ARCHBISHOP TRENCH.

FREDERICK DENISON MAURICE, writing in 1849 of the late Dr. Trench,—at that time not even Dean of Westminster, and fourteen years before he became Archbishop of Dublin,—says of him :—" To have been intimate so long as we have been, we are very unlike, and I sometimes fear that we do not understand each other, from reserve on his side, or mine, or both. Nevertheless, I love and admire him very heartily ; the fault is, I suppose, that we never quarrelled enough." And again, in 1861, during Dr. Trench's tenure of the Deanery of Westminster, Mr. Maurice writes in the same tone of wistful regret :—" I never have any conversation with Trench on any serious topic, and do not the least know what he thinks about things in Heaven or earth." In a word, there was to Mr Maurice, one of the warmest-hearted of men, a certain frigidity of reserve in the late Archbishop,—a reserve not in any way due to his official position, and most felt long before he filled any office of dignity,—which erected a certain wall of separation between the minds of colleagues who were in deep sympathy on many subjects, and had at one time been close friends. We fancy we can see the impress of this quality in the late Archbishop's most charac- teristic writings, in his poetry no less than in that part of his work which was more directly devoted to the elucidation of Scripture. There certainly never were two men engaged heart and soul in the same general aims and the same general work,—Maurice and Trench were brother Professors in King's College, London,—who were more different ; yet different as they were, they resembled each other in something more than the identity of their spiritual aims. Both Dr. Trench and Mr. Maurice were great students of words, and had for the wisdom of words the greatest possible reverence. Dr. Trench's little book on" Words " is one of the most popular books of that kind in the English language, and his most thoughtful and scholarly book on the synonyms of the New Testament,—a book of deli- cate scholarship,—is one by which he will long be remembered. Mr. Maurice, too, never entered on one of his deeper studies of philosophy or theology without a most careful study of the drift of those critical words by which the subject he had to deal with were best illustrated. He regarded " words " just as Dr. Trench regarded them, as buoys which mark out that unconscious drift of human thought which has so much more of true guidance in it than even its more conscious and deliberate flow. Both Dr. Trench and Mr. Maurice looked upon words as condensing and crystallising a history of Divine purpose far deeper and more significant than any conscious purpose of man could control. And with this strong ground of intellectual sympathy, as well as the deep sympathy of their common Christianity, it is rather curious that their original intimacy rather fell off than ripened as years went on. The reason probably was that while Maurice's reserve more or less disappeared with the deepening passion of his later years, Dr. Trench's reserve increased. He was a poet in his earlier life, and poetry unlocks lips which would other- wise be closed ; but after it has ceased to unlock them, it is very apt to close them still more effectually, since poetical feeling makes the mind of him who feels it especially sensitive to the great inadequacy of human speech, and effects this long after it has lost its power to bring up the speech to something like the level of the feeling or the thought. Very likely Mr. Maurice was right that the intimacy between him and Trench had dwindled because they had not "quarrelled enough," by which he meant that they had not frankly expressed to each other the divergences of their thoughts and feelings. Maurice's vehemence of conviction probably made Trench retire into him- self, and made his reserve all the more difficult to conquer. In Dr. Trench's writings, there is a pervading sense of satisfac- tion in all those delicate distinctions which he could adequately define, and a pervading reluctance to enter on that larger field in which Maurice was strongest, and in which language merely

shadows forth dimly at best what is in the heart ; nor was there in Dr. Trench that consuming zeal to give himself in some way or other for his brother men, which made it almost indifferent to Mr. Maurice how ineffectual his words might be, so long as they bodied forth the passion of his yearning to reach the hearts of those whom he longed to help. When Trench ceased to write poems, he shrank into that field of clear and definite teaching in which his scholarship helped him most. On a man of that type of mind, fastidiousness is apt to grow. Maurice was incapable of fastidiousness of any kind when once he felt that there was a work to be done in the world, the least fraction of which he might persuade himself that he could effectually perform.

The late Archbishop of Dublin was not a man of that unique type. In him there was the sensitiveness of a naturally fastidious mind,—a mind which sifts anxiously its thoughts and words, and feels the jarring chords of our nature at least as keenly as it feels the augury of higher things. Dr. Trench must have realised again and again what Matthew Arnold means by the lines :—

"Ah ! not the nectarous poppy lovers use Nor daily labour's dull Lethean spring Oblivion in lost angels can infuse Of the soiled glory, and the trailing wing."

Indeed, in the earliest of his published poems, Dr. Trench ex- pressed with very great beauty and power the despair which comes upon a soul conscious chiefly of this " soiled glory " and this " trailing wing : "-

" I wandered forth upon the shore,

Wishing this lie of life was o'er ; What was beyond I could not guess, I thought it might be quietness, And now I had no dream of bliss, No thought, no other hope but this, To he at rest ;—for all that fed The dream of my proud youth had fled, My dream of youth that I would be Happy and glorious, wise and free, In mine own right, and keep my state, And would repel the heavy weight, The load that crushed unto the ground The servile multitude around.

The purpose of my life had failed, The heavenly heights I would have scaled Seemed more than ever out of sight, Further beyond my feeble flight.

The beauty of the universe Was lying on me like a curse ; Only the lone surge at my feet Uttered a soothing murmur sweet,

As every broken weary wave

Sank gently to a quiet grave, Dying on the bosom of the sea : And death grew beautiful to me, Until it seemed a mother mild,

And I like some too happy child—

A happy child, that tired with play, Through a long summer holiday,

Runs to his mother's arms to weep

His little weariness asleep.

Rest—rest—all passion that once stirred

My heart, had ended in one word—

My one desire to be at rest, To lay my head on any breast,

Where there was hope that I might keep

A dreamless and unbroken sleep ; And the lulled Ocean seemed to say, ' With me is quiet—come away.' "

We do not, of course, mean that the fastidious feeling of what is amiss in life occupied the late Archbishop to the point of eclipsing the great promises held out to us by the Christian faith. Far from it. But certainly he did feel deeply, what he has elsewhere expressed,—namely, that he was not always

" Strong to fulfil in spirit and in voice

That hardest of all precepts—to rejoice."

There was that in his countenance which, though it was not without sweetness, embodied this deep sense of deficiency. In one of the most thoughtful and interesting of his papers on the synonyms of the New Testament, Dr. Trench dwells on the Greek word iaxeigista, which signifies " piety contemplated on the side in which it is a fear of God." And in dwelling upon it he seems to us to describe happily the character of his own piety. " The image on which the word rests is that of the taking hold and cautious handling of some precious yet delicate vessel, which with ruder or less anxious handling might easily

be broken But such a carefulness and cautious prudence in the conducting of affairs, springing, as in part it will, from fear of miscarriage, easily lies open to the charge of timidity." And of the corresponding adjective sbxx 3,i; he says : —" If we keep in mind that, in that mingled fear and love which together constitute the piety of man towards God, the Old Testament placed its emphasis on the fear, the New places it on the love (though there was love in the fear of God's saints then, as there must be fear in their love now), it will at once be evident how fitly " the Greek word in question " was chosen to set forth their piety under the old Covenant, who, like Zacharias and Elisabeth, were righteous before God, walking in all the commandments and ordinances of the Lord blameless, and leaving nothing willingly undone which pertained to the circle of their prescribed duties. For this sense of accurately and scrupulously perform- ing that which is prescribed, with the consciousness of the danger of slipping into a careless, negligent performance of God's service, and of the need, therefore, of anxiously watching against the adding to, or diminishing from, or in any other way altering, that which has been by Him commanded, lies ever in the words when used in their religious signification." " The careful taking bold and cautious handling of some precious yet delicate vessel," describes admirably the kind of fastidious piety which shone out in the late Archbishop. His character was hardly in greater contrast to that of his early colleague, Frederick Maurice with his fixed gaze on God and his passionate zeal for men, than to that of his immediate predecessor in the See of Dublin, the bold, utilitarian Whately, with his rough- and-ready banter for all coxcombs, spiritual or secular, his somewhat narrow sagacity, and his contempt for all refine- ments. After Archbishop Whately, Archbishop Trench must have seemed to many of his clergy the very embodiment of decorum and reserve, of fastidiousness and taste, of Anglican sobriety and Anglican caution. And he certainly struck a deeper note than any struck by Whately, without offending the evangelical sensibilities of a Church which preferred even the most homely of logicians to anything like moral tenderness for Rome. For the purpose of striking such a note, Dr. Trench's reserve was a great advantage ; without it he would have excited far more distrust than he actually did ; and his scholarly tone of mind, which avoided large theories in order to grapple with the exposition and illustration of specific Scriptural or spiritual difficulties more nearly within his grasp, was, perhaps, a still greater advantage. Men of all doctrinal shades could read such books as, for instance, his " Studies in the Gospels," with profit and pleasure, and it was hardly possible for those who did so, to rise up from them in the narrow doctrinal temper in which they might have first opened them. We may instance the striking paper on "The Unfinished Tower and the Deprecated War," in which the Archbishop shows that the " counting of the cost " enjoined on the Christian in the parables concerning the man who builds what he cannot finish, and the King who undertakes a war to which he is unequal, is really intended to expose the absolute deficiency of all human resources for build- ing a tower that would avail as a mode of escape from God, or for making any effectual war against the giver of all spiritual strength. In spite of all his reserve and reluctance to enter on questions on which he did not clearly see his way, Arch- bishop Trench combined with the delicacy of true scholarship much of the delicacy of true poetic feeling, and used them both in the service of his Christian faith, so that his reserve stopped far short of frigidity, and his caution of fearfulness. There was a true spiritual wisdom in him, though it was wisdom of a retiring and fastidious type. For he was deeply impressed with the truth

of his own fine apophthegm :—

" Merely thyself, 0 man, thou canst not long abide, But presently for less or greater must decide."