PROFESSOR CLIFFORD AND HIS TEACHERS. (To THE EDITOR OF THE
" SPECTATOR.")
Sta,—A correspondent who calls in question the justice of some of your censures of the late Professor Clifford, thinks that if he had found Christian teachers who had had the courage to de- clare that God educated the individual through the pressure of the tribe, he would never have taken up his attitude of defiance to Christianity. I should have said that this truth was the characteristic lesson of one whom be mentions with great respect, and whose career as a teacher almost covered his life. "The education of the individual through the pressure of the tribe," if not the exact words that Mr. Maurice would have chosen to describe the divine purpose for man, surely hardly differ from those in which most of his disciples would sum up his view of history in the light of theology. The most striking illustration of this view which. I now remember occurs in an account of a conversation in 1837, given in the interesting life of his friend, Samuel Clarke :—" When I was talking to 'F. D. M.' about the text, The kingdom of Heaven is within you,'" said Mr. Clarke, "he answered, And so, in a very im- portant sense, may it be said that the kingdom of England is within you,' and I gloried in the pith of that saying." it would be a very easy matter for any one conversant with his writings to fill this issue of the Spectator with similar proofs of the pre- dominance in his mind of this idea.' Any of his friends who will recall how wide a gulf severed his teaching from that of others which resembled his in every other point but the import- ance, in a spiritual point of view, of the education which a man receives through his race and his nation, will surely feel that, whatever other cause there ha e been for men falling away from the faith in which he lived and died, it was not the want of an earnest, profoundly felt—some might think even an excessive- insistance on the truth which is now being set up as its alterna-
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