LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
MR. BRIGHT'S RELIGION AND HIS POLITICS.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] Sin,—I read with interest your article upon Lord Derby's speech at Manchester, hoping that you would remark upon what seems to me an important matter.
Lord Derby spoke of John Bright's desire to separate religion from things secular and political. It is strange to find so accurate a speaker as Lord Derby confounding religion with ecclesiasticism ; and I am reminded of something John Ashworth said to me many years ago, about John Bright : " He has given more of the Bible to the Houses of Parliament, than the whole Bench of Bishops put together."
Every one must feel that the underlying spirit of John Bright's speeches was an earnest, and indeed aggressive religion, which made itself evident, not only in ecclesiastical questions, but to which he never hesitated to appeal on any occasion. Those who were in the House on March 14th, 1868, will not forget the thrill which passed round when, after appealing for justice to Ireland and the disestablishment of the Church, he quoted the words, " Unto the upright, there ariseth light in the darkness,"—or, in the course of the debate, when speaking of the disposition of the revenues of that Church, he reminded the House how much of the time and thoughts of the Founder of Christianity had been occupied in the allevia- tion of merely bodily distress.
Surely no words describing the life-work of a man are ade- quate which ignore the chief motive of his life. Too fre- quently, in the present time, apologies are made for a man's religion, and it is owned that he was a great man in spite of it. How curiously evident this is in the Lives of both Robert Browning and his wife,—to both of whom, as Christian thinkers, the age owes so much, and whose finest thoughts were inspired by the faith they held : and yet the biographers of both think they would have been better poets without it. Let us render honour where honour is due, and say of John Bright, that had his religion indeed been separated from his politics, had it not permeated the whole of his secular life, he would never have been the man be was, nor have done the
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