BOOKS.
MAURICE'S THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS.° Mn. Matrarez has within the last ten years attracted to himself a considerable amount of interest from thoughtful religious men in England. Especially among the younger men of this class has he been looked upon as one who seemed more likely than any writer of the day to lead them towards a solution of those profound problems, in respect to which the conscience and reason of the' age mani- fested symptoms of being in conflict with the old beliefs and tradi- tions embodied in our ecclesiastical institutions and our habitual forms of speech. His "Kingdom of Christ" excited more interest and raised higher hopes aniong theological students, and among those who seek in theology a key to all speculative thought, and to all the practical confusions and difficulties that obstruct a manly and a thoughtful life, than any work published since Coleridge's "Aids to Reflection." And no one of the many volumes of sermons he has since put forth has failed to sustain this interest, and to draw towards him the hopes and the admiration of an increasing body of attentive listeners. "Here, if anywhere," has been the cry amongst them, " can we find how to reconcile the faith and usages of our fathers with the results and method of science ; for here we find the largest recognition of all that we prize in modern thought, the deepest sympathy with all the requirements of the modern heart and intellect, the warmest love and appreciation of art and literature, and mental and poli- tical freedom, in combination with the most unflinching avowals of orthodoxy, the profoundest attachment to each article of the old catholic creeds." So striking indeed, and so contrasted with the tone of ordinary preachers, has been his assertion of the value and the glory of the human, that, where there has been doubt about him, it has been directed towards his views of the divine. Men have been so unused to see a zealous clergyman, a profound believer in his creed, who at the same time professed himself equally in- terested in the material and intellectual progress of the race, and indeed asserted as a fundamental article in his Christianity, the impossibility of severing the two elements of human life without placing each upon false grounds, that Mr. Maurice has been on the one hand attacked by the orthodox religious organs as a Ra- tionalist in disguise, and on 'the other hand has been suspected by Rationalists themselves of reserve or equivocation in his avowal of literal adherence to the creeds in their simplest, most straight- forward interpretation. We doubt whether the former party will, be convinced against their prejudices and their spites; the latter':. can hardly resist the evidence furnished by the volume of "Theo- logical Essays." Little- ground as there was before for suspecting that Mr. Maurice had some esoteric meaning to salve his philo- sophy, except, indeed, in the hopes and wishes of those who would fain have claimed so powerful an ally, a man must be blind be- yond all power of cure, who can read the Essays now published, and hesitate to acknowledge in Mr. Maurice a Christian who takes for eternal truth what St. Paul and St. 3-elm say in its most lite- ral sense, and who stands upon the old creeds as on a rock, which grows firmer and stronger beneath his feet the longer he lives to find the need of such a resting-place. And yet we think Mr. Maurice has himself to blame for much of the obloquy and suspicion which his writings have provoked. He has the habit of attacking opinions allusively, in a manner in- telligible enough to those who have read largely in modern theo- logical literature, or to those who mix in various theological " sets," but very puzzling to all who do not enjoy either of these dubious advantages. And the result is, that to many of his readers his objections have a vague application, and often seem directed against shadows of his own raising; while others, who may feel conscious that it is their own theories that are being at- tacked, will stoutly maintain that the representations made of them are broad caricatures, individual errors exaggerated into the tenets of a sect, or partial views of what they do really acknowledge in their beliefs. Few books would be more improved than Mr. Mau- rice's by an apparatus of notes and references, enabling the reader to test for himself the correctness of the representations in the text. It is not so much in this bearing, however, that we have felt how advantageous such an apparatus would have been ; but rather as a means by which Mr. Maurice would have freed him- self from a charge of vagueness, by letting people know precisely the tenets which he has from time to time impugned as injurious to the interests of true religion. He would perhaps say that he describes the tenets, and it is to them and not to the sects or per- sons holding them that his hostility is directed ; so that if no per- sons hold the tenets, why, so much the better—he' is mistaken; and his objections affect no one. And this would be a satisfactory answer if he never indicated any parties, or never approached near to the actual tenets of any party ; but he does both so evidently, that sects and parties do claim his objections while they deny their applicability, and undoubtedly give to the objections a wider application frequentlythan he himself intended. There is, for instance, no doubt that the party specially styling themselves " Evangelicia " would consider Mr. Maurice one of their bitterest opponents, and yet he holds in substance the doctrines upon which their school is built, and from which they do not allow themselves to have deviated. It is because we are sure- from personal ex- perience that Mr. Maurice's writings would be more widely ac- • Theological Essays. By Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A.. Chaplain of Lin- coln's Inn, and Professor of Divinity in King's College, London. Published by Macmillan and Co., Cambridge.
cepted, would excite less bitterness of feeling, and win hearts which they now repel, that we make this suggestion.
Another hint we feel constrained to offer for Mr. Maurice's best consideration, not on behalf of any sect or party, but of all of every sect who read his writings. We have found in conversation with men of various shades of opinion, and of various orders of intellect and various stages of cultivation, that the books Mr. Maurice has published are very generally felt to be more difficult of thorough mastery than any books, philosophical, scientific, or religious, of our day. And we go on and find, with a curious unanimity of confession, that the difficulty is felt to be in the meaning of cer- tain phrases, repeated so frequently in these writings as to make it evident that they enshrine fundamental principles of Mr. Maurice's interpretation of the Christian revelation. To enumerate all these phrases would be beyond the scope of a newspaper notice of a new book ; but the best that we can think of as specimens of their class are those by which the relation of Christ to the believer and to the whole human race is expressed. "_Humanity constituted in Christ," " Christ the root of our righteousness," are two most fre- quently recurring. Perhaps Mr. Maurice will more clearly appre- hend the difficulty if we ask him how humanity is constituted in the Son more than in the Father; whether by constitution in Christ he means more than ordinary people mean when they say that God created man ; whether man is more constituted in Christ than any other creature, or than matter and its qualities ? And if Christ be the root of our righteousness, in what sense man can be said to have a free will ? Does Mr. Maurice mean that each individual man is made up of an animal united to Christ, and that severed from Christ by sin the man becomes again an animal merely ? We have asked from those who profess to find in Mr. Maurice the best of modern teachers what these phrases precisely mean, and we have asked in vain ; one favourite answer being that the truth of such phrases must be felt, not understood. It is obvious to reply to such a " put-off," that the truth of the phrases is one thing, their meaning another, and that the latter is at present the object of inquiry. Another favourite phrase is that " Christ is the representative of humanity." If these phrases really cannot be explained any more than the words by which we express the qualites of objects, such as white, sweet, &c.,—in other words, if they express states of consciousnesswhich cannot be ex- plained to those who have never experienced them —let us and all who are puzzled by their use be plainly told this at once, and we_ will shut up the books in which they occur, as written in a tong that we have not learned. But if they are not incapable °flit:mg paraphrased, it would tend more than Mr. Maurice pro- baWy,,etineeives to the intellectual satisfaction of many, if he would do it. And we urge it upon his consideration the more strongly, bemuse the intellectual apprehension of his 'peening is unquestion- ably in many cases a necessary condition of deriving moral and spiritual benefit from it. We should have said in all cases, but that we hear some persons who do not profess to understand his meaning, or who on being questioned give irresistible evidence that they do not, attribute to the very phrases they do not under- stand a sort of mysterious value. The Essays were originally delivered as sermons in Lincoln's Inn Chapel, and are now published with additions and revision, and slightly altered in form. They are a series of connected discourses upon the main articles of the Creed, especially those articles or those views of the articles which offend Unitarians, and persons whose tendencies are in the same direction whether they call themselves Unitarians or not. Their method may be briefly described as a vindi- cation of the articles of orthodox Christian belief, by an appeal to the consciousness of the individual as exemplified in his own life and experience, and to the consciousness of the race as recorded in
history. Great stress, too, is laid upon the intellectual confusions and the practical mischief which have resulted from the denial, sup. pression, or extenuation of any of these articles ; and especially the history of the Christian Church is made to bear witness to the value of these articles, by the fact that her shortcomings, her dis- tractions, and her positive iniquities, have all proceeded not from her belief in her own creed, but from her want of belief in it—from her attempts infinite in number and variety to effect for the con- sciences and lives of men that redemption, justification, and sancti- fication, which her creeds tell her God in Christ has already ef- fected once for alL As argumentative discourses, in the common
sense of the word, the Essays will not, we imagine, carry convic-
tion to the minds of those who reject the creeds as contrary to rea- son and inconsistent with science. But they are rich in suggestive remarks and trains of thought, applicable to the needs of many a doubting, hesitating, half-convinced mind : and they are, be- yond all Mr. Maurice's previous volumes of sermons, valuable as a complete exposition of his own views of Christianity—the views of a man who is powerfully influencing his generation, and who pro- foundly believes in revealed religion as a series of facts disclosing God's plan for educating and restoring the human race. Nor can any one read them without being impressed with admiration and personal regard for the writer, aose subtilty of intellect, tender- ness of heart, reverence for human worth, and manly integrity and uprightness, are in almost every page strikingly displayed. No- thing is more impressive than the keen desire we have seen mani- fested by men of acute and logical minds to penetrate to the mean-
ing of Mr. Maurice's obscurities; nothing can be a more striking testimony, to the worth of that which they do comprehend in his
books. We are bound. to record, along with our admiration, the fact of this obscurity, if it were only that it might be impressed upon the consideration of the writer, and perhaps in future works be somewhat if not wholly cleared up. In an essay on the resurrection of the body, Mr. Maurice makes a subtile distinction between flesh and body, which we could un- derstand if it were not urged in behalf of the resurrection of the latter in contradistinction to the former, while Mr. Maurice rests his whole argument for the resurrection of the body in any sense upon the fact of Christ's resurrection; whereas he rose not with his body as opposed to his flesh, but with the actual flesh which hung on the cross, and with the wounds inflicted on it before death. This needs explanation.
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