lief not only might but must have had upon the habits of his mind, we are driven to conclude that he was, however quick and inquisitive, yet a careless, and therefore a bad, psychologist. 21. His writings do not indeed present a system of belief, or of unbelief sufficiently definite to be the subject of methodical argument throughout; and they are not less irregular and incongruous in substance, than they are in form. They are constant to nothing but to mutability. They present, however, a remarkable number of curious phenomena, and among them that of an intense satisfaction, an ardour of delight, in the Unitarian creed and worship at the period when he formally joined the societies of that denomination in Liverpool*: "The service at the Unitarian chapel, Paradise Street, has given me the most unmixed delight." (Sunday, Feb. 1st, 1835.) Previously to this he— "had no conception of the power which sacred poetry, full of real religious sentiment, and free from the mawkish mysticism which so much abounds in some collections, can exert over the heart and mind. . . . If Christianity is to become a living power in the civilised parts of the world, it must be under the Unitarian form ... What strikes me most of all is, what I might call the reality, the true connection with life, which this worship possesses. All that I had practised before seemed to lie in a region scarcely within view.... Here the prayers, the whole worship, is a part of my real life. I pray with my spirit, I pray with my understanding also.' May I not say, that suffering every hour from the bleeding wounds of my heart, those wounds that even my friends touch roughly, I have been already rewarded for acting in conformity with principle?" And there is much more to the same effect. * Life, II. p. 92; see also pp. 86, 101, 121, 123, 124. с 22. Shall we offer our explanation of the enigma which this outburst of devout gratification in connection with the freezing system of the Unitarian worship appears to present? It is this: the wave-tossed swimmer, gasping for breath, had been cast upon a shore; he had not had time to perceive that it was a barren one, and he did not yet know that another billow would soon bear him back to sea. His mind had rest and satisfaction, when he exchanged interminable doubts, and the disgusts of a false and abstractedly a dishonest position, for the definite view, and with the view the confession, of two essential parts of the Catholic faith, the unity of God and the mission of Christ. Thus he exulted in Unitarianism, as a starving garrison make a banquet upon a supply of garbage. But this did not and could not last. The narrow measure even of Unitarian dogma was soon felt to be too broad for him. "Blank misgivings, questionings," returned upon him. Scepticism was gorged for the moment; but its appetite too soon revived. Only two years after these raptures,* he was so perplexed in his view of the being of God, that he said, man could only turn to the light within him and follow it, forgetting the dark mystery of his existence. 23. Then he ceased to realise Christianity as an historical revelation. He ceased to perceive the duty of prayer. He lost his view of the personal immortality of the soul.§ He placed the idea of the Deity somewhere between the Christian belief and Pantheism, || and declared the latter to be the lesser evil. He reminds us of the long descent in the Inferno, from stage to stage, and circle to circle, each lower and each narrower than the last, until it ends in the eternal *Life, II. P. 283. § Ibid. III. p. 63. † Ibid. II. p. 318. + Ibid. II ice of Giudecca. The accompaniments, as regarded his own peace, of this process of destruction, he has feelingly described in these lines (1837)*: "Brother, or sister, whosoe'er thou art! Couldst thou but see the fang that gnaws my heart, And we trust that his appeal to pity will meet with a universal response. The claim made on his behalf,† that he should be regarded as a standard-bearer of mankind, calls for firm resistance. Many of his opinions warrant, and indeed demand from us, a sentiment nothing short of horror: but the man himself, who, if he erred terribly, suffered not less deeply, and who, amidst bewildering error and acute and protracted pain, still cherished many of the sentiments that belong to duty and to piety; he has a right to receive at our hands sympathy and tenderness, and we should leave the dark questions of his destiny there, where alone there is skill to solve them, in "The bosom of his Father and his God."+ 24. There were, it is evident, many signs of nobleness, both in fragments of his opinions, and in his conduct to the last. After he had become a Unitarian, he could still discern § "the essential mistake which lies at the bottom of Paley's system;" and when he was sinking yet lower, he did not cease (in 1837) to appreciate the excellence of Bishop Butler's theory || of human nature. He recom *Life, II. p. 334. † Introduction, p. x. mended that in philosophical inquiries we should be on our guard against selfishness, and rule points in opposition to our inclinations.* He held (1838) that our nature was unable to comprehend moral truth beyond its own degree of purity. He contended that virtue has an authority and obligation‡ independently of the ideas of our indefinite existence, and of its securing our happiness; and, even after he had ceased to retain any determinate belief in our future life, he still clung with happy inconsistency to the idea that in the hands of his Maker he should be safe, § and that God would certainly reward the disinterested generosity of some friend. He cherished, with whatever associations, the love of God, ¶ and maintained resignation to His will, even when it seems almost impossible to see how he could have had a dogmatic belief in the existence of a divine will at all. There was, in short, a disposition to resist the tyranny of self, to recognise the rule of duty, to maintain the supremacy of the higher over the lower parts of our nature, which is not always equally observable in less heterodox writers, and which imparts a strong tinge of consolation to the melancholy and painful retrospect of his life and opinions. 25. There are also circumstances connected with the discharge of active duty which should not be forgotten on his behalf. We cannot banish our sentiments of respect for one who twice in his life, for the sake even of erroneous conviction, and after much lingering and hesitation, severed himself from almost every worldly good. There may be persons who are entitled to condemn and upbraid him but such a voice should not come from among those who live in the lap of bodily and mental ease, who have : *Life, II. p. 270. § Ibid. III. p. 107. † Ibid. III. p. 25. || Ibid. p. 20. Ibid. II. p. 300. never experienced his trials, and upon whom God has never laid the weight of his afflictions. When he was bedridden, in his old age and in the solitude of his lodging -a solitude not the less sensible because he dwelt in one of the streets of busy Liverpool-his son, who bears the Queen's commission, returned from service in India to visit him. It is evident that this period was one of great enjoyment and relief. However, keeping in view his son's professional prospects, he writes to a friend that he has advised him to return to India;* and he adds: : "but as I shook him by the hand on Saturday evening, knowing that I should in all probability never see him again, I could hardly contain my anguish within my bosom. Fortunately I was going to bed, where I could give way to my sorrow." And he enters in his Journal, June 15th, 1839:— "Took my last leave of Ferdinand, and felt as if my heart was breaking." He indeed ascribes this paternal act, so tenderly and delicately performed, to his philosophy: we must take leave rather to set it down to the genial instincts of a nature which, speaking as spectators from a distance, we should call evidently an unselfish one, and full of kindly affections. 26. We have stated that these volumes do not contain any regular system of unbelief; but their author has presented to us very distinctly the particular stumbling-block which first, and also latterly, overthrew his faith, and which appears to have been the disposition to demand an amount, or rather a kind of evidence in favour of revealed religion different from that which the nature of the subject *Life, III. p. 65. |