pensation from above. He seems, indeed, to have been nearly stationary during the last three or four years of his life; to have been withheld, when he had arrived within a single stage of utter vacuity and desolation, from making that last advance. So large a share of this last portion of his life was occupied by weariness and torpor, or by acute and agonising pains, that the continuity of the action of his mind appears to have been broken, and his efforts at speculation to have been like the ineffectual attempts of a man who has lost his limbs to rise, and what he would have called progress thereby rendered impossible.

62. Hence perhaps it was, that the rapid and precipitous descent of many years became a sort of plain at the last. For let no man say that the reason of his remaining stationary was that he had attained the haven of his speculative rest-a simple, consistent, solid, indestructible philosophy of religion. The disjointed fragments of belief that remained were of necessity much more liable to further disruption, in proportion as their principle of cohesion had been progressively relaxed. This sounds, however, it will be said, too much like the assumptions that the slaves of creeds are apt to make. We will therefore say, and endeavour to prove, that his scheme, or view, or notion, or whatever be the right name of that by which he had replaced the repudiated form of "religion," had not even that unity and freedom from intrinsic causes of disturbance, which its cold, naked, passionless form, and the paucity of its propositions, should, if they could have secured anything, not have failed to secure.

63. The being of God was the dogma about which his intellect still hovered, and upon which, as we believe, his

affections less insecurely clung. The present was miserable; the future was intolerable: intolerable (so he says) as connected with the idea of a continued personal existence and only mitigated in part by the fact that it lay in utter darkness-hope might thus vaguely and feebly wander amidst "unconditioned possibility." That hope was so that "without form and void"; it did not embrace personality; on the other hand it had not absolutely realised the contrary doctrine of absorption: it was, if anywhere, in some region more void and dreamy, and by far less joyous, than that of the song of Ariel *

"Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea change

Into something rich and strange.”

And the "rich," if it existed at all, was not anything within his intelligent desires, nor the "strange" anything perceptibly related to his sympathies. He therefore had endured the full strain of his own searching doctrinethat virtue to be truly loved must be loved for its own sake, not for the hope of reward,† and that the foundations of morality are independent of the hope of a future. life. Thus he had removed from about his belief in the existence of God every secondary prop: the resignation which he declared, is a resignation entitled to the more honour, because he professed it at an awful disadvantage.

64. A little before his death he used these admirable and touching words, which however are much above the ordinary tone of his later life:

"I am going, my dear friend: I am leaving you very fast. I have not formed such definite views of the nature of a future life as

*Tempest,' i. 2.

† Life, III. p. 253,

many have; but I trust Him, who has taken care of me thus far. I should trust a friend, and can I not trust Him? There is not in my mind the possibility of a doubt."*

Again he cries, in extreme anguish—

"Oh my God! Oh my God! But I know thou dost not overlook any of Thy creatures; Thou dost not overlook me. So much torture-to kill a worm! Have mercy upon me, O God! have mercy upon me! I cry to Thee, knowing I cannot alter Thy ways. I cannot if I would—and I would not if I could. If a word could remove these sufferings, I would not utter it."

But could this, unless by some inconsistency, some merciful error, have continued? Was the disastrous course of his so-called inquiry at an end? Would the restlessness of his discursive understanding, unless paralysed by pain and exhaustion, have suffered him, after reducing his standing ground from the "large room" of the believer to a foot-span, there to maintain his position? On the contrary, it appears to us that there are recorded in the pages of his life dilemmas, which he had constructed, but had not disposed of, on which his view of primary duty must again have driven him to speculate, and of which, from the premisses he had assumed, he never could have found an affirmative solution.

65. The ultimate form, which his doctrine concerning the existence of God assumed, was this: that revelation there was not, and could not be: † that although miracles might have really taken place, there was no medium for their conveyance to our perceptions, such as could render the belief of them rational: that, however weighty, no evidence could establish one.§ Further, that

"it is a vain attempt to seek for knowledge of the Deity anywhere but within ourselves. To define God is to deny him: for definition is limitation, and he is unlimited. Useless, or worse than useless, are all the arguments of natural theology, unless we have previously found the proof of the being of God in our own souls. The idea of the eternal and unlimited spirit must proceed from the consciousness of the temporal and limited spirit; we know ourselves as this limited spirit, and we are conscious that we have not made ourselves to exist: another spirit must consequently exist, from whom the nature and limitation of our own depend. The limited proves the unlimited: else what could have set the limits?"*

66. Now he lays down elsewhere the canon that "religion does not consist in history, criticism, or metaphysics,"† and that it cannot depend upon any inquiry not fitted for the mass of men; and, strange as it may seem, he says that only "a small degree of reflection" is requisite in order to enable the mind to frame that notion of the Deity which flows out of the perception "that the limited proves the unlimited: else what could have set the limits ?" On various occasions he declaims against corrupting the minds of children by religious prejudices: he would have had them wait until they could perceive that "the limited proves the unlimited: else what could have set the limits?" This would have been the sole instrument, according to him, of showing to the young, to the heart of woman, to the poor, to the sick, to the perplexed, the God in whom they live and move and have their being. We do not indeed object to his raising an argument for the being of God from the internal view of our own souls, though we protest against his exclusion of other arguments, and with yet more decision against gratuitously founding the structure of religion upon any resort to

Life, III.

p.

147.

† Ibid. p. 227.

‡ Ibid. p. 318,

metaphysical reasoning, of which a large portion of mankind are by habit quite incapable. But what we wish now to point out is, that even upon the lean and impoverished remains of his belief, he was hopelessly at issue with himself. In the passage we have quoted the essential characteristic of God is, unlimited being.* But he likewise instructs us as follows:

"According to the constitution of our minds, the knowledge which we have of ourselves and of the external world leads us with absolute necessity to conclude that, if the world was created by the free act of a conscious Being, that Being must either be limited in power or in goodness. Out of this dilemma neither philosophy nor theology can extricate the thinking and unsuperstitious mind." t

Thus he had declared, as truths of the very highest certainty-1st. That the Creator of this universe must be limited in goodness or in power: 2nd. That, to be God, He could not be otherwise than unlimited. It was a mercy, and a marvel, that under these circumstances he did not further prosecute his reasonings, and that even the glimmering of light that remained to him was not extinguished.

67. But again, he had used the argument, while he continued to recognise a Revelation, that as the Divinity of our Lord was contested among His followers, it could not be essential to His religion. Afterwards he came clearly and fully to the conviction that all those who received a fixed Revelation, of whatever kind, were bibliolaters, idolaters, buried in darkness, and slaves of gross superstition that Christianity consisted in the renunciation of