large were the elements of power which Jesus abstained from evoking.

We are asked whether in our view, the death of Jesus was wilfully incurred? Certainly not, as we interpret it ; not more at least than any death incurred, with previous surmise of its possibility in the faithful discharge of duty. We believe that he simply said the truest, and did the rightest from hour to hour, whether it were to live or to die. And if we are to look closely at the immediate causes of the enmity whose victim he became, we find them in the spiritual doctrine which brought him into antagonism with the temple-worship. Of all the witnesses sworn against him, the only ones, it seems, that could produce any impression, were those who reported his saying, Destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another made without hands." 'Only take away the temple of the priest, and in a trice he would raise a religion of the soul. Let him but have dealings direct with the human spirit, audience face to face with its penitence and aspiration; let sacerdotal spies and guards no longer bar the entrance, and interpose before the veil; and he could find an inner shrine not made with hands susceptible of worship deeper, and of graces fairer than had been known before.' Such being, as we take it, the meaning of this sublime sentence, it is plain that he and the ritual hierarchy could not co-exist. It was their human business to kill animals, and burn incense: it was his divine mission to sweep all that away from the approaches to God. His piety was their sacrilege: and as they could call the police of the hour, he, only appeal to the heart of ages ;they gained their tragedy, and the world its redemption.

We believe he was carried forward to this catastrophe by no deliberate plan, no theatrical foresight of history, no theological commiseration for condemned souls; but by the simple necessitation of God's Holy Spirit, the moral necessity to be true and faithful, the affectionate necessity to love and trust. In adherence to these conditions, and from inability to disown the inspiration that owned him, he fell in the way of enmity and death. He forgave the one; he bowed to the other; and simply commended his spirit to him that judgeth righteously. Later and retrospective interpretation invented an economy and project

for all this, and thought to dignify him by making it the artifice of foresight instead of the evolution of nature. But that which God and holy spirits, freely creating forwards, mean only for beauty, love, and goodness-perverse men, reading backwards, turn into mere mechanism, conjuring, and deformity. For ourselves, taking the Divine fact, and rejecting the human version, we turn to the bended head on Calvary, and see in it a holy selfsacrifice, but neither an atonement nor a suicide.

Some misapprehensions of our meaning in the former critique we must leave without correction. We could wish to set ourselves right, especially in respect to the bearing which we have attributed to Christianity towards slavery. But the topic is quite distinct from that which it has been our present purpose to discuss: and to correct the refraction which our sentiments have undergone in passing through Mr. Newman's medium of vision involves so much, that we must content ourselves with simply disclaiming the principles of servility and injustice attributed to us, and professing our hearty concurrence in the indignation poured upon them. As to the character of Christ, our dissent from our acute friend is substantive, and cannot be explained away. After well reflecting on his strictures, we see no reason to renounce our conviction, that, notwithstanding the imperfect medium through which we contemplate the author of our religion, the image is clearly discernible of a most powerful and holy individuality, harmonising opposite tendencies, balancing the affinities between earth and heaven, rich in compassion to suffering and indignation at wrong, denying to self and in close communion with God, and inspired at once to teach the deepest truths of faith and personate the purest elements of goodness.

ART. VI. THEOLOGICAL ESSAYS.

Theological Essays.-By Frederick Denison Maurice, M.A., Chaplain of Lincoln's Inn, &c. Cambridge: Macmillan & Co. 1853.

MR. MAURICE's writings almost always possess, to our mind, an individual influence of their own, of a very rare order. It is a pleasure to read them, quite independently of their theme. They breathe the life and character of a rich and pure mind, utterly possessed by the thoughts it pours forth in such a continuous and rapid stream. When we differ from him, he has not the art of convincing us; but then it is startling to think how very few writers ever do radically overturn any mature system of belief. Slowly and imperceptibly, indeed, even the most deeply-rooted moral systems are modified by the whole surrounding atmosphere of thought, receive external influences into the inner conditions of their constitution, and change quietly with the seasons, shedding, now and then, a leaf that has lost all colour and life before it drops, and varying their outline as new shoots branch slowly out. But a mental revolution and revelation, the bewildering sight of a whole new world of truth,-though the hope of it seldom seems to be quite removed from the mind,-mature intellects scarcely expect, in this life, and seldom indeed experience. Certainly, if it were otherwise, Mr. Maurice's writings would scarcely be remarkable for their power to change conviction and reveal a previously-hidden region of truth. They make no forcible entry into the intellect, and though they exhale a fresh and inspiring influence, there is little fixed, defined, moral current to bear one rapidly on to a determinate conclusion. Often we are not sure that he fully discerns the drift of his own thoughts, and are sure that he does not see, or cannot distinctly exhibit the border-lines within which they flow. But it is always a satisfaction to be under the influence of his mind: and this volume of Essays has conferred on us the fresh intellectual benefit of enabling us to realize, far more clearly than before, how a deep and rich intellect

may invest what seem to us only arid fragments of technical theology, the most lifeless portions of the most lifeless creeds, with a real human interest and sacredness; how a long association with religious truth and emotion, may throw even around Nicene and Athanasian formulas the very spell of that quiet devotion, in the midst of which the English Church is accustomed to summon up those very dreary and unseasonable apparitions. Yet after all, Mr. Maurice's present work only gives us the spiritual vapour of a fine mind. Its elaborate purpose is to prove to Unitarians that Anglican theology is not technical, but the fullest answer to the yearnings of human nature. It seems to us that he has completely failed, that he has only shown clearly that his individual conceptions of it have been suggested by meditative piety, and riveted by constant association; yet even that teaches us how natural it is, in a rich nature, for soft and delicate beauty to overgrow every barren form of thought, till the most sterile fragment, encircled with moss and flower, seems no longer sterile, because it is no longer bare.

Probably the nature of Mr. Maurice's mind is little favourable for the task he has here attempted. Singularly fitted by a very wide power of moral sympathy to enter into prominent aspects of society in times past, and in a less degree into striking types of individual character, his most successful efforts have been devoted to reanimating some simple bygone phase of social faith, to reproducing the temporary attitudes of a nation's mind; as for instance, in his Essays on the "Religions of the World," and on the "Kings and Prophets of the Old Testament." He has the finest perception for vestiges of national character, for catching the moral temper of the past from faint traces, and restoring that vivid practical sympathy between the popular movements of our modern life, and the similar movements of antiquity, which the flight of centuries always tends to extinguish. He does not effect this by restoring the external dress to past ages, and presenting to us the visible scene of action, manners, and superficial character, like Carlyle, but by reproducing the social wants and admirations, the current thoughts and passions, the characteristic temptations, excuses, and sins which used to burst out in social masses then, as they do now, but have CHRISTIAN TEACHER.-No. 62.

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left traces discernible only to the few. Carlyle, with little clue, can reproduce at once, all the striking visible features of the past, all that affects the external life of multitudes, all that engraves itself upon their countenance, and moulds their demeanour. Mr. Maurice, with as little clue, can reproduce the moral secrets of a nation's experience, the temper of their resolution, the trials of their fidelity, the centres of their pride or ambition, their paroxysms of sin.

But the faculty of ready moral sympathy which gives him this fine insight is purely concrete and practical; while he is under the spell of a critical chapter in the actual experience of a nation, or a class, or an individual, he understands thoroughly the mode of feeling, the moral assumptions, the prominent points, the characteristic aspects of the position. Nothing can be more admirable, for instance, than the facility with which he throws himself into the Mahometan phase of faith,-their vivid conception of the Absolute Will, their prostrate attitude before the invisible king, their abject submission to every mandate issued from his throne. Or, to choose an illustration from one of his later works, nothing can be more life-like than his picture of the moral relation between the prophet Samuel and the people of Israel when they ask for a king; the grounds of the prophet's vehement opposition, and the conviction of his moments of higher inspiration, which induces him to relinquish it.

And this kind of subtle moral sympathy gives all the practical insight needed for restoring living interest to social history. But another gift-perhaps not so rare and valuable-but at all events dissimilar-is needed for what Mr. Maurice has attempted in this book. So quick and vigilant a sympathy with the moral state of others is scarcely needed, for he is dealing with current thoughts constantly reiterated, and systematically developed. But as the object of the present work is not to delineate either a phase of faith or character, but to test the truth of a system of belief-at least so far as its adaptation to human nature is concerned-something more than a capacity for dipping into the general spirit of an article of faith, and catching its religious odour, is needful. Mr. Maurice has undertaken to lay bare the roots in human nature of a