THOUGHTS FOR THE TIMES.* WE knew we should meet with

so many good things in this volume, we confess our mental attitude towards it was rather that of -disciple than critic. Yet if enjoyment should be the highest form -of criticism, we fancied we should not fail in our function. We knew we might have some epigrams more striking than true. A few startling anti-climaxes jarring us like a false chord ; an occasional flippancy of expression, apparent probably rather than real ; but we nerved ourselves for these, considering the prospect of abundant compensation.

The good things we promised ourselves are here—as we hope presently to show—yet we confess to a sense of disap- pointment. Mr. Haweis has sacrificed too much to his craving to be modern. We have no right to be disappointed ; he has not asked us to read his thoughts for eternity, bat his Thoughts for the Times. And judged in their relation to society, they are

admirable. Young men are helped over stiles of difficulty,

* Thoughts for the Times. By the Rev. H. R. Hawels, )LA. London: Henry S. King and Co. 1872. in the internal management of the creche is composed of 4 young women shown how to educate themselves ; the functions

of the Broad Church defined without possible reproach of misti- ness; the duties of the clergy, the Bible, and society (modern life has very little to do with each man's isolation), very clearly inti- mated. There is no lack of noble and generous sentiment, and with some classes of mind, no lack of tender sympathy. There is much information and richness of thought on many subjects. The writer may well ask,—What right have wethen to be disappointed? Well ;—the sermons are the sermons of one who, not so very long ago, said from the pulpit, "Brethren, after all, there is nothing in life quite so hard to bear as the silences of God." Therb is not one sentence in this volume which comes up to the depth of spiritual life implied in those words. There is no lack of skill in confuting theories ; in helping busy brains to see the weak points in the outward presentation of truth ; but as one whose authority Mr. Haweis would most readily admit has well said, "That which is a tendency and habit of the heart, is not cured by detecting fallacies in the mode in which it is embodied and presented to the intellect." The intellect certainly finds some- thing to feed upon, but the thirst of the soul is unquenched, the hunger of the spirit is unsatisfied. It is difficult to do justice to this volume, and yet point out its deficiency, but we will try. There is an old English adage that in love and rage we all speak Saxon, and it might be widened into a larger thought, namely, that the human heart in its deepest needs utters the same cry. This was the truth Mr. Maurice so firmly grasped, that listening to him, hearts the most alien in all things else, could, from their inmost recesses, have said, —We do hear him speak, each in our own tongue, the wonderful works of God. But what says Mr. Haweis? "Remember always, if truth is to be living, it must be expressed in the forms of the period it is designed to influence It won't do for you to go and read old books of theology if you want living truth." To this law and this testimony he brings his teaching. And what do we get? We must leave out Mr. Maurice, for though perhaps no man loved him more sincerely, yet he can write, "This, I think, is the great distinction letween the old Broad Church of Maurice, and the New Broad Church under

his followers. Maurice could not bear a re-statement ; he thought the old forms too sacred for paraphrase." Perhaps Mr. Maurice perceived that the spirit was apt to escape beyond our ken, -when the body which clothed it was rent. Any way, we may ask, who are the modern interpreters of truth for whom St.

Augustine, and Jeremy Taylor, Hooker, and Thomas it Kempis, and in some moods Peter and Paul, are to be relegated to the upper shelves ? For a moment we will lay them all aside, for the study of the volume before us. It contains much to interest, entertain, and instruct. First, Mr. Haweis deals with the position and teaching of the "liberal clergy," created, as the supply generally is, to meet a demand, and the demand in this case ap- pears to be the numbers "who are casting about for some new ground of religion, who want to have a religious belief, and can- not find one," 8re. And then in his position, as one of the teachers, ready and anxious to meet the need of the age, he points oat the essential distinction between dogma and truth, explaining with happy epigrammatic force that "dogma is' doctrine crystallized," and he gives an apt illustration of the distinction between truth and dogma :—

"Let me give you one more illustration of the difference between dogma and truth, which will bring out the folly of choosing dogma when you can get truth. Outside my garden there runs a rushing stream, and I tell my child, 'It is wrong for you to go outside the garden- gate unattended ; it is absolutely wrong for you to do so.' The dogma I place before my child is the dangerousness of the river. By-and-bye my child grows up, and people notice that he never goes oqtaide the garden gate. When he is about twenty people say to him, 'You are a young man, why don't you go and see the world ? ' His answer is ever this= Oh, because my father said I must not go outside the garden gate unattended ; but if some one will go with me I will go.' The dogma was true for the child ; the stream was dangerous to the child; but what would you say if a man were to carry into advanced manhood his belief in such a partial expression of the truth? You would say that he was either a fool or a lunatic, and you would not be far wrong."

Mr. Haweis then proceeds to state what should be the governing principle of the soul in its search' afterlight, namely, the love of truth, though the special truth the soul is in search of seems a difficult quantity to fix, since we read "Christianity itself is not a fixed term, so ready is it to change, so eager is it to assimilate with every new mode of life and character in every age. The Christianity of Christ is different from the Christianity of the Apostles. The Christianity of the Apostles was distinct from that of the Fathers," &c. This statement is followed by a page or two of perfect truth, tenderness, and eloquence, in summing up the roll of those martyrs for the truth of whom the world was not worthy. Yet even here we have such an anti-climax-as this:—

"Shall I look upon this great city as upon another, though not a New Jerusalem—this great and unbelieving city—unbelieving in the strictest sense of the word, because it has not known in this its day the things which belonged to its peace ; and shall I exclaim, in words more august and more tender than Stephen's, '0 Jerusalem, Jerusalem ! thou that killest the prophets, and stoneet them which are sent unto thee, how often '—by the voice of science, and the voice of a new and blessed knowledge, and by the many voices of advanced human experience— 'how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathers her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!'"

We think the new wine should, at least, have been put into new bottles. The most pathetic utterance of Christ does not admit the introduction of a modern parenthesis. After what we are afraid we must consider a very inadequate statement of what the "liberal clergy" have to teach, we come to the second discourse, "On the Idea of God." An attempt, "by the light of modern reflection, to try and place before you the fact of God's ex- istence." We have a distinction drawn between the partial nature of God, revealed to man in the universe, especially in human nature, and the whole nature of God beyond man's ken, thus aptly illustrated (Mr. Haweis' illustrations are always good) :-

"Let me give you an illustration. A member of Parliament is one man in relation to his constituents,—the people who have sent him to parliament ; he is another man with reference to his country, and it may be very possible that what would be pleasing and agreeable to his constituency may not be for the good of his country. As he sits in par- liament, he may vote for a tax which will fall very heavily upon his constituents, and yet very lightly upon the country at large, and his constituency will then abuse him as an unprofitable representative, because he has voted for something which seem bad for them, although it happened to be good for the country. As a member of parliament he belongs to a corporation, and he is acting with a representative corpora- tion; acting in his totality, in his larger corporate capacity, his ways are inscrutable to small-minded provincialists ; but all is well done, he is of necessity one thing with reference to the constituency, andanother to the country."

He thus concludes in a line pregnant with thought, "We are God's provincialists in the great country of the universe." But when he tries through an ascending scale to attain by any process of modern scientific argument to the nature of man's communion with God and the question of God's sympathy with man, we think he simply fails ;—fails, not in any want of perception of the higher source through which he may have attained that communion, or be conscious of that sympathy, but when he imagines it possible to grasp the idea, which idea is in itself life, through any rationalistic argument, even though "Rationalism means infinite sincerity, infinite aspiration, and infinite faith, — which as a matter of philosophy we beg leave to doubt." We pass on to another subject, "The Character of Christianity." We think few of those who are able, as we have little doubt very many are able, to acknowledge a deep debt of gratitude to Mr. Haweis for the teaching they have received from him, but must be pained with the manner in which he has treated this subject. For instance, in the pages on miracles, if the whole question were one of some insignificant social problem, to be dismissed in a column of offhand writing in some modern review, it could not be handled more lightly. We give the summary :—

"But whatever truth or untruth there may be in these opinions, one thing is tolerably evident to my mind, and it is this—that if you accept the Christian miracles you cannot reject all others. You must know that the keenest intellects of the day tell us that the evidence for many of the mediasvel miracles is just as strong as the evidence upon which we receive the Christian miracles, and in many cases far stronger; therefore, if you do receive the Christian miracles, you may be led a little further than you like, and have to accept the miraculous in other ages as well. On the other hand, it is open for you to reject the miracles, all miracles whatever, as a priori impossibilities in any sense. Personally, as to many questions in and out of the Bible connected with the miraculous, I prefer to hold my mind in a state of suspense ; for in these days thought is so rapid and many-sided, that a man is unwise who pretends to make up his mind about everything upon which be is called to give an opinion. When I know very little about a thing, I say I know very little about it ; and when I am in doubt about things which are being fiercely discussed upon other platforms, I say I am in doubt about them ; and when I know nothing at all about them, I say so. Of course this makes my teaching, such as it is, very unsatisfactory to those who want to know all about everything. There are numbers of clergymen in every sect and party who can supply that information, but I do not profess to be one of them. There are perhaps few who really prefer 'the malady of thought' to 'the deep slumber of a decided Opinion.' Yet I will cast in my lot with these."

"And now," he asks, "do any of you feel disposed to ask what is left of Christianity "?

"I answer, three things are left. let, so much of its history as will stand the test of fair criticism ; or, in other words, so much of its his- tory as is true. 2ndly, a system of ethics tending to form a peculiar and original type of character. And 3rdly, an actual and substantial, moral and spiritual influence, exercised from the time of Christ down to the present moment. These three things remain, and they cannot be taken away from us."

We get valuable suggestions in another chapter as to the essence of the Bible when criticism has concluded its keenest work, especially a passage on "the revelation of the Divine to the pure- in heart." But it is when we come to the "Discourse on Preach- ing" that we see most clearly what the missing link in this teaching is. We have before us a teacher so deeply concerned to make men better and wiser, so sympathetic with all the more apparent difficulties by which they are surrounded, and so will- ing to meet those difficulties, that it seems wonderful he should interest so much and touch so little. So we try to listen to what he has to say about his own work, and after hearing of the necessity for eminently practical teaching, we have this passage :—

"I said there is a strong feeling in some minds that the clergyman ought to preach doctrine, and not be too personal ; the people were to- apply the doctrine for themselves. I beard the other day of a young Dissenting minister, who was invited on trial to preach to a new con- gregation. His first sermon was a fresh, glowing sermon ; he believed, in the reformation of his fellow-creatures, and now that he had before him a set of men and women whose failures and weaknesses he could pretty well guess, he proposed to set them right ; so he told them that they mast not drink and must not lie, and they must not backbite ; in short, he detailed all the bad things they wore doing every day. He had these things on his heart to say, and he said them out boldly, and as he came down from the pulpit he felt tolerably satisfied with himself and his sermon. But an influential deacon in the vestry sharply repri- manded him, and told him that was not what they wanted ; they did not want to be exposed, to be condemned, and this by a presumptuous young man, and the angry senior Christian wound up with a famous piece of advice: 'Stick to the doctrine, man, stiok to the doctrine; that can never- do anybody any harm.' He might have added, 'nor any good either ;' so long as you are not allowed to show where your doctrines impinge on the practice of daily life, your doctrine will be a windbag, as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbaL"

Now, as a lay commentator, with no tenderness for Dissenters as such, we venture to say "the angry senior Christian" was right. In his mouth the word "doctrine" of course meant principle. Men do not listen patiently to what they knew before, unless the speaker possess, like our author, an entertaining style, and can season his discourse with brilliant epigram. The man who drinks does not need to be told he ought not to drink, nor the slanderer that he ought not to backbite, but each, if he were learning the secret of that "risen life" which might be his, might chance lay hold on the hand stretched out to lift him up. Of Mr. Maurice it was once well said, "Ho is a casuist who will lay down for us no rules of conscience, who refuses to chow their food- for his pupils ;" but of Mr. Maurice it might also have been said,— his spirit was clothed with that garment the very hem of which whoever touched drew virtue from the man. He drew lessons. from a life hid with Christ in God, and when he brought his treasure forth men said :—

" Lower than the shoals

We skim this diver went, nor did create, But find it for us deeper in our souls Than we can penetrate."

We remember many years since hearing Dr. Norman Macleod preach

to a crowded congregation on the subject of "walking worthy of the vocation wherewith ye are called." He said nothing against ill-temper, but in the repressed tones in which he was wont to

he said very quietly, " Brethren, do you see that man with a temper so bad, his utmost efforts will never make it genial ; do- you see him struggling day by day, but succeeding so feebly few care much for him ; do you see him wrestling in prayer against his hourly foe, and praying, too, for those who bear such little- love to him,"—that man is walking worthy of his vocation,. little as you know it. There was not a bad-tempered man in that congregation who was not the better for those words,—and the reason is not far to seek. We turn with pleasure to the few pages in the volume before us, written just after Mr. Maurice's death.

In them we recognise what Mr. Haweis is as a teacher when he

suffers himself to be at his best : when leaving behind him the thought "that it is difficult to know what to do with people who are satisfied with neither doctrinal nor practical teaching,'

leaving utterly behind the questions of modern phraseology and modern requirements, he touches our spirits, because his own is touched, and speaks of the eternal truths which do not need re- setting. We give a few sentences in his own words ; he is speaking of a conversation with Mr. Maurice :—

"'Are you not weary of men ?' I said to him one day. If I come to- yon at any time you lay down your pen or your book, and you let me waste your time, and you who never rest seem to have endless leisure to listen to others and to help them.'—' They teach me more than I teach, them,' he answered; and indeed it was this immense teachableness- which made him so great and wise a man. And so ho drew men's load of care from them and helped them to boar their burdens, and many who came to him desponding, and crushed, and heartless, went from him full of hope and new courage. I remember saying to him one day,. 'How are we to know when we have got bold of God, because sometimes we seem to have got a real hold upon Him, whilst at others we can realise nothing?' lie looked at ma with those eyes which so often

seemed to be looking into an eternity beyond, whilst he said, in his deep and tremulously earnest voice, Yon have not got hold of God, but Be has got hold of you.' I shall never forget it. It came like a revela- tion to me that we were changeable, that we could not measure Him by our feelings, because we were so full of vacillation, fancies, and incon- sistencies ; but that He was the Changeless One, who had got hold of man, and would never let him go. That has been a strange comfort to me in all my intellectual difficulties, in all my moral and spiritual wanderings ; the thought that this great Father has got hold of us His children, that in His pitiful and pitiless love He will put us into eternal fire, plunge us into hell after hell, until we have got hold of Him and cling to Him to be delivered from ourselves, our selfishness, and our sin."