Dr. Jelf, formerly principal of King's College, London, and better
known for a sermon, which has since become celebrated, on the English Church as " the Via Media " between Protestantism and Roue, died at Christchurch, Oxford, where he was one of the canons, last Tuesday. The doctor was a good man,—one of the cautious sort, for the " via media " had sunk into his very soul,—and had the art of attaching his pupils and friends heartily to him. In- deed, during the Oxford movement both Dr. Pusey and Dr. Newman addressed him as an authority, though his function was that of a moderator, not of an intellectual guide. The most bigoted act of his life,—the attempt, which unfortunately succeeded, to extrude Mr. Maurice from King's College for his view of the meaning of the word alWyrog (' eternal '), as applied to punish- ments,—which, as every one knows, Mr. Maurice holds to mean " spiritual," and not " always-enduring,"—was at least in its origin a sincerely conscientious act which he thought his duty to the College required of him ; though he may have warmed some- what to his work as the controversy went ou. He was genuinely panic-struck at the idea of diminishing in any degree the terrors of Hell,—which indeed no one was less inclined to do than Mr. Maurice, though he did not regard the infinite element in them as one simply of extended duration. Dr. Jelf was a very fair type of the sort of divine,—a very estim- able and honourable one, though not a great spiritual power,-... which our cautious and prudent Church has always tended to foster.
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