A very remarkable address was presented this day week to
the Rev. Dr. Martineau, on the completion of his eighty-third year. It was signed by more than six hundred representative men of letters, by great poets, by philosophers and men of science, by eminent politicians, by theologians of all schools, orthodox Roman Catholics, High Anglicans, Liberal Church- men, Nonconformists of all shades, Unitarians, Wesleyans,
Presbyterians of both the great Scotch Communions, and many members of the American Churches, and by a good many scientific men, some of whom would probably call them- selves Agnostics, as well as by a good number of most dis- tinguished Head-Masters and many of the most eminent masters of the staff of our great Public Schools. The pm-port of the address was to express "the feelings of reverence and affection" entertained towards Dr. Martineau not only by his own communion, but by all the signatories of the address, to thank him for the help given "to those who seek to combine the love of truth with the Christian life," and to recognise Dr. Martineau's great services to philosophy and religion. There is not another Englishman living to whom such an address could have been presented. For while it may be said of him, as it was (less truly) said of Goethe, that "he pursued a lonely road, his eye on Nature's plan,—neither made man too much a God, nor God too much a man,"—it may be truly said of him, as could not have been said of Goethe at all, that his ethical standard is purely Christian in its humility, without the slightest taint either of Stoic pride, of pagan laxity, or of the undue modern softness of feeling.
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