SERMONS BY DR. MARTINEAU AND DR. LIDDON.* THE disrespect in

which the world holds the literature of ser- mons is, at least in great measure, due to the point of view of pure ignorance. For our own parts, we know nothing more remarkable than the high interest of the best sermons published during the present generation. If the present writer had to choose not more than a dozen volumes to keep him company in solitary confinement, he suspects half the number might be made up of volumes of sermons. Where is there, for keen and profound knowledge of the world, measured by a high standard of spiritual and moral passion, anything to compare with most of the volumes of Dr. Newman's parochial and University sermons? Where can you find a finer blending of thought at once precise and profound, with high, if sometimes harsh, imaginative expres- sion, than in the various volumes of Dr. Martineau's sermons ? And where can you find a richer and more eloquent comment on the various phases of spiritual doubt and denial, than in the Uni- versity sermons of Canon Liddon ? Even to a mere man of the world of awakened mind, even though be had no sympathy with Christian beliefs as such, there would be much in the two volumes now before us to fix his attention and undermine his confidence in his own assumptions. But, of course, it is not the man who thinks the whole subject of the spiritual life visionary, who will appreciate such volumes as these at their true value. Rather will they awaken in him vague uneasiness, that disquieting sense that he has been measuring life more by his own deficiencies than his own positive know- ledge, which is often at the root of what is sometimes mistaken for instinctive aversion.

• Hours of Thought on Sacred Things. By James Martineau, LL.D., D.D. Vol. II. London : Longman's. 1879. Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford. By H. P. Liddon, D.D. Second Series. London : Itivingtons. 1879.

It would be hard to find Christian preachers of any typo wider apart than Dr. Martineau and Dr. Liddon. Dr. Martineau is a Christian Theist, who, while recognising iu Christ the highest moral expression of the divine mind, attaches very little authority, properly so called, to either the words or historical statements of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures wherever these are of a kind to challenge the principles of the modern conscience or of modern science ; while Canon Liddon holds strongly by ecclesiastical authority, and pleads eloquently even for that latest of all the Church's dogmatic symbols, the Athan- asian Creed. Yet so allied are these two preachers by the natural affinities of all Christian theism, that sometimes it would be hard even for one who knew both preachers well, to be quite sure to which of the two he was listening, if certain passages were

read aloud, without mention of any name. Take the following, for instance:— "Man is free; but ho can only preserve his true freedom by at voluntary service. His reason, his affections, his will cannot dispose of themselves capriciously with entire impunity. Truth, beauty, goodness, these aro the objects of their rightful service ; and what are these but aspects of the Eternal God ? Believe that all truth is unattainable ; and the ruin of the understanding is only a question of time. Treat moral beauty as a more fancy ; and the degradation of the affections must quickly follow. Decide that right and wrong are only phases of htiman feeling ; and the unnerved will must, are long forfeit all that gives it directness and strength. It is only in the ser- vice of high ideals that the soul of man can attain its excellence ; and when these are renounced, man doos not escape from service, he- only changes masters, and that for the worse. He falls back under the empire of sense or of nature, and he finds in the depths of his degradation the justification of the law against which he has rebelled."

Might not that have been found, without the alteration of a word, in Dr. Martineau's writings ? But it is in the noble sermon on " Christ's Service and Public Opinion," by Canon Liddon. Again, with the exception of two words, which Dr. Liddon would hardly have used, the thoughts at least of the following fine passage of Dr. Martineau's might easily have been found in such a sermon as Dr. Liddon's on " The Gospel and the Poor ;"—

" Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city. and bring in hither tho poor, and the maimed, and the lame, and the blind."—Luke xiv., 21.

" So that nameless, perhaps imaginary `city' was already just like ours, and hid away its misery behind its splendour ; and if you wanted to find its crowd of indigent and stricken, you had to dive into the lanes, and seek that you might save it. And, in the ancient cities, the quarters over which the needy or servile population spread were larger probably than in ours, and often the contrasts greater between their spacious mansions and their nests of poverty. Look at the map of old Athens, Corinth, or Rome : within the thin lino that traces the walls run two or three converging roads, joining, like scanty islands in a sea of space, a temple, a courthouse, a gymnasium, a circus, a bath, a cluster of palaces : leaving blank enough to shade every slope as in the open country. What stood upon those vast areas which the engraver cannot fill ?—the forgotten multitudes that leave no monu- ment ; who are born, and suffer, and die, without the notice of history ; but who are, collectively, at every moment, the largest holders in the great fund of human existence. When I try to fill up these silent blanks with the tones and looks of their lost life, and think of their tragedies of grief and passion on which the curtain never falls ; when I count the generations that inherit the woes of one metropolis ; when I remember how many are the vanished cities of the world, and the scorns of those that yet remain ; I understand too well the deep pity of the saviours of humanity, and look with wondering reverence at their faith and hope, rather than their charity."

We note this occasional convergence between two strikingly contrasted styles, only because it bears witness to the influence of that great spiritual faith which, in spite of the wide differ- ence between these writers ecclesiastically, penetrates both volumes, and makes us feel how much nearer the preachers are to each other than either of them can be to the new teachers who find the voice of truth iu Agnosticism, Determinism, and the faith in " posthumous " existence.

Yet, as we have said, it would be hard for men who own one master to be more widely divided than are Dr. Mar- tineau,—who probably accepts no more of the supernatural- ism of Scripture than Dr. Abbott, and is much more distinctly humanitarian as to the person of Christ,—and Dr. Liddon, who is a Catholic Anglican, identified heart and soul with the sacramental doctrine of both the Eastern and the Western. Church, and who even now would look upon reunion with the great communions of the East as the only adequate presage of the victory of Christ's kingdom over human evil. And these differences being so great as they are, it is curious to observe how nearly at times they seem to disappear in the strong sympathy of Christian feeling. There is a sermon of Dr. Liddon's, on "The Life of Faith and the Athanasian Creed," in which he attempts to show how completely the spirit of those denunciations in the Athanasian Creed to which its oppo- nents most object, is taken from the language of Christ himself, and how impossible it is to make faith in Christ the root of all true life, unless want of faith in Christ brings with it the loss of that life, the penalties of spiritual death. Yet we doubt whether anything in Dr. Liddon's sermon on that subject is calculated to lend so much strength to what we may call the severer view of spiritual penalties in the life to come, as some parts of Dr. Martineau's on " The Forecast of Retribution." In it he con- trasts very forcibly the good-natured man-of-the-world's view of moral evil with the view taken by the educated conscience and spirit,—and shows that the latter is all on the side of that in- finitude of condemnation which finds its natural language in -" the worm that dieth not, and the fire that is not quenched" :-

" What, then, can we learn from the historical or external study of our kind ? That men exist with infinite variety of spiritual feature, so mingling their lineaments and invisibly melting away their shades as to defy the resources of a narrow classification. But that the characters, as objects of moral judgment, are as various as the men, observation gives us not the slightest reason to believe. We know, indeed, quite positively that there is no constant ratio between the two orders of differences ; and that of two minds akin in result, one may he chiefly involuntary nature, the other, all voluntary habit; the one, like the wild flower in its native fields ; the other, like the same kind, painfully trained iu a foreign clime, with elaborated soil, and arti- ficial heats. What is true of one case, is true of all. The apparent gradations of character may be all resolvable into varieties in the problem originally set by nature ; and in the phenomena which we observe there is nothing to decide on the relative merits of men,— they may all deserve the very same ; or their just reward may be twofold, wide apart as the kingdom of our Father' from the outer darkness of weeping and wailing. Thus we may understand, how religious men do not feel their classification contradicted by the facts of the world. The marks on which judicial insight fixes its gaze are illegible, they think, save to the eye of God. The world is to them a spiritual masquerade ; where the jewelled cloak may hang upon the shoulders of a bankrupt, and the rags of beggary conceal a prince. Hence their lofty moderation, their somewhat cold and impassive demeanour towards human life. They neither trust, nor wholly dis- trust, the moral appearances of things ; for the heart is deeper than they can read. They dare not yield their full affection to any being, lest he prove a foreigner, and no citizen of heaven. Yet they know themselves in the presence of many a person, could they but discern him, worthy of eternal affection, and regarded already with the com- placency of God. In their indifference to external symptoms, they tend even to go in contradiction to them ; to suspect a snare in the sound look of decent habits and happy dispositions ; to cling to hope and believe in latent good, where outwardly appear only the wreck of passion and the deformity of guilt. And so they are apt to move through life without admiration and without despair for men; with no eager expenditure of love, but with a store of deep affections in reserve ; with the wealth and intensity of their souls delivered over to nothing actual, but sedulously enlarged and deepened for objects invisible and waiting to be revealed. While the doctrine of a heaven and a hell, with a corresponding classification of mankind, is thus not contradicted by outward obser- vation, its real seat and strength lie in the inward reflection upon ourselves and the nature of the right and wrong we do. The moment we turn to question our own hearts, and judge, 'not by the seeing of the eye,' but by the secret oracle of conscience, all notion of the infinite gradations of character, and of our own freedom from any- thing very bad or very good, entirely disappears : as we gaze, the saeutral shade divides in the midst, and gathers itself at either end into the white light of heaven and the blackness of the gulf. In the moment of temptation, what is the scene really enacted within us ? Is it not invariably a controversy,—a struggle,—between two competing passions for occupancy of our will ?—passions, between which it is ours to decide, and of which we know the one to be nobler, and the other relatively base ? When, as Peter stood with the ser- vants at the fire, the first cock-crowing smote upon his heart and told him the thing which he had done, what was the sad history which he read as he looked in ? Would he not interpret it thus ?—' What have I done ? Soul of the rock become weak as water ! the deepest love I have, love to the purest of beings,—love backed by all the claims of Truth,—I have put away, to give myself up to Fear, fear for these poor, shivering limbs, fear of them that kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do!' Will Peter, then, think simply that lie has done rather amiss, and that it is a pity he was so taken off his guard ?—or, that he is a wretch, who has done the worst possible to him ?—for how can a man do more than the very wickedest thing that comes before his choice at the time ? You, indeed, who stand by and look on, may imagine to yourself impulses still more depraved to which, had he been some other man, he might have yielded ; but if these were never present to him, if they never came into the field of his temptation, what are they to him ? They are wholly foreign to his problem ; in the solution of which he could sink no lower than to accept the proposals of Satan and decline the answer of God. What -consolation would it have brought to the Apostle's bitter tears, to tell him that more shocking things might be imagined,—that if, for in- stance, he had gone up to his Master and assassinated him, that would have been worse ? The suggestion would be but an insult to his remorse, and would operate like the voice of those foolish and heartless comforters, who remind you, as you smart under one sor- row, that you might have had two, and that, though the blessing folded to your bosom has been torn away, another, sitting in the chair beside you, yet remains. Peter would reply, ' Go to, thou fool and blind ; Satan gave me tho lie to tell; but he put no murderer's

dagger in my hand; what more, then, could I do for him than I have done ?"

That is a very remarkable passage, in the sermon of one who bases his faith entirely on the utterances of conscience, and attaches no more value to the words of revelation, where they seem to go beyond the declarations of conscience, than he would to the language of a historian who had exceeded the warrant of his pieces justificatives. Thus Dr. Martineau speaks as follows, in the same sermon, with something approaching to indifference, of the literal authority even of Christ's own words :—

" It can scarcely be that there is not something in the great world to come corresponding to the immeasurable difference which reveals itself in our own forecasting souls between holiness and guilt. By what method this felt difference will, however, declare and justify itself, it were vain to surmise ; and least of all can we lay any stress on the mythological pictures to which, in the intensity of their spiritual convictions, prophetic men have had recourse as symbols of the truth they would convey, and the interval they desired to mark. Whether it be Plato's roaring shaft, with its thorny sides and police of fiends, through which the dead must pass, or Christ's undying worm and unquenchable fire, it were childish to take these images for more than solemn hints of an undefinable reality, or to imagine that, by dissipating them, you get rid of the penalties of sin."

Hence, it is clear that it is not the language of Scrip- ture, except so far as that is the echo of the language of the conscience itself, on which Dr. Martineau relies. Indeed, if we may venture a general criticism on this volume, as on all the many fine volumes which have come from the same hand, we should say that Dr. Martineau places the Christian revelation too high, even as a perfect embodi- ment of the conscience and the spirit of man, to pass over its greatest words, even where it goes somewhat beyond what the unassisted conscience would assert, with so little significance as he attaches to it. It would be strange, indeed, if he who em- bodied for us, as Dr. Martineau believes that Christ embodied, the spiritual life of God, had been encompassed in so great a cloud of misunderstood metaphor and imaginary history as the "critical" view of the Gospel finds in the narrative of our Lord's life and work. But though we may esteem it difficult to reconcile altogether Dr. Martineau's deep spiritual reverence with his cool critical scepticism, his volume is, perhaps, all the more on that account suited to the reading of a day which is more sceptical than reverent.

Dr. Liddon's volume, while it contains much that is coloured to some extent by his ecclesiastical position, is full also of fine criticisms on the spirit of modern society, modern ethics, and modern politics. Nothing can be finer, for instance, than the sermon on humility and truth, containing the following appli- cation to the spirit of a democratic age :—

"It may be thought that the social foes of humility are less power- ful now than in bygone years, that good-taste on this side, and the strong and strengthening current of political democracy on that, have in this matter already done, or bid fair to do, the proper work of the Gospel. But this is to forget that the essence of all true moral excellence lies not in external conformity to a conventional standard, but in an inward disposition, under the control of recognised prin- ciple. The formulas of good-taste are merely an elegant translation of the common opinion of contemporary society. The humility of good-taste is strictly an affair of appropriate phrases, gestures, re- serves, withdrawals ; it is the result of a socially enforced conformity to an outward law. The humility of democratic feeling is often a very vigorous form of pride, which is scarcely at pains to disguise its real character. The demand for an impossible social equality, which has done so much to discredit some of the noblest aspirations for liberty that the modern world has known, is due to the temper which creates a tyranny, only working under circumstances which, for the moment, forbid it. The impatience of an equal in the one case is the impatience of a superior in the other. The humility of a democracy is largely concerned with enforcing an outward conformity to this virtue on the part of other people ; and both it and the humility of good-taste may remind us of those cannibals who have walked in our parks clothed in the dress and affecting the manners of European civilisation, and yet have found it difficult to restrain themselves from indulging old habits when there has been much to tempt them. Humility, to be genuine, must be based on principle ; and that principle is suggested by the Apostle's question, which warns every human being that, be his wealth, his titles, his position, his name among men, what they may, they afford no real ground for self- exaltation, because they are external to his real self, and are in fact bestowed on him from above."

Or take the following criticism on the strength and weak- ness of what is called " public opinion :"—

" What is the duty of a Christian towards this ubiquitous and pene- trating agency ? Is be to ignore or despise it, in the spirit of some Stoic of the earlier school ? Assuredly not. St. Paul was respectful even towards heathen opinion ; he bids Christians do nothing reck- lessly to forfeit its favourable judgment ; he shapes his phrases, not seldom, as would a man who is guided by this instinctive deference. For, always and everywhere, public opinion must needs contain certain, perhaps considerable, elements of truth. Those great moral ideas of righteousness and retribution, which are to human conduct what its axioms are to mathematical science, and which have their attestation or their echo in the depths of every human soul, do, more or less, enter as ingredients into all forms of public opinion ; they secure to it a claim on respectful attention; they preserve it from the rapid disintegration which, without them, could not but overtake it. They may be grossly misapplied, or associated with wild profanity and folly ; but they forbid us to treat any public opinion as wholly worthless or erroneous ; they secure to it an element which is cer- tainly from above, and which may partly shape the baser material in which it is embedded. Are we, then, to place ourselves trustfully in its hands, to defer to, and to obey it, at least in a Christian country, and in an age of enlightenment and progress ? Is it to furnish us, iu the last resort, with a rule of conduct, or with our standards of moral and religious truth ? Again, assuredly not. For consider how this public opinion is formed : it is practically the result of a general sub- scription ; it is the workmanship of all the human beings who go to make up society, or a section of society. Certainly the wise, the ex- perienced, the conscientious, the disinterested, contribute towards it, each in proportion to his weight and influence. But as certainly, also, the reckless, the unprincipled, the foolish, the selfish, have their share in producing it ; a larger share, the world being what it is, than their nobler rivals. In public opinion, power often counts for more than character ; Nero could shape opinion at Rome more effect- ively than Seneca. Genius which holds itself bound by moral con- siderations is often less influential, at least for a time, than genius which mocks jauntily at the simple distinctions between right and wrong. Public opinion is, in point of fact, a conglomerate; it is a compromise between the many elements which go to make up human society, a compromise in which all are represented, but in which, upon the whole, the lower and selfish elements of thought and feeling are apt to preponderate. And therefore, while it is always a matter of high interest to ascertain what is the verdict of public opinion on a given question, both because it represents so much, and because it can do so much, this verdict will never be received by Christians as an absolute guide to truth, though it may well be a subject for re- spectful attention. The same conclusion is suggested by a considera- tion of the vicissitudes to which public opinion is liable. It is liable to the action of disturbing causes, which betray it, upon occasions, into wild inconsistencies with itself. The panic produced by an un- foreseen catastrophe, the fascination exerted by a brilliant writer or speaker, the apparent coincidence between some suspicion enter- tained by a long-cherished, perhaps unexamined prejndice, and some trivial discovery or occurrence ;—these things will sometimes rouse into desperate energy some one element of passion latent in the vast body of general opinion, so that it breaks with all that has hitherto restrained and balanced it, and precipitates a society upon some coarse of conduct altogether at variance with its better antecedents. And this liability of powerful sections of opinion to suffer from the disturbing effects of panic, must needs unfit them for the duties of guides in matters of religious and moral truth. In truth, common opinion is too wanting in patience, in penetration, in delicacy of moral touch and apprehension, to deal successfully, or otherwise than blunderingly and coarsely, with questions like these. It cannot be right to cry Hosanna!' now, to-morrow Crucify !'

to applaud in Galilee that which is condemned in Jerusalem; to sanction in this generation much which was denounced in that ; to adore what you have burned, and to burn what you have adored,' with conspicuous versatility, merely because a large body of human beings—the majority of whom, it may be, are quite without particu- lar information on the subject—love to have it so. To attempt to please men in this sense, is most assuredly incompatible with the service of Christ."

Take them all in all, we doubt if any two volumes published within the last year have contained more help towards forming a true opinion on the deepest questions that men's minds and hearts can debate, than these two volumes of mere " Sermons," one by a Unitarian thinker, and the other by an academical ecclesiastic of High-Church views.