On Tuesday afternoon Dr. Martineau (who had completed his ninetieth
year on Sunday) received a deputation from Manchester College, Oxford, to congratulate him on the event, and to express the gratitude with which they regarded his services to the College, and especially the lectures on philosophy which he had delivered there. We can ourselves answer for it that those lectures have been amongst the most powerful and brilliant which the students of this country have ever heard; and perhaps, even when they are compared with those of Sir William Hamilton at Edinburgh, or those of the late Mr. Thomas Hill Green at Oxford, the most powerful and brilliant of all. The only remark to which we feel disposed to take any exception in Dr. Martineau's modest and dignified reply was that the basis of Christian teaching would inevitably have to be sought "less and less in the letter of Scripture," and more and more, we suppose, in that dubious product of the higher criticism which Dr. Martineau has set forth so elaborately in his book on "The Seat of Authority in Religion." Even the New Testament, doubtless, is not infallible, but it seems to us to come much nearer the reality of Christ's life and gospel than Dr. Martineau's highly con- jectural emendations of it. We wish that in the memorial which is to be erected to him, a cheap and attractive edition of his philosophical books, with Watts's magnificent portrait prefixed, had taken the place of the proposed statue. It would have been at least as effectual as any statue in preserving his great name in the memory of future generations.
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