself
a most false god, and that she had never wor
shipped the GOD revealed in the Scriptures."

Frederick Denison Maurice • 9

So this extraordinary household continued ;
outwardly in harmony around the breakfast
table, but retiring afterwards to compose letters
to each other, from the drawing-room to the
study, concerning the most intricate prob
lems of theological difference. The children
believed themselves persecuted. Elizabeth, the
eldest, embraced with ardour the doctrines of
the Church of England. Anne, the younger,
joined the chapel of Mr. Vernon, a Baptist ;
and a kind of lesser warfare broke out between
the two on the respective merits of Establish
ment and Dissent. The mother drifted into
the full, rigid creed of Calvinism, becoming
convinced of the existence of the elect, and at
the same time that she was not one of them.
The father confronted the whole disturbance
with a kind of helpless disgust ; filled with
foreboding lest his only boy should also be
found to repudiate the belief which he cherished
with all the confidence of a life's experience.

In such confused and cloudy atmosphere
the child struggled towards manhood. He
appeared as a boy " puzzled into silence by
the conflicting elements around him " ; much
given to reading and solitude ; his favourite
companion his sister Emma ; distinguished
from the beginning by that shyness and
humility which was to be manifested in all
his days, as well as by that purity of action
and intention which drew so many towards
him in after years. He was interested by his

io Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

father in new schemes of social improvement.
He was living already in a world of abstractions
rather than of real things. " I never knew
him to commit even an ordinary fault," was
the testimony of his cousin : " he was the
gentlest, most docile and affectionate of crea
tures." Before fifteen he had solemnly pledged
himself, with another, " to endeavour to
distinguish ourselves in after life, and to
promote as far as lies in our power the good
of mankind." If there is much admirable in
this, there is also something a little forced and
unnatural. Maurice, as a child, is not found
playing games or collecting natural treasures,
or enjoying that freedom — " to run, to ride,
to swim" — in three elements, which was mould
ing Kingsley's sensitive and impetuous spirit.
The system has something of the remoteness
and oppression of the system of the youthful
Mill. The consequences were equally manifest
in after years. " It is better to let Nature
have her way," the one might have agreed
with the other, " I was never a child."

But one dominant desire entered into the
very fibre of his being. The experience of a
divided household, and of the miseries thereby
entailed, awoke in him a longing for the Unity
which seemed to him the ultimate goal of all
human endeavour. " The desire for Unity has
haunted me all my life through," is a later
confession of an inheritance from the troubles
of a child. " I have never been able to sub-

Frederick Denison Maurice 1 1

stitute any desire for that, or to accept any
of the different schemes for satisfying it which
men have devised."

By a kind of irony he came to find the
satisfaction for this longing in the very Name
of that Trinity in Unity which was the subject
of those painful family quarrels. " I not only
believe in the Trinity in Unity," is a later
assertion, " but I find in it the centre of all my
beliefs ; the rest of my spirit when I contem
plate myself or mankind. But, strange as it may
seem, I owe the depth of this belief in a great
measure to my training in my home. The
very name that was used to describe the denial
of this doctrine is the one which most expresses
to me the end that I have been compelled,
even in spite of myself, to seek."

Gloom, stimulated by the merciless doctrines
of the now dominant family creed, took posses
sion of his soul at the time of awakening man
hood. In an individual experience which here
but expressed a wide companionship of child-
suffering, he became convinced that an Election
beyond man's will had decided his eternal
destiny, and that his lot would be numbered
among the lost. He writes of himself as
" a being destined to a few short years of
misery here, as an earnest of, and preparation
for, that more enduring state of wretchedness
and woe."

He abandoned the idea of the ministry,
Unitarian or Christian. And, although the

12 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

ultimate despair was lightened by the wise
counsel of a friend, he was still in a condition
of perplexity and confusion when he passed to
the University, for a first experience of a
world in which he had developed so aloof and
solitary.

In 1823 Maurice entered Trinity College,
Cambridge. The letters of the early days give
an impression of a rather painful shyness and
self-consciousness, an exaggerated humility ;
the awkwardness of one privately educated
finding himself suddenly plunged into the
jolly, noisy tradition of the English Public
School and University system. Julius Hare,
his tutor, was the first stimulating influence ;
the first to recognize also that in this stiff,
shy, formal youth, he was dealing with a mind
of unusual distinction. Gradually he crept
from his shell ; became a member of the Union
Society, and mixed with those who were busy
in its debates ; gathered round him in friend
ship some of the more serious-minded of his
contemporaries. The most famous of these,
in part through the natural charm of his
character, more by the fortune of an early
death and the inspiration of a biography of
genius, was John Sterling. Maurice became
a kind of second father to the famous Apostles'
Club, where, from then until to-day, men of
originality and talent have discussed the
universe and their own souls. Despite all
his efforts towards retirement, he began

Frederick^ Denison Maurice 1 3

to be recognized as one of the remarkable
men of his time. His letters home are still,
stilted, and pedantic, the letters of one of
those solemn young men who take themselves
seriously from the beginning. But they show
a throwing-off of the first depression and an
enlargement from the cramped outlook of
the earlier days.

Later, Maurice migrated to Trinity Hall,
designing to study law with a view to a career
in the legal profession. From here he issued,
with a friend, the Metropolitan Quarterly Maga
zine, a vigorous and short-lived Undergraduate
journal. The work is contemporary and
alive, the interests mainly in literature. " We
are aristocrats to the core," he declares in
one article. He attacks Bentham and the
Utilitarians, makes scathing onslaughts upon
personal journalism and gossip, offers advice
concerning the prevailing system of young
ladies' education.

At the close of his University career he
was faced with the dilemma then unhappily
presented to all the young men owning
allegiance to any but the State religion. To
obtain his degree he would be compelled
publicly to declare himself a member of the
Church of England. To refuse a degree on
these terms would be to publicly declare
himself a repudiator of its principles. He
was averse to either affirmation. A Fellow
ship, and probably a distinguished academic

1 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 9 oo

career, awaited him if he were to make
the declaration. The very fact that worldly
advancement seemed bound up with such
a pronouncement, made him distrust the
arguments which would lead him to accept
it. Moreover, like so many of the enquiring
students of his day, he had grown to hate
the University system as he found it working.
It was the system before the Oxford Movement,
on the one hand, and the scientific eagerness
on the other, had awakened the dry bones of
the eighteenth century tradition. Macaulay,
Tennyson, and others had protested with
violence against those who "profess to lead
and teach us nothing, feeding not the heart."
"The hungry young," was the contemporary
complaint of a man of genius, " looked up to
their spiritual nurses, and for food were bidden
to eat the east wind."

So Maurice slipped quietly away from
Cambridge without his degree. With his
friend Sterling he descended into the great
welter of London, plunging immediately and
with zest into all the literary and social
interests then fermenting in the capital. He
wrote articles for the Westminster Review. With
Sterling he joined the London Debating
Society, distinguished already by the presence
of John Stuart Mill and his allies. The friends
formed there a third party of two, equally
opposed to the Tory and Radical sections.
His shyness and his exaggerated depreciation

Frederic^ Venison Maurice 1 5

of his own attraction and performances pre
vented his becoming conspicuous in the Society
at the time. But, if his speech was halting,
there was no uncertainty about the power of
his pen. He wrote for Mr. Silk Buckingham's
literary organ, The Athen<eum^ became editor of
the Lonaon Literary Chronicle, and finally united
with some half-dozen friends to purchase
The Athenaeum outright, of which he was
installed as editor.

" So under free auspices, themselves their
own captains," says Carlyle, " Maurice and
Sterling set sail for the new voyage of
adventure into all the world." The advocacy
of this new organ, with the vehemence of
youth in it, was in the direction of Reform.
But from the first Maurice, like Carlyle,
revealed his divergence from the awakening
Radicalism of the age. There is an emphasis
upon enthusiasm in it ; a desire for heroic
things ; a profound contempt for contemporary
society and human energy uncharged with the
inspiration of high purposes ; and an appeal to
the individual greatness of the individual man.

Home troubles disturbed these activities.
His father's fortune was lost in Constitutional
Spanish Bonds. The Athenaeum proved a
failure. His sister Emma was dying. Maurice,
writing on literature and current affairs, and
collecting in a novel the embodiment of the
criticism of his age, was still fretting at the
deeper questions of man's being and destiny.

uccpcr <

1 6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

No clear record exists of the progress of his
mind during these troublous times. Harassed
and depressed, convinced that his life was
a failure and his strength spent for naught, at
last he consented to embark again upon
University study with a view to preparation
for ordination as a minister of the Church of
England. He chose Oxford for his return,
partly as a deliberate penance in self-chosen
subjection to the humiliation of Undergraduate
life after three years of fancied independence ;
partly in the hope of learning from that
atmosphere, with " something of that freedom
and courage for which the young men whom
I knew at Cambridge were remarkable, some
thing more of solidity and reverence for what is
established."

Early in 1830 Maurice entered again as
an Undergraduate, at Exeter College, Oxford.
It was an Oxford still in the sleep of the
eighteenth century, with Newman an obscure
town Vicar, and three years to wait before
Keble's Assize sermon at S. Mary's pro
claimed the awakening. His Oxford period
was less remarkable than his Cambridge days.
Cambridge, indeed, had formed him, and he
came to the other University as a visitor and
alien. He was older than most of the men.
He was very poor. He kept to himself,
toiling at his books. But he impressed
Gladstone and others with the sense of his
honesty and intellectual powers, and became

FredericJ^ 'Denison Maurice i J

a member of the Essay Society called (after
its founder) the " W. E. G." The times were
those associated with the struggle over the
great Reform Bill ; and the " Condition of
the People " problem was forcing attention
even in these remote and secluded places. He
saw riot, midnight fires, the fierce passion of
the people ; a sudden revelation of the abyss
which yawned in those days below comfortable
English society.

In the midst of the work his sister died.
He found himself in this great loss detached
from the things of space and time ; more and
more carried into the region where the out
ward show of the world becomes a pageant in
which man disquieteth himself in vain. He
felt himself at another crisis in life. He was
filled with remorse at the constant unrest
and fever of the past, so much consumed in
vanity. All the thought and determination
commenced here to become conscious, which in
the days to come he was to proclaim as truth
to his generation. He fell back upon the
Divine reality from all the weariness of passing
things. The resolution of all the great souls
of the past to attain to a knowledge of GOD
came to proclaim to him the Summum Bonum
of human action. " All the honesty and truth
in the world," he wrote at this time, " has
come from GOD, being manifested in the hearts
of some men, and from thence affecting the
general courses of society." He " cannot put

D

1 8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

up with a dream in the place of GOD." The
cry of human nature through every age is for
this revelation — GOD manifest in the person
of man, not as Lawgiver or as Sovereign, but
as Friend. Such a universal longing can be
satisfied by nothing less than the evidence that
"the Life was manifest and we have seen it";
" That which was from the beginning, which we
ha^e heard) which we have seen with our eyes,
which we have looked upon, and our hands have
handled, of the Word of Lifer

And if this knowledge of GOD was to him
the consummation of all human wisdom, the
losing of self in GOD was the foundation of
all human morality. " The death of CHRIST,"
he writes in rare, impassioned pleading, " is
actually, literally the death of you and me."
"To believe we have any self of our own is
the Devil's lie : and when he has tempted us
to believe it and to act as if we had a life
out of CHRIST, he then mocks us and shows
us that this life is a very death." " Let us
believe that we have each a life, our only life,
not of you nor me, but a universal life in
Him."

Quern nosse est vfoere : cui serVtre regnare —
" whom to know is to live : whom to serve
is to reign" — -or in our old English version,
"In knowledge of whom standeth our eternal
life ; whose service is perfect freedom." These
two principles — knowledge of GOD as Eternal
Life, the object of a passionate energy of all

'Denison ^Maurice

the powers of the soul ; and the surrender of
the individual life into that universal Energy
which is the very life of GOD — were to sustain
his spirit through all the long effort of his

days.

Maurice was ordained a Deacon in the
Church of England in 1834, and immediately
retired to a country curacy at Bubbenhall, five
miles from Leamington. His desire at such
a time was for "greater self-abasement," and
"a more perfect and universal charity." He
was nearly thirty ; older than the general age
for ordination. He had experienced the life
of both Universities. As a layman he had
realized something of the literary and social
interests of London, the new desires for change
which were fermenting among the younger
and more ardent spirits of the time. He had
appeared in that company to one acute observer
as "one alive amongst a wide circle of a
transitory, phantasmal character." His know
ledge was encyclopaedic, scarcely paralleled by
any of his contemporaries. He belonged to
no school or party in the Church, and was
unknown to its leaders.

That Church was nearing a crisis in its
history. England, in the successful struggle
over the Reform Bill, and the enormous
progressive triumph of the first Reformed
Parliament, had pronounced almost violently
for change. The Church of England, with

•VI UUUA1

2O Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

its archaic organization and its feudal ideals,
was becoming dimly conscious of the necessity
of putting its house in order. Below the
aristocratic society of which it was a part, a
population more forlorn and wretched than
in any past history, was slowly forcing its
misery before the attention of the governing
power. In the world of thought and of action
the time was full of the sound and promise of
the dawn.

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 2 1

CHAPTER 11

THE KINGDOM OF CHRIST

TV/TAURICE was two years in charge of a
country parish. They were years of
a devouring intellectual activity. Eustace
Conway was published at the beginning, Sub
scription no Bondage in the middle ; The Kingdom
of Christ projected at the close.

Eustace Conway was never referred to by
Maurice in after life, and one can gather he
was not particularly proud of his one completed
experiment in fiction. It is a curious mixture
of intellectual discussion with the wildest
melodrama, the kind of novel which, being
read to-day, has stamped upon every line of
it the life of a vanished age.

The title-page bears the challenge from
Pascal :—

" // est dangereux de trop faire voir a Vhomme
combien il est egal aux betes, sans lui montrer sa
grandeur. II est encore dangereux de lui faire
trop voir sa grandeur, sans sa bassesse. II est
encore plus dangereux de lui laisser ignorer Pun
et Tautre. Mais il est tres avantageux de lui
representer Fun et rautre"

2 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Each particular chapter has little introductory
headlines from Byron, Cowper, Goldsmith, and
similar writers. The conversations are stilted
and artificial, and it is evident that the author
has not attained complete command of his
material. Yet even with these obvious defi
ciencies and a kind of elaboration of humour
and style, the work is sharply distinguished
from the normal production of the first essayist
in fiction.

In the long conversations of the first
volume, Maurice attempts to reproduce some
thing of his own experience, in his passage from
the shelter of the University to the intellectual
and moral turmoil of the capital. Eustace
Conway, the hero, was often supposed to be
a picture of himself, but it is more than pro
bable that, if it represented any living person,
it was an attempt to depict John Sterling.

There are denunciations of the old Cambridge
life, with the College producing "the most
withering, benumbing influence ever exerted
over a human spirit." " These dark shadows
and solemn damps chilled the course of my
blood. The whole of my existence among
them was a vain and purposeless dream," cries
Eustace Conway to his sister. "The men
are not so blameable," he declared in another
place, " though no doubt the vast majority are
idiots, and ninety-nine out of one hundred of
the remainder will be knaves. It is the system
which is so utterly intolerable."

Frederick Dcnison Maurice 23

Eustace, in later talk, flames out against
being called a Whig. " If there is an animal
in the universe that I loathe," he states, "it
is a Whig." And here also Maurice or
Sterling is speaking.

He passes to irony when he deals with the
Societies of Moral Philosophers, " who assemble
twice a week," in Goldsmith's words, " in
order to show the absurdity of the present
mode of religion and to establish a new one
in its stead." All this conversation and dis
cussion of ultimate philosophies is set in the
midst of London society, with around a most
violent action ; mysterious Spanish revolu
tionists, mysterious Spanish ladies, baffled
and illtreated adventurers, violence, despair.
Wanderers from other lands enter the tale
to describe the heavy oppression of England.
"That dense, commercial strength which one
encounters even in your religion," says one
of these, " is a more overpowering nightmare
upon the soul than any bad influence I have
felt elsewhere. There were times when I could
scarcely bear up against it, when the myriads
of eyes which I encountered, all riveted upon
gain, seemed to be invested with a sort of
Medusan enchantment."

Eustace, after enlarging his contempt for
most creeds, to all creeds, in a kind of Byronic
reaction against the whole of the sorry farce
of human things, is drawn back by his dying
sister into acceptance of the historic Faith. He

24 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

had acknowledged Society as God with the
Utilitarians. He had acknowledged Self as
God with the Spiritualists. He now confessed
that He is GOD whose praise is in the
Churches ; and at each stage he seemed to
have gained more arrogance. By the bedside
of his dying sister he learned, as Maurice
himself learned in similar circumstance, some
thing of the possibilities of sacrifice of the
individual desires in obedience to the Divine
Will. Eustace is left at the end with the
exhortation of his friend : — " True the strife
must continue till your death, and that from
first to last it is a strife against principalities
and powers. Yet do not be discouraged. The
worst of your toil is over, for henceforth you
will know who are your enemies and upon
whom you must depend for succour. You
have learnt that we are not men unless we
are free, and that we are not free unless we
are living in subjection to the law which made

us so."

Of very different weight and interests was
the next of Maurice's publications. With his
pamphlet on the Subscription controversy, the
first of a long list of polemical publications,
Maurice made his plunge into the troubled
waters of theological strife. The leaders at
Oxford in a rally against Liberalism, were
fighting the demands of the reformers for the
abolition of subscription to the Thirty-nine

Denison Maurice

Articles in the University, and the throwing
open of its resources to men of all religious
beliefs. It was with the encouragement of
these men, therefore, welcoming a new and
valuable recruit, that Maurice produced his
paradoxical plea for subscription as a guarantee
of liberty. He seemed to take Liberalism
with a flank attack, to smite it in an undefended
quarter, and his attitude here and henceforth
caused amazement amongst those who were
" fighting for liberty in the trammels of an
historic creed."

From this time commenced a long series
of gibes and sneers at a philosopher who could
think that the heights and depths of the
universe were comprehended within the
boundaries of sixteenth century thought.
"Deep respect for Maurice," says Leslie
Stephen, "admiration of his subtlety and
power of generalization, only increased Mill's
wonder that he could find all truth in the
Thirty-nine Articles." The sneer was unjust.
Maurice neither at this time nor at any time
professed that he could find "all truth in the
Thirty-nine Articles." It was at least with
some direct experience of the alternative
position — the knowledge of the uncontrolled
ravages of tyranny, promoted in a Church
without some impersonal standard of belief —
that he came to plead so passionately for the
maintenance of ancient, time-worn formularies.
The intellectuals were perplexed and disgusted.

26 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

The contemptuous guffaw of Carlyle, the thin
sneers of Froude, were directed against a
theologian who appeared as a philosopher, in
his fight for the retaining of prison bonds and
the paralysing influence of dead things. The
offence was especially annoying in the work
of one who combined so much intellectual
power with such transparent sincerity of
purpose. The majority of those who resisted
Reform could be easily relegated by the clever
men of the day to the two limbos which (in
their vision) included most of the orthodox
faith — those of the knave and of the fool.
But here was one who could challenge all
their knowledge of past systems, of undis
puted intellectual power, combined with an
honesty of purpose and unworldliness of
temperament utterly indifferent to temporal
advantage. The almost mystical inspiration
of a prophet and seer who seemed at times
to be caught into the seventh heaven, and
to return with some memory of its glories,
perplexed and confused the defenders of
liberty as they saw the same energy and
sincerity exalting these little chopped-up
fragments of Tudor theology.

Afterwards Maurice came to recognize that
his position was mistaken. Here, as in so
many of his controversies, he was fighting on
a different plane from his antagonists, and
looking towards other horizons. He had
been living in the region of philosophic issues.

tderick Ttenison Maurice

He was repudiating here, from all the lessons
of the past, the conception of progress as being
encouraged by a thin and watery creed. The
more vague a creed becomes — so Liberalism
thought then, so Liberalism thinks to-day — the
more true it is to reality and the more efficient
as a guide of life. For Maurice, " every hope
for human culture, for the reconciliation of
opposing schools, for blessings to mankind,"
rested on a theology. Against the Liberal
toleration which he prophesied would become
a Liberal tyranny — the belief in " undenomina
tional" religion — he set up defiantly the
standard of a definite and deliberate affirmation
concerning GOD and man, and the relationship
of the One to the other.

But the practical question was on a different
plane of argument — whether young Non
conformists should be debarred from academic
success unless they deliberately confessed a
theology which they did not believe. " Liberals
were clearly right," he came to acknowledge
thirty-six years afterwards, " in saying that
the Articles did not mean to those who signed
them at the University or on taking Orders,
what I supposed them to mean, and I was
wrong. They were right in saying that sub
scription did mean to most the renunciation
of a right to think, and, since none could
renounce that right, it involved dishonesty."
Yet to the end also he refused that rejection
of dogmatic formula, which was the impulse

28 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

behind the movement towards freedom. He
would admit any one with a definite creed
gladly. He would not acquiesce in the
demand for the compounding of all the creeds
together in a mortar and the finding of truth
in the residuum. He refused to entertain any
hospitality to that vague and diffused undog-
matic religion which is so dear to the heart of
the man of the world. " They have acquired
a new name," he wrote many years later.
" They are called Broad Churchmen now, and
delight to be called so. But their breadth
seems to me to be narrowness. They include
all kinds of opinions. But what message
have they for the people who do not live
on opinions ? "

Early in 1836 Maurice returned to London
to become chaplain at Guy's Hospital. The
work here was more congenial to him than that
of a country parish, where his constitutional
shyness was a check to free intercourse, and
the whole feudal system of Church and
society challenged the principles which he was
elaborating in his own mind. With the sick
and dying he was more at home. He could
turn to realities amongst those who were
being unwillingly forced into the facing of real
things. He had "great pleasure" in collect
ing the patients in a ward round the bedside
of one of the most sick, and reading and
explaining the Bible to them. He tried

Frederick Denison Maurice

to influence, and to some extent succeeded
in influencing, the medical students at the
hospital, lecturing to a select few on moral
philosophy. He received as a pupil Mr.
Strachey (afterwards Sir Edward Strachey),
who has left interesting records of his
experience in Maurice's teaching.

Here he watched the courses of the times ;
especially, and, with foreboding, the later
progress of the Oxford Movement. He
found himself more and more drifting away
from sympathy with the leaders who at first
had hailed him as an ally. He allowed
himself to be nominated for the Chair of
Political Economy at Oxford in order definitely
to assert the position that political economy
is " not the foundation of morals and politics,
but must have them for its foundation or be
worth nothing " ; a principle which the work
of Ruskin was to make familiar to a younger
generation, but which in those days appeared
as but idle words.

And at this time he issued a series of tracts
in the form of Letters to a Quaker •, which were
later to be collected and developed into his great
work on The Kingdom of Christ. The second
of these tracts, a reply to the famous tract of
Dr. Pusey on Baptism, excited an open rupture
with the Oxford leaders. From this moment
commenced that long and chequered career of
religious controversy in which all parties in
turn at times welcomed Maurice as an ally

UUU al

30 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

and at times repudiated him as a deserter.
His position in his lifetime was never under
stood. He defended not merely his own
opinion but liberty of opinion ; and the plain
man outside seemed to see him tacking
wildly in advocacy of Evangelical or Catholic
or extreme Liberal principles. He rushed in
impetuously to defend the weakest side
attacked, and the sight of authority or mob-
power replacing reason and argument was
sufficient to summon him like a trumpet-call to
the battle. In the controversies themselves he
was fighting on a different plane of thought
to that of his opponents. Very few of the
leaders of the various parties had any know
ledge of modern philosophy. Newman, the
greatest of all, only came to read Kant in
his old age. While they were dealing with
points of historical accuracy or the affirma
tions of a dogmatic system, he was concerned
with movement in a region where these dog
matic assertions took upon themselves new
values. The plain principles of the plain
man were found to lead upward to a realm
where familiar things lost their hard, sharp
outlines. Amongst the audience, therefore,
for the most part unacquainted with meta
physical discussion, and failing to translate
the theological symbolism into terms of uni
versal significance, the often startling changes
of position which Maurice appeared to be
making and his difficulty of expressing himself

Frederick Denis on Maurice 3 1

in language which they could understand,
led many in impatience to brand him as a
"muddy mystic," exciting at once bewilder
ment and despair.

The Kingdom of Christ forms the first, and,
in many respects, the most important of
Maurice's works. All the " Maurician " the
ology is in these volumes. With the great
History of Philosophy, the work remains to
day, of all his enormous output in the literature
of the time, the one element which has attained
some permanent value. The rest is, in the
main, of historic interest. The letters make
up the confession of a progress, the apologia
of one who had passed " on a journey "
to his present haven. The journey was the
reverse of the normal pilgrimage. Thousands
in those days had been brought up in ortho
dox belief in the orthodox formularies of the
Church of England, and passed with widening
knowledge into a Unitarian or rational position.
Those who had experienced the reverse process
were few and remarkable. And the most
indifferent were challenged by the piquancy
of the record of one who had experienced
the freer air of a religion without tests or
dogmas, passing back into worship of a
"dead CHRIST" and "tangled Trinities."

" Hints to a Quaker " runs the sub-tide,
"concerning the principles, conception and
ordinances of the Catholic Church." The
problem in its ultimate challenge was that of

32 Leaders of tbe Church 1800-1900

a spiritual kingdom and its membership.
The Quakers had sought to establish a
spiritual kingdom in the world. "Did not
such a kingdom exist already ? " asked
Maurice, "and were not those ordinances
rejected by the Quakers the expression of
it ? " The French Revolution had rever
berated through the thought of Europe.
Europe could never be quite the same again.
All men had been summoned to the ultimate
examination — What is the basis of society ?
What holds in reality man to man ? Is there
a universal society for man as man ? Maurice
refers back to the teaching of Coleridge, his
master, especially concerning the ordinances
of the Church ; that " these are not empty
memorials, or charms and fetishes, but signs
to the race " ; signs of the existence of that
Universal Order which is the object of the
enquiry, and which belongs in its essence to
the world of real things outside the illusions
of space and time. " They are the voice," he
claims, " in which GOD speaks to His creatures ;
the very witness that their fellowship with
each other rests on their fellowship with Him,
and both upon the mystery of His being ;
the very means by which we are meant to rise
to the enjoyment of the highest blessing which
He has bestowed upon us." In this way
" there rose up before me," says Maurice,
" the idea of a Church universal, not built
upon human inventions or human faith, but

Frederick Denison Maurice

on the very nature of GOD Himself and
upon the union which He has formed with
His creatures ; a Church revealed to man
as a fixed and eternal reality by means which
Infinite Wisdom had itself devised."

The Church as a witness to the ideal fellow
ship which alone can make significant and
intelligible the life of man ; protesting always
against that individual selfishness and egotism
which is at all times tearing society asunder
into its constituent and warring atoms ;
this was the reality which Maurice made it
his business to proclaim. " The world would
have been torn in pieces by its individual
factions," he declares, " if there had not been
this bond of peace and fellowship in the midst
of it-
Much of the investigation is historic. With
a wealth of knowledge and illustration Maurice
takes his readers through the chaotic regions
of post-Reformation theology. From Greek
philosophy downward through the centuries
he traces the consensus of testimony to this
struggle in the life of man between two
principles : " one tending downwards, one
upward ; one belonging to the earth, one
claiming fellowship with something pure and
Divine." From Luther and Calvin, through
Fox and the early Quakers, in the Unitarian
and Methodist movements of the eighteenth
century, he finds this search for a Kingdom ;
a Kingdom not of this world ; fixed upon

F

a iving

3 4 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

securer foundations than any to be found in
the shifting sands of time. He discerns a
Catholic tendency even in the theology which
can be traced most directly to a Protestant
origin. Man cannot live alone ; cannot stand
as an isolated individual ; and all attempts to
separate him from his fellows, or to show
him fulfilling the purpose of his being in an
ideal in which his fellows have no share, have
always ended in bitterness and disaster. Even
Protestant Germany "cannot be content with
a purely Protestant system. Catholicism it
must have, either in the form of Pantheism
or of definite Christianity."

The same lesson is driven home again as
he investigates the philosophical movements of
the time, and those new ideals of society with
which the Revolution had changed the surface
of the world. He criticizes Positivism and
" the social work of Mr. Owen (Robert Owen,
the Socialist leader and head of the New
Lanark experiment) in the manufacturing
districts." "The problem how to deal with
the population concentrated there," he says,
" is the most awful one which presents
itself to the modern politician. Any one who
could offer but a suggestion on the subject,
especially if it were the result of experience,
were entitled to a hearing." Everywhere he
found individualism, whether of the solitary
life, or of a class, or of a nation, crumbling to
pieces ; as man called out for the realization

Unison Maurice

of that Kingdom which should unite him to
his fellows, and find the realization of his life's
purpose in the common welfare. Combination,
not divested of religious sympathies, but with
a piteous fury striving to seize and to appro
priate them to its own ends, he found as
the keynote of the age. Yet " any modern
attempt to construct a universal society," he
declares, "has been defeated by the determination
of men to assert their wills." "The true
universal society, mankind is convinced, must
be one which does not overlook these wills
nor regret them, but must assume them as the
very principle and explanation of its existence."
And it is " equally impossible for man to be
content with a spiritual society which is not
universal, and a universal society which is not
spiritual."

Mankind, therefore, has everywhere looked
to a comity of righteousness and everywhere
demanded a King. That which we expect,
say the Evangelists, is a Kingdom. This
JESUS of Nazareth we believe and affirm to
be the King for whom mankind has longed
so earnestly. The critic has therefore to
reject one of these propositions. He must
either declare that men are not in need of a
spiritual and universal society, or that this
Person has not the credentials of the character
which He assumes. Maurice attempts to de
monstrate the falsity of both these propositions.
The unity at the root of all union among men,

The un

36 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

the deep foundations upon which rest the
pillars of the universe, must be revealed, he
asserts, in gradual discovery through the forces
and relations of human society. On the one
hand, he challenges the world to convince this
King of anything in His nature and teaching
contrary to the ideal of the Divine headship in
a universal order. On the other, he interprets
the outward signs and manifestations of the
Kingdom which He has founded as being in
their nature universal ; standing for the affirma
tion of this unchallenged truth. The entrance
into the Kingdom through Baptism into the
Name connected with admission to it through
all the centuries, he defends against the Quaker,
the Baptist, the modern Protestant, the modern
philosopher ; as affirming men to be in a certain
state of fellowship in a real Kingdom of Heaven
upon earth, a Kingdom of which the principle
must be ever the same, a Kingdom to which
all kings are meant to be in subjection. " The
operation of this spirit upon him is to draw him
continually out of himself, to teach him to
disclaim all independent virtue, to bring him
into the knowledge and image of the FATHER
and the SON." Against such a conception of
Baptism he rejects those who make it appear
" that the blessing of Baptism is not this — that
it receives men into the holy communion of
saints ; but that it bestows upon them certain
individual blessings, endows them with a certain
individual holiness."

gn

t

Frederick Denison Maurice

In similar fashion he examines all the signs
of the Kingdom — Baptism, the Eucharist, the
Ministry, the Scriptures — putting, it must be
confessed forcibly and fairly, the discontent
with each of these as they are criticized from
various sources : the Quakers, who believe in
the Kingdom without signs ; the Protestant
dissenters, who think the signs have been per
verted; the philosophers and rationalists, who
believe neither in the Kingdom nor the signs ;
and the Romanists, "who have perverted the
signs." This is of the nature of controversy,
and Maurice hits hard, apparently unconscious
of the offence which such hitting must often
give. No one who really studied The Kingdom

Christ could ever again make the mistake,
so common in his generation, of identifying
Maurice with the Broad Churchmen of his day.
Not only does he hate the " Broad Church " as
a system or a party as fiercely as he hates all
systems and all parties. He is entirely antip
athetic to the Liberal position. To him the
Creeds are of vital significance ; the Eucharist
the guarantee of a Real Presence ; the Ministry
endowed with a real power of binding and
loosing ; the Prayer Book and the Thirty-nine
Articles far nearer the truth of things than
the thin and troubled speculations of the
nineteenth century. The Liberals, in a word,
are rationalists ; Maurice is a mystic, seeking
and finding immediately beneath and beyond
the surface-show of things those spiritual

38 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

realities upon which the foundations of the
Church are laid : the Kingdom, as he sees it,
with its signs and its laws and its unity.
Here is a fellowship not made with hands,
unchallenged by the centuries, set up against
the individual lusts of the world. It is no
product of a kindly dream. Its existence forms
the only key to the confused enigma of human
life. Its triumph will herald the Consummation
of all things.

Against a reference to the Bible alone he
clings to an historic Creed. "The man," he
says, " who seriously believes that the Bible is
the only document which has been preserved to
men by Divine care and providence, is separated
by the very narrowest plank from absolute
atheism ; a plank," he adds with prophetic
insight, " so narrow and fragile that in a very
short time it will be broken down." Of the
Eucharist, " it has been the most holy symbol
to nations," he declares, " between which, race,
political institutions, and acquired habits, had
established the most seemingly impossible
barriers." He would appear to agree with a
modern essayist and statesman who finds the
belief in the Mass the most enduring evidence
of a real religion in Europe. "Now in this nine
teenth century," he affirms, "there are not a few
persons who have arrived at this deep and inward
conviction, that the question whether Chris
tianity shall be a practical principle and truth in
the hearts of men, or shall be extinguished for

Frederick 'Denison Maurice

a set of intellectual notions or generalizations,
depends mainly on the question, whether the
Eucharist shall or shall not be acknowledged and
received as the bond of a universal life and the
means whereby men become partakers of it."
"Go and tell men," he says in another passage,
in a rare outbreak of irony, " that the Eucharist
is not a real bond between CHRIST and His
members, but a picture or likeness which by a
violent act of our will we may turn into reality.
Thus you will fulfil GOD'S commission ; thus
you will reform a corrupt and sinful land."

He will have nothing to do with the limita
tion of its significance to that of a memorial, or
with the belief that faith is not a receptive but a
creative power — that it makes the thing which it
believes. " The impression that this Sacrament
is a reality in spite of all men's attempts to
prove it and make it a fiction, has kept alive
the belief that the Presence of GOD is a truth
and not a dream."

Later he passes to the discussion of the relation
of this Universal Church with national bodies ;
to a passionate affirmation of the national
character of a true Church ; and an attempt to
discriminate the functions of civil law and the
functions of ecclesiastical discipline. He finds
the unity of the Church, under the distinc
tions and limitations of national bodies, in
certain permanent ordinances in which the
character and universality of the Church are
expressed. He is impressed with the changes

4O Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

which are coming upon mankind, especially in
this re-moulding of the form of ecclesiastical
society. Everywhere men are coming together
towards unity. " Shall we not rejoice and give
thanks," he cries, " that we are born in these
latter days of the world when all things are
hastening to their consummation, and when the
unity of the Church shall be established, to be
that ground upon which all unity in nations and
in the heart of men is resting ? "

At the end he comes down to the earth again,
to deal with the practical exigencies of the situa
tion. " Only a Church," he defiantly asserts,
" can educate a nation." To confine its work
to the mere teaching of dogma is destructive of
the very idea of education. " The sects," as he
somewhat unhappily terms the non-episcopal
bodies, cannot do it, for " they cannot connect
the institution of the family, as such, with their
religion." For they look upon the religious
body as something different in kind from the
family. Nor can the State do it. It aims at
making men citizens. It cannot teach them to
be sons and brothers. The statesman must have
his schools established upon the express principle
that the parents are not competent to teach or
to choose teachers themselves. "All wise
statesmen of antiquity," says Maurice, " felt
this difficulty, and rejoiced to avail themselves
of such means as they had of escape from it."
He warns modern statesmen that they will be
found in similar perplexity if they pursue

Frederick Denison Maurice 41

similar courses. This applies even to purely
scientific education. "The maxim of a State
education must always be, how much nobler a
thing it is to make shoes than to seek for
principles." But "a National Church, strong
in the conviction of its own distinct powers,
paying respectful homage to those of the State,
educating all classes to be citizens by making
them men, is the only alternative to Jesuitry
on the one hand and an arid empiricism on the
other."

Finally, he appeals in impassioned language
to the National Church to take up the burden
of its high calling. Against ignorant parties,
High, Low, Broad, he appeals to the Liturgy ;
so far distinctively English, that it may be taken
as expressive of the mind of the English Church.
None of that Church's great sons were content
with a system. " All affirmed a kingdom," he
cries. He is filled with scorn against all
Church parties and their newspapers and
reviews, "generously striving that no other
party shall have the stigma of being more
unfair and libellous than their own." He
urges special attention to " the awful manu
facturing districts." "A Church which was
looked upon, and almost looked upon itself,
as a tool of the aristocracy, which compared
its own orders with the ranks in civil society,
and forgot that it existed to testify that man as
man is the object of his Creator's sympathy ;
uch a Church had no voice which could

suc a

42 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

reach the hearts of these multitudes." Nor
is the clamour of a revivalist religion to each
individual to save his own soul proving more
adequate. " Such words spoken with true
earnestness are very mighty. But they are not
enough ; men feel that they are not merely lost
creatures ; they look up to heaven above them,
and ask whether it can be true that this is the
whole account of their condition ; that their
sense of right and wrong, their cravings for
fellowship, their consciousness of being creatures
having powers which no other creatures possess,
are all nothing." " If religion," they say, "will
give us no explanation of these feelings, if it
can only tell us about a fall for the whole race,
and an escape for a few individuals of it, then
our wants must be satisfied without religion.
Then begin Chartism and Socialism and what
ever schemes make rich men tremble."

He passes to the vision of the Church beyond
the boundaries of England. He calls for
activity in the new colonies, in missionary effort
which can never succeed " except in the preach
ing of an organic society." He can even
cherish hope for the Church of Ireland if it
would abandon the English interest, become
national, and assert : " We are come over as
protectors of these Celts. We are to raise them
out of barbarism ! "

He concludes on a note of mingled exaltation
and humility : " I have in this book," he con
fesses, " attacked no wrong tendency to which

Frederick Denison Maurice 43

I do not know myself to be liable." " I am
not ignorant that the hints I have offered in
opposition to systems may be turned by them
selves or by others into a system." " I do pray
earnestly that if any such schools should arise
they may come to naught, and that if what I
have written in this book should tend even in
the least degree to favour the establishment of
them, it may come to naught."

• "'Let all Thine enemies perish, O LORD* : all
systems, schools, parties, which have hindered
men from seeing the largeness and freedom and
glory of Thy kingdom : but 'let them that love
Thee,' in whatever earthly mists they may at
present be involved, * be as the sun when he
goeth forth in his strength.* '

The Kingdom of (Christ threw down a challenge
defiantly to all of a particular class of news
papers. The " Religious Press " still flourishes
mightily in Britain. It has no parallel else
where. In the early 'forties it formed a
system of triumphant tyranny. With its
dogmatism, its lack of charity, its willingness
to crush all new movements and unpopular
causes, it appealed always against the solitary
thinker to the massed forces of a crowd. To
Maurice it seemed to be brewed out of the
fumes of the nether pit. His life was a long,
fierce warfare against a collection of newspapers,
notably The Record^ which recognized that in
fighting him they were fighting for their very

44 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

existence, and which gave and took no quarter.
This Record, the official organ of the rich and
prosperous Evangelical section of the Church,
exercised at this time an unchallenged domin
ance over the minds of its readers, and weighed
heavily upon the religious life of England.
The daily newspapers were accustomed to refer
to it for information upon matters ecclesiastical.
The normal mind, distrustful of new things,
found its heavy platitudes entirely congruous
with the timidity which dreads the unknown.
It was always prepared to stamp out any
minority provided that minority were suffi
ciently small. Its combination of worldliness
and intolerance, its proclamation of " comfort
able things" to a society which seemed to
Maurice to be needing a prophecy of warning
and judgment, its influence upon preferment,
and the universal fear it inspired among those
who would fain have challanged its domination,
drove him headlong into a warfare against it
which daily deepened in bitterness. It must be
confessed that he commenced the conflict ; and
at any time if he had left the paper alone, its
directors might have been content to abandon
the attacks upon him. But to leave it alone was
just what he would never consent to do. He
considered that its enormous power represented
one of the elements of that " devil-worship "
which he found everywhere around him ; and he
was determined never to cease fighting until he
had broken its rule. " On his part," confesses

Frederic]^ Denison Maurice 45

his son, " the war was one of aggression.
None of them had attacked him the moment
he denounced them. But once the issue was
joined they were struggling for their very
existence. If he could turn the religious world
into recognizing the essential atheism of the
religious Press, their occupation was gone. On
both sides, therefore, it was a war in which no
quarter could be given."

From the publication of The Kingdom of Christ
to the violent effort towards a social upheaval
which culminated in 1848, Maurice's life in
London is the record of an immense activity.

Happiness had come to him from his
marriage to Anne Barton, sister-in-law to
Sterling, in 1837. This new link with Sterling
made him all the more anxious concerning the
physical decline and mental difficulties of his
dearly-loved friend. The marriage itself, in
his own words, " brought a change from cloud
to perpetual sunshine." He was continuing
his work at the great hospital in the service of
the sick and dying. He was showering religious
tracts upon the disturbed theological waters, in
which the full flood-tide of the Oxford Move
ment was dashing itself against the rocks of
religious prejudice and religious indifference.
He was intensely absorbed in the new changes
which politics were bringing upon the nation,
in the disappointments which followed the
failure of the high hopes associated with the

46 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Reform Movement of 1832. And he was more
and more compelled to turn his attention to
that immense class of disenfranchised populace
whose sufferings and demands the comfortable
and leisured classes confronted with vague fore
bodings ; to challenge their intolerable condition
with that vision of Unity, in a common family,
under one Father, which he had proclaimed as
the good news of the Kingdom of GOD.

His demands in connexion with national
education were immediately confronted with the
slow developments of the time. Gladstone in
those remote days was advocating that a school
master should not be allowed to teach in the
elementary schools without a certificate from
the Bishop of his religious soundness. Maurice
was no more backward in insisting that the
business of education belonged to the Church
and not to the State. His lectures bearing the
title, " Has the Church or the State power to
educate the nation ?", subsequently published in
book-form, flung down the gage of battle to
everything which was held sacred by the Radi
calism of his time. The Educational Magazine,
of which he became joint editor, continued the
controversy. " The thing he most dreaded,"
says his son, "was the attempt to treat a human
being as composed of two entities, one called
religious, the other secular." The transference
of the education of the people from the Church
to the State he was prepared to oppose to the
end. More logical than most, he saw here the

Frederick Denison Maurice 47

impossibility of permanence in any of those
huddled compromises which have represented
the successive steps in the building of a national
educational system. He knew that there was
no permanence in any kind of combination
which would break up the child's mind between
different sections of interest, and warn off re
ligion from one and State subsidy from the other.
And if the whole course of modern development
has travelled steadily farther from his first prin
ciples, at least it may be recognized that he
saw more clearly than most the logical alterna
tives then embodied in tiny beginnings, and
that the verdict upon any system having the
note of finality has not yet been declared.

In the practical encouragement of a larger
educational system in England, Maurice threw
himself heartily into the work of reform. From
his Undergraduate days, when in his first pub
lication he had criticized the education of girls,
he had reached forward towards something
better than that caricature of training which
passed in those days for the education of
women. In his more mature life he was the
driving force in the making of Queen's
College, of which foundation he was the life
and inspiration. " Though many have watered
and tended the plant," was the confession in
after years of the Archbishop of Dublin
(Trench), " the vital seed in which it was all
wrapped up, and out of which every part was
unfolded, was sown by him."

U111U1U.1

48 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

A fresh field of exploration was opened by
the friendship of the Macmillans, two young
Scotch publishers, who were full of desire for
the satisfaction of the religious needs of the
young business-men of the time. Mr. Daniel
Macmillan in 1840 had written to Archdeacon
Hare explaining to him something of the
chaotic condition of the young city men with
whom he daily came in contact. It was the
story of a general ferment, with the new
thought confronting in perplexity the sterile
phrases of the orthodox theology. Hare
forwarded the letter to Maurice, but no
immediate action followed. Two years after
wards Mr. Macmillan wrote to Hare again
on the same subject. He explained the
thoughts and difficulties of the clerks, work
men, and shopmen in this new growing city
civilization ; their endeavours to find a working
creed of life ; their attendance at Chartist and
Socialist meetings and their dissatisfaction with
them ; their profound dissociation from all the*
Churches. " There is no spiritual guidance in
existence," was his forlorn summary, " at all
equal to the wants of our time." Hare again
appealed to Maurice, and Macmillan called and
was welcomed as a friend. For many months
there were frequent discussions concerning the
most appropriate method of appeal, in the name
of an historic theology, to the citizens of a
kingdom which had lost the note of its origins.
" We have been dosing our people with re-

Frederick Denison Maurice 49

ligion," was Maurice's complaint, " when what
they want is not this but the living GOD ; and
we are threatened now, not with the loss of
religious feeling, so-called, or of religious
notions, or of religious observances, but with
atheism." "The heart and the flesh of our
countrymen is crying out for GOD. We give
them a stone for bread, systems for realities ;
they despair of ever attaining what they
need. The upper classes become, as may
happen, sleekly devout, for the sake of good
order, avowedly believing that one must make
the best of the world without GOD ; the middle
classes try what may be done by keeping them
selves warm in dissent and agitation, to kill the
sense of hollowness ; the poor, who must have
realities of some kind, understanding from
their betters that all but houses and lands are
abstractions, must make a grasp at them or else
destroy them." " And the specific for all this
evil is some Evangelical discourse upon the
Bible being the rule of faith, some High
Church cry for tradition, some Liberal theory of
education." All are dead things, he cried — it
is the burden of all his message — except in so
far as they are " pointing towards a Living
Being, to know whom is life," and leading us
to that knowledge, and so to fellowship one
with another. These were the things which
he felt " I must utter or burst."

In the midst of such a confusion he saw the
Oxford Movement pursuing its hazardous

H

50 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

courses and staggering towards the final catas
trophe. It was academic, concerned with theory
and ancient controversies. It had not yet come
down into the common ways of men in the
tumult of the city, and there were no signs in
those days that it would ever consent to such a
progress. It seemed to Maurice destined to
waste itself more and more over things remote
and futile. And, although he was always
prepared to rush in to defend its leaders
against the tyranny of mob-domination, yet he
was also finding himself more and more com
pelled to testify against its later developments.
In the controversy concerning the Jerusalem
bishopric — one of the three crushing blows
which drove Newman out of the English
Church — Maurice plunged eagerly into the
struggle to advocate the German alliance. The
year after, however, he is vehement in
defence of Dr. Pusey against his inhibition
from preaching in the University pulpit ; and
publishes a letter to Lord Ashley on " Right
and wrong ways of supporting Protestantism."
Small wonder that men were perplexed at these
alternate protests of one whose profoundest
conviction was of the mischief of organized
parties in the Church, and the wickedness of all
persecution. In all such parties he found the
principle of doing evil that good may come
recognized, that it is lawful to lie to GOD, that
no faith is to be kept with those whom they
account heretics. It is a long, historic tradition.

Frederick Denis on Maurice 5 1

The peacemaker also, as in the same historic
tradition, was repudiated by all.

The end of the long conflict was near when
W. G. Ward published in 1 844 his Ideal of a
Christian Church. Utterly repudiating the
contempt for the Articles which that work
everywhere expressed, and Ward's cheerful
attack upon the whole system which these
Articles embodied, Maurice nevertheless was
active in opposition to that persecuting Pro
testantism which was consummating the final
catastrophe. He busied himself in the issuing
of a protest in the name of Liberalism and
based upon general principles of Christian
freedom. Two letters "To a Non-resident
Member of Convocation " represent his con
tribution to the general turmoil. In these
letters are to be found the seeds of a con
troversy destined in later years to become
notorious, with Maurice as defender instead
of critic. For here he chooses, to illustrate
the impossibility of binding present interpreta
tion to sixteenth century;conceptions, the words
of the seventh Article. To the reformers the
" Mterna Vita " represented unending existence
beyond the grave ; to Maurice, the knowledge
of GOD. " It would be an outrage upon my
conscience," he affirmed, " to express assent or
consent to any Article which did put c future
state ' in the Article for { eternal life.' "

The flood of violence was far beyond the
control of any voices of reason. Ward, in a

5 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

brilliant defence, in which Maurice's interven
tion was dragged into the field to testify to the
insincerity of the attacks upon him, was con
demned by the voice of Convocation. Only
the veto of the two Proctors prevented his
expulsion. A few days after he had married
and passed over to the Roman Catholic
Church.

Later came the greater loss. Newman,
finding light at last after the period of
waiting, left his "father's house" for the
" far country in a journey from which he
had shrunk so long. The record of the final
steps given in the Essay on the Development
of Christian Doctrine revealed to Maurice how
great was the divergence between them. " I
rose up from the volume," he writes, " with a
feeling of sadness and oppression, as if I were
in the midst of a country under a visitation
of locusts." But it was a blow from which,
as Disraeli could testify a generation after
wards, the Church of England was still reeling ;
as if, in Gladstone's words, a great bell sounding
on a cathedral tower had suddenly ceased tolling.
It was the breaking of the energies of a decade.
His followers were scattered and troubled ;
some passing with him in "the going out of
'45 " ; some retiring altogether from the active
conflict ; some finding complete shipwreck of
any spiritual belief in a world so full of irony
and baffled purposes.

For many years the influence of the Oxford

Frederick Denison Maurice 53

Movement almost ceased to operate. Oxford
itself was given over to a triumphant Liberal
ism. The social protest against the tyrannous
conditions of the time began to replace the
interest in these theological discussions ; and
there came to be heard in the stillness the
echoes of the deep crying of the poor. The
stage was clear for any company who could
bring to such a terrific problem of social
disorder any reading of the vision or message
of its right interpretation.

Maurice in private trouble was being
fashioned for the work to which he was to be
called. Mrs. Sterling had died in 1843. Sterling
died in September, 1844. He left behind in
Maurice's memory a continual reproach for
what he came to regard as harshness and
impatience with his first and dearest friend ;
whose Life he could never afterwards bear to
read, so full it was of irrevocable things. Then
after but a brief period of married happiness,
at the end of a long and painful illness, his wife
died in 1845. "I feel much more oppressed
with the sense of sin than of sorrow," was his
mournful confession. " I cry to be forgiven
for the eight years in which one of the truest
and noblest of GOD'S children was trusted to
one who could not help or guide her aright,
rather than to be comforted in the desolation
which is appointed to me."

He took up bravely the burden of an exist
ence from which the light had gone. He found

54 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

himself attaining an increasing reputation as a
theologian, with some particular appeal to the
more thoughtful men of his generation. He
gave the "Boyle Lectures" on the Religions of
the World and the " Warburton Lectures " on
the Epistle to the Hebrews, in which he
scathingly criticized Newman's theory of de
velopment. A Theological School in King's
College was being established, and he was
chosen first Theological Professor. Later he
was appointed chaplain at Lincoln's Inn ; and
left Guy's Hospital after ten years of patient
service there ; in which he had learnt in
familiar experience, the heights and depths of
human life, and the tragedy which lives behind
the smiling surface of the world.

Frederick Denison ^Maurice 55

CHAPTER III

THE SHAKING OF THE EARTH

HPHE "hungry forties" were an evil time
in England. The decade formed the
concluding period of an age during which
the dim thousands at the basis of society were
passing through one of the most terrible
experiences of all their long unhappy history.
The industrial revolution, and the years of
depression succeeding the great wars, had
reduced the peasantry in the villages, and the
disorganized masses who were creating the
cities, into a condition of penury and despair.
It was a hell deeper and wider than any to
which the working classes of this country had
before descended. And the last years, when,
indeed, if the people had only known it, the
worst of the time was over, were gathering up
into articulate protest all the passion of the
poor. " Every bad harvest," is the verdict of
social history, "brought riots and outrages in
its train. The midnight sky was often red
with burning hay-ricks, corn-stacks, and farm
buildings, set on fire by starving labourers."
There were outbreaks born of a wide distress

There

5 6 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

and misery in all the first years of the
young Queen's reign. In 1840 Lord John
Russell could tell the House of Commons that
the people of the British Isles were in a worse
condition than the negroes in the West Indies.
" The state of society in England," wrote
Dr. Arnold to Carlyle, " was never yet paralleled
in history." Cobden inflamed the first agitation
of the Anti-Corn League with story after story
of the tragedy of rural labourers : women
pawning their wedding-rings to buy food,
people living on boiled nettles or decayed
carcases of dead cattle. The great Emigration
was flinging numbers beyond the sea, inflamed
with revolt and despair and bitterness against
their own land. " In want, in terror, and
with a sense of the crushing injustice of the
times, they cursed the land in which they had
been born." "There was a sullen, passive
reign of distrust amongst the people," is the
confession of the memories of these days.
"The Reform Bill had disappointed them.
All their trade conflicts had ended in failure.
Even the resounding attacks against the Corn
Laws, then beginning to fill the country,
excited little interest among the working
classes, and so they gave little response.
Betrayal and failure had made them sad and
hopeless."

Commission after Commission had set itself
to examine the " Condition of England "
problem, and had come to no satisfactory

Denison Maurice 57

conclusion. The only certain conviction among
the governing classes was of the necessity of
drastic action in the suppression of revolt and
riot, and a profound condemnation of all
the Chartist and Socialist agitations among
the workers themselves. Lord Melbourne
denounced in Parliament the criminal character
of the Trades Unions, and counselled drastic
measures against them. Dr. Arnold, a Liberal
of humane and enlightened views, advanced
to the boundaries of possible invective in the
ferocity of his language concerning the new
movement for the " People's Charter." These
people themselves drifted hither and thither in
a kind of vague unrest. The new Poor Law
was a necessity if the whole nation was not to
sink into a spongy mass of pauperism. But it
was passed by a Parliament in whose election
they had no voice ; and it seemed to them
merely the cruelty of a State indifference to
their forlorn condition. The " Bastilles," as
the workhouses were called, were the subject
of universal popular denunciation. An enor
mous migration to the towns and beyond the
sea appeared to give no relief to the pauper
villages. "The country," as Canon Dixon
says, "was going to hell apace." The awful
revelations of the Commission on labour in
the factories, and the martyrdom of children
there contentedly tolerated — revelations which
to-day cannot be read unmoved — had but
stimulated the slow, timid beginnings of

58 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Factory Legislation. The lust of greed —
here as in San Domingo in the sixteenth
century, or South Africa in the twentieth — had
proved triumphant over all the weak affirma
tions of the moral law. Without organization,
purpose, or plan, the people were gathering
into lumps and blotches of population, as they
were swept together by the demands of the
new mechanical industry. Engels, in his
Condition of the Wording Class in England in
1844, could hold up to an astonished Europe
the vision of the cellar-dwellers of Manchester
and the intolerable life of the British artisan,
as a kind of warning lest its peoples should
come also into this place of torment. Unrest
and disquietude — disquietude born of hunger
and privation, and a bleak outlook for the
future — tormented the sullen cities. Some
times it took the form of mere blind and
stupid outrage, an aimless striking at machinery,
which they thought was taking the bread from
their mouths. Sometimes it organized itself
into riot and open revolt. All the hopes of
the people gathered round the Charter, which
came to be a symbol to society of the coming
Revolution ; in which the scenes of Paris, fifty
years before, might be repeated in the streets
of London, before the coming of the day of
better things.

The wisest men of the time were baffled by
a problem to which they could find no solution.
Carlyle, attending London dinner-parties and

Frederic^ Denison Maurice

59

hearing Sydney Smith "guffawing, other per
sons prating, jargoning," sees how that " through
these thin cobwebs Death and Eternity sate
glaring." " In no time since the beginnings of
society," is his deliberate verdict, " was the lot
of these same dumb millions of toilers so
utterly unbearable as it is even in the days
passing over us." He depicts England finding
itself full of wealth and yet dying of inanition ;
"two millions in workhouses and poor-law
prisons, or having outdoor relief flung over the
wall to them " ; the nation, like Midas, having
demanded gold, and turning into gold whatever
it touched, being given also the asses' ears and
the asses' wisdom ; the whole people profoundly
unhappy, because they have " forgotten GOD."
Small wonder that in tiny groups, in the under
world, of Methodists and obscure preachers,
men turned to prophecy and the visions of the
terror of the latter days, for light upon the
trouble of the time.

Upon all such sufferings, uncertainties,
doubts, and agonies came the inspiration of
the European uprising of 1848. The "song
of the quick " was heard " in the ears of the
dead." The long period of European sleep
and silence suddenly flared into resonant action.
Lamennais, back "amongst realities once again"
after the experience of his fortress-prison, was
called to represent the people in a republican
assembly. "A great act of justice is being
done," was his cry ; " cannot you feel the

60 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

breath of GOD ? " Mazzini, after years of
obscure poverty in the back streets, " the
hell of exile," in London, was soon to find
himself raising the red banner of GOD and
Humanity upon the walls of Rome. Every
throne in Europe tottered, and most were
thrown to the ground. The barricades were
up in Berlin, in Milan, in Paris. The air
was filled with the clamour and havoc of
change. The revelation of the coming of
terrors seemed at last realized in the ways of
men ; with the sun becoming black as sack
cloth of hair, and the moon blood-red, and the
stars of heaven falling to earth, as a fig-tree
when she is shaken by a mighty wind.

The young men whom Maurice gathered
round him demanded study of the Apocalyptic
vision as alone adequate to the time, and
Kingsley was searching the prophet Amos for
guidance in the stern work to which men
would be called in the coming "Day of the
LORD." In Italy the Pope was first a national
hero, then a fugitive. The Republic was
proclaimed in Paris. Louis Philippe had fled
across the sea. In Prussia, in Hungary, in
Lombardy, in Poland, as if moved by some
unseen wind of the Spirit, the people had risen
and were fighting in the streets. To Maurice,
with his confident faith in the workings of the
Divine energy in human affairs, the whole
movement was a visible coming of the Son
of Man. "If any preacher had tried to impress

Frederick Denison Maurice 6 1

you," he cried at the end of this wonderful
year, "with the belief that some signs and
wonders were near at hand, if he had tasked his
imagination or his skill in interpreting the hard
sayings in Scripture to tell you minutely what
those signs and wonders would be, are you not
sure that his anticipations would be poor and
cold when compared with the things which you
have heard of and almost seen ? " " Do you
really think," was his challenge, " that the
invasion of Palestine by Sennacherib was a
greater event than the overthrowing of nearly
all the greatest powers, civil and ecclesiastical,
in Christendom ? "

Yet in such upheaval Maurice's sympathies
were not entirely with the advocates of the
newer ideals. He repudiated with a passionate
rejection the principles of popular sovereignty
and of democracy. The catastrophe, in his
interpretation, had judged kings, not kingship.
It was a warning to those who had proved
unfaithful to the ideal ; not the passing of the
ideal itself before a stronger. " I do not start,"
he wrote in remonstrance to Mr. Ludlow,
" from the Radical or popular ground. I begin,
where I think you both end, in the acknow
ledgement of the Divine sovereignty. Thence
I come to the Tory ideal of kings reigning by
the grace of GOD." He held this truth not
only as belonging to the time in which it was
asserted and developed, but as bequeathed by
that time to all subsequent ages. With the

62 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

tenacity of the Non-Jurors he clung to a
position which, logically, would class him as
one of their descendants. " The sovereignty
of the people," he proclaimed, " in any sense
or form, I not only repudiate as at once the
silliest and most blasphemous of all contra
dictions, but I look upon it as the same
contradiction, the same blasphemy in its fullest
expression, of which the kings have been
guilty."

Mankind, or the less adventurous of them,
still despaired of the Republic. The first
Revolution had burnt into their souls the vision
of society falling into fragments through lack
of an organized, central unity. They could
find no binding power or cohesion in anything
but the monarchical principle. To Maurice the
only alternative to a constitutional monarchy
appeared to be "an autocracy of sheer brutal
force, reigning in arrogance and triumph."

The after-swell of the great European tide
was washing even the remote shores of
England. The demand for the Charter had
been first formulated in 1838. After ten years
of agitation it seemed possible that the forces
of revolt might at last break forth into open
explosion. Men wondered if London would
exhibit the same scenes of violence as Paris or
Berlin. The famous loth of April was to
see the monster petition escorted by a hundred
thousand determined men from Kennington to
Westminster ; the evening might see barricades

Frederick Denison Maurice 63

and fighting in the streets. Maurice, utterly
opposed to the appeal to force, had joined the
side of order, and offered himself with the
multitude of the middle classes which enrolled
themselves as special constables. Kingsley had
hurried to London from his country parish to
be present at the day of decision, to see if
anything could be done even at the last moment
to prevent a collision between the Chartists and
the troops. Maurice sent him to Mr. Ludlow,
and on this day first arose the combination of
that little band of reformers who were to
become famous in the history of social progress
under the title of the " Christian Socialists/'
" The poor fellows mean well however much
misguided " were Kingsley's first words. It
would be horrible if there were bloodshed. I
am going to Kennington to see what man can
do. Will you go with me ? "

There was nothing to be done. The demon
stration in a few hours had passed from tragedy
to farce. The crowding of London with troops,
the enrolling of 150,000 special constables to
guarantee the preservation of property, the lack
of leadership among the workmen, and their
own weakness and irresolution, had rendered
all prospect of violence negligible. The
numbers who assembled proved ridiculously
inadequate to the work which they proposed
to accomplish. Rain fell steadily. The leaders
fled. The crowd dispersed. The great petition
crawled ingloriously to Westminster in a four-

64 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

wheeled cab. The day closed in mockery and
rejoicing. Kingsley, in Alton Locfy, has given
his own vision of the tense atmosphere at the
beginning, and the reaction of ridicule at the
close. He knew too well the misery and
hunger ravaging the masses of the poor to find
any exultation in such an ending. If there were
little cause for trembling, there was still less
cause for laughter. He compares in passionate
protest this laughter to the secret smiling of
Tennyson's Epicurean gods ; as, in their far
remote paradise, looking over wasted lands and
a desolation which is to them but a distant
vision of change, they find the discord of
lamentation sounding like faint music far
away, and all the tragic terror of the time
" like a tale of little meaning though the words
are strong."

In such a spirit — with the atmosphere fey,
enchanted — Maurice and the little company
who had gathered round him in the later
spring of 1848, were watching with profound
anxiety the signs of the time. They were
convinced of the need for action, of the burden
of action laid upon them. Their first immediate
step was to placard London with addresses to
the workmen of England, telling them that
they had more friends than they knew of " who
love you because you are their brothers, and
who fear GOD, and therefore dare not neglect
you, His children." In plain terms these
placards informed their readers that the Charter

Frederick Denison Maurice 65

would not make them "free from slavery to
ten-pound bribes, to every spouter who flatters
self-conceit, to beer and gin." The workmen
of England, thus addressed on impersonal
hoardings, were lying crushed and forlorn
in the failure of their great endeavour, and
the ridicule which was being outpoured on
the bogus names in the great petition. Such
a collapse may perhaps account for a lack
of resentment at these strange, ill-chosen
lectures, delivered to them through the quaint
medium of advertisement in the streets of
London, by men who had hitherto done
nothing to guarantee their sincerity and their
sympathy.

From such unpromising beginnings they
passed to more continuous effort. On May 6,
1848, appeared the first number of Politics
for the People. It consisted of a tiny news
paper of sixteen pages, published weekly at
a penny. It appealed definitely to the working
classes, and to all those in England who
felt the reality of the grievances from which
the working classes suffered, and who realized
the necessity of reform. From the first,
" physical force Chartism " was repudiated.
The hope of the new time was to come from
religion : and the appeal — sometimes passionate,
sometimes bitter — was primarily to the Church
and its ministers to take up the obligation
of social improvement. " We have used the
Bible," cried Kingsley in an early number, "as

K

Bible,

6 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

if it were a mere special constable's hand
book, an opium dose for keeping beasts of
burden patient while they were being over
loaded, a mere book to keep the poor in
order." Against such blasphemy he appealed
to the prophets and the teaching of the New
Testament, for vindication of "justice from
GOD to those whom men oppress ; glory to
GOD from those whom men despise."

Maurice's contributions were of a less violent
type. He essayed the work of dialogue — " In
the penny boats," " Liberty, a dialogue between
a French Propagandist, an English Labourer
and the Editor " ; and so on. A remarkable
body of men contributed to this short-lived
journal. Letters were admitted from Chartists
and workmen. Kingsley's contributions, written
under the famous signature of " Parson Lot,"
were the most noteworthy. Kingsley and
Mr. Ludlow had gone much further than
Maurice in identifying themselves with the
Chartist ideals. They attacked with vehe
mence a social system which tolerated unspeak
able things. They refused toleration to those
who found refuge from action in ignorance.
They demanded that men of good-will should
choose a side and cut sharp the dividing line
between the friends of GOD and His enemies.
"When once fairly let loose upon his prey,"
wrote W. R. Greg of Kingsley, "all the Red
Indian within him comes to the surface, and
he wields his tomahawk with an unbaptized

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 67

heartiness, slightly heathenish no doubt, but
withal unspeakably refreshing.'*

" I am a Radical reformer," the "Red Indian"
was writing, " I am not one of those who
laugh at your petition. I have no patience
with those who do. My only quarrel with the
Charter is that it does not go far enough in
reform." Obloquy, abuse, the foulest calumny
gathered round him. His friends remonstrated.
He held on his way undaunted. " I will not
be a liar," he writes. " I will speak in season
and out of season. My path is clear and I will
follow it. GOD has made the word of the LORD
like fire within my bones, giving me no peace
till I have spoken out."

Mr. Ludlow, fresh from the vision of 1848 in
Paris, with Socialism as a living faith, and the
priests behind the barricades, was inspired with
a similar fighting spirit. Maurice appears as
charged with the ungrateful task of continually
holding back these impetuous reformers ;
counselling caution, softening the asperities of
denunciation, preaching loving-kindness and
charity rather than the violence bred of revolt
and despair.

One must confess that here his work is
not entirely effective. He suffered from an
incomplete apprehension of the nature of the
world of shadows in which his lot was cast
for a season. He was living in that world of
principles which to him formed the only reality.
The fight of Michael against the great dragon,

68 Leaders of the Church 1800-190(1

and the war continually waged by the armies of
Heaven, were more real to him than the welter
and chaos of political or sanitary reform in mid-
century London. He appealed for unity always
among the better men of all parties, to repudiate
each and severally the ignobler elements with
which they were united. The idea that the
men of high purpose in various historic political
parties should each abandon organizations which
include among their adherents men of selfish
and base ideals, and form a kind of united
company of the good visibly warring against the
evil, is an ideal which has haunted the minds of
many philosophical reformers. But it is not an
ideal applicable to the actual world of political
and social change. Nothing is more certain than
that, were such conditions attained, the good
would be found as visibly and bitterly fighting
against the good, as the evil against the evil.

Maurice would defend Kingsley and Mr.
Ludlow to the respectable dignitaries who were
patronizing the movement ; archdeacons and
academic persons who were shocked at their
plainness of speech. At the same time he
would urge them to resist the attractions of the
strong piquant phrase. He expurgated many
of their articles, and stopped altogether
Kingsley's story of The Nuns Pool. He
was often wearied because of the greatness of
the way. Sometimes the ineffective interference,
and " the consciousness of missing my aim
continually," make him feel that " I must have

Frederick Denison Mai

been a madman to embark upon such an enter
prise." But then he is encouraged by the
knowledge that " I did not choose it, but was
brought into it by some purpose greater than I
know of."

Seventeen numbers only were issued of
Politics for the People. The circulation reached
some two thousand a week ; but there
seemed no chance of it attaining an economic
success. Advertisements were impossible, and
the newspaper was boycotted by most respectable
newsagents. It died before the end of that
wonderful summer, while yet the European
conflagration raged fiercely and the future of
the nations was all unknown.

The general spirit of the little group was
undaunted by such a failure. They remained
quite heedless of the clamour of the respect
able amongst the Churches against this
newfangled Christianity. They were more
moved by the distrust, not perhaps inexplicable,
amongst the working-class leaders themselves,
of this sudden incursion into their midst of a
Church party. For the long, intolerable years
the Chartists had received from that Church
little but abuse or apathy. "The Bishops,"
was Lord Shaftesbury's bitter cry in 1844,
"are timid, time-serving, and great worshippers
of wealth and power. I can scarcely remember
an instance in which a clergyman has been found
to maintain the cause of the labourers in the
face of the pew-holders." As they had acted,

70 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

so were they judged. " I would shed the last
drop of my lifeblood," was Kingsley's hungry
cry, " for the social and political emancipation
of England, as GOD is my witness. And here
are the very men for whom I would die
fancying me an aristocrat ! "

Teast, issued in monthly parts in Frasers
Magazine, carried on the protest through the
autumn. All the bewildered vision of the
"two nations" of England, especially of the
confusion and despair in the rural districts, still
burns in its passionate pages. The weekly
meetings at Maurice's house continued during
the winter. Impatience for direct action found
fruit in tiny schemes of social amelioration. A
Night School was set up, for men first, after
wards for women and children, in Little Ormond
Yard, Bloomsbury. The Monday Bible Classes
drew to Maurice's house a strange mixture in
creed and politics, to whom Maurice sought
to interpret from the Book of Genesis the
meaning of the troubles of the time.

In the spring of 1849 further efforts were
undertaken. The great revolutionary move
ment had collapsed in Europe, and the old order
had been re-established in fire and blood. The
Reaction, with all the tragedy of high hopes
disappointed, was in the hour of its triumph.
In England and in Ireland so many who had
hoped for the coming of the day of better
things were leaving the country in despair of
improvement. The spirit of the last pages of

Frederick Denison Maurice 71

Locke , with the emigrants turning to a new
world undefiled by the accumulated wrong of
centuries, was the spirit in which so many were
departing from the shores of their own land.

The Christian Socialists refused to abandon
the vision of the " good time coming." Meet
ings were arranged with some of the Chartist
leaders in London. " They seemed to think
much of a clergyman being willing to hold
conferences with them in a friendly spirit,"
was Maurice's sad discovery, " though they
are quite used to meeting Members of Parlia
ment." Kingsley had broken down in health
under the strain in the winter, but with partial
recovery returned again with eagerness to the
arena, lamenting the delay in the coming of
the spring and the slowness of all human
change. He describes his visits to London,
pilgrimages with Mr. Ludlow to Lincoln's
Inn Chapel to see the "Master" preaching.
" Maurice's head looked like some great, awful
Giorgione portrait in the pulpit." In one of
the working class meetings the effect was
more profound. " Last night will never be
forgotten by many, many men. Maurice was
— I cannot describe him. Chartists told me
this morning that many were affected even
to tears. The man was inspired, gigantic.
He stunned us."

The meeting had been called to consider
some practical step to destroy sweating, espe
cially in the slop-tailoring trade. Revelations

72 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

concerning this sweating had created one of
the periodical sluggish movements of the public
conscience, which from time to time excite
disquietude and a demand for public action.
Maurice went to the root-causes of the whole
random disorganization of modern life, in a
philosophy whose far-reaching application, had
they but understood it, would have scared many
of the patrons of the new reforms. He de
nounced almost savagely the gospel of free
competition, and set forth the contrary ideal of
association as the law of the Christian kingdom.
" Competition is put forth as the law of the
universe," he wrote a little later. " That is a
lie. The time is coming for us to declare that
it is a lie." "The payment of wages under this
competitive system has ceased to be a righteous
mode of expressing the true relation between
employer and employed." The challenge, clear
and definite and with no soft words of com
promise, is flung down to the orthodox economy
which was the child of the industrial revolution
in early Victorian England. " We may restore
the old state of things" cried this social prophet,
" we may bring in a new one. GOD will decide
that. His voice has gone forth clearly bidding
us come forward to fight against the present
state of things." " It is no old condition we
are contending with, but an accursed new one,
the product of a hateful, devilish theory which
must be fought with to the death."

The challenge, here deliberate, was im-

7rederick Denison Maurice

73

mediately accepted. It was sufficiently out
rageous that a clergyman should term himself
a Chartist and ally himself with those who
demanded votes for the lower orders. But
when such a clergyman passed from political
to economic questions, assailed the very fabric
of society, openly advocated Socialism, and
denounced as " devilish " the comfortable
creed upon which were based the wealth and
security of the leisured class, it was evident
that he could expect little but a long and
furious warfare against one who stirred up
the people to unimaginable ends. Socialism
came to Maurice, as it came a little later in
Germany, in the form of encouragement
of association or co-operation among the
working classes themselves. It was not the
formation of little secluded Utopias he desired,
leading the communal life. Nor did he ever
appeal to the State to come in to organize the
industrial class. But he thought that, by unit
ing the workmen themselves into Co-operative
Producing Associations, he could eliminate the
profits of dead capital and abrogate the ferocity
of the competitive struggle. Associations
developing from tiny beginnings might become
universal ; and, when universal, would over
throw that tyranny of capital which was
supposed at that time, through "the iron
law of wages," to drive always the remu
neration of the workers down to the bare
limits of subsistence.

74 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

But Co-operation in those days wore a very
different garb from that which clothes it
to-day. This mild and beneficent business-
organization of distribution and production,
now so sleepy and conservative, patronized
by Bishops, extolled by all that is respectable
and secure, appeared sixty years ago as a pro
gramme of violent and revolutionary change.
Workmen uniting with workmen, as their
own masters, repudiating the leadership of the
intellectual and the rich, were in such unity
to shake the very fabric of society. Ultimately
they might succeed in abolishing those profits
of capital without which an upper and middle
class could not decently endure. In the eyes
of such a class it was revolutionary, anti-
Christian, communistic, cutting at the root
of the natural relationship of master and
man, employer and employed. It signified
a lawlessness and independence at the basis
of society which could only consummate in
some enormous collapse and upheaval. The
orthodox in business and politics and religion
turned in disgust from these reckless men ;
whose theology was misty and vague, whose
political economy was contemptible, who were
encouraging blasphemy by the proclamation,
not in the name of a barren atheism, but as
the demand of the Divine Ruler of the
universe, that the competitive system must
be overthrown.

Through all the gathering storms of opposi-

FredericJ^ 'Denison Maurice 75

tion they continued on their way. From the
conferences held with the working men during
that troubled summer at the Cranbourne
Tavern, came the impulses towards the creation
of Workmen's Co-operative Associations.
Maurice's Socialism, here and always, was of a
strictly limited nature. The State, he held,
never could be communist, and never ought to
be communist. " It is by nature and law
conservative of individual rights, individual
possessions." But the Church on the other
hand, he maintained, is communist in principle.
And in the union of the two he finds a reconcilia
tion of those divergent principles of collective
and individual welfare whose disunion has
troubled the minds of so many social philo
sophers. "The union of Church and State,
of bodies existing for opposite ends, each
necessary to the other, is precisely that which
should accomplish the fusion of the principles
of Communism and of property."

Mr. Ludlow returned from Paris full of
enthusiasm for the then most promising move
ment of the ^Associations Ou^rieres. In
England reform came but slowly, and those
who cared to listen were still troubled by the
crying of the poor. Cholera was raging in
the unspeakable slums of Bermondsey and
Wapping, and Kingsley found almost intolerable
the waste and misery of it all. He was impatient
for that sanitary reform which he believed could
save so many human lives. " Do not let them

7 6 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

wait for committee meetings and investigations."
He pleaded, "While they will be maundering
about vested interests and such like, the people
are dying." The "Condition of the People"
problem, seen with his own eyes, took upon
itself a deepening aspect of tragedy ; and the
degradation and horror were torturing his
sensitive spirit. " If I had not had the Com
munion at church to-day," he wrote to Mr.
Ludlow, "to tell me that JESUS does reign,
I should have blasphemed in my heart, I
think, and said, ' the devil is king.' ' " I
have a wild longing to do something ; what,
GOD only knows."

Maurice, the leader to whom all turned in
their trouble, seemed hesitating, unsatisfying.
He was profoundly convinced of the futility of
all leagues and organizations, and refused to
undertake the formation of the "League of
Health" which the younger men desired. "The
dread of societies, clubs, leagues," he confesses,
" has grown upon me. I have fought with it
and often wished to overcome it. It has returned
again and again upon me with evidence that I
cannot doubt of being a Divine, not a diabolical
inspiration." The National Society stood before
him as an awful warning. " The meetings for
party agitation, the lists of subscriptions intended
to excite competition and appealing to the
lowest feelings " filled him with an infi
nite repugnance. He deemed it destined to
become " a mere dead log " or to be " inspired

ing u

or sc<

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 77

with a false demoniacal life by a set of
Church clubs " ; which would " ten years
hence have left the Jacobin Club and every
other at an immeasurable distance behind them
in the race of wickedness." Analogies drawn
from the Anti-Corn Law League only produced
from him a discomforting allusion to the verdict
of the Bhagcfoad Gita : — " Those who worship
the Devatas obtain speedy answers to their
prayers. " Against energy expended in such a
League he advocated a humbler task ; the call
ing upon the students of Lincoln's Inn to unite
with the medical men of King's College Hospital,
the clergy of the district, and some of the Chartist
leaders, in an active campaign in their crowded
neighbourhood, against overcrowding, insanita-
tion, vice, ignorance. " I speak as a clergyman,"
he wrote to Mr. Ludlow, " to you as a lawyer.
May we not by GOD'S blessing help to secure
both our professions from perishing ? "

Yet this discouraging advice, given in seem
ing detachment and calmness, reflected but little
the passionate feelings beneath the smooth
surface. Time and again, the fires which burned
always at his inner being would flare out into
violent utterance, revealing something of the
self-restraint which kept them generally con
trolled. Maurice had written of another's cold
vision of the Bible as a religious book : — " He
is a man who takes things comfortably ; warm
ing his hands by the fire, but it will never burn
or scorch him in the least." Were it otherwise,

7 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

"the fire would be in his heart while he was
arranging his knick-knacks and watering his
flowers, and it would come out though it burnt
up the pretty cottage and garden and Church,
and all Borrowdale and Derwentwater." And
with Maurice the fire was in the heart, and
would "come out" at times, though it burnt
up all the secure and established conventions,
through which men constructed cushions and
barriers to preserve them from the hardness of
real things.

Never more flashing and blinding was this
furnace revealed than amid that commonest and
mournfullest of all the reformer's experience : —
the divisions, the mistrusts, the recriminations
of rival advocates of progress. " I could go
mad too," he flared out in one sudden protest ;
"and these bewildering charges and counter
charges, and protests and objections, upset my
head and heart more even than the evils which
upon such terms can never be remedied. c Ten
grains of calomel?' c No, bleed, bleed!' 'Fool,
Mesmerism is the only thing ! ' c How dare
you say so ? ' c There is Hydropathy, there
is Homoeopathy.' c Thank you, doctors, one
and all. You may draw the curtain. The
patient is gone.' Poor England ! its tongue
is foul ; its pulse fluttering ; it is dying of
inanition and repletion ; and we are debating
and protesting ! "

The reformers yielded upon the question of
the Health League and abandoned the project.

Frederick Denison Maurice 79

They could not yield in what appeared a more
serious demand, for the abandonment of the
promotion of Working Class Associations.
Maurice wished them to preach the principles of
Co-operation : they wished to launch Co-opera
tive Societies ; and they would not be swept
away from such work into district-visiting and
the immediate effort at parochial improvement.
To their surprise and delight, when the testing
time came, Maurice, instead of retiring, threw
himself whole-heartedly into the cause. It
was to commence with a Tailors' Association.
Kingsley's historic pamphlet upon Cheap Clothes
and Nasty launched the little venture ; with an
impeachment, in the name of Christian prin
ciples, of the accepted conditions of industry.
After eighteen months of comparative silence,
since the cessation of Politics for the People , it
was agreed that the practical measure should be
accompanied by another step forward. Chart
ism by this time had become a dead thing ;
Socialism a living menace ; and the defiant
flag of Christian Socialism was nailed to the
mast. The name was apparently adopted with
a desire to offend the maximum number of
persons on both sides ; "to commit us at once,"
says Maurice, cheerfully, " to the conflict we
must engage in sooner or later with the unsocial
Christians and the un-Christian Socialists."
The little dialogue upon Christian Socialism,
which Maurice issued as the first of a new series
of tracts, sums up in its affirmations and its

8o Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

defiance the spirit of the whole movement.
There can be discerned all through it the con
sciousness of a struggle ; and a struggle against
forces almost overwhelming ; with an appeal
always to a vindication beyond men's approval.
It is introduced as a dialogue " between Some
body, a person of respectability ; and Nobody,
the author." " I seriously believe," was the
frank challenge, " that Christianity is the only
foundation of Socialism, and that a true
Socialism is the necessary result of a sound
Christianity."

The author refuses to rejoice with the rejoic
ings of society at the triumph of the old system
in Europe. " If the order of revolutions pro
duced poor fruit," he asserts, " I cannot yet
perceive that the order of reactions has produced
any better. If the supporters of Co-operation
made some strange plunges and some tremen
dous downfalls, I believe the progress to
perdition under your competitive system is
sufficiently steady and rapid to gratify the most
fervent wishes of those who seek for the
destruction of order, and above all of those
who make England a by- word among the
nations."

From the orthodox teaching of the narrow
creed of a commercial economy, he appealed, as
Ruskin was to appeal later, to some enduring
definition of the wealth which made for human
well-being. With Ruskin also he confronted
the affirmations of a passing stage of free com-

Frederic!^ Denison Maurice 8 1

petition with the organizations and ideals of
older times. "I hold that there has been a
sound Christianity in the world," he claimed,
" and that it has been the power which has kept
society from the dissolution with which the
competitive principle has been perpetually
threatening it." Christianity he finds " un
sound just in proportion as it has become mine
or yours, as men have ceased to connect it with
the whole order of the world and of human
life, and have made it a scheme or method for
obtaining selfish prizes which men are to compete
for, just as for the things of the earth." He
proclaimed with a kind of exultation the older
view of the Church, with which indeed was
incorporated all his life's assertion of a Divine
order and meaning in human affairs ; of the
Church as a fellowship constituted by GOD in
a Divine and human Person, by whom it is
upheld, by whom it is preserved from the dis
memberment with which the selfish tendencies
of our nature are always threatening it."

He turns with scorn from such visions as
those of Montalembert in France and the
" Young England " movement at home ; in
which salvation is to be effected by the romantic
and kindly philanthropy of the wealthy, and the
deferential gratitude of the poor. " He loves
the poor as poor," Maurice says almost savagely,
" as means, that is to say, of calling forth and
exhibiting the virtues, the self-sacrifice, the
saintship of the rich." " Though he knows

M

82 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

that the greatness of the period which he
admires arose from co-operation, not from
competition, he must denounce co-operation
and practically glorify competition, because the
one talks of emancipating the labourer and the
other leaves him to the alms of the faithful. He
must know, if he will reflect, that these alms,
were they multiplied a thousandfold, could
not save hundreds or thousands of his fellow-
countrymen and countrywomen from abject
misery of body and soul."

Against such an ideal he elevates the vision
of the message he thinks he has been sent to
proclaim. " Our Church must apply herself to
the task of raising the poor into men. She
cannot go on treating them merely as poor."
And in a final outburst he announces that
despite all the opposition of a world timid,
interested and hostile, this cause must ulti
mately triumpth.

" If you accuse us of being idle, visionary
dreamers who abhor statistics, we must plainly
tell you that our object will be to deal with the
commonplace details of human misery, to
enquire not how the world may be cut into
parallelograms, but how you and I can buy our
coats without sinning against GOD and abetting
the destruction of our fellow-creatures ; to show
how our little acts of inconsideration may cause
far more physical and moral evil than great
crimes ; to point out a way in which habitual
acts of deliberation and reflection upon , our

'reaertct

lemson Maurice

relations to our brethren may avert or relieve
wretchedness, which grand charities and mag
nificent subscription lists leave untouched or
perhaps aggravate.

S. How do you propose to prove that you
are the persons who are the fittest to undertake
this mission ?

N. We do not propose to prove it.

S. How do you know that any one will listen
to you ?

N. We do not know it.

S. Have you enlisted any powerful sup
porters ?

N. None at all.

S. You count upon some help from the
periodical Press ?

N. We have no reason to expect the least.

S. Not even from the religious newspapers ?

N. From them one and all, utter contempt
or violent denunciations.

S. A brilliant prospect certainly !

N. The old prospect. If this counsel, or
this work, be of man, it will come to nought.
If it be of GOD, slop-sellers, philosophers,
economists, the whole trading world, the whole
religious world cannot overthrow it, for they
will be found fighting against GOD.

84 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER IV

" HE STIRRETH UP THE PEOPLE "

T TNDER such auspices, early in the dividing
year of the century, and with the deter
mination that men should be stimulated to
"buy their coats without sinning against GOD,"
the humble Association of Tailors was launched
in Castle Street, near Oxford Street. It was
followed by the Association of Needlewomen,
for the remedying of the worst form of
sweating among the women workers. Maurice
exercised all his persuasive arts among his
friends in London and Cambridge to obtain
orders for the firm. Other similar associations
have been launched since ; to which also the
philanthropic have been invited to give orders.
Somehow the system, then as now, has failed
to work. The demand for expansion, however,
was not to be content with one tiny experiment
among the slop-tailoring trades. In more am
bitious scope a parent society, the Society for
Promoting Working Men's Associations, was
organized out of the original band of
Christian Socialists and their friends, including
some of the working men. The council

Denison Maurice

of this Society met weekly at Maurice's
house to consider plans for propagandism.
The object of the movement, as set forth
in Tract V of the tracts on Christian
Socialism, was definite and ambitious. " It
is now our business," wrote the promoters,
" to show by what machinery the objects of
Christian Socialism can, as we believe, be
compassed ; how working men can release
themselves, and can be helped by others to
release themselves, from the thraldom of
individual labour under the competitive system ;
or at least how far they can at present by
honest fellowship mitigate its evils."

Maurice, an inspirer and a prophet, was diffi
cult to those who were eager to push forward
into practical affairs. His profound, almost
morbid, distrust of organizations and systems,
led him to oppose the creation of machinery
which practical men thought essential to the
working-out of the ideal. As the machinery
became elaborated, he would attack it as sub
stituting mechanical things for the ethical and
moral forces without which it was useless. He
feared lest the machinery itself should become
an object of worship. " He desired," says his
to Christianize Socialism, not to Chris-

son,

tian-Socialize the universe." Beyond all things
he dreaded becoming the head of a party of
Christian Socialists. This fastidious distrust
and hatred of party drove him to oppose many
of the deliberate efforts to place the movement

86 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

upon a workable business foundation. The
leaders, bringing forward some seemingly
innocent plan dealing with committees or
consolidation, would find themselves suddenly
confronted with a judgment and condemnation,
in which the eternal laws of the universe were
called in to brand as intolerable some entirely
simple piece of practical adjustment. One
such attempt designed to form a Central
Board, uniting together individual Associations
in various towns, checking them, controlling
them, advising them. Mr. Ludlow, inviting
Maurice to join such a company, received
a shattering reply. In his refusal : " The line
I have marked out for myself," Maurice
asserts, "is the right one. Any other would
involve me in a fatal desertion of the prin
ciples upon which I have for years striven
to act, and above all, of that principle of
fellowship and brotherhood in work which
I have felt called to assert with greater loud-
ness of late." He scorns the belief in the
power of organization to make sets of men
with an evil moral purpose, good and useful.
" In His Name," he vehemently protests,
" and in assertion of His rights I will, with
GOD'S help, continue to declare in your ears
and in the ears of the half-dozen who are
awake on Sunday afternoons, that no Privy
Councils or GEcumenical Councils ever did
lay, or ever can lay, a foundation for men's
souls and GOD'S Church to rest upon." The

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 87

Central Board was promptly abandoned. The
managers of the several Associations and the
promoters remained apart ; and the latter
engaged rather in the work of disseminating the
ideals and principles of Co-operation than in the
actual organization of Co-operative Societies.

The movement developed amid storms of
obloquy and denunciation. The whole respect
able and religious Press united in an endeavour
to crush the men who were stirring up the
people into discontent, and repudiation of the
legitimate social order. The quarterlies con
tributed their heavy artillery. The Tablet for
the Roman- Catholics, the Eclectic Review of
the extreme Dissenters, the T)aily News repre
senting Cobden and the Manchester School,
joined the Record and other orthodox Church
papers in the general hue and cry. The
vindication by the Parliamentary Committee
upon " Investments for the Savings of the
Middle and Working Classes," and the strong
support of John Stuart Mill, exercised no
mitigating influence. Alton Locke was published
in the spring of 1850, and concentrated upon
Kingsley's devoted head all the fury of the
time. The publisher of Teast refused it, and
it finally only struggled into print through
the kind offices of Carlyle. The Record struck
at it passionately and blindly.

I have before me a bound copy of the
Christian Socialist ; a " Journal of Association,"
as the sub-title runs, " conducted by several

ao UW

8 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

of the promoters of the London Working
Men's Associations." Yellow with age, sharply
limited by the necessities of print and paper
before the repeal of the paper-duties, it
appears as a journal more eager for the
preaching of a faith than for the production
of a newspaper. It represents an interesting,
if rather pathetic, relic of a time long gone.
The weekly issues exhibit rather a series of
spasmodic cries than any intelligible record of
the movement, or of the world outside ; the
voice of one crying through the darkness :
" Will the night soon pass ? " The articles
which call attention to the patient endurance
of the poor, are full also of that indignation
against acquiescence in accepted things, which
is the heart of any movement towards reform.

There are letters from working men explain
ing their desolate condition. There is in
flammatory poetry such as Kingsley's proclama
tion of " The Day of the LORD " in the first
number. There are attempts to justify the
Bible to the people as the book of redemption
proclaimed to all ; and attempts to justify
Socialism and Co-operation to those among
the wealthy and respectable classes who thought
that these meant the destruction of the old
Faith. There are fragments from foreign travel
descriptive of nature and the world outside,
curiously intertwined with the record of the
slow advance of the Working Men's Associa
tions, which occupies the bulk of the news.

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice

89

The most important general articles are
those which give the weekly record of the
Government Committee on the Savings of the
Middle and Working Classes, with the evi
dence of John Stuart Mill and others as to
the desirability of securing the legal status of
the Associations. The general tone is full of
violence and of bitterness, and of prophecy
of the evils to come. "The new idea,"
Mr. Ludlow leads off in the first article
of the first number, " has gone abroad into
the world that Socialism, the latest-born of
the forces now at work in modern society, and
Christianity, the eldest-born of these forces,
are in their nature not hostile but akin to each
other ; or rather that the one is but the
development, the outgrowth, the manifestation
of the other ; and that the strangest and most
monstrous forms of Socialism are but Christian
heresy." They call upon Christianity to come
out from its present position, cramped in
between the four walls of its churches or
chapels, and forbidden to go forth into the
wide world conquering and to conquer ; " to
assert GOD'S rightful domination over every
process, and trade, and industry, over every
act of our common life " ; and " to embody
in due forms of organization every truth of
that Faith committed to its charge." They
see society drifting rudderless on the sea of
competition. They call for a fight against all
the armies of mammon. They reveal in

N

90 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

all these fiery pages the sense of an actual
and visible combat against the forces of evil.
They challenge the affirmations of John
Stuart Mill with the proclamations of the
Book of Deuteronomy. They find harvest
labourers, hired at a penny a day, with their
wages refused ; and receiving instead a penny
halfpenny for three weeks' labour. They
confront such courses with the judgment in
the Epistle of S. James against those who kept
back the hire of the reapers by fraud. " People
of England," they ask, " choose between these
two gospels."

They comment freely on the ritual riots
at S. Barnabas', Pimlico. " Since when has
religious liberty been so little understood in
England," they write, " that a clergyman must
run the risk of having his church pulled down
because he is dressed in white instead of in
black, sits behind a gilt screen, lights a candle
in broad daylight, and writes inscriptions so
that they shall not be read?" And all the
while " the palace of the slop-sellers in Oxford
Street remains inviolate " !

Their attitude towards politics is revealed
in the comments upon the ministerial crisis
of 1851. "The people are sick of party cries
and party leaders," writes Mr. Ludlow, " sick
of Parliamentary interference altogether." They
despise the Whigs. They thoroughly distrust
the Manchester party as an embodiment of
competitive selfishness. They find the Peelites

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice

a clever coterie with no followers, and they
will not hear of a return of the Protectionists.
"The people were disposed to give the new
men a fair trial, but a bread tax they would
not submit to. Come what might they would
not allow the food of England to be taxed for
the raising of landlords' rents and the swelling
of farmers' incomes."

And throughout all they are conscious of
the perilous condition of the body politic.
" I think of the four judgments of Ezekiel,"
runs one leading article, " again I repeat it,
we have had famine, pestilence, we have
noisome beasts ; again I ask, does the sword
alone remain ? "

Kingsley, in a series of fiery articles, taking
for text a murder in rural England, used
the revelations of the trial as material for an
impeachment of the whole organized system.
The real accomplices of the murderers, he
declares, are " the whole enlightened and
civilized British public." " Sooner or later the
LORD of Heaven and earth, He who lives and
sees and bides His time till men fancy He is
dead or an absentee landlord like themselves,
He who is supposed by many to have no
intention of interfering till the end of the
world, He will require the murdered man's
blood at your hands."

" The end of the world ! " he bursts forth,
in the warning of one who saw clearly
the hazardous nature of the time, and the

the \

92 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

forces which were surging and boiling just
beneath the thin crust of society, "The end
of the world ! Well, gentlemen, and how do
you know that the end of the world is not
come, and the day of the LORD thereof at
hand, and a new world already in its birth
throes ? That which decayeth and waxeth old,
the system which has become impotent, effete,
living on the traditions of its boyhood, con
fessing its inability either to grow and develop
or to arise and play the man in the might of
its long-past youth, that, said the wisest man
except One who ever trod this earth, is ready
to vanish away. Ye hypocrites ! ye can discern
the face of the sky, yet ye cannot discern the
signs of this time."

The Experiences of Thomas Bradfoot, School
master, an uncompleted novel, represents
Maurice's contribution to the Christian Socialist.
It is written in a spirit more quiet and tran
quil than those passionate outbursts of the
younger reformers. It appeared in fragmentary
contributions week by week, and the plot is
not very far advanced before the end. In the
form of a personal confession it professes to
give the experience of a country schoolmaster,
confused by the various issues which were
fighting themselves out over National Educa
tion ; as they are fighting themselves out to-day.
There is the dominance of the Parson and of
the Squire for evil and for good ; the attack by
the Nonconformists, in part justified, in part

IDenison Maurice

exaggerated ; new Jacobin ideals brought into
the southern English market town by a French
officer. The interest of the fragment is not
so much in the thought as in the style.
Maurice, in his definite determination after
simplicity in a story which he desires the
working man to read, reveals himself here
as a real master of simple English prose. It
is an enormous advance on Eustace Comvay,
and with none of the confusion and involved
purpose of the theological writings. The
author whom this little effort most recalls is
the author of Mark Rutherford 's Autobiography ;
and if a critic were reading it to-day as from an
unknown hand, he would be exceedingly
inclined to ascribe it to that writer. In the
growing love of the hero for his little
cousin, for example, there is an astonishing
resemblance to certain scenes in The 'Deliverance.
" I began to think that Elinor was worth a
thousand times as much as that young
woman, or any other that I had ever looked
upon. I recollected her little rosy child's
face, and then how it had altered, and what
a new expression had come out in it, and
how strange and sad the smile upon it was
the last time she spoke to me ; till the vision
began to meet me when I rose in the morning,
and amidst the grinning faces of the school
boys, and in the trees and flowers when I
went out to breathe of the evening air, and at
night whether I was awake or asleep." Such

94 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

sentences as these might have walked straight
out of the novels of Mr. Hale White.

The Christian Socialist contains the complete
record of the founding of these various tiny
productive Associations in London ; with their
balance sheets from month to month. It was
on the smallest scale. In December, 1850, we
find advanced to the tailors ^378, to the shoe
makers £251, to the printers £254, to the
bakers £57. The little capital is made up of
donations of ^513, and loans of j£6i6. There
are rather forlorn experiences of the inability
of the workmen to respond to the Co-operative
gospel, with remonstrances against such a class
as the working builders in the Co-operative
Society sweating their unskilled labourers.
Most of the Societies ended in disaster with
considerable financial failure. They had com
menced, as in so many cases, with the least
organizable class, those who had been working
in the sweated trades. They had suffered from
the difficulty which has oppressed so many Co
operative Productive Societies, of obtaining
honest and competent directors. The Christian
Socialist became the Journal of ^Association^
carried on an uneasy life for a time, and finally
also died away. It perished with the flag
flying defiant still, and no repentance or
repudiation of the cause which it had made
its own. " So die, thou child of stormy dawn,"
wrote Kingsley, in one of the most passionate
of his poems ; as he called on the forces of

Frederick T)enison Maurice 95

teeming June and the great influence of the
rain of GOD to bring the seed encompassed in
that death to a fairer flower and fruit : —

" Fall warm, fall fast, thou mellow rain ;
Thou rain of GOD, make fat the land ;
That roots, which parch in burning sand
May bud to flower and fruit again.

To grace, perchance, a fairer morn
In mightier lands beyond the sea,
While honour falls to such as we

From hearts of heroes yet unborn,

Who in the light of fuller day,
Of purer science, holier laws,
Bless us, faint heralds of their cause,

Dim beacons of their glorious way.

Failure ? While tide-floods rise and boil
Round cape and isle, in port and cove,
Resistless, star-led from above :

What though our tiny wave recoil ? "

At the beginning of 1851 Maurice and
Tom Hughes undertook together a tour in
Lancashire to spread the gospel of Co-operation.
Everywhere Associations were being formed,
each looking for guidance to the little central
company of promoters. Those who found
Christianity a thing incredible and who quite
honestly thought that the emancipation or the
workers was impossible without the abandon
ment of this creed, felt alarmed at this
new revival from such unexpected quarters.
Mr. Holyoake, in the Reasonery declared

96 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

open war from the side opposite to that of
the religious Press, denouncing Maurice and
Kingsley for attempting by philanthropic
methods, to obtain converts amongst the
working men to a faith which was dead
and incredible. That charge he repeated at
intervals in all his subsequent works. No
course, it may be asserted, could be more
remote from the whole aims and objects of
the founders. Maurice, at the time he was
endeavouring to spread Co-operation, was de
nouncing the National Society for making " a
convulsive struggle for schoolrooms by plead
ing that they were meaning to put down
Chartism." " What could be a more fatal sign
of want of faith in education itself," he asks,
" than this eagerness to draw arguments for it
from the selfishness of the higher classes ? "

The Socialism of Maurice, indeed, flowed
forth from his Christianity. He had drunk
his politics, as another has asserted, " from the
breasts of the Gospel." The good news of
the Fellowship and Kingdom meant for him
the assertion of a unity to which the laws of
competition were always opposed ; and the
announcement that competition was an in
evitable condition of progress he had denounced
as a devil's lie. But any vision of persuading
workmen to become Christians by improving
their material condition, or any hope that the
Church could be aggrandized by concern in
social philanthropy, was a vision and a hope so

FredericJ^ 'Denison ^Maurice 97

repugnant to every word he had ever written
that the charge left him amazed at its injustice.
But, while the Secularists were thus battering
at one gate, the Christians were no less back
ward at the others. In September Mr. Croker
opened fresh batteries in the Quarterly Review
under the title " Revolutionary Literature."
" Very beggarly Crokerism," was Carlyle's
comment, " all of copperas and gall, and
human baseness " ; adding cheerily, " no viler
mortal calls himself man than old Croker at
this time." Maurice and Kingsley were
denounced as " heads of a clique of educated
and clever but wayward-minded men ; who
from, as it seems, a morbid craving for notoriety
or a crazy straining after paradox, have taken up
the unnatural and unhallowed task of preaching
in the Press and from the pulpit, not, indeed,
open, undisguised Jacobinism and Jacquerie,
but under the name of Christian Socialism, the
same doctrines in a form not less dangerous for
being less honest." So, in the accepted methods
of criticism, the engaging creature spilt his
poison around and waited for results ; calling
the special attention of the authorities of the
Church to the fact that Mr. Maurice, who, " we
understand, is considered the founder and head
of the school," and " the avowed author of
other works, theological as well as political, of
a still more heterodox character," is " occupy
ing the chair of Divinity in King's College,
London."

o

98 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

It was the year of the Great Exhibition in
Hyde Park. Crowds of strangers, including
great companies of working men, were finding
their way to London. Special efforts were
made to reach these multitudes, and draw
them into communion with the religious life
of the nation.

One such effort — a series of sermons preached
at S. John's, Fitzroy Square, on the Message of
the Church to the rich and the poor — furnished
the spark which produced the explosion. They
were to be given by F. W. Robertson, Kingsley
and Maurice. The first of these, on the message
to the wealthy, led of? with doctrine sufficiently
novel and unexpected in the pulpit of an
Established Church. "Rarely have we dared
to demand of the powers that be, justice ; of the
wealthy men and the titled, duties. We have
produced folios of slavish flattering upon the
Divine Right of Power. Shame on us ! We
have not denounced the wrongs done to weak
ness. And yet for one text in the Bible which
requires submission and patience from the poor,
you will find a hundred which denounce the
vices of the rich."

This was strong meat ; next Sunday stronger
was to follow when Kingsley, in the very
words of the Revolutionary Hope, proclaimed
the Christian message of Emancipation : —

" The business for which GOD sends a
Christian priest in a Christian nation," was the
defiant assertion, " is to preach and practise

Frederic

Frederick Denison Maurice 99

Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, in the
fullest, deepest, widest meaning of these three
great words. In so far as he does he is a
true priest, doing the LORD'S work with the
LORD'S blessing upon him. In so far as he
does not he is no priest at all, but a traitor
to GOD and man."

The Incumbent's patience was exhausted,
and at the conclusion of the sermon he came
forward to the reading-desk and denounced the
doctrines therein propounded. The excitement
in the church was intense. A little girl who
was with Maurice remembers asking indignantly,
" Shall we throw our Prayer Books at him ? "
Maurice refused to preach the concluding
sermon. The news of the scandal spread
with rapidity. The Christian Socialists were
universally condemned. Kingsley was for
bidden by Bishop Blomfield to preach again
in London. The inhibition was afterwards
withdrawn ; but the effect of its obloquy
remained, and something of the unpopularity
of the disciple was transferred to the master.

The authorities were not slow to respond to
the challenge of the great organ of Conservatism
and sober opinion. The Council of King's
College were filled with forebodings at the
eccentricities and rashness of their Theological
Professor. Dr. Jelf, the Principal, was moved
to increasing remonstrance. " I see nothing in
your writings," he wrote to Maurice, " incon
sistent per se with your position as a Professor

i oo Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

of Divinity in this College." But as to
Kingsley, "I confess that I have rarely met
with a more reckless and dangerous writer."
Maurice's name, he pathetically protests, is
placarded in conjunction with this revolutionary,
" on large placards in inky characters in every
street." " It will be said justly," he complains,
" Mr. Maurice is identified with Mr. Kingsley,
and Mr. Kingsley is identified with Mr. Holy-
oake, and Mr. Holyoake is identified with Tom
Paine." " There are only three links between
King's College and the author of the Rights of
Man" \ "Unless you are prepared to take
steps to vindicate your character," he concluded,
" the best advice your most sincere friend could
give you would be to resign your office without
delay."

Maurice replied softly to such amazing
arguments. Beneath the gentleness, however,
was a strength unshaken and resolved. " I
cannot resign my office," he asserted, "while
such insinuations are current respecting me."
Dr. Jelf continued to wring his hands over
the broken crockery. A Clerical Committee
of Enquiry was appointed by the Council to
consider " how to allay the just apprehensions
of the Council." " I can do nothing what
ever to allay them," was Maurice's blunt
reply. " If I gave up the working Associa
tions, which I believe would be a great sin,
I should feel myself obliged to begin some
similar undertaking the next day." " I shall

Frederick Denison Maurice

101

not disclaim any friend, or consent to give up
the name ' Christian Socialism/ or pledge
myself to avoid any acts in future which
have given offence in time past."

The Clerical Committee behaved after their
kind. They praised Maurice's work at the
College. They commended Christian Socialism
because " the scheme which has been set forth
under that designation — a designation, in their
opinion, not happily chosen — is believed by
those who have devised it to be the most
effectual antidote to Socialism commonly so
called." And they expressed their regret at
finding Maurice's name mixed up with pub
lications on the same subject which they
considered to be " of very questionable ten
dency." Maurice returned a humble and
grateful reply, and for the moment the
incident was closed. The Council expressed
their relief from " much anxiety " by the
assurance of the Committee that, "allowance
being made for occasional obscurity or want
of caution in certain modes of expression, there
appears to them in Professor Maurice's own
writings on the subject of Christian Socialism,
nothing which does not admit of a favourable
construction." " But they feel warranted
in entertaining a confident hope that, by
increased caution for the future on his part,
any further measures of theirs will be rendered
unnecessary."

The impotence, the timidity, and something

IO2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

of the insolence of an Established Church is in
these suave and wounding phrases. The Jelfs
and Harrisons and Inglises, the Marquis of
Bristol and the Earl of Harrowby, thus let off
with a caution a great Christian teacher and
social reformer ; whose crime was that of
having loved the Church beyond all worldly
things. " He stirreth up the people " now,
as in all the past, was the head and front
of an offence which demanded apology and
forgiveness. There is here the same heavy
complacency, the same dullness, the same
blindness to the signs of the time, which a
few years before had broken Newman's spirit,
and driven him, in despair of any improve
ment, into open revolt and departure. And
the stern warnings of his farewell stand
as judgment and condemnation of the his
tory of three centuries : " Thine own off
spring . . . who love thee and would fain
toil for thee, thou dost gaze upon with fear
as though a portent, or dost loathe as an
offence." "Thou makest them to stand all
the day idle as the very condition of serving
thee ; or thou biddest them begone where
they will be more welcome ; or thou sellest
them for nought to the stranger that passeth
by. And what will ye do in the end thereof?"
The inexorable progress of things outside
this hothouse atmosphere, was to drive these
defenders of the Faith and all the contented
society of which they were representatives, into

7redericJ^ Denison Maurice 103

the unwelcome facing of realities. Distress
was but little mitigated. The great engineering
and iron-trade strike in the winter of 1852
shook the foundations of England's industrial
order. Many of those who believed in the
Workmen's Associations urged the seizing of
this opportunity for an attempt to organize the
industry, or a portion of it, on the new co
operative basis. Others, less sanguine of
immediate change, wished to devote their
energies to the bringing about of a reconcilia
tion between masters and men. Maurice was
amongst the latter. He was reproached for
urging the strikers to unconditional surrender.
" I will not ask the men to starve," was his
reply, " unless I can starve with them." In
similar design he refused to discuss at confer
ences the relations which should exist between
Capital and Labour. His work was to go
deeper, to probe to the actual foundations of
society, to find human relations beneath and
beyond all relations of property. " To set trade
and commerce right," was his formula, " we
must find some ground, not for them, but for
those who are concerned in them, for men to
stand upon."

A great step forward marked this year in the
passage of the Bill legalizing Associations under
the title of "The Industrial and Provident
Partnership Bill." Maurice's distrust of De
mocracy remained. Lord Goderich, afterwards
ist Marquis of Ripon, had prepared one of the

104 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

tracts for Christian Socialists on The Duty of the
Age. He proclaimed Democracy as the great
factor of the time ; and asserted that the duty
of all Christian men was to recognize this
factor, and to attempt to reconcile it with the
government of CHRIST. He announced him
self as a Democrat ; and urged the working
men to strive for universal suffrage, and to
prepare themselves for its responsibilities and
obligations.

All this to Maurice was of the nature of
heresy. The tracts had been printed and were
ready for issue, but Maurice commanded their
immediate suppression. Every man of the
little company was against him, but they all
yielded to his impetuous demand. " Monarchy
with me is a starting-point," was his explana
tion, " and I look upon Socialism as historically
developing out of it, not absorbing it into itself."
" Reconstitute society upon the democratic
basis," he affirmed, " treat the sovereign and
the aristocrat as not intended to rule and guide
the land, as only holding their commissions
from us, and I anticipate nothing but a most
accursed sacerdotal rule or a military despotism ;
with the great body of the population in either
case morally, politically, physically serfs, more
than they are at present or ever have been."

Maurice lived in pre-revolutionary days.
His thought was static, not dynamic. It was
the thought of a time before obscure discoveries
in the life of earthworms and orchids had

changed the whole human outlook upon the
universe. GOD to him was the foundation and
sustainer of all things, the source from which
all human life and human society were derived.
But GOD appeared less as the underlying
Energy, one of whose attributes is change,
than as the unchanging presence of One who,
watching over Israel and all the nations,
slumbers not nor sleeps. Maurice refused to
entertain the conception of a society passing
through evolution into new states of being, in
which the very affirmations of the older time
became meaningless and outworn. " Society is
not to be made anew by arrangements of
ours " was his protest against the onslaughts
of Democracy, " but is to be regenerated by
finding the law and crown of its order and
harmony, the only secret of its existence, in
GOD." Why such order and harmony should
be identified with a Sovereign and Aris
tocracy was never quite clear to his more
advanced disciples. To these the old order
was vanishing under the influence of a Divine
inspiration which was consuming all the past,
and declaring with a voice which none could
challenge, Ecce ncfra facio omnia.

But the men who had seen the collapse of
1848, and were haunted by the memories of
1794, could not dream of any abiding system
except through the ancient organization. No
stable republic had survived in Europe. The
old kings had returned. Order reigned — at

106 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Warsaw and elsewhere. Maurice thought the
obligation laid upon him was that of proclaim
ing society and humanity to be Divine realities
as they stand, not as they may become. To-day
Becoming, rather than Being, is interpreted as
the note of the Divine ; and the world-order
is read as a process ; passing towards a one
far-off Divine event to which the whole creation
moves. The energy of Almighty power thus
appears most conspicuous in operation just in
that hurrying of the old into a new which is
the perfect flower and fruit of all the past's
endeavour.

Meantime, in their own little effort, the
company collected together for the advance
ment of these productive Associations found
sufficient difficulty in practical affairs. Many
of the Associations themselves declined to
march. The advertisements of the Christian
Socialist were refused by most respectable
newspapers, and respectable booksellers de
clined to keep copies of it for sale. Maurice,
still in part detached, but held in reverence
by all, found himself continually in request,
now to allay dissension, now to cheer the faint
hearted. Like some great pillar in the flood,
he stood steadfast and unmoved, confident
in the truth of his cause, and in its ultimate
triumph.

His methods were frankly autocratic. When
differences arose between Vansittart Neale and
Hughes on the one hand, and Mr. Ludlow on

mderick 1)enison Maurice 10'

the other, he tore up the letter of the latter,
and called upon him frankly to say that he
did wrong. " I earnestly implore you to work
with me," he pleaded, "that the dividing,
warring, godless tendencies in each of our
hearts, which are keeping us apart and
making association impossible, may be kept
down and extirpated. We cannot be Chris
tian Socialists upon any other terms/'

"For GOD'S sake come down and see me,"
Kingsley was pleading, " if only for a day. I
have more doubts, perplexities, hopes, and fears
to pour out to you than I could utter in a
week. And to the rest of our friends I cannot
open. You comprehend me. You are bigger
than I."

Heedless of the hubbub around him, with
his eyes set towards far conquests, Maurice
pressed forward in the work he had set
himself to do. With the legal recognition of
the Associations the worst was over. Hence
forth the great storm fell into quietness, and
presently died away. The distributive Societies
came to flourish exceedingly ; the productive
Societies, more directly favoured by the pro
moters, had a more chequered history. With
the coming of better times and the smoothing
of the raw edges of discontent, the acute
social crisis was passed. England in the 'fifties
was entering upon its greatest period of com
mercial expansion, and an ever-growing com
merce and an ever -widening Empire were

io8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

providing an opening for those pent-up energies
which a decade before had seemed destined to
turn towards revolution. Gradually the vessel
righted itself and floated once more buoyantly
in calm seas. It had been a near escape from
shipwreck ; how near no one in the future
will ever be able clearly to estimate.

With this relief of the pressure the move
ment of the little band of Christian Socialists
expanded and loosened. Some, like Hughes
and Vansittart Neale, threw themselves into
the practical direction of the new Co-opera
tive Movement. Kingsley concentrated his
attention more and more upon sanitary reform,
and the direct methods of bringing the new
scientific discoveries into the service of social
welfare. Maurice passed through troubled
waters of controversy in his own particular
work as a theologian and philosopher. Prophet
always rather than practical reformer, his concern
was first with the things of the spirit ; especially
with that testing of the ancient creed and faith
which was being provided by all the ferment of
the new knowledge. Henceforth his work was
to be, in the main, that of protest ; proclaiming
always in a society becoming more and more
comfortable and indifferent, and to a Church
blind to the changes of the time, the great
elemental truths upon which the universe
endures : that GOD is the foundation of all
social order, that a real Kingdom exists with
a King who proclaimed its coming and estab-

Frederick Denison Maurice 109

lished its laws upon this world so many years
ago ; that this order is steadily advancing
towards a triumph in which the meaning of
the whole will be revealed in the light of
the end.

What to-day is the judgment of this
"Christian Socialist Movement," as declared
by the verdict of history ? It bulks larger in
the vision of posterity than amongst the men of
its own time. The later distinction of some of
its first founders, and the large changes which
have followed from these small beginnings,
have given it a reputation which at the
moment it had no means of justifying. It
was on the tiniest scale : — A few thousand
tracts sold, a couple of unsuccessful weekly
journals, a few hundreds of pounds subscribed ;
just a little eddy in the midst of the great
turmoil of London and of England at the
dividing time of the century. Its notoriety
was largely created by its enemies. The
religious Press, the journals of the wealthier
classes, could never forgive theological pro-,
fessors and country clergymen for plunging
into the world of affairs, designing themselves
u Socialists " and consorting with " infidels."
Abuse rained down upon them. The violence
of the condemnation of their principles and
their actions may be accepted as a measure of
the changes which have flowed from these
remote beginnings. Their " Christian Socialism,"

no Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

examined to-day critically as a constructive
system, and removed from the setting of
emotional indignation and pity which gave it
distinction, seems to be but a mild method
of reform. Except for its utility in exciting
exasperation among the enemy, the term
" Socialism " might have been dropped from
its propaganda ; for few of its members under
stood what Socialism meant, and of these still
fewer accepted it. The leaders, Maurice and
Kingsley, were aristocratic to the backbone.
Maurice accepted kingship as fundamental,
repudiated republicanism, and thought that the
rule of democracy was the rule of the devil.
Kingsley remained to the end convinced that
society should be organized in classes, with the
country gentleman and the University graduate
recognizing the responsibilities of their position
and leading the lower orders along the ways of
peace and prosperity. So from the beginning
the " Christian Socialists " repudiated everything
in the nature of " Communism," and demanded
little from the State ; being on the whole more
convinced of its tyrannies than its beneficence.
They shared also much of the timidity of
their time concerning intercourse with the
atheist and the unbeliever. Maurice hastened
to repudiate the suggestion that Kingsley had
ever contributed to "infidel newspapers." And
in all their letters, the friendly attitude of many
social reformers to the Straussian propaganda
and the efforts of free thought is contemplated

*

Frederic^ Ttcnison Maurice 1 1 1

with horror and dismay. We are here far
from the time when ecclesiastical dignitaries
compete with each other for the privilege of
contributing to the pages of the Clarion and
similar anti-theistic publications, and vie with
each other in exhibiting their charity by attend
ing at banquets in honour of distinguished
opponents of Christianity.

The ruins of a world occupy the intervening
age. Only in examination of the stiff, queer
ideals of the early Victorian period can we
realize the immensity of the transformation
which has created our own time. These men
saw certain specific evils to which most of
their class were blind ; the degradation of
that crowded life which festered unheeded at
the basis of society ; the ineffectiveness of the
recognized clerical remedies — more churches,
more schools, authority, obedience. They
saw the poor perishing, and no man laying
it to heart ; society rocking to its foundations.
They declared themselves on the side of that
" hunger and cold " which could appeal for
vindication to no human avenger. " What is
the use," cried Kingsley, " of talking to a
hungry pauper about Heaven ? * Sir,' as my
clerk said to me yesterday, < there is a weight
upon their hearts, and they care for no hope
and no change, for they know they can be no
worse off than they are/ And so they have
no spirit to arise and go to their FATHER.'*

They were as hot and eager as a Carlyle or a

1 1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Ruskin in denouncing a society that " thus
could build." They set themselves to break
through the heavy complacency which weighed
like an oppression in high quarters of Church
and State, and stifled the effort of reform.
They found the Church but hardly waking
from its long sleep of centuries, with the
movement which had made the awakening still
unrelated to the life of the poor. The Estab
lished religion, as a great critic has said, for so
many generations, had been " simply a part of
the ruling class, told off to perform Divine
services, to maintain order and respectability in
decent society."

From this moment, however, there were
never lacking those inspired by some far
different ideal. Within that Church's boun
daries, from this little company as pioneers,
there flowed down henceforth a continual
tradition of social effort and concern. It
came to mingle and unite with the revival in
the Oxford Movement of the conception of
the Church as an organism, with the renewed
conceptions of discipline and sacrifice which
had seemed for so long to be but idle dreams.
It influenced with its enthusiasm the accepted
courses of a Liberal theology. It even
disturbed the old complacent outlook of
the Evangelical section, with its comfort and
security in a feudal tradition. It is still
advancing in a clear, confident stream, and is
destined to exercise no despicable influence in

Frederick Denison Maurice 1 1 3

the social reconstruction of the coming days.
The ancient formal machinery, in its dustiness
and decay, has been charged with a spirit
more human, more compelling and alive ;
urging always a Christian responsibility to the
dim, troubled populations of the poor, and the
failure of any schemes of social philanthropy to
effect anything like an establishment of social
justice. We live in the midst of that current,
and cannot adequately judge the extent of
its working. It has to contend against the
accumulated rubbish of centuries, in a society
still in structure feudal. The overturn of the
Revolution has brought here no acceptance of
social equality ; and the barriers of prejudice
are more stolid in class tradition than in any
society of the civilized world.

At times all the attempts to redeem the
Church of the Establishment, essentially as it
seems, the preserve of a wealthy and leisured
class, recruited — when it draws recruits —
almost exclusively from those prosperous
persons who put on an Anglican belief with
an increasing social prestige, seem vain and
hopeless. "All the Churches are against me,"
was Lord Shaftesbury's bitter complaint in his
effort for the redemption of child-life sixty
years ago. And still in any similar large and
striking advance against present discontents,
it is for the most part outside the Churches
that men must turn for the impulse to press
forward towards an untried future. We have

114 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

not yet learnt to cut the world into parallelo
grams. It is doubtful if we have even
succeeded in " buying our coats " without
"visibly sinning against GOD." The squalor
and hunger and starved empty energies of the
Abyss still confront with an unanswered chal
lenge the affirmation of a Common Fellowship.
And the cry of baffled purposes rises with the
old complaint, " Neither hast Thou saved Thy
people at all." But in the heart of the City's
squalor, and scattered over the forlorn country
side, little knots and centres of revolt are to
be found, where proclamation is made, in the
name of a King, of a universal justice which
will one day come to pass, and a fairer future
awaiting the bewildered family of mankind.
And all of these will acknowledge their
gratitude to the pioneers ; to this little com
pany which sixty years ago, to the scandal
of their contemporaries, elevated the banner
of Liberty, Equality, and Brotherhood, as
the ensign of the Armies of the LORD.

Frederick Denison Maurice

CHAPTER V

A HERETIC

ICING'S College had shown impatience
with the social eccentricities of its
Theological Professor. The breach was closed,
but it left its mark. The Council had looked
for some increased caution in the future on his
part, which should render any further measures
on their part unnecessary. Here evidently, to
those who knew Maurice — his fearlessness, his
utter indifference to worldly prospects, his
determination to speak out — was a condition
of unstable equilibrium. In a very short time
trouble was once more impending, which could
only have one end.

The disquietude of the time was always
before him. He desired especially to help the
young men facing a world of thought and
speculation more disturbed than at any period
since the upheaval of the Reformation. The
great influx of the new knowledge had broken
down the security of the older beliefs. Many
who wished to affirm the ancient historic Creed
turned in despair from the popular interpreta
tion of doctrines which seemed incredible.

tlUll V

1 1 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Maurice was being continually consulted by
those to whom the question was one of life or
death. Amongst all the branches of organized
religion in England he always had an especially
friendly feeling towards the Unitarians. He
had left them deliberately ; but he appreciated
from the personal experience of his childhood
their high level of intelligence and social
interest. To these he now addressed his
new apologia for the Christian Faith, the
Theological Assays. " My mind has been more
filled with the Essays," he wrote, " by day and
sometimes by night, than has been quite good
for me. They are in fact my letters which
express the deepest thoughts that are in me,
and have been in me working for a long
time." He felt that the publication would
mark a great crisis in his life. " But I believe
I was to write this book," he declared, " and
could not honestly have put it off. There is
more solemnity to me about it than about
anything else I have done."

The Theological Essays form the clearest
and most connected summary of Maurice's
theological position. " I have maintained," he
states in the dedication to Alfred Tennyson,
u that a theology which does not correspond to
the deepest thoughts and feelings of human
beings cannot be a true theology." The
central thought of it all, as of all Maurice's
pleading for half a century, is the appeal
from man to GOD. The nature of GOD, and

Frederick Denison Maurice 1 1 7

not the emotions or sentiments of man con
cerning Him, was the sure foundation of
religion. The Evangelical Revival, in the dead
cinders of whose once great fires he was then
residing, " made the sinful man, and not the
GOD of all grace, the foundation of Christian
theology." The Oxford Movement failed, as
he thought, to bring back the life of the Creed ;
to say, " See how all begins from a FATHER,
goes on to the SON, finds its completeness in
the HOLY SPIRIT." He was writing for his
age in face of the wants of his special time.
He had heard the demand from the heart of
material success and outward comfort, for
some conception of life in which material and
comfortable things would cease to trouble or
allure. Everywhere he thought he could dis
cover around him that great longing for the
understanding and apprehension of the Eternal
beneath and behind the shows of time, without
which man's life ceases to take upon itself any
intelligible meaning, and presently ends in
nothing but a huge weariness. "The cry
which I hear most loudly about me," he
asserted, "which rings most clearly within
me, is this : Has this age any connexion
with the permanent and the Eternal ? Is
there any link between our present, our
past, and our future ; any One who unites
the past, the present, and the future in
Himself? Is there an Eternal GOD ? Has
He made Himself known to us ? Has He

n8 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

given us a right to trust Him now and for
ever?"

It is a scheme of a theology, though of
theology charged with white-hot emotion and
illuminated with lightning flashes of prophecy.
It passes from the beginning to the end ; from
the origin of man's life to its consummation,
both in GOD. It presents a plan as vivid and
complete as those schemes of human purpose
and destiny which were carved on the porticoes
of old Gothic cathedrals, with the panorama
of the universe unfolded from the fire of its
creation to the fire of its close. Charity, as
in the theology of the Greek Fathers, is the
ground and centre of existence ; and GOD, as
the Infinite Charity, is the starting-point of
all. "Take away GOD," is the affirmation,
" and you take away everything. Without
this, Bible and Church alike are good for
nothing."

Against this Infinite Charity there shadows
the vision of sin — sin as an experience, dis
turbing, haunting, tearing to pieces the fabric
of human well-being and the unity of the
individual soul. It leads the observer in a close
circle, narrow and dismal, without explanation
and without escape ; until he can rise to the
confession, not merely " I have sinned against
society " or " against my own true nature,"
but " giving the words their true and natural
meaning, { I have sinned against Thee/ ' This
consciousness, apprehended in dim, fantastic

Fre

£,„!

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 119

fashion by all the generations of humanity,
has excited those distortions of sacrifice, asceti
cism, and rites of expiation, which have tortured
mankind since the dawn of history. " As long
as men are dwelling in twilight, all ghosts of
the past, all phantoms of the future, walk by
them." But the preaching ordained for the
Kingdom of Heaven, " is it not, as always, the
great instrument of levelling hills and exalting
valleys ? "

Evil, for Maurice, is the work of evil spirit,
the power of darkness against which are
fighting in continual warfare all the armies of
heaven. Yet with this universal consciousness
of bondage he discovers also an universal
longing for a Deliverer : " some one whom
I did not create, some one who is not subject
to my accidents and changes, some one in
whom I may rest for life and death." The
earnest expectation of the creature had been
desirous through unremembered time for the
manifestation of a Redeemer. Maurice finds
great ideas floating in the vast ocean of tradi
tions which the old world exhibits to him ;
vague conceptions of an absolute GOD, of a
SON of GOD who shall come at last to deliver
mankind from their captivity. "We ask," he
claims, " not for a system, but a revelation," a
revelation "which shall show us what they are,
why we have had these hints and intimations
of them, what the eternal substances are which
correspond to them." This revelation he finds

I2O Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

at last in the Person of JESUS CHRIST — Verbum
caro factum est — " the CHRIST whose Name
I was taught to proclaim in my childhood, the
source of the good acts of every man, the Light
which lighteth every man that cometh into the
world." The hearts of the people demanded
incarnations. " We accept the fact of the
Incarnation because we feel that it is impossible
to know the Absolute and Invisible GOD as
man needs to know Him and craves to know
Him, without an Incarnation." " We receive
the fact of an Incarnation, not perceiving how
we can recognize a SON of GOD and Son of
Man, such as man needs and craves for, unless
He were in all points tempted like as we are."
" We receive the fact of an Incarnation because
we ask of GOD a redemption, not for a few
persons, from certain evil tendencies, but for
humanity, from all the plagues by which it is
tormented."

Maurice sees the Atonement in the light
of this Incarnation ; not — with the popular
theology — apprehending the Incarnation from
the experience of an Atonement. In his attack
upon the popular notions of Sacrifice he is at
the heart of his divergence from the Protestant
theology of his time. Against the accepted
orthodox position he breaks out in fiercest
protest. He denounces a scheme of things
which makes a Divine justice different from a
human justice, and interprets punishment as
a Divine satisfaction, and declares that " an

Frederick Ttenison Maurice 12 1

innocent person can save the guilty from the
consequences of his guilt by taking these upon
himself." "Debates are going on in every
corner of the land," he cries, " suggested by
these difficulties. What misery, what aliena
tion of hearts arises from them, no one can
tell." He protests against any explanation of
a CHRIST changing the Will of GOD, which He
took flesh and died to fulfil. The Scripture
says, " The Lamb of GOD taketh away the
sin of the world." Have we a right to call
ourselves Scriptural or orthodox if we change
the word and put "penalty of sin " for " sin " ?
From the Cross and its mystery he passes to
the vision of immortal life. " The last enemy
which shall be destroyed," Strauss had said,
" is the belief of man in his own immortality."
Maurice accepts the challenge. " No experi
ments for the purpose, no theory of the
universe, no new arrangements, no increase in
material comfort," he proclaims, " has succeeded
in destroying this belief." " As long as every
thing about him preaches of permanence and
restoration, as well as of fragility and decay, as
long as he is obliged to speak of succession and
continuance and order in the universe and in
the societies of men, as long as he feels that he
can investigate the one, and that he is a living
portion of the other, so long the sense of
immortality will be with him." Death is the
enemy. There is a deep conviction in men's
minds that death is " utterly monstrous,

R

122 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

anomalous ; something to which they cannot
and should not submit." Generations of
moralists have done nothing whatever to
enforce the experience of 6,000 years. " They
go on denouncing the folly of men for thinking
that death is not a necessity, for not yielding to
the necessity. The heart of man does not heed
discourses ; their own hearts do not heed
them."

From this "last enemy" he comes back to
the vision unfolded in The Kingdom of Christ ;
of a Church built upon a sure foundation,
alien from the courses of the world, the
source and inspiration of all human fellowship.
Here also is a reality, with power working
in the ways of men ; working none the less
though all men denounced it or denied it ;
destined to an ultimate victory. " If I
thought," is Maurice's passionate affirmation,
" that the world which is to arise out of the
wreck of that in which we are living, were one
of which some other than JESUS CHRIST, the
SON of GOD, was to be the King, I should have
no more fervent wish, supposing I could then
form a wish, I could conceive no better prayer,
supposing there was then one to whom I could
offer a prayer, than that I and my fellow-men
and the whole universe might perish at once
and for ever."

Baptism and the Eucharist are witnesses,
not creators, of that eternal order. " For
eighteen centuries Christendom has kept this

Frederick Denison Maurice 123

Feast. There has been no other like it in
the world." He will acknowledge no visible
Church, however tremendous and universal its
claims, as adequate by itself to represent this
Divine order. All visible Churches are but
broken lights of a reality behind the illusions
of time and change. The world contains the
elements of which the Church is composed. In
the Church these elements are transformed by
a uniting, reconciling power. The Church is,
therefore, " human society in its normal state."
The world is that same society, irregular and
abnormal. The world is the Church without
GOD. "The Church is the world restored to
its relation with GOD, taken back by Him into
the state for which He created it."

Back he comes at the end to the Infinite
Charity, which was the beginning ; " not to be
found with its root in this earth, or in the heart
of any man who dwells on this earth." Its
deepest mystery is expressed in the conception
of the Eternal Communion of the Blessed
Trinity. Here is the origin and guarantee of
all fellowship ; " showing how in fact, and not
merely in imagination, the Charity of GOD may
find its reflex and expression in the charity of
man, and the charity of man, its substance as
well as its fruition, in the Charity of GOD."
And from this comes the fundamental mystery
which is the very substance of Maurice's pro
clamation : the origin of Eternal Life in the
knowledge of GOD. "The knowledge does

124 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

not procure the life, the knowledge constitutes
the life."

Here, as always, he will cling to the historic
distinction between temporal and eternal things ;
not, as in popular misconceptions, two time-
states sharply divided by the boundary of
death, but two different! conditions of being
apprehended by a creature who is a child of
two worlds ; the things which are seen, tem
poral ; the things which are unseen, eternal. The
spiritual universe is neither subject to temporal
conditions, nor obedient to the law of temporal
decay. " A child knows more of eternity than
of time. The succession of years confounds it.
It mixes the dates which it has been instructed
in most strangely. But its intuition of some
thing which is beyond all dates makes you
marvel." " If I spoke of defining eternal life,"
says Maurice, " I should feel, and I think all
would feel, that I was using an improper word.
For how can we define that which has no
definite limits of time ? But instead of picturing
to ourselves some future place, calling that
eternal life, and determining the worth of it by
a number of years or centuries or millenniums,
we are bound to say once for all, c This is the
eternal life, that which CHRIST has brought
with Him, that which we have in Him — the
knowledge of GOD.' ' In such a life " we can
have fellowship with those who are nigh and
those who are far off; with men of every habit,
colour, opinion ; with those whom the veil of

r

Frederick Denison Maurice 125

flesh divides from us ; with Him who is the
perfect Charity, with the FATHER and the SON,
who dwelleth in the Unity of One Blessed and
Eternal Spirit."

In the concluding essay he definitely attacks
the popular notions of eternal life and eternal
death. " Eternity," he could only reiterate
in reference to life or to punishment, "has
nothing to do with time or duration." He
boldly challenges the announcement of a stern
and limited gospel — the notion that "the
message which CHRIST brought from Heaven to
earth is, * My FATHER has created multitudes
whom He means to perish for ever and
ever ; by My Agony and bloody sweat, by
My Cross and Passion, I have induced Him
in the case of an inconceivable minority to
forgo that design/ ' " I dare not pronounce,"
he confesses, " what are the possibilities of
resistance in a human will to the loving Will
of GOD. There are times when they seem to
me, thinking of myself more than others,
almost infinite. But I know that there is
something which must be infinite. I am
obliged to believe in an abyss of love
deeper than the abyss of death. I dare not
lose faith in that love. I must feel that this
love is compassing the universe. More about
it I cannot know, but GOD knows. I leave
myself and all to Him."

The last words are a solemn warning to the
religious leaders of his time. The doctrine

O

126 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

of endless punishment was being avowedly
defended as necessary for the reprobates of
the world. Religious men, the people of re
finement and intelligence, might dispense with
it. But how were the poor to be kept moral
without it, or the publicans and harlots
persuaded to repent of their sins ? Maurice
shatters such a theory with the affirmations
of the Gospel. "When CHRIST denounced a
c generation of vipers,' and asked, c How shall
ye escape the damnation of hell ? ' He was
speaking to religious men, to doctors of the
law. But when He went amongst publicans
and sinners, it was to preach the Gospel of the
Kingdom of GOD."

Never had the challenge been more de
liberate, or the response more certain. Some,
like Kingsley, hailed it with enthusiasm.
" Maurice's Essays," he writes, " will constitute
an epoch. If the Church of England rejects
them she will rot and die as the Alexandrian
died before her. If she accepts them, not as a
code complete, but as a hint towards a new
method of thought, she may save herself still."
Maurice knew that whether the Church of
England ultimately rejected them or no, at least
the immediate effect would be repudiation and
anger. Theological error, especially in the
form of an awakening against the current
Tartarean conception of hell, was even more
serious than fantastic social theories. In fact,

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 127

in the minds of most men, the two hung
together in a common revolutionary system.
Maurice's social reform advocated the rising of
the poor against their masters, while at the
same time his theological eccentricities removed
the only guarantee of the morality of the poor
which is provided by the fear of the hereafter.
" I would not be surprised," he writes, if the
book " did reveal the thoughts of many hearts,
if it were for the falling and rising again of
many in Israel." But he had recognized also
from the first that " when I wrote the sentences
about eternal death, I was writing my own
sentence at King's College."

The prophecy was soon verified. A hubbub
of protest immediately demanded drastic action.
The unfortunate Principal endeavoured to
smooth matters over by urging Maurice to
resign, as most convenient to him and to the
College. Ever a fighter, with the military
instinct strong in him, and a determination to
carry his protest to the end, Maurice rejected
so simple a course. He was living in an
atmosphere mystic and exalted, in which the
particular inconveniences of worldly persecution
counted for nothing at all. " Hard fighting
is in store for us," he writes to Kingsley,
" but those that are with us are stronger than
those who are against us ; though we ourselves
may be often among the latter. Let us hope
rtiightily for the future. There will be a
gathering of CHRIST'S hosts as well as of the

o —

1 2 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

devil's out of the ranks of Pharisees and
Sadducees, of publicans and harlots."

So he resolutely refused to resign, and
challenged the authorities to expel him. To
have resigned would have been to give away his
whole contention ; the demand for a liberty of
prophesying within the Established Church, and
the rejection of any limits narrower than the
Articles and the Creed. " 1 plainly declare," he
announced, " that I cannot preach the Gospel
at all if I am tied to the popular notions on
the subject."

An interminable correspondence resulted,
becoming more and more impossible as each of
the men realized that neither had any conception
of a common denominator. Maurice protested
vehemently against Dr. Jelf 's cheerful phrases :
" Unhappy publication," " fallen into error,"
" entangled into subtleties," and so on. What
he had done he had done deliberately with his
eyes open. " If the publication is unhappy,"
he writes, " all I have ever written was so, and
all my teaching in the College has been so."
He was willing, however, to go quietly if the
Council would call on him to resign because he
was at variance with a Principal in whom they
had confidence. He would not resign because
they held him to believe and teach that which
a clergyman subscribing to the Articles and the
Prayer Book has no right to believe and teach.
Finally, the breach became open and unbridgable.
Dr. Jelf fixed his complaint upon the necessity

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 129

for the establishment of a sound theology on the
notion of reward and punishment, which, to
Maurice, was merely a peculiarly offensive form
of atheism. " I have drawn the sword and
thrown away the scabbard," he wrote, " telling
Jelf plainly in a note to-day that 1 see the differ
ences between us are wider and deeper than he
supposes ; that they affect the essence of the
Gospel and the whole interpretation of the
Bible."

The forces outside accelerated the catastrophe.
Bishop Blomfield wrote to Dr. Jelf saying that
while Professor Maurice held his chair, he
should decline to receive the College certificate
as a qualification for the Bishop's examination.
The Oxford critics were scornful. " Maurice
had been petted," wrote James Mozley to
Dean Church, " and told he is a philosopher,
till he naturally thinks he is one. And he has
not a clear idea in his head. It is a reputation
that, the instant it is touched, must go down
like a card house."

All the efforts of peacemakers were in vain.
Maurice thought himself to be fighting the battle
of a whole generation, concentrated in this dis
pute upon one particular and vital issue. "The
crisis, I am convinced, is at hand which will
bring the question to an issue ; whether we
believe in what Dr. Jelf calls a 'religion of
mercy' (proved to be such because phrases
about salvation are to phrases about damnation
as 57 to 8, the Bible being a great betting-book

s

, ,, ,

i

130 Leaaers of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

where the odds on the favourite are marked as
at Doncaster or Newmarket), or whether we
believe in a gospel of deliverance from sin and
perdition." " From the multitudes that are
pretending to believe in GOD, while they mean
the Devil," he protests in fierce phrases, " I
saw that it must come, and that it was safer
to meet it."

Friends exerted themselves to avert the
scandal of a public dismissal. Hare warned
those responsible with what a terrible shock an
official condemnation of Maurice would come
to that large portion of the intelligent mind in
all classes which he had profoundly influenced
by his teaching and his writings. " I do not
believe," was his high tribute, " that there is
any other living man who has done anything at
all approaching to what Maurice has effected in
reconciling the reason and the conscience of
the thoughtful men of our age to the Faith of
our Church." And Colenso, not yet branded
as a heretic, dedicated to him in warm and
friendly admiration a new volume of sermons.
Wilberforce, seeking peace, and desirous above
all things of averting a scandal, was filled with
perplexity. He " exceedingly regrets " the publi
cation of the Theologlical Sssays. He " continues
to be altogether at a loss to understand from
them what Maurice does and what he does not
hold." "If they stood alone," he confesses,
" and if they were a fair sample of his theological
teaching, I should think him so unsafe a teacher

Frederick Denison Maurice 131

of youth that I should acquiesce with great
regret in his removal." But he dreaded the
noisy triumph of the partizan, and the future of
such a controversy. " It will be universally
believed," he wrote to Dr. Jelf, " that Maurice
is sacrificed to the 1(ecord, and this will inflict
a blow upon your professorial body of which I
cannot calculate the issue." He surmises that
" there will be no small uproar about this
business," and prophesies " the beginning of
such strife is as when one letteth out water."
But the result, as Maurice had foreseen, was
assured from the beginning. Dr. Jelf sent his
impeachment, together with printed copies of
the long correspondence with Maurice, to every
member of the Council. Maurice returned his
final reply. On Thursday, October 27, 1 853, a
special meeting of the Council was summoned
to consider the matter. After long delibera
tion, it was resolved that the opinions set forth
in the essay on Eternal Life, especially referring
to " the future punishment of the wicked and
the final issues of the Day of Judgment, are of
dangerous tendency, and calculated to unsettle
the minds of the theological students of King's
College." It was therefore decided that, while
acknowledging his zealous and able services,
" the Council feel it to be their painful duty
to declare that the continuance of Professor
Maurice's connexion with the College, as one
of its Professors, would be seriously detrimental
to its usefulness."

LW 1LO

132 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

An amendment, asking the Bishop of London
to appoint competent theologians to examine
the orthodoxy of the writings complained of,
was moved by Gladstone, but rejected. He
deplored the rapid and panic-driven judgment
which was due to " a body of laymen, chiefly
lords." " Even decency demanded of the
Council," he wrote to Lord Lyttelton, " acting
perforce in a judicial capacity, that they should
let the accused person know in the most
distinct terms for what he was dismissed, and
should show that they had dismissed him, if
at all, only after using much greater pains to
ascertain that his opinions were in real con
trariety to some Article of the Faith."

The decision, in fact, had been settled before
discussion. Maurice was sacrificed to the
popular clamour of the religious Press,
especially the Record^ which had for years
been demanding his destruction. The Bishop
of Lichfield (Lonsdale, formerly Principal of
King's College) wrote to Maurice that on
these grounds alone he would not have voted
with the Council ; thus exhibiting his opinion
" on the question of the expediency of getting
rid of you in deference to external clamour,
and not my opinion of your theology." The
Bishop of London (Blomfield) at the meeting
stated his opinion that Mr. Maurice was
preaching " dangerous doctrines, contrary to
those of the Church of England." The
reference of these opinions to any impartial

Frederick Denison Maurice 133

tribunal which might possibly have pronounced
in Maurice's favour, was the last thing desired.

Maurice refused to resign. He was at
once forbidden to continue lecturing, an insult
which he felt deeply after the long years of
devoted service he had given to the College.
The Council resolved that they entirely
approved of the Principal's conduct with
reference to the suspension of Mr. Maurice's
lectures. He made a last appeal, demand
ing the formulation of the exact nature
of the charge against him, and the par
ticular Articles of the Faith which condemned
his teaching. " If I have violated any law of
the Church," he insisted, " that law can be at
once pointed out. The nature of the transac
tion can be defined without any reference to
possible tendencies and results. It is this
justice, and not any personal favour, which I
now request at your hands."

On reading this letter the Council decided
that they " did not think it necessary to enter
further into the subject, and declared the two
chairs held by Mr. Maurice in the College to
be vacant."

134 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER VI
IN TIME OF ORDER

A/TAURICE appears thus, at the age of
forty-eight, branded as a heretic in the
sight of all the world ; the centre of a fierce
controversy in which he found himself almost
as much in disagreement with his supporters
as with his opponents. The orthodox, the
opponents of change, and all the classes
dominated by the Record newspaper, held that
he had suffered no more than he deserved.
Liberal opinion declared in his favour. His
offer to resign the chaplaincy at Lincoln's Inn
was refused by the Benchers. Addresses of
sympathy poured in ; from the co-operators of
London to their President ; from old pupils
at King's and from Queen's College ; and
from members of the Nonconformist bodies.
None were more welcome than those verses
of invitation from Tennyson, which will
always associate Maurice's name in literature
with a great tribute to a life's devotion ; lines
which sound even to-day with something of
the music of the waves, breaking on the
Channel shore : —

Freaerick Venison Maurice 135

" For being of that honest few,
Who give the Fiend himself his due,

Should eighty-thousand College Councils
Thunder * Aanathema,' friend, at you,

Should all our Churchmen foam in spite
At you, so careful of the right,

Yet one lay hearth would give you welcome
(Take it and come) to the Isle of Wight.

Come, Maurice, come ; the lawn as yet
Is hoar with rime or spongy-wet ;

But when the wreath of March has blossom'd,
Crocus, anemone, violet,

Or later, pay one visit here,

For those are few we love as dear ;

Nor pay but one, but come for many,
Many and many a happy year."

The man himself was undismayed by all the
tumult around him. " My appeal through
out," he claimed, " has been to the formularies
of the Church. I am condemned by those
especially who wish the religious newspapers
to be the great court of Ecclesiastical Appeal."
Content to lose all emoluments from that
Church's resources, he yet defied all antagonists
to expel him from its boundaries. " They
cannot drive me out of the Church of
England," he announced, " for it is not to
drive any one out to make him incapable of
receiving the revenues which are accidentally
attached to it. These revenues may be turned
to secular uses, wholly turned perhaps some
day ; but the Church will remain."

136 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

The Theological Sssays, aided by so splendid
an advertisement, excited widespread discussion
in the country. " I fear I cannot be always
meek and gentle," Maurice confessed, " with
the butchers of GOD'S words and Church."
But when he sees such a popular theology as
that of the Atonement " turning, as I almost
know, thousands into infidels and hundreds
into Romanists," he cannot keep silence.

He was full of continuous plans for social
betterment ; for " Cambridge Tracts " (the first
by himself) on the Oxford Movement ; for
" Tracts for Priests and People," which should
appeal to the drifting and bewildered crowd
who knew not what to believe ; for conferences
on the hazardous subject : " How is the
chasm to be filled between the clergyman
and the working man ? " Above all, he
appealed for light. "That cannot be true,"
he cried, " which shrinks from the light,
tempting the cowardly and self-indulgent to
a faint acquiescence ; which involves, it seems
to me, the most real and deadly atheism."

Forbidden to teach in the University College,
which would no longer accept him, he turned
to the work of educational enlightenment in
a very different stratum of society, and under
far more exacting conditions. Scce convertimur
ad Qentes. The promoters of the Working
Men's Associations were filled with eagerness
for the spreading of higher education among
the working class. Inspired by the example

Frederick Denison Maurice 137

of the People's College which had been
established at Sheffield twelve years before,
they determined to establish a similar in
stitution in London.

Early in 1854 Maurice drew up a printed
scheme of organization, which became the basis
of the Scheme for the Working Men's College.
A house in Red Lion Square, rented from one
of the Associations which had collapsed, was
set apart as the home of the new venture.
Maurice lectured to raise funds and to make
the experiment known. In October of that
year the College was launched into the
world with an inaugural address by Maurice
at S. Martin's Hall. More than 130 students
were enrolled for the first year. Men of
ability and renown were interested in its aims
and persuaded to volunteer as teachers.
Ruskin started a drawing class, Rossetti taught
the use of colour, Westlake, Frederic Harrison,
Lowes Dickinson, and others, generously gave
their time and interest.

There were difficulties in all the early days
concerning tests, and the religious influences
of the place. The daily routine, and many cir
cumstances connected with it, caused Maurice
great distress and continual fits of depression.
Sometimes he is lamenting the unpopularity
of prayers at the College, and " our general
failure to give it a heart." Sometimes he is
troubled over the question of Sunday, and
the organization of excursions and walks for

T

138 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

those who showed no desire to attend places
of religious worship. He was continually-
endeavouring to resign, and was continually
brought back again into the difficulties. " I
have felt that a Working College," he wrote
to Mr. Ludlow, " if it is to do anything must
be in direct hostility to the secularists ; that
is to say, must assert that as its foundation
principle which they are denying. But to do
this effectually it must also be in direct
hostility to the religionists ; that is to say,
it must assert the principle that GOD is to be
sought and honoured in every pursuit, not
merely in something technically called religion."
But, although in many respects disappointing
the fervent dreams of its founders, the College
continued to live with various fortunes, and
to-day, in a new home and with a new
generation of supporters, cherishes in reverence
and affection the memory of the pioneers.

From the controversy over King's College
to the attack upon Mansel seven years later,
Maurice was passing through a time of com
parative quiet. The years passed, bringing their
changes ; losses, bereavement, the coming of
middle age, the opportunities appearing and
vanishing like little clouds on the sky-line.
His mother died, and his sister Priscilla in
1854 ; his brother-in-law, Archdeacon Hare,
the following year. The nation was being
stirred by the re-appearance of the horrid sights
of war, after the long peace ; and the struggle

FredericJ^ Denison Maurice 139

in the Crimea, with all its follies and heroisms,
was challenging the interpreters of human
history in the light of prophecy.

Maurice was less moved than Kingsley and
Tennyson by the outward show of its pageant,
the shock of battle, the " sword's high irresist
ible song." He sought, often painfully, to
find the inner meaning of it all ; to understand
the working of GOD'S providence on the large
stage of human affairs. Kingsley felt the horrors
of that long Russian winter breaking his spirit,
and every soldier's suffering was laid upon
him like a personal pain. " Statesmen, Bishops,
and all that are false to our country in her
hour of need," weighed heavily on his soul.
" It is a burning fiery furnace," Maurice writes
to him, " we are going through in this war.
I see it, and in some degree I feel it, and
the SON of GOD, I believe and trust, is with us
in the midst of it." He had hoped for the
war chiefly as " a sign of what GOD was doing."
He believed the attack on Russia to be right
and just. He thought "our business," which
we have been " forced to do when we were
most reasonably and remarkably reluctant, is
to resist a power which set itself up to break
down national boundaries, and establish a
universal Empire." "Goo has sent us upon the
errand " he declares boldly. And he finds the
war " like the commencement of a battle
between GOD in His absoluteness, and
the Czar in his."

1 40 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

Later came the darker tragedies of the
Indian Mutiny, " bringing back all the ques
tions to this age which the Lisbon earthquake
forced upon the last." " We shall have our
letters on optimism and also our Candides.
And if we do not take the Cross as the solution
of the world's puzzles, I think the Voltaire
doctrine will triumph over the Rousseau."
"I think," he confessed, "that there should
be no accusations except of ourselves ; and
that these should appear chiefly in acts of
repentance." He laments the methods of
"progress" in India which have finally resulted
in this tragedy. " Our morality and our Chris
tianity are of a very low order." We cannot
impart more than we have. " We have im
parted just what we have and what we were
— some sense of law, justice, truth, with a
considerable amount of atheism. It is clear
that we have converted the people to that^
and the atheistical period being impregnated
with all the elements of the devil-worship
which it has supplanted, is, as the first French
Revolution proved, the time for ferocities."

In many of the questions of current contro
versy he was on the Conservative side. He
was often distrustful of the demand for the
breaking-up of old institutions, and of the thirst
for independence and for pleasure which had
come upon a world so occupied with its great
possessions. The Sunday controversy was in
full cry during these years. He hated the

Fredem

Frederick Dentson Maurice 141

method by which those who feared the future
were endeavouring to stamp down the forces
which were breaking up the old Puritan
Sabbath. He protested against the petition
of the LORD'S Day Society, with its glib quo
tations from Scripture, evoking the terrible
suspicion that " there must be something in our
religious condition which is very like that of
the Jews when they made the Sabbath Day
the main excuse for denying the Son of
man, and the SON of GOD, and seeking to
kill Him." But he still upheld " the Christian
Sabbath " as " expressing that union of rest and
work which is implied in the constitution of
the universe," still " an ordinance connected
with the nation and its holiness."

His sermons at Lincoln's Inn were regularly
printed, and distributed by a little company
of his followers and friends. He published
his book on Sacrifice, and a collection of
lectures ; his sermons on S. John's Gospel,
and on the Apocalypse ; with the first part
of his great History of Philosophy. He con
tinued undaunted his warfare against the old
enemies ; " the foul stench sent forth by our
anonymous periodical literature," and the
religious world, " which I hope will hate me
more and more," he wrote at this time, "and
which I hope to hate more and more." He
proclaimed as resolutely as ever the principles
which guided all his energies in the service
of GOD and man : that time and eternity

142 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

co-exist here, that " we cannot always act upon
the strange lie that the things which we see
are those which determine what we are " ; that
the knowledge of GOD is eternal life. He
demonstrated from S. John's theology " not
only that the knowledge of GOD is possible
for men, but that it is the foundation of all
knowledge of men and things ; that science
is impossible altogether if He is excluded
from the sphere of it."

In that commonplace world of mid-century
London, in a kind of Bloomsbury villa, with
but little outward evidence of any motive-
power animating the life around but the thirst
for pleasure and for comfort, Maurice lived
in those exalted regions where GOD and His
enemies wrestled for the bodies and the souls
of men. He saw the Churches, with their
stiff, formal traditions, sharply divided from the
life of the ever-passing crowd. He found their
energies pent up into services one day in seven,
and emphasizing only the more obvious sins
of the flesh as being the essence of all evil.
He demanded that they should come out into
the streets and into the daylight, in a new
crusade for the transfiguration of the whole
of modern society, in the light of the great
illumination of the end. " I am sure," he
maintained, " that if the Gospel is not regarded
as a message to all mankind of the redemption
which GOD has effected in His SON ; if the
Bible is thought to be speaking only of a

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 143

world to come, and not of a Kingdom of
Righteousness and Peace and Truth with
which we may be in conformity or in enmity
now ; if the Church is not felt to be the
hallower of all professions and occupations,
the bond of all classes, the instrument of
reforming abuses, the admonisher of the rich,
the friend of the poor, the asserter of the
glory of that humanity which CHRIST bears —
we are to blame, and GOD will call us to
account as unfaithful stewards of His trea
sure."

His vision of the world around him was
apocalyptic ; as full of sombre and bright colour
as that flashing union of high things and base
which Carlyle in similar times was unfolding
to the world. Behind the grey bricks and
crowded streets and bewildered, busy people,
he discerned the pouring of the vials, and the
loosening of the great winds of heaven, and
the thunder of the trumpets of the night.
More and more he came to believe in a
tremendous crisis to which humanity was
hurrying, and in the dark days which are
awaiting the children of the years to come. " I
foresee a terrible breaking down of notions,
opinions, even of most precious beliefs ; an
overthrow of what we call our religion ; a
convulsion greater than that of the sixteenth
century in our way to reformation and unity.
Still I believe they will come, and that they will
come through an unveiling to our hearts of the

1 44 Leaders of the Church 1 3 oo - 1 900

old mystery of the Trinity in which our fathers
believed, but which they made an excuse for
exclusion and persecution, not a bond of fellow
ship, a message of peace and deliverance to
mankind." This preaching of the Trinity in
its fullness, he declares, will be " the everlasting
Gospel to the nations, which will involve the
overthrow of the Papal polity and the brutal
tyrannies, as well as the foul superstitions of
the earth."

Maurice believed that the Apocalypse would
at last be found to remove most veils from this
' mystery, as well as " the meaning of the course
of GOD'S government of the world from the
beginning to the end." His lectures on the
Revelation of S. John exhibit his outlook upon
life ; his strange and often disturbing exegesis,
his mystical vision, and the passionate elo
quence of his appeal to Divine guidance and
judgment and vindication in all the courses
of human affairs. It is the book which could,
perhaps, be most readily recommended as con
veying some sense of the power of the man,
and that fire within him which, as in the case
of the legendary hero of old, seemed sufficient
to burn up the sins of the whole world. He
passes from queer, often fantastic, interpreta
tions of the meaning of these obscure visions
to the unfolding of a Divine philosophy of
history ; in which, suddenly and in a moment,
there becomes revealed to him, in a form which
words can scarcely utter, the conception of the

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 145

Divine purposes. Sometimes he will turn
to denounce the exaltation of the greatness
of London in terms of the old exaltation of
the greatness of Babylon or Tyre or any other
heathen polity. Sometimes he will remind
his audience that the one may be no stabler
than the other. " Now, as in the old time,
there are idols, processions, and sacrifices
offered to vain things that cannot help or
deliver." "Call your world religious, political,
commercial, fashionable, by what title you
please, it is still a harlot world, a world of
confusion and bondage." All his pleading
is an expansion of the declaration which once
the old English people delighted to inscribe
on the doors and lintels of their houses, from
which the world of his day had wandered
so far away : — Nisi domum Dominus #dificat,
labor frustra est ; " Except the LORD build
the house, their labour is but lost that
build it. Except the LORD keep the city,
the watchman waketh but in vain."

Sometimes, again, London, England, all the
little causes of to-day's fretting and noises,
vanish in the scene of a great panorama
advancing steadily from its remote beginnings
to a sure end ; the panorama of man's life and
destiny, unrolled on the vast stage of human
affairs. " Following the dictates of their sepa
rate, individual, Adam nature," he cries, " they
have realized the full meaning of the curse ;
they have sunk into themselves ; in the midst

u

146 Leaders of the Chunk 1800-1900

of society, they have been solitary. Claiming
their right as made in the image of GOD
they have found a second Adam, who is not
a living soul but a quickening spirit. They
have left the garden with all its delights as
a condition fit for babyhood, not for mature
age. They have perceived that labour is
better than enjoyment ; conquest of the thorn
and the thistle, than the eating of all things
that are good for food and pleasant to the
sight. They have learnt that the way to the
tree of life is through death ; that when it
takes the form of the cross the flaming sword
cannot keep any sinful mortal from approach
ing it. They see the river which watered the
garden converted into a river of the water
of life, proceeding out of the Throne of GOD
and of the Lamb."

He refused to alter the writing of his past
controversy. " Like Pilate, I am afraid of
altering it, lest I should substitute, to please
the Jews, c He said, " I am King," ' for ( He is
King.' ' He was subject to depression always,
and knew the terrors of the descent into the
depths and waste places of the human soul.
" The eternal torment," he once wrote, " which
I not only believe but know that we must
be saved from, because I have been in it."
" I am a hard Puritan," he confessed in one
place, "almost incapable of enjoyment, though
on principle justifying enjoyment as GOD'S
gift to His creatures." The old humility

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 1 47

remained. " I have well deserved to alienate
all whom I love," he mournfully declares, "and
with many I have succeeded only too well."
Proofs about GOD under such conditions were
no use to him at all. A demiurge creating
a universe which he had sent spinning uncon
trolled down the courses of change, seemed to
him no more consoling to the troubled family
of mankind than a blind chance which had
thrown together man's blind beginnings. He
wanted GOD here and now. His cry was the
cry of humanity out of the dust : a call for
a Redeemer, a Deliverer ; the " human cry "
de profundis, in all ages. In extremity, in face
of reality, the strongest spirit must thus throw
itself back upon the Infinite, with the pleading
of Columbus as he gazed over the conquering
storm : — " I will cling fast to Thee, O GOD,
though the waves buffet me : Thee, Thee at
least I know." " I think with you," he writes
to Kingsley, "of darker days to come. I speak
of them sometimes to my children ; but oftener
of a brighter day that, I think, will rise
out of the darkness, and which we, though
we may have left the earth, may share with
them." The great struggle of every time
he affirmed, in words which interpret the
whole upheaval of an age, is " to realize the
union of the spiritual and the eternal with the
manifestations of it in time." " We must have
the eternal which our fathers nearly forgot ;
we are seizing it with a violence which makes

we an

148 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

us throw aside what they knew and felt to be
unspeakably precious. We shall find that we
must take their bequest or give up our own
purchase. But we must believe that, through
whatever conflicts — and terrible they must be —
we are to reach a fuller and brighter discovery
of Him who was from the beginning, than the
ages that were before us."

He refused to adopt the transcendental
method, which despaired of the message being
found within the boundaries of the historic
religion, and wandered out into the ways of
nature or turned inward to the examination
of man's soul in order to find that which
it desired. The English method, to which
he clung, " must begin with the FATHER,"
he affirmed, " in order to know something of
the SON and the SPIRIT." So he clung to the
Bible, and the affirmations of the Church in
Creed and Articles : and all the long evidence
in eighteen disordered centuries of Power
working towards unity in the world. The
Old Testament he accepted as the message of
deliverance — " I am the LORD thy GOD, which
brought thee out of the house of bondage."
The Articles, he asserted, were not unfriendly
to progress, but favourable to it. He refused
to accept the forlorn confession that the mind
of men in all the travail of the ages had failed
to attain any position which was stable and
secure. " We are likely to revolve in endless
circles, not to advance at all, if we assume that

Freden

FredericJ^ Denison Maurice 149

nothing has been done or proved yet in
the world concerning moral and spiritual
principles."

Above all, in thus turning back from the
outward show of social re-organization into
examination of the kingdom of the spirit,
Maurice was none the less passionately con
cerned with the welfare of those " common
people " for whose salvation he had striven
so bravely. "All doubts are sacred," he
announces, "except those of the rich." "There
come times to all of us when we wish the
people at the devil, when we would like to
forget all that we have ever said or thought
about them." Yet there is the inevitable
return ; in which, through all art and nature,
the man who revolts from this hard service
will be taught to love the people again, " to
feel that the best thing for any of us is to
live and die for them."

The loss of a belief in a living GOD,
chiefly through the sins of the priesthood,
had resulted in the loss of freedom to
Christendom. He thought it impossible that
freedom should return without the Faith.
The time of struggle and deliverance must be
at hand. He announces himself as continually
struggling against the " devil-worship," which
all civilization and all Christianity has to fight
as a common enemy. He sees the clergy
bitterly estranged from all classes of the people,
high and low, wise and unwise. " And yet the

UlgU A

150 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

heart and the flesh of the intellectual man, as
much as of the clodhoppers, are crying out for
the living GOD" ; in a cry " we have not under
stood and have been unable to answer." "The
god we have preached has not been the GOD
who is manifested in His SON JESUS CHRIST ;
but another altogether different being, in whom
we mingle strangely the Siva and the Vishnu —
the first being the ground of the character, the
other its ornamental and graceful vesture."
" Groaning in spirit," he describes himself, as
he has seen the priests in the churches, "who
seemed as if they existed to bear witness that
there is no fellowship between earth and
heaven, and that GOD and man are not recon
ciled." " I have asked myself whither all
things are tending, and what the movements
of these sixty years have brought forth."
And he can find an answer which can redeem
him out of the despair of one gazing merely
on the outward aspect of an apostate age.
" Every one of these movements has been a
step in the revelation to men that they are
not animals plus a soul, but that they are spirits
with an animal nature ; that the bond of their
union is not a commercial one, not submission
to a common tyrant, not brutal rage against
him, but that it does rest and has always rested
on a spiritual ground ; that the sin of the
Church, the horrible apostasy of the Church,
has consisted in denying its own function,
which is to proclaim to men their spiritual

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice

condition, the eternal foundation on which
it rests, the manifestation which has been
made of it by the birth, death, resurrection
and ascension of the SON of GOD, and the gift
of the Spirit."

1 52 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

CHAPTER VII

" QUEM NOSSE VlVERE "

TPHE second of Maurice's two greatest
controversies passed out from the region
of ephemeral speculation into questions of
profounder import. The Rev. H. L. Mansel,
Reader in Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy
in the University of Oxford, and afterwards
Dean of S. Paul's, was a brilliant logician
of the school of Sir William Hamilton. It
had been rumoured for some time that he
was the author of a new apologetic, which
would make short work of all modern heresies,
and restore the battered walls of the orthodox
theology. By a kind of destructive criticism
of human intelligence and human ethics, the
troublesome German idealists and the irritating
English moralists were alike to be rendered
ridiculous. The impeachment of the ethics
of the Old Testament, or of the philosophy
of the accepted creeds, was to be rendered
suddenly useless by demonstration of the
worthlessness of all such attempts of the
creature to interpret the mind of the Creator.
In 1858 this new Apologetic was proclaimed
from the University pulpit in the famous

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 153

Bampton Lectures upon reason and revela
tion. The lectures were attended by crowded
audiences at Oxford. When published, they
rapidly ran through two editions. Everywhere
they were approved by those who saw their
usefulness in the immediate campaign against
rationalism, and who failed to understand the
enormous abysses to which the " New
Agnosticism " was directly to lead.

Maurice, from the first, recognized the full
implications of Mansel's logic. He immediately
joined issue in a fierce attack. The contro
versy took upon itself elements of passing
interest in the personal issues which became
mingled with the larger discussion. But the
subject of the divergence was as old as history,
and will last as long as intelligence in the world
endures. The contending positions have been
dividing mankind since the same problem
confused the praises of the Psalmists, and dis
quieted the author of the Book of Job. The
challenge which had come in the form of that
mighty drama to a simple pastoral people,
wandering between the desert and the sea, is
a challenge equally inevitable and perhaps
equally unanswerable in a world where every
thing but the desert and the sea has changed.
Complexity and ingenuity of invention have
elaborated man's mind, and multiplied his out
ward possessions, in a fashion which would
seem to those ancient, simple peoples to have
made him almost a rival of the gods. But

x

154 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

the question, " Canst thou by searching find out
GOD ? " is still haunting the minds of all who
are driven, by the unrest which abides in
material triumphs, towards effort beyond the
boundary of material things. Why has He
brought bitterness on the earth ? Why are
moral elements so hard to disentangle in
human affairs ? Whence come these catas-
trophies which fall upon mankind, and bring
sudden ruin alike on the guilty and the
innocent ? Is there ground for the hope that
moral elements will be vindicated in any kind
of ultimate judgment, in which the wicked will
be cast down and the righteous exalted ? The
question when once opened, here as always,
passes to the further and more disquieting
problem : Can the finite in any degree appre
hend the Infinite ? Has mankind merely to bow
before omnipotent force, from which nothing
can be predicted in relation to that moral law
which it has elaborated in its own cramped and
limited life ? Is humanity to worship an abso
lute Being, though His justice be not as human
justice, nor His mercy as the mercy of men ?

All these questions were involved in this
struggle ; between the one side, which em
phasized the mysteries of the Infinite, and the
failure of the human reason before the un
known ; and the other, which clung defiantly to
the tradition of a great past, and affirmed that
the goodness and justice of men were of the
same order as the goodness and justice of

'Denison Maurice 155

GOD. It was a controversy which developed
an extraordinary bitterness, in which the energy
expended turned to heat rather than to light.
Maurice undoubtedly commenced the onslaught.
He fell upon Mansel's theology with a fierce
ness which surprised his own friends. His own
view was that he was attacking an intellectual
position. But reading the controversy to-day,
with Maurice's taunts and ironies and ferocities,
we may understand why the author of the
Bampton Lectures found it difficult to distin
guish the position from the personality. All
Maurice's life had, in fact, been concentrated
upon one ultimate affirmation. He saw this
here denied. He saw it denied, as he thought
(perhaps unjustly) not sadly and reluctantly,
but with a kind of jaunty contentment. He
saw the alternative as an assertion of a loung
ing agnosticism which for the young men of
the time was saving the trouble of thought.
Human life to Maurice only became significant
in so far as it turned itself to the search after a
knowledge of GOD. To that high quest had
been dedicated the effort of the noblest minds of
the centuries. His History of Philosophy was,
as a matter of fact, a history of philosophers.
He showed them wandering into many strange
ways and coming to many different conclusions.
But he showed them all consumed with this
fierce desire, to know the meaning of the
world, to know the Maker of the world.
All separate systems and diverse theologies

156 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

bore witness in his interpretation to this
one central fact, the insatiable longing of the
creature towards the Creator ; quemadmodum
desiderat cervus ad fontes aquarum. And
this thirst "as of the hart for the water-
brooks," had evoked its satisfaction. Human
experience could testify to a response. Life
had become intelligible and radiant in the
response of the Creator towards the creature,
the coming of that " Eternal Life " which is
the very life of GOD. "Thou hast fashioned
us, O GOD, for Thee : and the human heart is
restless, till it finds rest in Thee," was a state
ment, not only of struggle, but of attainment.
"To feel through the actual finite for the
Infinite, through the actual temporal for the
Eternal " was no blind crying in the darkness,
but an effort which advanced towards a goal.
If the possibility of such a purpose and end
be denied, life becomes for Maurice a tale
told by an idiot, signifying nothing. If the
denial were made sorrowfully and reverently,
with some sense of the tremendous issues
involved, he would still resist, with every
energy of his being, the vanishing over the
horizon of all the hope of the world. He
thought he found the denial made pleasantly,
with dialectic ingenuity, designed in a kind of
cleverness to turn the flank or the anti-Christian
philosophy of the day. He repudiated the
scorn thrown upon German thinkers for
attempting to transcend the boundaries of

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 157

human knowledge. He knew these men to be
very different from the vulgar opinion which
regarded them as arrogant heretics and atheists.
He would have nothing to do with the building
of the Church upon a kind of universal ignor
ance. The preaching of such a doctrine from
a University pulpit to the clergy and students
of the future, seemed to him a thing intolerable.
Like " Paul with beasts," he had " fought with
death." If this were true, all the long fight
had been a vain and empty thing. So he
struck out in a kind of white heat of protest
against the principle, here concentrated in
tangible form, which he had felt as a kind
of elusive power of evil diffused through all
the society of his time.

And in these months of violent and often
painful controversy was fought the battle of
an age. Mansel had learnt philosophy from
Hamilton. His successor was Herbert Spencer.
He occupies an intermediate place in a con
tinuous transition from the one to the other.
His lectures are full of logical acuteness,
and contain passages of striking eloquence
and beauty. He could plead with some
justice that he was following in the tradi
tion of Butler. The great apologist of the
eighteenth century had confronted the vague
and benignant Deism of his day with facts
of nature and human life which no man could
challenge or deny. Against the fastidious re
pudiation of the hardness and strangeness of

158 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

revealed religion he had exhibited the hardness
and strangeness of natural religion. He had
proved to the optimism of his century that
no god of rose-water and happiness could be
constructed by reason contemplating the tangled
chaos of the universe. Mansel was attempt
ing to push the same principle to a further
conclusion. " No difficulty emerges in theology,"
he quotes from Sir William Hamilton, " which
has not previously emerged in philosophy." He
examines the historic antinomies, the difficulties
of succession in a timeless state, the irreconcil
able contrast of unity and plurality, freedom
and necessity, finite and infinite. But he passes
beyond this comparatively trodden way into
more daring speculations concerning a moral
divergence between the limited and the Un
conditioned. " He Who has ordained all things
in measure, number and weight, has also given
to the reason of man, as to his life, its boundaries
which it cannot pass." He confesses that " our
heavenly affections must in some measure take
their source and their form from our earthly
ones," and our love towards GOD, if it is to
be love at all, must not be wholly unlike our
love towards our neighbour. But what of
GOD'S love to us ? " That there is an absolute
morality," he affirmed, " based upon, or rather
identical with, the eternal nature of GOD, is,
indeed, a conviction forced upon us by the same
evidence as that on which we believe that GOD
exists at all. But what that absolute morality is

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 159

we are as unable to fix in any human conception
as we are to divine the other attributes of the
same Divine nature."

So he appeals against the popular impeach
ment, in the name of human conceptions of for
giveness, of an eternal punishment. We cannot
know what is the relation of sin to infinite
justice. To the affirmative that sin cannot
for ever be triumphant against GOD, he opposes
the mystery of the existence of sin at any time.
Is not GOD infinitely wise and holy and
powerful now, and does not sin exist along with
that infinite holiness and wisdom and power ?
" It is no disparagement of the value and
authority of the moral reason," he says in a
central passage, "within its proper sphere ot
human action, if we refuse to exalt it to the
measure and standard of the absolute and
infinite goodness of GOD." " In His moral
attributes " (is the summary) " no less than in
the rest of His Infinite Being, GOD'S judg
ments are unsearchable, and His ways past
finding out."

These are the passages which draw from Mill
the fiery retort : " I will call no being good who
is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to
my fellow-creatures, and if such a being can
sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to
hell I will go." Mansel, in fact, was demanding
Revelation because Reason unaided could make
nothing of the world. Instead of falling back
on an infallible Church he was appealing to

160 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

an infallible Bible. It was the same essential
argument as that in which Newman, in one
of the great passages of the Apologia^ after
describing the astonishing and bewildering
panorama which the history of humanity opened
to the thoughtful mind, declared the spectacle
" a vision to dizzy and appal," inflicting upon
the mind " the sense of a profound mystery,
which is absolutely beyond human solution."
Mansel refused to criticize the ethical
standards of the Old Testament ; because he
refused to acknowledge any ethical standards
by which such a creature as man could weigh
and measure the character of GOD. The little
human limitations, in dividing between good and
evil, and weighing nicely the balance in human
action between the one and the other, were finite
judgments of finite things. They had no place
in the region of the infinite. Mansel garnished
his philosophical argument with fervent and
eloquent exhortations concerning human effort
and humility and work in the service of man.
But fundamentally his position varied very
little from that expounded in the philosophy
of Caliban upon Setebos. It is the abandon
ment by the moral reason of man, of the
difficult task of asserting moral reason to be
the foundation of the universe. It is but a
short step from this scepticism to the assertion
of a caprice or a malice in the play of natural
things. So we are back on the Enchanted
Island ; contemplating a deity, spiteful, playful,

cJ Denison Maurice 1 6 1

capricious, whose ways and manners we can
never estimate or judge ; and thinking that, as
he cannot heal his cold nor cure his ache, he
plays with the fortunes of his creatures ; raising
one to honour and happiness, condemning
another to infinite torment ; and all just as
Caliban himself lets the twenty lucky creatures
pass and suddenly shatters the twenty-first, for
no intelligible reason, " loving not, hating not,
just choosing so."

" This seems to me," said Maurice, " the
most important question in the world." " I
cannot put up with a dream in the place of
GOD," was his passionate assertion from the
beginning of his labour to the end. Most men
are content to accept some dim and misty con
ception of an Almighty Being, woven from
the fading visions of childhood, in which
the Almighty appears as a visible person, a
venerable old man ; tempered by a later know
ledge that heaven is not above the curtain
of the sky, nor the Ruler and Maker of the
world compounded of material things, in a
Paradise beyond the fixed stars. They are
busy with the doings of a day, and but vaguely
conscious of a special Providence brooding over
human affairs, to be invoked in moments of
sorrow and despair. Maurice, like Hamlet,
saw a special Providence in the fall of a sparrow
or the breaking of a leaf. GOD still visibly
walked in the garden in the cool of the day,
and every bush was aflame with His Presence.

Y

1 62 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

His laws directed the long process of history.
His righteousness thundered in the judgments
which fell upon men and nations who repudiated
His service. In such an apprehension of the
Divine, Mansel's agnosticism created a vast
desolation. The human cry passed upward
into starless spaces, to an Infinite Power remote
from man's ideal goodness ; where all moral
and finite conceptions lost their intelligible
meaning, and vanished in the vastness and
the cold.

Maurice could hold no communion with a
God whose goodness was not as man's good
ness, and who revealed Himself in dogmatic
commands which might be irrational but which
must be obeyed. He was of the long tradition
who had denied the acceptance of such an easy
cutting of the tangled skein of life. He had
confronted the strength of the agnostic demon
stration of the inseparable difficulties which
human reason discovers, when it beats against
the boundaries which no human reason can
pass. He had known something of the agony
of those who found no guidance outside man's
feeble impulse, and no goodness beyond his
tiny random efforts towards the righting of all
the old wrongs. He had " almost said even as
they." But he had recalled the tenacity and
courage of the long tradition of those who had
refused to accept such a triumph of night and
darkness. Had he failed where these had
endured, "then," he must have confessed,

Denison Maurice 163

" I should have condemned the generation
of Thy children."

So that in this particular point of time the
campaign of centuries was fought in one of
its stoutest battles. First in a series of ser
mons, and then in public "Letters to a Student
of Theology preparing for Orders," Maurice
challenged his opponent. It must be con
fessed that the method adopted would seem
to have excited the maximum of irritation with
the minimum of effect. He writes as to one
who is actually sitting under the lectures of
Mr. Mansel at Oxford, and accepting him as
his teacher and guide. He writes with ex
clamatory sarcasms interspersed with compli
ments to the Bampton Lecturer. These
compliments are quite honestly intended ; but
set in such a context they appear to be even
more elaborate attacks upon their victim.
There is little here of philosophic examination
in the region of metaphysic, in which Maurice
was as much at home as his opponent ; but
contemptuous references to the fact that Mansel
had swept away Thomas & Kempis, Augustine,
Bernard, all the work of the Schoolmen and
all the work of the English Church divines.
Maurice professed to rejoice in the publication
of Mr. Mansel's book, nearly as much as its
most vehement admirers can rejoice ; " for the
question must now be asked of each one of
us : * Do you take these words about knowing
GOD which occur in books of devotion, in

OOD v

164 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

old divines, in the Prayer Book, in the Bible,
literally or figuratively in a less exact sense
than you would use the word " know " as
applied to some other subject ?" He sneers
at Mansel's parade of authority and at the
" learned principles in the text/' He describes
" how rude and poor my way of arriving at
the force of a word is, in comparison with
Mr. Mansel's." " But you and I are not School
men ; we are roughing it in the world. We
have to look upon all questions as they bear
upon the actual business of life." He accuses
Mansel of a vagueness deliberately designed to
appease the professedly Orthodox and Evan
gelical clergymen in London. " In virtue of
that vagueness he is able to deal his blows right
and left. He can at least frighten his readers
with the belief that there is something which
they ought to eschew." He raises as witness
against Mansel, quotations from Milton's letter
to Hartlib, in which the poet describes
the " young unmatriculated novice " driven
into intellectual chaos by the " abstractions
of logic and metaphysics ; so that those
of a most delicious and airie spirit retire
themselves, knowing no better, to the enjoy
ment of ease and luxury, living out their
days in feast and jollity, which, indeed, is the
wisest and safest course of all those unless
they were with more integrity undertaken."
He makes a vital point, indeed, when he states
that Mansel's whole argument "turns not on

Fredericf^ Denison Maurice 165

my consciousness of finite things and my in
capacity for being conscious of infinite things "
but " upon my consciousness of the term finite
and the term infinite." Mansel's conception of
prayer — " constant activity in besieging a being
of whose will we know nothing" — he finds
realized in practice, not in the New Testament,
but in the experience of those who called on
the name of Baal from morning even until
noon, saying, " O Baal, hear us. But there
was no voice, nor any that regarded."

Maurice's whole contention against Mansel's
philosophy and the lessons of his teaching are
summed up in his conviction that "all pain
and restlessness is better than self-contentment."
" I believe that among Mr. Mansel's auditors,"
he says, " there will have been not a few on
whom his words will have acted as a most
soothing lullaby, who will have wrapped them
selves in comfortable thankfulness that they
were not Rationalists, spiritualists, or even as
that German ; who will have rejoiced to think
that they do not trouble themselves about
eternal things which are out of man's reach,
like Puritans and Methodists ; who will pro
claim that they accept Christianity in the lump,
and so are not impeded by any of its little
details from thinking and doing what they list."
" Such men, I believe, do more to lower the
moral tone and moral practice of England than
all sceptics and infidels altogether."

Finally, when he comes to the moral

1 66 Leaden of the Church 1800-1900

question, the test and summary of all that
has gone before, Maurice prophesies against
Mansel, with something of the dogmatism and
more of the violence of the Hebrew prophet.
" I was beginning to comment on these words.
I was trying to tell you what impression they
made on me. I cannot I can only say if
they are true, let us burn our Bibles, let us tell
our countrymen that the agony and bloody
sweat of CHRIST, His cross and passion, His
death and burial, His resurrection and ascen
sion, mean nothing." Without the belief in
that restitution of all things which Mansel had
scorned, "we shall not stop at Mr. Mansel's
point," says Maurice savagely, " but we shall
be certain that evil must run for ever and ever,
must drive out all that is opposed to it. We
shall praise thee, O devil, we shall acknow
ledge thee to be the lord." He accused
Mansel of attempting to defend the Bible,
" but the moment he approaches it, feeling
that he is at war with it " ; and of adopting
a position which could only logically result in
a blind abnegation of human reason ; either
in the acceptance of the claims of an infallible
Church or the losing of human action in the
sand and thorns of a universal ignorance and
despair.

Such extracts sufficiently reveal the atmo
sphere in which Maurice confronted the
new Christian agnosticism. Mansel, stung

Frederic^ Dcnison Maurice 167

to protest by this torrent of invective and
sarcasm, not unnaturally, broke into a still
fiercer reply ; and the flames of controversy
raged hotly for a time. Maurice at once was
recalled to a more tranquil mood, and in his
counter reply abandoned much of that cause
of offence which had appeared like personal
prejudice and violence. " If the religious Press
had not declared, almost en masse, in favour of
Mansel," he said, " I would not have written
against him." All through the bitter struggle
he felt that he was not crushing some unfor
tunate, friendless advocate of new doctrine,
but protesting against a fashionable philosophy
entrenched in high places, applauded by the
religious world. Mansel had intervened in
Maurice's former controversy upon Eternal
Life with a clearer foresight of the issues
involved, than the more ignorant of his
opponents. He had shown that " the attempt
to defend the then currently received view in
regard to Elysium and Tartarus was hopeless,
if GOD'S character was really shadowed forth in
such sentences as : c Can a mother forget her
sucking child ? Yea, she may forget, yet will
I not forget thee.' ' Maurice seemed to see
this great thinker teaching men to laugh over
the troubles of the age and of all ages which
had rejected the limited material outlook, and
had gone forth into the wilderness and solitary
places in order to find out the real secret of
man's being and destiny. He thought that in

1 68 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

the name of orthodoxy here was " a warning
to men against feeling too strongly, thinking
too deeply, lest they should find too much of
the Almighty wisdom, lest they should be too
conscious of the Almighty goodness." " He
entered into the controversy," says his son
rightly, " under disadvantages which he had
encountered in no other cases. Mr. Mansel
had treated his subject with the calmness and
coolness of one who dissects an anatomical
specimen. My father felt every cut of the
lecturer's knife as if it had been employed upon
his heart-strings. He did not realize and,
indeed, he did not till long afterwards become
fully aware, that the lecturer, bred up in the
school of philosophy whose tenets he was
expounding, and looking upon all outside it as
mere folly, was pouring forth what were to
him beliefs as genuine as my father's were
to himself."

This controversy extended over two years.
It was accompanied by, and it intensified, all that
conviction of an approaching crisis which was
haunting Maurice's mind at this time. This
conviction produced even a sense of thankful
ness at the passing away of those who may have
been saved from the evils to come. " It seems
as if there was a gathering in of many," he
wrote upon the death of a friend, " whom we
fancy we want grievously. But I have such
a sense of an approaching crisis as near at hand,
that I cannot but thank GOD for all who have

Frederick Denison Maurice 169

been permitted to pass out of the world before
it comes ; to help, I cannot doubt, in unknown
ways, those who are passing through it." The
whole affair gave him a " kind of staggering
sensation as if everything was turned upside
down." He had learnt from Augustine many
years before, as he confessed to Mr. Ludlow,
that the existence of evil was by its very nature
an unintelligible thing ; that to attempt to
reduce it to a law or principle was to commit
a contradiction. That was not the question
at issue. It was " whether the unintelligibility
of evil or the omnipotence of GOD is a reason
for not regarding Him as carrying on a war
against evil, and for not expecting that in that
war, evil will be vanquished ? " The Bible he
interpreted as the book of "the wars of the
LORD." " It does not define evil ; but it
assumes evil." It assumes a warfare against
evil. It sets forth a process by which evil
can be overcome ; and it looks towards an
end when evil will be altogether destroyed.
"If I had taken advice," he asserts, "I should
have let Mr. Mansel alone altogether. But
there are monitors within which must be
obeyed, whatever voices without contradict
them."

The controversy was an incident in the long
warfare of a lifetime. The end seemed by no
means assured. It drew upon him something
of the obloquy which he had received in
earlier efforts to attack opinions which were

z

earlier

1 70 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

fashionable and established. He was to go
forward almost alone. The Liberal thought of
his day could rarely understand, and certainly
never could follow, that combination of mystic
apprehension and logical subtlety which gave
Maurice his ultimate theology. More and
more he came to appeal to the revelation of
GOD, not as a destroyer, but as the right
eous Judge of men : to recognize that there
must be a great breaking-down of religious
belief before His recognition and triumph
could be assured : to apprehend, not with
out foreboding, something of the results of
that breaking -down in human conduct, as
belief in the spiritual world faded into belief
in mere earthly satisfaction, and this again
passed into a kind of cosmic weariness. But
he looked towards a change beyond the
change, when there would come to this tired
company a revelation, born from the heart
of its dispair, of the unity upon whose
foundation is established the pillars of all
human society ; and a vision of the time,
when, not in some far-off Paradise, but here
upon the solid ground and under the wide
sky, the earth shall be filled with the know
ledge of GOD, as the waters cover the sea.

Frederick Denison Maurice

171

CHAPTER VIII
IN TIME OF CHANGE

the early 'sixties a change was taking
place in the thought of the time, as disturb
ing and revolutionary as the social upheavals
of twenty years before. The New Knowledge
associated with the advance of the natural
sciences was dazzling men's minds with the
security of its triumphs, and throwing down
a challenge to all accepted things. In 1859
the Origin of Species was published, a work
which bears the same high position in the world
of speculation as the discovery of America
by Columbus in the world of action. The
year after, Huxley, in a memorable dis
course, as an exponent of the new ideas, had
shattered the fluent ignorance of Wilberforce
at the British Association Meeting at Oxford.
German criticism was gradually becoming
familiar to English students. The old domi
nance of authority was crumbling before the
demand for freedom. The scene resembled
nothing so much as the breaking-up of the
icefields in the early summer. The noise of
the shattering and violence disquieted the

U1C bl

172 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

minds of men. There were panics, as upon
the publication of the Essays and Relieves ;
when two Archbishops and twenty-five Bishops
united to declare that the position advocated in
the volume was incompatible with membership
of the Church of England. There were appeals
to the secular arm to enforce the assertion of
authority. Alliances were hastily constructed
between the old enemies who had fought
so bitterly, High and Low Church, against
the audacity of the invader. There were
attempts, which the plain man outside re
garded with astonishment, at actions which
looked like personal persecution : in the
ejection of Colenso from his bishopric, and
the refusal to pay Jowett the salary which
was due to him for his work as Greek Pro
fessor. There were combined onslaughts of
the Liberals against subscription to the Articles,
and the recitation in public worship of the
Athanasian Creed. The whole period was one
of unrest and upheaval, with a loosening of the
old moorings. The recognition of the necessity
for change was accompanied by a profound dis
trust of what this change might bring.

Maurice was committed to a difficult task
amid the perplexities of the time. He had
scarcely any sympathy with the Broad Church
development. He was a dogmatist to the
backbone, and repudiated all advocacy of
vague and watery creeds. He was compara
tively ignorant in the region of criticism, and

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 173

profoundly distrustful of the critical results
in their more startling developments. He
contemplated with the extremest repugnance
theories which are accepted by all men to-day
as entirely natural and credible. For long he
fought both for the test of subscription to
the Articles, and for the Athanasian Creed. At
the same time he had been repudiated by
both the historic parties in the Church, and
it was the Broad Church leaders who had
been most inclined to support him in the
hour of his own rejection. Above all, he
would ever plunge in to defend the weaker
side, to repudiate persecution, to emphasize
the dangers and iniquities of mob-law. He
stood very much alone in a time less ardent,
and for a cause less generous, than that which
in the later 'forties had affirmed the duty of
the Church towards all who are desolate and
oppressed. -

Early in 1860, in an article upon the revision
of the Prayer Book and the Act of Uniformity,
he repudiated the attempt " to broaden the
formularies " of the Church in order to
include all who professed and called them
selves Christians. " Do not let us surrender
the one great witness which we possess," he
pleaded, " that a nation consists of redeemed
men, sons of GOD : that mankind stands,
not in Adam but in CHRIST. " "Give up
the Prayer Book to an Evangelical or semi-
Evangelical Commission, and this witness

174 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

will be eliminated from it by a thousand little
alterations which will be accounted insignificant,
but which will, in fact, render the English
Church another Church altogether." Yet he
would rather trust the living book to the
" lowest Churchman " than to " those accom
plished and tolerant persons, the representatives
of the Broad Church." "The Liturgy has
been to me a great theological teacher, a
perpetual testimony that the FATHER, the SON,
and the SPIRIT, the one GOD, Blessed for ever,
is the Author of all life, freedom, unity to
men. Why do I hear nothing of this from
those who profess to reform it ? Why do
they appear only to treat it as an old praying-
machine which, in the course of centuries,
gets out of order like other machines, and
which should be altered according to the im
proved mechanical notions of our time ? "

Maurice, here as always, was reproached by
Liberal thinkers for accepting as a standard
of perfection the English Prayer Book and
the Thirty-nine Articles. The reproach was
unfair and untrue. Maurice was confronting
a time of chaotic thought, with the Church
divided into contending parties. He was
convinced that the sixteenth century had
come to a more trustworthy theology, in
the prayers and affirmations which it had
based upon all the Church's past history and
experience, than any which could be huddled
together by Synod or Convocation in the

Frederi

Frederick Denison Maurice 175

nineteenth. " I, and others who think with
me, are far safer under the protection of an
Act of Parliament," he asserted, " than we
should be if left to the mercy of an eccle
siastical public opinion, dictated by the journals,
executed by the episcopate.

In this year he was appointed by the
Crown to the Chapel of S. Peter's, Vere Street.
The actual presentation was in the gift of
Mr. William Cowper, First Commissioner of
Works in Lord Palmerston's Government ;
who later, as Mr. Cowper-Temple, was to
attain unenviable immortality as the reputed
inventor of a new religion. A hubbub of
protest arose, led by the Record. An
address was signed by a small number of
clergymen, praying the Bishop of London
not to institute him. A counter address,
however, established conclusively the respect
and devotion which Maurice had inspired.
The signatures included Gladstone and
Tennyson, men of almost every walk in
life, three Bishops, as well as other lesser
Church dignitaries. The terms of it recog
nized wide differences and some opposition to
elements in his teaching. " But as we trust,"
it concluded, " we are all united in our several
vocations in the one object of promoting glory
to GOD in the highest, peace upon earth and
goodwill towards men, we hail with satisfaction
the honour done to a fellow-labourer in the
great cause."

6'^

1 7 6 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

In his reply Maurice outlines an apology
for all his life. " I took refuge in the Church
of England, in which I had not been educated,
because, as I thought, it offered me an
altogether different bond of fraternity from
that of similarity in opinions. A society
merely united in opinion had, it seemed to
me, no real cohesion." " The Church of
England confesses a FATHER who has revealed
Himself in a SON ; a SON who took our nature,
and became Man, and has redeemed men to be
His children ; a SPIRIT who raises men to be
spirits. She invites all to stand on that ground.
She tells all — so I read her formularies —
that they have no less right to claim their
places in her as members of CHRIST than they
have to claim their places in the nation as
subjects of the Queen, and in their families as
children of an earthly father and mother. This
was a rock upon which I felt that I could
rest. It was a foundation for a universal
human society. If no such society existed,
history seemed to me a hopeless riddle, human
life very intolerable. If it did exist, it could
not crush national life or family life, but must
cherish and sustain both. It could stifle no
thought ; it must thrive when it suffered
persecution, grow weak whenever it inflicted
persecution. It must be ready to embrace all
persons. It could never seek to comprehend
any sect. It must be the great instrument of
healing the strife of classes within a nation.

Frederii

Frederick Denison Maurice

It must proclaim CHRIST as the Deliverer and
Head of all nations."

Preaching at Vere Street, visits to the
Workmen's Colleges in the various towns,
meditation and writing upon the new changes
in thought, occupied the beginnings of these
days. Everywhere Maurice repudiated the
common opinion that he was seeking a
modified and weakened theology. " I do not
plead for a Christianity," he asserted, "any less
strong and definite than that which is held by
the extremest section of the Hecordite school.
I find fault with their Christianity only because
it seems to me to have nothing to do with
CHRIST, to be a mere religious system con
structed by human hands, made up of crude,
philosophical notions and popular superstitions,
and fleeing from that revelation of the living
and true GOD which I find set forth in Scrip
ture."

The excitement of the Gssays and Reviews
debate filled him with foreboding. He con
fesses to Stanley that he cannot have much
sympathy with the book generally, because
" my only hope of resisting the devil-worship
of the religious world lies in preaching the
full revelation of GOD in CHRIST." But the
efforts to suppress it, and the episcopal
rally against it, appeared alike mischievous
and futile. " The orthodoxy which covers
our atheism must be broken through ; and

2 A

1 7 8 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

whether it is done by the Essays and
or in any other way, seems to me a matter
of indifference, though it is not a matter of
indifference whether the Church shall be com
mitted to a new persecution which must make
the new reformation, when it comes, more
complicated and terrible."

The more he studied the book, the less
he liked it. He found the task hopeless to
extract any theology or humanity from the
Sssays and Reviews. Yet he protested against
the Memorial addressed to the Archbishop,
demanding that definite action should be taken
against its authors ; for he discerned in
history "a clear and direct sentence of GOD
upon all attempts to restrain the expression
of thought and belief." The unbelief of the
time — and he knew something of it — he found
" more deep and more widely spread than
those who complain of the Essays and Reviews
have any notion." And one of its roots is
laid in the notion that "all that Churchmen
and believers in the Bible can do is, if they
have power, to silence each other." Their un
belief he found later to be " the unbelief of us
all " ; as manifest in the anonymous invectives
of Wilberforce in the Quarterly Review, as in
the bewildered protests of the men them
selves ; " discussing certain positions about
GOD instead of believing in the GOD acting,
speaking, and ruling whom the Scripture sets
before us."

Frederick Denis on Maurice 179

Instead of meeting negation with negation,
Maurice attempted with others, in a series of
Tracts for Priests and People^ to preach some
positive belief to the perplexed thought of
the time. But in such a scheme he refused
to join in the attack on the Athanasian Creed.
" You think that to avoid the contradiction,"
he writes to Mr. Ludlow, " it must be sur
rendered to those religious people who like
to curse their brethren a little, but not so
strongly as this Creed, according to their use
of it, curses these brethren. If GOD so
orders it, let the Creed go. But my work
is to protest against the current opinion, and
to use the old Creed for the worrying and
torment of those who hold it."

He deplored the " utter weariness and hope
lessness about the Scriptures which we see
everywhere." He looked with foreboding at
the course of the impeachment, as it was carried
through the various Courts of Appeal. He
was kindled to indignation against the rabble
of country clergymen who voted against the
grant of adequate salary to Jowett for his work
as Regius Professor of Greek. " The effect of
all persecutions," he asserted, "is to endorse
denials, to extinguish no heresy."

The great Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy ,
the work of a lifetime of labour, was published
at the end of 1861 ; the Tracts for Priests
and People six months later. In the first,
he reveals his conception of a history of

11C 1CV<

180 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

philosophy as the history of the thought
of the great men of all time ; feeling after a
knowledge of GOD, and refusing to be content
with any lesser search. In the second, he
reveals the search attained, in a faith and
conviction which for him was the end of
the journey. " The Name of the Trinity, the
FATHER, the SON, and the HOLY GHOST,
is, as the Fathers and Schoolmen said con
tinually, the Name of the Infinite Charity,
the Perfect Love, the full vision of which
is that Beatific Vision for which saints and
angels long, even while they dwell in it."
" To lose this, to be separated from this, to
be cut off from the Name in which we live
and move and have our being, is everlasting
death."

From such high visions he is compelled to
come down to the solid earth again.

" The Essays and H(ev'iews debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso's words have weight."

So Browning wrote of these distant days.
The passage from the one controversy to the
other was without break. Colenso's words
had very little weight with Maurice, who
was utterly perplexed by the Bishop's mathe
matical mind, and by the queer kind of dis
torted humour which he drew from his
speculations on the Pentateuch. But ten

Frederick Denison Maurice 1 8 1

years before, when all men were attacking
Maurice, Colenso had plunged chivalrously
into the conflict, and publicly dedicated his
book to one who was being branded before
the world as a heretic. Maurice found him
self torn between repugnance to the opinions
and loyalty to the friend. He could not see
how the man could keep the bishopric with
such confessed beliefs. On the other hand,
he utterly condemned the machinations of
Wilberforce to eject Colenso from the
Church. He shared to the full the distrust
of Wilberforce, entertained by those who
thought they saw in that master of diplomacy
the very incarnation of the spirit of the mob,
and its tendency to persecute all unpopular
causes.

The conversations between the philosopher
and the critic are not without a certain pathetic
humour. "I asked him," says Maurice,
" whether he did not think Samuel must have
been a horrid scoundrel if he forged a story
about the ' I AM ' speaking to Moses, and to
my unspeakable surprise and terror he said,
c No. Many good men had done such things.
He might not mean more than Milton meant."1
There was worse to come. " He even threw
out the notion that the Pentateuch might be a
poem ; and when I said that to a person who
had ever asked himself what a poem is, the
notion was simply ridiculous, he showed that
his idea of poetry is that it is something which

nis iae<

1 8 2 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

is not historical. And his idea of history is
that it is a branch of arithmetic." Maurice
thought the Bishop utterly wrong. These
speculations opened abysses which he did not
care to contemplate. Colenso approached the
whole subject with a lack of reverence, and a
kind of cheerful delight in propounding strange
conundrums concerning the history of the
Jews. But the statement that the conscience
of most people would demand that a theologian
with such opinions should resign, was met by
the Bishop with some slight words suggesting
that the conscience of most people was also
surprised at Maurice's position as an incumbent
of the Church. Such a suggestion determined
Maurice to resign himself, and to start life
anew at fifty-seven. "People will not hear
me," he explained. " My words they call
strange and mystical. If I can awaken them
by an act, which they will also think strange
and foolish, to give heed to men who can
command their ears and hearts, I shall be too
thankful."

He found the position intolerable, for
he was supposed to be partly talking of the
Old Testament as the guide to all moral
and political wisdom, and partly holding with
Colenso that it is a book of fictions and
forgeries. He was even moved to contemplate
the possibility of a negative Liberalism itself
adopting persecution when it attained domin
ance. But the Bishop of London (Tait) refused

Frederic^ Denison Maurice 1 83

to let him go. Messages poured in urging him
to reconsider his decision. And finally, on an
appeal to personal honour in connexion with
the Colenso case, he agreed to withdraw.

The fierceness of the main controversy refused
to be abated. In 1863, Pusey and his friends
were again attacking Jowett, and Maurice
hastened to the defence. The controversy was
interesting as provoking a letter from Newman,
who had been so long silent, explaining the
contention in the famous Tract XC. All
Maurice's efforts were now directed towards
preventing the Church from expelling beyond its
borders the new Liberal school of theologians.
The appeal, it must be confessed, was to the
legal and secular protection. " I am sure,"
he wrote, "that you will find every sect
narrower and more cruel than the Church."
To that Church he had come out of such
a sect — a sect which had considered itself,
and rightly considered itself, more enlightened
and liberal than most of its brethren. "We
have been repeating phrases and formularies,"
he cried. " We have not entered into them,
but only have accepted certain reasonings
and proofs against them. Now they arc
starting up and looking at us as if they
were alive, and we are frightened at the
sight." " We do want," is a later message
to a distressed correspondent, "one and all of
us, to be brought down, to learn, as you say,
not how we may define GOD (define GOD 1

184 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

Repeat the words to yourself and think how
terrible they are) but that He is, and that
He knows us though we know Him ever so
little, and that He has been and is guiding
us by strange ways out of our darkness into
His light."

Yet he would have nothing to do with any
re-writing of the Bible ; either of the Old Testa
ment, as in Colenso's whimsical speculations,
or of the Gospel stories, as in the work of
Renan, which had come with such a fascina
tion to so many men and women of the
time. He contended that the Exodus was true
history, and the Book of Genesis, in Pusey's
expression, the " Divine Psalm of creation.'*
He rejected such forensic arguments as those
in Paley's Evidences^ against which he had
been fighting all his days. " I cannot help
thinking," he writes to Kingsley, " that he has
done much to demoralize Cambridge, and to
raise up a set of divines who turned out a bag-
infidel on Sundays to run him down, fixing
exactly where he shall run, and being exceed
ingly provoked if he finds any holes and
corners which they do not happen to know
of."

Maurice was not in the least troubled by the
advance of the new scientific speculation ;
perhaps because he had never accepted the
argument for the existence of GOD, demonstrated
from the work of nature. The natural world
indeed stood somewhat outside his interests.

Frederick Denison Maurice 1 8 5

He could respond but imperfectly to its beauty,
and discerned no Spiritual Presence in the
wide ocean, and the living air, and the light
of setting suns. And he was unperplexed by
its evidence of law and order and the rigorous
sequence of change, which were exciting in
the minds of so many a doubt concerning
any past disturbance of that order. He put
aside, somewhat airily, the question of miracles,
dissenting altogether from the ordinary defini
tion of a miracle. "I don't confess so many
miracles, not a hundredth part so many," he
wrote to Mr. R. H. Hutton, "in the flight
of the Israelites from Egypt as in the flight
of the French from Moscow." The history
of the Exodus he interpreted as miraculous
in the sense that " it is referred directly to GOD
and not to intermediate agents." " That is
just what I want it for, as an explanation
of the flight from Moscow, and of all other
flight which I read of in The Times and
elsewhere."

Renan's Life of Jesus he was reading with
a deepening disgust. At first he had accepted
it as a plausible and graceful falsehood ; but
afterwards he came to revolt against it as
something unhealthy and pernicious. " Renan's
Jesus," he writes, " is a charming Galilaean,
with a certain sympathy for beautiful scenery,
and an affectionate tenderness for the peasants
who follow him. But he is provoked to
violence, impatience, base trickery, as soon

2 B

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1 86 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

as he finds his mission as a reformer un
successful. A Frenchman bred amid pious
frauds calls him the most delightful and
wonderful of men ; who practises innocent
artifices, resorts to thaumaturgy, but when he
does resort to it is guilty of wilful imposture
beside the grave of his friend. We in England
should say he was a horrible liar and audacious
blasphemer." He finds the book " detestable,
morally as well as theologically." " Renan
takes the supernatural out of the Gospels," he
asserts. " He cannot take it out of his own
life. I say of his Jesus : Incredulus odi"

The famous Privy Council Judgment of
1864, in which "hell was dismissed with
costs" by Lord Westbury in suave and ironical
phrases, gave rise to the last and fiercest
of Maurice's struggles. The refusal to expel
from the Church those who declined to affirm
the hopeless and unending torments of the
wicked, excited something like a panic. Men
were brought together who had fought each
other for nearly half a century. High Church
and Low Church united to draw up a Decla
ration of Faith, repudiating opinions which
seemed to them to undermine the foundation
of all the accepted morality. Everything that
Maurice most hated was here united in one
common cause : the domination of mob — and
especially of clerical mob — law ; the attempt
to bully and persecute a minority ; the panic
of a crowd at seeing new things ; the full

Frederick Denison Maurice 187

exercise of the party system, which he
thought was openly inspired by the devil.
And all were concentrated upon a defence of
the teaching of future rewards and punish
ments, as being the only method through
which the poor could be coerced into aban
donment of the deadly sins. He flared out
in correspondence in The Times with Pusey
against the whole affair. The controversy
became more and more heated, until his pro
tagonist withdrew with the dry declaration
that he and Maurice worshipped different
Gods. In his reply, Maurice declined to
repudiate the challenge. The new Declaration
of Faith, he said, means to young clergymen,
poor curates, poor incumbents : " Sign, or we
will turn the whole force of religious public
opinion against you. Sign, or we will starve
you. Look at the Greek Professor. You see
we CAN take that vengeance on those whom
we do not like. You see that we are willing
to take it, and that no considerations of faithful
and devoted service will hinder us/' " This
is what is called signing for the love of GOD."
"I accept," he deliberately affirmed, "Dr.
Pusey's own statement, tremendous as it is.
I say that the god whom we are adjured to
love under these penalties is not the GOD of
whom I have read 'in the Canonical Scrip
tures'; not the GOD who declares that He
abhors robbery for burnt offering."

Of such strong stuff was controversy com-

1 8 8 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

posed, in the days when men felt that the
triumph of the one side or the other was
a triumph of life or of death.

Maurice still found difficulty in expounding
his position to the unphilosophical, to all those
who could make no kind of conception of
the meaning of a timeless condition. The
universal opinion made eternity a very, very
long time ; because, except for those who
have challenged the foundation of the world
and felt it move for a moment under their
feet, there can be no meaning in the appre
hension of a Being unconditioned by time.
Time and Space, for the majority are real
solid enduring things, and any attempt to
prove them otherwise is moonshine. The
ordinary Broad Churchman of Maurice's day
thought that eternity meant a long condition
of punishment for the wicked, at the con
clusion of which their sins might be expiated,
and their sufferings ended. The ordinary
Evangelical Churchman thought that eternity
meant a long condition of punishment for the
wicked which would never terminate, but
continue through days and years and cen
turies for ever and ever.

To the plain man Maurice must belong
either to the one or the other. It is said that
part of his popularity among the working
classes was due to the belief that he wished
to make things easier for them in the next
world. This was an acceptance of an inter-

Frederick Denison Maurice 189

pretation of his doctrine which would have
filled him with a kind of bewildered horror.
" We have reduced the Gehenna of the Bible
into a heathen Tartarus," he declares, in a
protest in which he repudiates both these con
ceptions. " We have turned the Heaven of
the Bible into something less real, less hopeful,
than a heathen Elysium." If eternal life
" means only a life, or rather happiness, pro
longed through an indefinite series of future
ages," he asked, " is it not utterly strange and
monstrous language to talk of that life as
manifested, and manifested by the Man of
Sorrows ? "

He fell back on the true historic antithesis
between temporal — things which are subject
to the incidents of change and of growth and
of decay, and eternal — things which are subject
to no such incidents. And the eternal he found
here or nowhere ; now, as in all the past and in
all the future. "When eternity is merely a vast
interminable future," he asserts, " it swallows
up everything. Yet there is no joy in con
templating it. People shrink from our negative
heaven only one degree less than from our
hell. They seem different parts of the same
vague abyss. Life in one sense is absent from
both. Death they think rules in both."

He found himself more and more isolated,
" seeming ridiculous to all disciples of Jowett,
a heretic, and a wilful liar to all disciples of
Pusey." The prayer that he might never form

1 90 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

a party of followers had been abundantly ful
filled.

He distrusted Ecclesiastical Courts. He
hated the appeal to the spiritual arm. He was
prepared to spend his last energies in resisting
the separation between Church and State. . He
openly scorned " a thing called a Church, con
sisting of a Metropolitan and a Synod, a poor
imitation of a Popedom, which is to set aside
the glorious traditions of the English nation
which were grounded upon the Old Testament,
which are the deliverance from priestly tribunals
and a king-bishop." He revoked his old appeal
for Subscription, whose fate had been sealed, he
thought, by Disraeli's scorn of the new know
ledge amid the delirious approval of the clergy ;
in his famous speech at Oxford upon " Is
man an ape or an angel ? " But at the
same time he was every day more convinced
that " theology is what our age is crying for,
even when it thinks that it is crying to be rid
of theology." " Those who talk of leaving
men to their religious instincts," he said in
prophetic words, "or their perceptions of
morality, are preparing a fresh succession of
burdens for us and our children."

He was filled with foreboding as he contem
plated many of the signs of the time, especially
the growing rift between those who believed in
the new freedom and those who clung to the old
Faith. " The thought that the greatest effort
of those who speak most for freedom," he

Frederick Denison Maurice 191

wrote to Mr. Ludlow, " is to throw off the
witness for GOD as the Emancipator which was
born in the times of old, and that those who
cling most to the Bible regard Him as a tyrant,
sometimes overwhelms me."

He is more and more appalled at the atheism
of a religious world which thought that GOD
has nothing to do with nations and politics,
" which should be left to such men as Metter-
nich and Louis Napoleon" ; from which
" nothing but a baptism of fire can deliver
us." He refuses to accept Stanley's belief that
the improved temper of the age promised a
quiet and happy solution of all controversies.
He is convinced that these and other indica
tions foretold the approach of a great conflict
and crisis in the Church. He looks back over
the old days with a sense of a goodness and
mercy that has followed him through all. The
vision of the young men at Oxford "whose
faces are so full of promises of good and
possibilities of evil," sets him longing that he
could tell them " a little of the mystery that
is about them," and the heights and depths of
human things.

Towards the end, as from the beginning, he
will protest the conviction, which only deepened
with the passing of the years ; — " the Creed,
the LORD'S Prayer, and the Ten Command
ments — yes, the Ten Commandments, in spite
of all modern theories to the contrary — seem
to me the true witnesses of a universal fellow-

iu me i

192 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

ship as well as of a national fellowship ; the
Sacraments the pledges of its reality through
all ages past and to come."

It is autumn and calm weather, with some
thing of the tranquillity which has been so long
delayed, and light and autumn sunshine before
the end. In 1866 the Professorship of Moral
Philosophy was vacant at Cambridge. It was
the one solitary piece of preferment which
Maurice would have cared to accept. He was
elected in a triumph which, as Kingsley wrote,
" could not have been more complete. My heart
is as full as a boy's." So in the evening of the
day he was in part removed from the tumult of
controversy, engaged in the work of teaching
under fairer conditions than in the restless
and confused society of London. He could
turn the great powers of his mind more entirely
to the ultimate things : to examination of
the origin and nature of the Conscience,
that mysterious inner voice of protest and
appeal : to the meaning of a Social Morality :
to the revelation of the life of the world.
" More than in any former time we must begin
everything from GOD," was the unchanging
faith, " and see everything terminate in
Him." He believed that " the most earnest
unbelief of the day " was " a protest against the
unbelief to which the Church has yielded."
He was convinced that Englishmen were more
likely to be led back into faith by the political
road than by the German metaphysical road.

r

Frederick Denison Maurice 193

He wrote letters in the Daily News upon
" Church and State," strongly repudiating any
idea of work towards separation, asserting that
a union of Church and State is implied in
the existence ot each, and is necessary for the
protection of moral freedom. He called aloud
at times for something of that old fire which
alone could consume the sins of the world ; the
fire which nearly thirty years before he had
thought should burn up all Borrowdale and
Derwentwater. " Unless we are baptized in a
fire like that which burned in S. Louis or in
Calvin, I don't think the Church or the State
will ever shake off the trammels which hold
fast the one or the other."

He took increasing interest in the actual
work of reform : supporting female suffrage ;
investigating in the painful work of the Royal
Commission on Contagious Diseases ; refusing
to give up the Catechism in controversy about
National Education. " Under the name of
progress," he prophesied, in an assertion
which time has not disproved, " we seem to
be drifting back into the old Bell and
Lancaster notion of cramming a number of
children into a schoolroom, and then cramming
them with a number of fragments of informa
tion — part labelled religious, part secular —
which, if they should be able to digest this
hard morsel, was to be their education." He
was never tired of quoting the spirit of Dar
win's investigations as a lesson and model

2 c

194 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

for Churchmen. He was filled with anxiety
at the splendid materialism of English life,
as wealth poured like water into its streets.
He thought sometimes that " the slow disease of
money-getting and money-worship, by which we
have been so long tormented, must end in death."

Abroad he saw the tremendous shock of war,
in a vision full of pity and terror. He thinks
France deserved all her losses. He believes
that the growth of a lust for conquest will mean
in the victorious a loss of moral tone. " My
horror of Empire is so great and general," he
wrote at this time.

There were memories of the old interest,
as the ground-swell of the long theological
struggle of the mid-century sank slowly down
ward into a kind of quiet. In a final word on
the Athanasian Creed, he recognized that " it is
pretty sure to be banished from our service
now, and I wish that it should." But he wishes
also to explain " what I have meant by reading
it while I have read it." The Ritualist dis
turbances had replaced the old fight against
Liberalism, and once more he was protesting
against the attempts of fanatics to put down
a minority by force, or to appeal to the power
of the crowd in the work of persecution. He
would sometimes wonder what would be the end
of this day's business : though now, in the
evening, it was coming to suffice him to know
that the day would end, and that then the
end would be known.

Frederick Denison Maurice 195

In lecturing at the University, later in work
as Vicar of S. Edward's at Cambridge (a
parish without a stipend, whose charge he
gladly accepted), the time slipped peacefully
by. He liked to talk to the classes of little
children, and to gather visitors among the
Undergraduates. He would speak of the long
days past and the faith which had sustained
him through them all. " I have laid a great
many addled eggs in my time," he said one
day in rather a sad tone, " but I think I see
a connexion through the whole of my life
that I have only lately begun to realize. The
desire for unity, and the search after unity
both in the nation and in the Church, has
haunted me all my days."

" His hair was now of a silvery white,"
writes his son, " very ample in quantity, fine
and soft as silk. The rush of his start for a
walk had gone ; his movements had, like his
life, become quiet and measured. At no time
had there been so much beauty about his face
and figure. There was now — partly from
manner, partly from face, partly from a char
acter that seemed expressed in all — a beauty
which seemed to shine round him, and was
very commonly observed by those among
whom he was."

Death came to him gradually at the last, in
a slow failing of an over-worked mind and
body. The early months of 1872 showed him
in a continual growing weakness. At Easter

196 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

he was resigning S. Edward's, growing weaker
day by day and having the experience of great
suffering. " Though I have not S. Edward's,"
he said, " I hope I may give myself more to
the work of the hospital." At another time he
said, " If I may not preach here I may preach
in other worlds." He delighted in the reading
aloud to him of the Book of Revelation and
of Job, " the books most loved by the poor."
He was continually speaking with horror of the
divisions of the Church. Nights of suffering
he would spend in prayer. The reproach
which had haunted him all his days increased
with the periods of bodily weakness. The sense
of unsatisfactory work, of sin so strong upon
him, of purposes baffled and so often turned
aside, impressed the mournful contrast between
the ideal and the reality. The conviction
of unprofitable service here at the end fell
back upon the cry of Pascal, the universal
human cry out of the deep : " I have fled
from Thee : I have deserted Thee : I have
crucified Thee : I have left Thee : O that
Thou mayest not leave me for ever."

The gloom of the Valley of the Shadow
deepened towards the close. But there was
light at the last. " During the night of Easter
Sunday he suffered greatly, and was in great
anguish of mind, asking that those around him
would pray that these nervous fears might be
taken away." Later he said, " I have two
voices, but I cannot silence the second voice as

Frederick Denison Maurice 197

Tennyson did." It was said to him, "The LORD
is my light, and my salvation ; whom then
shall I fear : the LORD is the strength of my
life ; of whom then shall I be afraid ? " He
said, " That is what I wanted." Later he
asked for the third Psalm, and towards morn
ing for a part of the Litany. " I am not going
to death," he said, " I am going into life."

Towards the close " he began talking very
rapidly, very indistinctly . . . about the Com
munion being offered for all nations and peoples,
about its being women's work to teach men its
meaning."

" He went on speaking, but more and more
indistinctly, till suddenly he seemed to make
a great effort to gather himself up, and after
a pause he said, slowly and distinctly, c The
knowledge of the love of GOD — the blessing of
GOD Almighty, the FATHER, the SON, and the
HOLY GHOST, be amongst you — amongst us —
and remain with us for ever.' ' He never
spoke again.

They buried him at Highgate, where already
rested father, sister, mother ; in that hill
cemetery which stands high above the city,
and sees all its striving but as a little smoke,
drifting across a quiet sky. He had lived
in that whirlpool of tossing lives ; he had
laboured for it, and loved it, and worn out
his frail body in its service, until the fire
that was within him had burnt through the

198 Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

tenement in which it could no longer be
confined. There he lies, while the world
changes, and mankind sweeps forward in its
strange journey, through the courses of time.
Many at his death recognized the withdrawal
of a power from the earth, and mourned the
loss of such strong service and devotion. But
to those who had loved him, the end appeared
like the going over of one who had helped to
guard many weaker pilgrims from all the
dangers of the way. " { My sword I give to him
that shall succeed me in my Pilgrimage. My marks
and scars I carry with me, to be a witness for me
that I ha^pe fought His battles, who now will be my
Rewarded . . . So he passed over, and all the
Trumpets sounded for him on the other side."

Frederick Denison Maurice 199

CHAPTER IX

THE MAN

1V/TAURICE was below middle height, but
with a dignity of bearing which re
moved all sense of smallness. His habits
gave the impression of an abundance of
nervous energy. He would start his walk
with a little run, move violently about the
room while dictating his books, attack the fire
with a poker or clutch pillows in an uncon
scious embrace ; all the while pouring forth a
continuous stream of words. He habitually
overworked, and suffered consequent nervous
collapses, with those deadening fits of depres
sion which are the marks of an overstrained
nervous system. He took no exercise except
the walking to and from his engagements,
and few holidays unless ordered away by the
doctor.

He was oppressed through life by shyness
and an exaggerated humility. The first in time
became mitigated by the affection of friends
and admirers who would accept his invita
tions to " Prophetic Breakfasts " or attend
his evening Bible classes ; but it never quite

2OO Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

disappeared. The second persisted to the end.
Only at intervals, and when strongly moved,
all this reticence was thrown off, and he would
suddenly appear as if transformed by the great
ness of his emotion. "There were times,"
says his son, " when he could make his words
sting like a lash and burn like a hot iron."
" When his wrath was excited by something
mean or cruel, he would begin in a most violent
manner to rub together the palms of his hands.
He appeared at such moments to be entirely
absorbed in his own reflections, and utterly
unconscious of the terrible effect which the
fierce look of his face and the wild rubbing of
his hands produced upon an innocent bystander.
A lady who often saw him thus says that she
always expected sparks to fly from his hands,
and to see him bodily on fire."

He was a man possessing through life the
vision of the unseen, and dwelling in intimate
communion with the things of the spirit.
GOD was always in his thought. " Whenever
he woke in the night," says his wife, " he
was always praying." And in the very early
morning, " I often pretended to be asleep,"
is her testimony, " lest I should disturb him
while he was praying out his heart to GOD."
Often he would pass whole nights in prayer.

The household was of the simplest. Maurice,
unconcerned with the things of the body, was
entirely indifferent to physical comfort. He
protested continually against indiscriminate

Frederick

1 • •

Frederick Denison Maurice 201

almsgiving ; but no beggar went from his
doors empty away. In practice he carried to
an extreme point his own fasting on all the
days prescribed by the Church. " Not infre
quently on Good Friday and other days he
palpably suffered from his almost entire
abstinence from food, and at other times
during the year he used to exercise the most
curious ingenuity in trying to avoid taking
food without allowing his doing so to be
observed."

Dignity, kindliness, gentleness, distinguished
all his doings. He had none of the noisy and
genial manners which are the fashion in the
new school of Christian Social reformers. He
shrunk timidly away from the slightest rebuff.
If anything went wrong, he took the blame on
himself. " There was a continual tendency to
take the heaviest load on his own shoulders
and to assign the lightest to others, all the
while pretending and really persuading himself
that he was not doing his fair share." He
exercised a quite remarkable influence upon
all who were sensible to unselfish goodness,
especially simple persons, servants, children,
country villagers. There were, however,
exceptions. Many found him difficult, and
repudiated his lead after having worked with
him for some time.

His cousin, who was brought up with him,
gives a testimony to a friendship with one of
no ordinary standard of purity and charity.

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2O2 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

" I had great opportunities," he said, " of
watching his early character and progress, and
1 rejoice to have an occasion of repeating now
what I often said then, that during that time
I never knew him to commit even an ordinary-
fault or apparently to entertain an immoral
idea. He was the gentlest, most docile and
affectionate of creatures. But he was equally
earnest in what he believed to be right, and
energetic in the pursuit of his views. It may
be thought an extravagant assertion, a mere
formal tribute to a deceased friend and com
panion, but after a long and intimate experience
of the world I can say with all sincerity that
he was the most saint-like individual I ever
met — CnRisT-like, if I dare use the word."
And long years afterwards " he was the only
saint I ever knew," was the statement of a
well-known figure in letters and society.

One who had learnt to reverence him
from the earliest years has told me of the
impression made on a child of twelve by his
preaching, with the voice thrilling through
the darkened chapel ; conveying less by
words, then but dimly understood, than by
the impression of a personality, the revelation
of a kind of intimate intercourse with the
spiritual world. She recalls his kindness to
little children, in walks with him through the
London dawn to the early Communion service ;
with the eager child's cross-examination upon
the insoluble problems of the world, and the

Frederic*

Frederick Denis on Maurice 203

attempt of Maurice always to stimulate thought
rather than to provide cut and dried answers ;
to make people think for themselves. The
enthusiasm of the girls at Queen's College for
him was unbounded. It was the greatest
honour of all to be chosen to sit by his side and
help in the reports which he was writing. To
one who had the measure of his unworldliness
it seemed that if he would only hold the baby
in his arms, the child would be better all its
life afterwards. " He appeared to be looking
straight up into Heaven," is the remembrance
of another, "and to be seeing it open."

With all this intense seriousness and spiritual
vision, there was a large capacity for quiet fun
and laughter. I have seen humorous verses
written when quite a boy on the tea-meetings
and classes of his sisters at Frenchay, and later
similar poems refusing invitations to children's
tea-parties, written for his own boys. This
humour is almost entirely absent from his
published writings. It is there transmuted
into a kind of satire, often fierce and wound
ing. Undoubtedly this change has given a
wrong impression of the man. And, with
this humour, was an intense capacity for kind
liness and for affection. Nothing was too
small for him to devote to it his time and
thought. Any one in distress was assisted.
There are stories of revealing interest ; as,
once, when accosted by a woman in the
street, Maurice turned away from her with

204 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

harsh words, but immediately afterwards was
ashamed of his repugnance, returned to her
and remonstrated with her in gentleness, im
ploring her to abandon the life she was leading.
Or at another time, being anxious to assist a
blind bedridden woman in an underground
kitchen to whom he was accustomed to read
the Bible, he purchased one of the large bed-
pillows which she made for her livelihood,
and bore it home triumphantly through the
streets, to the astonishment of the passers-by.
He dedicates his book on "Social Morality"
to his two sons, " who have taught me," he
confesses, " how poor, helpless and useless the
life of a father on earth would be, if there
were not a Father in Heaven."

Many of his contemporaries who refused to
accept his philosophy, and thought his theology
vague and misty, bore high tribute to the
greatness of his character. "He is indeed
a spiritual splendour," wrote Gladstone, " to
borrow the phrase of Dante about S. Dominic."
Yet " his intellectual constitution," is the states
man's confession, " has long been, and still is
to me, something of an enigma." " I never
understand," said Archdeacon Allen, "what
Mr. Maurice says, but I am never with him
without being the better for it." " I am very
sorry about Maurice's death," wrote Jowett
at the end. " He was misty and confused, and
none of his writings appear to me worth
reading. But he was a great man with a

Frederic

r\ \ o* M 4-*a»*

Frederick Denison Maurice 205

disinterested nature, and he always stood by
any one who appeared to be oppressed." And
an incident is told me of the time when
Maurice was announced to be resigning his
chapel at Vere Street. Jowett, after pausing
on a walk to hear a philosopher of a more
successful and less scrupulous type, who was
destined to high position in the Church of
England, lamenting " poor Maurice's indiscre
tions," remarked tersely to Maurice's son
when they had parted, " I would rather be
your father than — that gentleman." " Shall
I dwell in the house of cedar," Stanley wrote
to Maurice at the same time, "while the ark
of the LORD abides in tents ? " And there is
a mass of correspondence still existing which
came to him from the most varied sources,
urging him not to persist in his determina
tion to resign.

In examining his published writings, it is
important to remember the intense effort
which Maurice always made to put himself
at the point of view that he most disliked
and rejected. Just as he believed that all
honest doubts were sacred, so he believed that
all honest convictions were to be respected.
Thus he appears as an almost blind champion
of Royalty and Aristocracy. Yet he always
insisted on his humble origin as a thing of
which he might almost be said to be proud.
When he stood for a Professorship at Oxford
and was beaten, he said, " They wanted a

206 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

scholar and a gentleman, and I am neither."
He had nothing of the courtier in him, nor
the anxiety for social advancement which so
often manifests itself amongst those to whom
such things should appear but as a little dust
of praise. But, although he felt a sub
stantial faith and satisfaction in distinctively
plebeian virtues, he was yet convinced of the
advantage of an aristocracy and a monarchy.
He disliked John Bright, partly, no doubt,
for his opposition to the Factory Acts, but
also very largely for that sweeping and bitter
denunciation of aristocracy which Maurice felt
to be a sign of incapacity to enter into the
feelings of others. He also undoubtedly
possessed a strong sense of order, which he
connected with the arrangements of classes,
and a sense that each should realize its own
duties. This accounts in part for the sus
picion and repulsion, which he felt more
powerfully in early manhood than in later
life, towards any attempts of young noble
men to play the democrat. This was not
exactly a suspicion of their sincerity, for the
sternest protest against such utterances were
addressed to a man whose sincerity he could
never have doubted — Lord Goderich, now
Marquis of Ripon.

This same desire to realize the opposite
point of view to his own, and to criticize his
own point of view, was shown in his apparent
readiness to find fault with the clergy, and to

Frederic

Frederick Denison Maurice 207

accept harsh words concerning them. It was
this impulse, carried into the fiercest courses
of polemic, when under the stress of excite
ment most men abandon such generosity to
opponents, that often confused the issues, and
made those controverting with him think that
he was weakening in his main contention ;
or even, in certain cases, that he was praising
things in their principles with a deliberate and
insulting irony.

Maurice was, indeed, a remarkable combina
tion of complexity and simplicity. Intellectual
persons generally found him hard to under
stand. It was necessary to begin at the
beginning, to appreciate the one or two fun
damental ideas upon which he has based his
conception of the world. When these were
apprehended, the rest flowed forward naturally,
and was largely an explanation of these ideas,
and of their application to the particular dis
turbance of the day. In character, although
entirely simple and truthful, he was complex
in this sense, that you might know him for
a long time without discovering the various
sides to him. Many who were only familiar
with his gentleness and quietness were bewil
dered at the sudden outbursts of the wrath
and fire which would sometimes come upon
him. Others who had only read of him as
a violent and almost savage controversalist,
were astonished when they discovered the
sweetness and humility of the man himself.

208 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

He believed in growth and development,
although he belonged essentially to the age
before the conception of evolution had changed
the whole vision of the world. " He taught
history," writes one of his old students at
Queen's College, "by leading us to see how
GOD had been guiding the nations, and in spite
of their faults and failures guiding them to
nobler developments." When lecturing on
the American War of Independence he would
speak of the impossibility of "making" a
constitution. Just as every human being is
given a constitution which is the result of
natural growth, so the nation must expand
and develop along appointed ways. " He
was quite ready to recognize that America
could do very well without a king, though he
believed that here the monarchy was helpful."

He was a thinker, a writer, and a preacher ;
perhaps greatest as the last. To Maurice
preaching was of the nature of prophecy.
"The word of the LORD came unto me,
saying," seemed to be the initial and stimu
lating energy, which scattered all the shyness
and humility, and drove him, with mind up
lifted beyond all temporal and visible horizons,
to proclaim the message of the everlasting
Gospel. Many testimonies remain of those
who, visiting Lincoln's Inn chapel or S. Peter's
in Vere Street, were arrested by the conscious
ness here of some spiritual force and power
different from that of the teachers and

""

Frederick Denison Maurice 209

preachers around him. There was none of
Newman's particular, thrilling simplicity and
charm, or of Liddon's high sustained rhetoric.
The argument was often difficult to follow ; and
many afterwards retained a far more general
impression of the man as a thing inspired,
than of the nature of the inspiration. But
all were impressed with a kind of atmosphere
of strong energy and conviction, and a
burden laid upon this man which straitened
him till it were accomplished. " It is about
forty years since my most intimate friend,"
(Walter Bagehot,) wrote Mr. R. H. Hutton,
" took me to hear one of the afternoon sermons
of the Chaplain of the Inn. I went, and it
is hardly too much to say that the voice and
manner of the preacher, his voice and manner
in the reading-desk at least as much as in
the pulpit, have lived in my memory ever
since as no other voice and manner have
ever lived in it. The half-stern, half-pathetic
emphasis with which he gave the words of
the confession : c And there is no help in us,
throwing the weight of meaning on to the
last word, and the rising of his voice into
a higher plane of hope as he passed away
from the confession of weakness to the
invocation of GOD'S help, struck the one note
of his life, the passionate trust in eternal help,
as it had never been struck in my hearing
before."

And as the voice, so the man. " His eye

2 E

2 1 o Leaders of the Church 1 8 oo - 1 900

was full of sweetness but fixed, and, as it
were, fascinated by some ideal point. His
countenance expressed nervous, high-strung
tension, as though all the various play of
feelings in ordinary human nature converged
in him towards a single focus — the declaration
of the Divine purpose. Yet this tension,
this peremptoriness, this convergence of his
whole nature on a single point, never gave
the effect of a dictatorial air for a moment.
There was a quiver in his voice, a tremulous-
ness in the strong deep lines of his face,
a tenderness in his eye which assured you at
once that there was nothing of the hard,
crystallizing character of a dogmatic belief in
the Absolute, in the faith which had conquered
his heart. And most men recognized this,
for the hardest voices took a tender and
almost caressing tone in addressing him."
" The only fault, as most of his hearers would
think, of his manner, was the perfect monotony
of his sweet and solemn intonation. His
voice was the most musical of voices, with
the least variety and play. His mind was
one of the simplest, deepest, humblest and
most intense, with the least range of illus
tration. He had humour and irony, faculties
of broad range, but with him they moved
on a single line. His humour and irony
were ever of one kind, the humour and irony
which dwell perpetually on the inconsistencies
and paradoxes involved in the contrasts between

'

Frederick Denison Maurice 211

human dreams and Divine purposes, and which
derive only a kindly feeling for the former from
the knowledge that they are apparently so eager
to come into painful collision with the latter."

He prophesied in the nineteenth century, in
its greatest and wealthiest city, as Isaiah pro
phesied to the little towns of Palestine and
Syria. The " burden of London " was his
theme, like ancient Tyrus, " situate at the
entering of the sea," and like Tyrus, pro
claiming, " I am a god. I sit in the seat of
GOD, in the midst of the sea." He told its
proud and busy people, eager for prosperity
and comfort, and thinking that a nation
could be established in Imperial domination,
that all this was but dust and vanity without
the strong springs of devotion and unselfish
life, which alone could build a city upon sure
foundations. He preached not so much to
the individual as to the community ; or
rather to the individual as part of the com
munity. He was less concerned with absorp
tion in a personal salvation, than with
that energy of sacrifice in which the personal
desire became identified with the effort for
the redemption of a whole race. He looked
across the long vista of the centuries, seeing
the rise and fall of nations, the valleys
exalted and the mountains and the hills
made low. He declared, from his estimate
of the Divine Purpose in the world, the
inner meaning of it all. " What measure,"

2 1 2 Leaders of the Church 1 800 - 1 900

he asked, "is there between the intelligibility
of Isaiah and that of Lord Mahon's Life of
Pitt as political treatises?" "The language
of one is all luminous, the other muddy
beyond expression." "And yet we cannot
make out Isaiah, and Lord Mahon appears
to cause us no trouble."

And for him at times also the darkened
skies become suddenly " all luminous," and
the city encompassed with chariots and horses
of fire. " Great angels, awful shapes and wings
and eyes," occupied the background of the
panorama of history. In that history's pro
gress, amongst the tangled changes of con
temporary politics, as in the building of
populous cities and their falling into decay,
he saw the movement of the spiritual energies
which lay behind the pageant of the world.
"We have been hearing of a vision," he
proclaimed. Without such a vision, "what
mere shows and mockeries would be the state
and ceremonial of kings, the debates of legis
lators, the yearnings and struggles of peoples !
The same painted scenery, the same shifting
pageants, the same unreal words spoken
through different masks by counterfeit voices,
the same plots which seem never to be un
ravelled. What does it all mean ? How do
men endure the ceaseless change, the dull
monotony ? " But with the vision, the mon
otony becomes illuminated with a light which
charges to-day with significance, and reveals

"•

-11 .

Frederick Denison Maurice 213

all the change as a progress towards an end.
"In English temples," he cries, "thou mayest
hear * Holy, holy, holy, LORD GOD of Hosts'
resounding from the lips of Seraphim. In
them thou mayest know that thou art in the
midst of a company of angels and archangels
and just men made perfect ; nay, that thou
sittest in the Presence of JESUS, the Mediator
of the new Covenant, and of GOD the Judge
of All. And if the sense of that Presence
awaken all the consciousness of thine own
evil, and of the evil of the people among
whom thou dwellest, the taste of that Sacri
fice, which was once offered for thee and
for all the world, will purge thine iniquity.
When that Divine love has kindled thy flag
ging and perishing thoughts and hopes, thou
mayest learn that GOD can use thee to bear
the tidings of His love and righteousness
to a sense-bound land that is bowing to silver
and gold, to horses and chariots. And if
there should come a convulsion in that land,
such as neither thou nor thy fathers have
known ; be sure that it signifies the removal
of such things as can be shaken, that those
things which cannot be shaken may remain."
His prophecy was thus of the nature
of an apocalypse. He spoke no comfortable
words to the city. He was often filled with
the darkest forebodings as to the future. With
so many of the great men of his age, he saw
England visibly changing, and changing, as

214 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

he thought, to the worship of heathen gods,
heathen idols. Unrivalled commercial pros
perity was persuading the nation to forget the
LORD GOD, who had brought it out of past
captivity, and led it through strange ways to
so perilous a position amongst the peoples of
the world. It was a battle-cry by one who
was ever a soldier, righting in the wars of the
LORD ; with the vision always before him
of the Armies of Heaven, led by One upon
a white horse whose Name was Faithful and
True, and who treadeth the winepress of the
fierceness and wrath of Almighty GOD.

" He had no ambition," was the verdict
on Maurice of the late Duke of Argyll, " no
social gifts, no brilliant eloquence. He had no
attraction of manner or of conversation. Even
his appearance was against him. He was
a short man with broad shoulders and a
short neck. He had a pale face, but deeply
scored with lines of meditation and thought.
His eyes alone were striking ; large and fine,
with a very earnest and somewhat perplexed
expression. They seemed to be always say
ing, c Open Thou mine eyes, that I may
behold the wondrous things contained in Thy
law/ ' " His sermons," he continues, " were
always interesting, and some of them most
impressive. I always listened to them with
great attention, although on coming away
I was generally conscious of a feeling of in
completeness, as of a want unsatisfied."

Frederick Denison Maurice

" The most beautiful human soul," was
Charles Kingsley's description, "whom GOD
has ever in His great mercy allowed me, most
unworthy, to meet with upon this earth ; the
man who, of all men whom I have seen,
approached nearest to my conception of
S. John, the Apostle of Love. Well do
I remember, when we were looking together
at Leonardo da Vinci's fresco of the Last
Supper, his complaining, almost with indigna
tion, of the girlish and sentimental face which
the painter, like too many Italians, had given
to S. John. I asked, 'Why?' And he
answered, * Why ? Was not S. John the
Apostle of Love ? Then in such a world
of hate and misery as this, do you not think
he had more furrows in his cheek than all
the other Apostles ? ' And I looked upon
the furrows in that most delicate and yet
most noble face, and knew that he spoke true
of S. John and of himself likewise, and under
stood better from that moment what was
meant by c bearing the sorrows and carrying
the infirmities of men.' "

216 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

CHAPTER X

THE WORK

CUCH was the man : what of the work
which he was set to accomplish ? The
prophet with his visions was confronted with
a strange world of make believe, in which
his lot was cast for a season. The people
of the nineteenth century, as the people in the
ancient allegory, lay bound as prisoners in the
cave ; seeing nothing but the shadows thrown
upon the walls by the flickering firelight : and
in their blindness mistaking these shadows for
real things.

It is the prophetic function to sift and
distinguish the reality from the illusion.
Maurice was aided in his apprehension of the
real things by his indifference to the shadows.
From the beginning external Nature made
but little appeal to him. He lamented his
insensibility to the charm and beauty of the
world. " My sole vocation," he wrote, " is
metaphysical and theological grubbing. The
treasures of earth and sky are not for me."
And he classes himself amongst those " who
delve in the dark flower-less caverns and coal

*

Frederick Denison Maurice 217

mines of their own souls." Half-wistfully,
half-pathetically, he confessed this deficiency,
which from childhood had turned his mind
inward instead of outward, and deprived his
writing as well as his life of so much of the
serenity which comes from an apprehension
of the lights and glories of the world.
" I did not in any right mood," he said,
with his characteristic humility, " impute my
incapacity to GOD, but to my own sin."
Nor did the larger satisfactions of human
enjoyment in the work of art or the normal
delights of man, come to soften and lessen
the austerity of a life given to high effort
in thought and conduct. " I am a hard
Puritan," he wrote to Kingsley, " almost
incapable of enjoyment, though on principle
justifying enjoyment as GOD'S gift to His
creatures. I have well deserved to alienate all
whom I love, and with many I have succeeded
only too well." This insensibility to the
material, indeed, helped him to regard with
tranquillity those discoveries of his time which
were modifying the conception of the process
by which the natural world has been made.
" We cannot find GOD in nature," was his
conviction. The natural theology of Paley
and the natural mysticism of the transcenden-
talists alike seemed to him unsatisfying. In
consequence, the discovery of the mechanism of
evolution, which seemed to destroy the final
causes of the first, and the increasing apprehen-

2 F

218 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

sion of the cruelty and clumsiness of nature,
which so weakened the appeal of the second,
failed in any way to weaken or destroy Maurice's
ultimate beliefs.

In the life itself, this sharp limitation
of interest is undoubtedly a reason why to
many the element of romance seems absent,
the atmosphere rarified, and a little difficult
to breathe. " The warmth of lesser life " is
absent. Maurice, longing for the salvation
of the people, and prepared to shed the last
drop of his blood for their cause, appears
detached from them, living in a world
which to the ordinary mind is cold and
bleak. In such a world the schemata of
philosophy and the dogmas of the theo
logians seem to possess more reality, than
the simple human interests of simple men
and women.

There is little light and shade in his writing.
There is no softening atmosphere. Above
all, there is no relaxation from the high level
of severe thought which carries the reader
through the region of the mountains in the
midst of ice and storm, remote from the rich
sunlit plain beneath his feet. The outward
life is of the same piece. The strong convic
tions rarely find adequate expression ; and the
resolute determination is not always successful,
to come down from the world of ideas into the
world of men. It is the life of a student, a
philosopher, a prophet, living in the midst of

in

Frederick Denison Maurice

the city, but not a member of it ; gazing
perplexed upon the kind of things which men
do, and the interests which dominate their lives.

This life is reflected in the writings. Here
is little grace or beauty of style. Maurice will
often give his readers the pregnant phrase, and
at intervals his passionate eloquence will sweep
forward with a kind of swing and fury of
indignation or appeal. Sometimes he is almost
terrible in his denunciation of meanness or
cruelty. Sometimes he is filled with the vision
of things present and to come in a kind of
inspiration. Sometimes he is gazing over the
great city in a kind of tenderness and longing :
" If thou hadst known the things that belong
unto thy peace — but now they are hid from
thine eyes." But there is none of that solemn
intensity and delicate charm of style which has
made such a writer as Newman appeal to
successive generations, nor of the clear light
and simplicity of Church, nor of the pomp
and marching music of Ruskin and the
magic splendour of Carlyle.

Much of his work is dictated matter, and
bears all the evidences of dictated matter.
It is vast in quantity, thirty or forty volumes
of an average of 400 or 500 pages apiece.
It repeats itself. It sprawls over chapters
and pages. It is often extraordinarily tangled
and obscure. It belongs to the time, and
the bulk of it has perished with the time.
In the controversies which filled with the

22O Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

noise of combat the ears of a generation now
all dead and forgotten, once so passionately
alive, he stands among the company as the
only theologian of the nineteenth century in
England with a metaphysical training and a
claim to philosophic distinction. He was
living as much in the world of severe
thought, as amongst the lesser disputants
of a lower plane, who were muttering
and complaining concerning the Thirty-nine
Articles or the Athanasian Creed.

Maurice, like Butler, found himself testi
fying in the midst of an age when " it is
come, I know not how," (in historic words),
" to be taken for granted, by many persons,
that Christianity is not so much a subject for
enquiry, but that it is, now at length, dis
covered to be fictitious. And accordingly
they treat it, as if, in the present age, this
was an agreed point among all people of
discernment ; and nothing remained but to
set it up as a principal subject of mirth and
ridicule, as it were by way of reprisals, for
its having so long interrupted the pleasures
of the world." Maurice, a philosopher with
unchallenged erudition, a thinker of high
intellectual capacity, an honest man, came to
challenge so pleasant a scheme of human
action. He was classed as a Broad Church
man, just as Carlyle was classed as a Radical,
because men are classified on account of their
opponents, rather than through their own

F:

Frederick Denison Maurice

affirmations. Carlyle was attacking a dead
organic society. Maurice was attacking a
theological dominance which was cumbered
with dust and decay — the dust and decay of
centuries. He lived in an age when the
great Revolution had transformed the world,
as completely as the Black Death had effected
the passing of the mediaeval time. Few
recognized the lessons of the Great Change ;
many were turning again to attempt the
endowment of dead things with some ghastly
semblance of vitality.

He was never a Protestant. He passed
almost directly from the Unitarian position to
the assertion of a kind of Liberal Catholicism.
And Catholic he remained to the end ; basing
his deepest conviction upon the unity of all
life ; consummating in that Unity in Trinity,
which is the ultimate human conception of
the Eternal Charity, beyond the basis of all
being. It was the revolt against the selfishness
and aggrandizement of each person or family,
accepting its own self-centred solitariness,
which drove him into warfare against the
Political Economy of his age. Just as he
would have nothing to say to the orthodox
Protestant theology which insisted on a per
sonal salvation, so he would have no toler
ance for the orthodox competitive Economics
which exalted a personal material prosperity.
Hatred of the so-called "law of competition"
made him a co-operator and a Socialist. He

222 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

thought this exaltation of competition to be
the exaltation of a blind brutal god, the
dominance of the worship of idols. Nature,
" red in tooth and claw with ravin," might
shriek against the creed of fellowship ; show
ing nothing but the ferocity of a perpetual
struggle in which the weakest are irrevocably
destroyed. He had been led by other ways
to other interpretations of human affairs ; to
see sympathy widening from the family to the
nation, and from the nation to an enthusiasm
for humanity which included all mankind.

He carried this repudiation into all his
energies. He refused to allow competition
in education, and substituted at Queen's
College a system of reports for a system
of prizes. He endeavoured to carry out the
same idea in the Working Men's College,
with an ideal not of emulation, but of co
operation. He always maintained that the
duty of those reformers who associated
themselves with him in the stormy days of
the later 'forties was less to form Co-operative
Societies than to preach Co-operation.

Experience in part justified his contention.
The productive Associations one after the other
collapsed. The workers gathered in them
proved as rapacious for individual welfare, as
blind to the communal good, as the workers
outside. Maurice himself lost money in the
Associations, and Vansittart Neale, having
risked and ruined two fortunes, was reduced

Frederic

Frederick Denison Maurice 223

to penury. Such misfortunes did not in the
least daunt one who had learnt something of
a large faith "in time, and that which shapes
it to some perfect end," and could see the
dullness of the common day always trans
figured by something of the radiance of that
ultimate vision.

His metaphysic is a history. He declared
that he had no concern in the abstractions
themselves, detached from the life of man ;
and that all his interest was in the struggle
of men in successive ages to attain that
knowledge of GOD which is the goal of all
human effort. So his History of Philosophy
is made up of little biographies of the men
who, shunning delight and living laborious
days, had turned themselves with a kind of
heroic fury upon the quest of the ultimate
Truth ; who had piled mountain upon moun
tain, in the endeavour to climb to the very
floors of Heaven. In such a world he felt
at home. He never protested against diver
gent systems so long as this " hunger of
the Infinite " was driving their framers for
ward in any kind of honest search for its
attainment. Divinity, in Bacon's great phrase,
was for him " the Sabbath and Port of all
man's labours and peregrinations." Always,
and amongst the most diverse thinkers, he
will show this thread of common effort
running through the successive centuries ;
building up, from the earliest speculators, in

224 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

a remote world in the grey dawn of history,
down to the perplexed thinkers of a present
extraordinarily complex and baffling, a tradi
tion of laborious service bringing no earthly
reward. His survey extended from Plato,
who "dreamt GOD," to Hegel and the modern
transcendentalists, " recognizing by the intellect
that the intellect cannot conceive of a GOD
who must make Himself known." Maurice
reveals this company of the seekers for the
Holy Grail as those who, abandoning the
warmth of lesser life and the tranquil satis
factions of security and comfort, have been
driven out into the wilderness and solitary
places in insatiable desire for the goal of all
their wanderings. They came to many
different conclusions, seemingly hostile to
each other. But they all stand as part of
one order in the verdict of time, sharply
opposed to those who are content to establish
a comfortable life in the cities of the plain.
So with Hobbes, " seeking first of all to
know what that kind of motion might be
which produces the phantoms of the senses
and of the understanding, and the other
properties of animals " : in the assertion of
Spinoza, that "all noble things are difficult,
all noble things are rare," and his perplexity
concerning personality and the distinction
between GOD'S Essence and His Intellect
and His Will : — " though I am not ignorant
of the word I am ignorant of its significa-

rgdcrick Denison Maurice 225

tion ; nor can I form any clear conception
of it, although I firmly believe that in the
blessed vision of GOD which is promised
to the faithful, GOD will reveal this to
His own " : with Malebranche, Gutt-Tronken>
declaring " GOD is Himself actually in the
midst of us, not as a mere observer of our
good or evil actions, but as the principle of
our society, the bond of our friendship, the
soul — if I may say so— of the intercourse and
fellowship that we have with each other " :
with Protestant and Catholic : in the great
aspiration of the early Renaissance : with such
thinkers as Pico, asserting the belief in GOD
as everything — " all practical morality, all the
ascent of man out of evil to good, out of
darkness to light, rests upon the faith that
Being, Truth, Goodness, Unity are in Him
as their object, become through Him the
inheritance of the creatures whom He has
made " : — with all this great and eager com
panionship Maurice finds himself in sympathy
and communion. Here he discovers " a chain
of tradition which cannot be neglected, that
all nature, all legends, still more the forms of
ecclesiastical society, have been supposed to
be pledges and sacraments of a mysterious
Presence."

Maurice's philosophy thus starts from the
Divine. He makes no attempt to deduce
the Presence of GOD from the visible world,
or to pass from the creature to the Creator.

2 G

226 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

GOD is for him the only reality. Scripture
is either the gradual unfolding of GOD or it
is nothing. Human experience is an ever-
deepening apprehension of His existence and
working. Confused and partial notions about
GOD have been the root of all the divisions,
superstitions, plagues of the world. Right
apprehension of His attributes and purposes
has been the inspiration of all human pro
gress and the foundation of all human welfare.
He can give no clear dogmatic affirmations
of a carefully-bounded and limited definition.
" The reason cannot be satisfied without mys
teries." The finite can never apprehend the
Infinite. It is only in those elements of
human effort in which the limitations of
temporal and material conditions are trans
cended, that this human personality can
obtain any conscious apprehension of the
Divine. As GOD — in that old language of the
Church — sheweth forth His Almighty power
most chiefly in mercy and in pity ; so man,
in the losing of his own personal life for
the salvation of humanity, is most clearly
conscious of apprehending, in some quality
more convincing than the cold affirmations of
a logical satisfaction, the nature of the Infinite
Charity.

From such a conception of the Divine
purpose beneath the illusions of time, Maurice
passed to the conviction of a fundamental
Divine order working, in a world of con-

\\

Frederick Denison Maurice 227

fusion, towards the attainment of a harmony
which will consummate all its life and energies
in one intelligible end. As in the vision of
Augustine, he saw two polities — the city of
man and the city of GOD ; the first based
on individual demands for individual satis
factions, full of the elements of competition
and wild warfare ; the second uniting this
same bewildered company into a unity in
which each will find his satisfaction in the
satisfaction of all. "The pursuit of unity,"
he asserted in the later years, " is the end
which GOD has set before me from my cradle
upwards ; the vision of unity as infinite,
embracing, sustaining, the confession which
I make in the Creed, that I have accepted in
my mature years." The witness of this unity
he found in the Church, with its visible Sacra
ments binding men together of all classes and
nations, including rather than estranging, pro
claiming as its ultimate object of worship a
Trinity in Unity. "Will not our lips be
some day opened," he wrote " to say that the
Kingdom of Heaven is not for those who
would shut it up, but for those who would
open it, as the Apostles did, to all kindreds
and tongues and tribes ? All perplexities and
contradictions of human opinion and practice
seem to me to be preparing the way for this
discovery, otherwise they would drive me to
despair." The revelation of GOD in the living
Word alone can emancipate the peoples.

228 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

" The Name into which we are baptized," he
cried, " the Name which was to bind together
all nations, comes to me more and more as
that which must at last break the fetters of
oppression. I can find none of my Liberal
friends to whom that language does not sound
utterly wild and incomprehensible ; while the
orthodox would give me for the eternal Name
the dry dogma of the Trinity ; an opinion
which I may brag of as mine, given me by
I know not what councils of noisy doctors,
and to be retained in spite of the reason
which it is said to contradict, lest I should
be cast into hell for rejecting it. I am sure
this Name is the Infinite All-embracing
Charity, which I may proclaim to publicans
and harlots as that in which they are living
and moving and having their being ; in which
they may believe, and by which they may be
raised to the freedom and righteousness and
fellowship for which they were created."

So the Church, like the philosophers,
becomes for Maurice a witness to the presence
of this Divine order and unity ; Sacraments
the organon of a revelation, the necessary
form of a revelation, because they discover
the Divine nature in its union with the human,
and do not make the human the standard and
measure of the Divine. And all this witness
and experience pass back to the memory of
One who came as Light and Ruler of the
Universe, out of the regions beyond space

Frederick Denison Maurice

and time, into the limitations of space and
time, by a self-emptying ; the CHRIST who
is the King, and who will put all things into
subjection under His feet, until death and
hell itself shall be cast into the lake of fire
and be consumed. In that life lay the
possibilities of escape from the separate
existence, hard and round like a ball of
adamant, in which man ultimately found him
self alone in the midst of a great nothingness
and cold. " I come to give thanks," he wrote
at the beginning, when the full meaning
of this revelation dawned on him, " that in
Him is the life of the world. I do not want
a separate life either here or hereafter. I
come to renounce that separate life, to disclaim
it. I understand that the SON of GOD, by
sacrificing Himself, has given me a share
and property in another life, the common life
which is in Him ; and 1 have come to pray
that He will deliver me and my brethren and
the universe from that separate and selfish
life, which is the cause of all our woes and
miseries, spiritual and fleshly, inward and
outward."

From such a theology came the inspiration
of all his effort and the explanation of his
attitude upon so many critical occasions : his
abandonment of the religion of his fathers :
his enthusiasm for social justice : his teaching
in a time of religious disturbance.

He came from a "sect" into the Church

230 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

because he demanded a larger and freer air,
because he repudiated boundaries and limita
tions built upon the affirmations of belief.
Men (for him) were not made members of
CHRIST because they believed that He was
GOD, or because they entertained certain dogmas
concerning certain ultimate propositions. They
were citizens of that Kingdom because they had
been bought by a great redemption. And the
children, who knew nothing of their high calling,
and the indifferent and the scornful, the pub
licans and harlots, as securely as the orthodox
and devout, were all members of one Body,
citizens of the Kingdom of GOD. " We cannot
rise out of schism," he asserted, "unless some
one proclaims CHRIST as the centre of unity to
each man and to all men." This was the
message which he found himself compelled to
set forth ; " voices of the living and of the
dead ringing continually in my ears, with, I
think, a diviner voice of One that liveth and
was dead, telling me that I ought to do that,
whether men hear or are deaf."

He plunged into the social controversy of an
age " fast hurrying to destruction in its worship
of Mammon." He found it directed by the
doctrine of free competition, and the unsuccess
ful to the devil. The inspiring force in his
effort was not primarily, as in the case of
others, the revolt of pity against remediable
human suffering, or of intelligence against
remediable human disorder. It was with

Frederick Denison Maurice 231

Maurice a repudiation, with all the fire of a
nature full of a consuming energy, of a social
order and gospel which seemed to him a direct
contradiction of the law and gospel of the
Kingdom. An economy which declared that
the welfare of the whole could only be
maintained through each man feverishly and
hungrily seeking his own individual aggran
dizement, seemed to him a proclamation
that the devil and not CHRIST was the king
of the universe. " If there is lying at the
root of society," he asserted, " the recogni
tion of the unity of men in CHRIST, the natural
intercourse of men in different countries will
bring out that belief into clearness and fullness,
and remove the limitation and narrowness
which arise from the confusion between CHRIST
Himself and our notions about Him. But that
Commerce is in itself, apart from this principle,
any bond of brotherhood whatever, that it does
not lead to the denial of all brotherhood, to
murderous conflicts between Labour and
Capital, to slavery and slave-trade, I know not
how, in the face of the most patent and received
facts, it is possible to maintain."

Again, in passing from the social to the
religious confusions of the age, he is found
always judging present things in the clear
light of this conception of the beginning
and the end. He was accused, by those
who had abandoned the old, stiff formulas,
of an attempt " to methodize shams, to

232 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

idealize shovel-hattery, to build up, not earth
only, but heaven also, upon a ground-plan
of the Thirty-nine Articles." These men
demanded a Church of living men. "You
show us," he pictures them as saying, " no
such thing, only some mysterious pictures of
water and bread and wine, an absolute creed,
an office which enables men to put 'Cantuar'
and 'Ebor' after their names, a book worn
to shreds with commentaries." To all this
Maurice replied by confronting the vague
and gusty affirmations of his contemporaries,
with the magnificent, free, emancipating pro
clamations of an historic Christianity. It is a
society which he sought, and a society which
he found, binding men together here and
now ; binding together into one unity, the
past, the present, and the future. Maurice
refused to accept a unity of belief as a
ground of combination. He demanded a
unity of action, purpose and hope. He
found this unity in a Church, not creating
through its ordinances, but recognizing that
which indeed existed beyond those ordin
ances, the Divine energy in the world, and
the Divine response to the pleadings and
the desires of humanity. Of the Prayer
Book, " I am convinced," he cried, " it
preaches a gospel to mankind which no
dissenters and no infidels preach. I am con
vinced that GOD will take it from us if He
sees it does not help us but harms us. Till

'

Frederick Denison Maurice 233

then I turn to it for protection against Record,
Guardian, King's College Councils, his Grace
the Archbishop, Mr. Morrison, the brothers
Newman, Dr. Cummings, and Pius IX."

The free and full gospel there indicated
gives him the power of resistance against the
orthodoxy which covers the atheism of his
surroundings. " My only hope of resisting
the devil-worship of the religious world," he
said, "lies in preaching the full revelation
of GOD in CHRIST set forth in the Bible."

Underneath this temporal show, which
wasted away and presently would altogether
crumble into dust, he had seen the City
whose foundations are secure. The courses
in time of this phantom race of men, spirits
in a world of spirits, imprisoned in strange
unintelligible limitations against which the
ardour of human resolution beats in vain, only
became significant as interpreted in the light
of this revelation : the vision of the end and
the beginning — the end in the beginning.
" So there will be discovered," is the sum
mary of his " Social Morality," of all his
life's travail, " beneath all the polities of the
earth, sustaining the order of each country,
upholding the charity of each household, a
city which hath foundations, whose Builder
and Maker is GOD. It must be for all kin
dreds and races ; therefore with the Sectarian
ism which rends humanity asunder, with the
Imperialism which would substitute for universal

2 H

234 Leaders of the Cburch 1800-1900

fellowship a universal death, must it wage im
placable war. Against these we pray as often
as we ask that GOD'S will may be done on earth
as it is in heaven.

He clung to this faith amid all the splendour
and the terror of passing things ; proclaiming
that the Gospel is a message to mankind of the
redemption which GOD has effected in His SON ;
that the Bible is not only speaking of a world to
come, but of a kingdom here of righteousness,
peace, and truth ; that we may be in conformity
with this kingdom, or in enmity, now ; that the
Church is " the healer of all privations and
diseases, the bond of all classes, the instrument
for reforming abuses, the admonisher of the
rich, the friend of the poor, the asserter of the
glory of that humanity which CHRIST bears."

He saw warfare and confusion everywhere
around him, the old breaking into fragments,
men's hearts failing them for fear as the curtain
of the horizon lifted upon a vision of ocean
and storm. He saw the good at cross-pur
poses with the good, party attacking party,
the Church bare and leafless in the frosty
weather, with no promise of a second spring.
Sometimes the sense of baffled purposes, and
of the large outpouring of the forces of evil,
filled him with the darkest forebodings for the
days to come. In such moments he looked
with anxiety on the future of his children,
who were to be brought up in a world filled
with little but dust and decay ; and rejoiced

.

Frederick Denison Maurice 235

over the gathering of those who had passed
away from the evil to come. At other times
the conviction was strong within him that
humanity will never be content permanently
to inhabit ruins, that mankind will never
acquiesce in a godless world.

His prophecy is too recent to have attained
denial or fulfilment. We are still living
in an age, beyond that of most generations
perplexed and bewildered by the changes
which have come upon human thought and
human action ; now exultant, with its soul
uplifted, in the magnificence of its material
triumph ; now mournful in the experience of
the failure of all material progress to satisfy
the hungry heart of man. The immediate
fate of the future is hidden from our eyes.
The affirmation of some ultimate principle of
Charity behind the outward show of things is
still challenged by those who can see no vision
but of a meaningless struggle, in which man
disquieteth himself in vain. " I cannot see one
shadow or tittle of evidence," is the assertion of
one modern thinker, " that the great unknown
underlying the phenomena of the universe
stands to us in the relation of a father — loves
us and cares for us, as Christianity declares."
" I believe the time is coming," is the counter-
assertion of another, " when those only who are
able to say ex animo> I believe in GOD the
FATHER Almighty, Creator of Heaven and

236 Leaders of the Church 1800-1900

earth, will be found to be in the full possession
of their common sense."

Maurice is in the tradition of those who " at
least " were " very sure of GOD." He was a
seer, a mystic, a prophet ; charged with
thoughts sometimes too great for human
utterance, and occupied with a Vision beyond
the boundaries of time.

Developments of newer knowledge and
a civilization increasing in complexity, are
sweeping modern Society into new interests,
to which the age in which Maurice lived
seems remote and far away. The nineteenth
century, in its simplicities and ardours and
austerities, already stands apart as something
removed from the energies of its successor.
Is the Vision also destined to vanish, in
which these men thought was included all
the hope of the world ? Even in such a
case their work will not be forgotten. If in
the generations to come the quest has been
abandoned, and mankind has learnt to abide
in contentment in the plain, heedless of the
challenge of the distant hills ; there will still
be honour for the memory of those who set
forth so bravely, upon an adventure which
thus proved in the end all hopeless and
barren. But if the old tradition remains,
and amid the noise of the busy streets some
will always hear the calling of an adventure
beyond temporal attainment ; it is to the
memory of such as this man that these will

Frederick Denison Maurice

237

turn, for the record of the travellers who
once toiled up the hazardous way, towards
the peaks which lose their summits in the
cloud.

INDEX TO NAMES OF PERSONS
MENTIONED IN THE TEXT

Allen, Archdeacon, 204.
Argyll, Duke of, 214.
Arnold, Dr. 56, 57,

Bagehot, Walter, 209.

Barton, Anne (Mrs. Mau
rice), 45, 53, 200.

Beaconsfield, Lord, 52, 190.

Bentham, Jeremy, 13.

Blomfield, Bishop, 99, 129,
132.

Bright, John, 206.

Bristol, Lord, 102.

Browning, Robert, 1 80.

Buckingham, Silk, 15.

Carlyle, Thomas, I, 6, 15,
26, 56, 58, 87, 97, in,
143, 219-221.

Church, Dean, 129, 219.

Clough, A. H., 2.

Cobden, Richard, 56, 87.

Colenso, Bishop, 3, 130,
172, 180, 181-184.

Coleridge, S. T., 6, 32.

Cowper-Temple, W., 175.

Croker, J. W., 97.

Dickinson, Lowes, 137.
Dixon, Canon, 57.

Engels, Friedrich, 58.
Froude, J. A., 2, 26.

Gladstone, W. E., 16, 46,

52, 132, 175, 204.
Greg, W. R., 66.
Green, T. H., 5.

Hare, Archdeacon, I, 6, 12,

48, 130, 138.
Hamilton, Sir William, 1 5 2,

157, 158.

Harrison, Frederic, 137.
Harrow by, Lord, 102.
Holyoake, G. J., 95, 100.
Hughes, Thomas, 95, 106,

108.

Hutton, R. H., 185, 209.
Huxley, Professor, 171.

Jelf, Dr.,99, 100, 127, 128,

129, 131, 133.
Jowett, Professor, 3, 172,

179, 183, 189,204,205.

239

240

Index

Keble, Rev. John, 16.

Kingsley, Rev. Charles, 60-
66, 68, 70, 75, 79, 87,
88, 91, 94, 96, 97-100,
107, 108, no, in, 126,
127, 139, 147, 184, 192,
215, 217.

Liddon, Dr., 209.

Lonsdale, Bishop, 132.

Ludlow, J. M., 6 1, 63, 66-
68,71,75-77,86,89,90,
106, 138, 169, 179, 191.

Lyttelton, Lord, 132.

Macaulay, Lord, 14.
Macmillan, D., 48.
Mansel, Dean, 3, 138, 152,

"53* i55»I57-l6°, 162-
169.
Maurice, Rev. Michael

(father), 7-10.
„ Priscilla (mother), 7-

9» 138.

„ Elizabeth (sister), 9.

„ Anne (sister), 9, 15.

„ Emma (sister), 9.

„ Priscilla (sister), 138.
Melbourne, Lord, 57.
Mill, J. S., i, 10, 14, 25,

87, 89, 90, 159.
Mozley, Dr., 129.

Neale, Vansittart, 1 06, 1 08,

222.

Newman, Cardinal, 16, 30,
50, 52, 102, 160, 183,
209, 219.

Owen, Robert, 34.

Palmerston, Lord, 175.
Pattison, Mark, 5.
Pusey, Dr., 3, 29, 50, 183,
184, 187,189.

Ripon, Lord, 103, 206.
Robertson, Rev. F. W.,

98.

Rossetti, D. G., 137.
Ruskin, John, 2, 29, 80,

112, 137, 219.
Russell, Lord John, 56.

Shaftesbury, Lord, 50, 69,

II3-

Smith, Sydney, 59.
Spencer, Herbert, 157.
Stanley, Dean, 3, 177, 191,
^ 205.

Stephen, Leslie, 25.
Sterling, John, 12, 14, 15,

22, 23, 45, 53.
Strachey, Sir Edward, 29.

Tait, Archbishop, 175, 182.
Tennyson, Lord, 14, 64,
116, 134, 139, 175, 197.
Trench, Archbishop, 47.

Ward, W. G., 51.
Westbury, Lord, 186.
Westlake, Professor, 137.
Wilberforce, Bishop, 130,
171, 178, 181.

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