Returning to Oxford from such society must have been a little like going back to the Middle Ages; but Stanley's work lay there, and how admirably he did it is recounted at length by his biographer. The third Hampden agitation. in the end of 1847, called him once again into action as a defender of a persecuted, although most uninteresting. man. Some time before that he had become Select Preacher, and delivered the four sermons afterward published in his volume on the Apostolical Age. I heard only the last of them, that on St. John, preached in St. Mary's on January 31st, 1847, and it certainly appeared to me. then incomparably the best sermon to which I had ever listened. At the same time, I should hardly agree with the view put forth by Mr. Prothero in commenting upon this portion of Stanley's life. He evidently thinks that the movement of 1833 was an interruption to the course of progress on which Oxford was entering before that date. I consider that, given the traditions of English religious life, it was quite inevitable, and that, although the immediate aims of its promoters were mistaken in almost every particular, they have yet produced indirect results of the greatest moment, or, to put it in the words used by the late Master of Balliol to Lord Arthur Russell, a Liberal of the Liberals, who had never been in the slightest degree affected by the English High Church Movement, but had grown up almost entirely under German influ ences, "We must admit that if the High Church Movement had not taken place the English life of to-day would have lost a great deal of beauty and richness.' Stanley came as a power upon the scene just at the right moment. There was a dramatic propriety in his appearing as Select Preacher about the time that Newman's Essay on Development appeared, a book of whose last page he said that it seemed to him "one of the most affecting passages ever written by an uninspired pen.' Up to this time he had given no very special attention to politics; but a passage on page 346 about Peel's speech on his last night of power may be quoted as showing the general drift of his opinions. Writing of it, he said: "No return of Cicero from exile, no triumphal procession up to the temple of Capitoline Jove, no Appius Claudius in the Roman Senate, no Chatham dying in the House of Lords, could have been a truly grander sight than that great Minister retiring from Office, giving to the whole world Free Trade with one hand, and universal peace with the other, and casting under foot the miserable factions which had dethroned him. 'E'en at the base of Pompey's statue Which all the while ran blood, great Cæsar fell.' So I write, the metaphor being suggested by an eye-witness, who told me it was Mark Antony's speech over Cæsar's body, but spoken by Cæsar himself." The outbreak of the Revolution of 1848 much quickened his interest in secular affairs. He took an early opportunity of visiting Paris and was there when the formidable movement of April 16th occurred. A good many extracts are given from his letters to friends in England from the French capital, but fewer than I should like to see, for the events of those days, to say nothing of their world-wide consequences, had important special effects both on Stanley himself and on Oxford generally, doing much to divert the attention of both from a too exclusive pre-occupation with theological questions. Stanley returned to Paris in October, 1848, and saw the reflux of the great tidal wave which had overwhelmed the Government of Louis Philippe. He was exceedingly impressed by it, almost too much indeed, for I remember a striking sermon which he preached before the University in the February of 1849, in which he contrasted the deep calm which then prevailed with the agitations of the year before, not foreseeing the tremendous storm then about to break over Central Europe, which was only stilled by the intervention of Russia. Various important changes took place about this time in his private life. His father died in August, 1849, his younger brother in the December of that year, and his elder brother in the beginning of 1850. He succeeded also to a small landed property which made it impossible for him to retain his fellowship, and so lost his home at University College. He was offered, and refused, the Deanery of Carlisle, but accepted a Canonry at Canterbury and became secretary to the University Commission which was appointed in 1850 to inquire into the detestable old system which had long prevented Oxford taking her proper place among the Universities of Christendom. He left University College for Canterbury with many and poignant regrets, but the great cathedral city soon engaged his affections. The publication of the report of the University Commission in 1852 set him free to carry into effect a project, which he had long had in his mind, of making a journey in the East. He started for the South of Europe in the August of that year, returned for a brief period to England, during which he attended the funeral of the Duke of Wellington, and got fairly away in December. In due time he landed in Egypt and began the journey which resulted in Sinai and Palestine. After leaving Syria, on his return journey, he made his way north by Smyrna and Ephesus to Constantinople, whence he visited Nicæa, getting back to England in June, 1853, and, having now forgotten all his regrets for Oxford, threw himself heartily into his work at Canterbury, one side of which was soon reflected to the world in his Memorials, published in December, 1854. His lecture in that volume on the murder of Becket most especially interested him. He had pictured to himself so vividly the details of that event that, when he took me over the scene of it, he left on my mind the impression that if he had not taken part in the murder he had at least known a great deal too much about it. In the summer of 1855 he published his Epistles to the Corinthians, a companion work to his friend Jowett's Commentary on the Thessalonians, Galatians, and Romans. While engaged, to some extent, with these books he was still more busy with Sinai and Palestine, which appeared in the spring of 1856, and which is, on the whole, the best of his works. I read it when it first appeared, and wrote what he told me was the first favorable review he had seen of it. I re-read a great part of it after an interval of more than thirty years on my way home from India, on the Red Sea and at Jerusalem in the winter of 1886, and I re-read the whole of it in the winter of 1887 at the foot of Mount Carmel. Much attention to these subjects had altered many of my views about them in the space of a generation as it had, I imagine, the views of most laymen. Nevertheless, although I should disagree with a very large number of the statements which the book contains, and should consider it rather as a poem and a geographical work than as a contribution to history, there is hardly a paragraph or a sentence in it that does not seem to me well-deserving to be read. An amusing interchange of letters, which will be found near the end of the first volume, took place between Stanley and his famous contemporary, the author of the Christian Year, with regard to this book. Stanley had the deepest possible affection, as he well might, for what is, after all, the most characteristic product of the Anglican Church, and wrote to Mr. Keble, sending him a copy of Sinai and Palestine. That excellent man, however, although one of the sweetest of sacred poets, was an exceedingly narrow theologian, ignorant as a babe of all that had been done by the Protestant Churches of the Continent to throw light upon the history either of the Old or of the New Testament, and alike upon this as upon all other occasions, he received the advances of Stanley with the greatest possible coolness. The revenge of the late Dean of Westminster and of his tolerant and comprehensive spirit working on his successor has been highly characteristic. Let any one who stands with his back to the Western door of the Great Abbey turn to the right, and he will find himself in a small chapel, the Baptistery, in which Mr. Keble's monument is not only watched by Maurice and Kingsley, who to him were little better than Abaddon and Apollyon, but in which he has right opposite to him the bust of his godson, Matthew Arnold, who had certainly wandered very much further from what he would have considered the paths of orthodoxy than either of these two redoubtable heresiarchs. In the end of 1856 Stanley was appointed Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, and delivered his three inaugural lectures in the February of 1857. About a year afterward he left Canterbury, as sorry to go away from it as he had been to go thither some years before. Before, however, settling into his new house as Canon of Christ church he made an agreeable tour in Sweden and a highly important one in Russia, which formed the groundwork of, and the incitement to, his Lectures on the Eastern Church. Of this tour there is too brief an account in these volumes, for it was not only full of instruction to him, but had a great deal of influence on his whole way of thinking of Christendom in his later life. He had the experience which must, I think, fall to the lot of every one who, occupied with the political and religious problems which are presented by Europe, but having looked at them hitherto only from the West, stands for the first time in the Kremlin and scans the future with the eyes of the East. Some time passed before he succeeded in re-acclimatizing himself on the banks of the Isis, but by 1860 all his old love for Oxford had returned. Such lectures had never before been given by a Professor of Ecclesiastical History in that University, and gradually he began to produce a very great effect upon his students. One serious drawback he noticed that the flower of the intelligence of the place had ceased to take Orders. This is a mischief which has gone on increasing, and will go from bad to worse until subscription is much more relaxed and the bond becomes a promise to abide by certain rules, not to hold certain opinions, more especially when they relate to subjects about which the best opinion is merely a conjecture. The happy tenor of his Oxford life was varied by his being involved in various controversies-as, for instance, that concerning the appointment to the Boden Sanskrit Professorship, in which 66 his friend Max Müller was defeated by a rally of all the least sensible people in the Oxford Convocation, not because they had any views on the comparative merits as an Orientalist, either of him or his very respectable opponent, but because Max Müller was closely connected with the Liberal Party in the University, and the majority in Convocation abhorred nothing so much as what one of them beautifully described as that d -d intellect." He also warmly defended the cause of toleration when the person assailed was a wellintentioned but injudicious member of the High Church Party-then Rector of St. George's in the East-who had excited the alarm of some of his parishioners by changes in the Ritual, an alarm which soon developed into outrage and riot under the guidance of raging partisans. In this dispute Stanley only intervened from the instincts of a peace-maker, but with the quarrel about Essays and Reviews he was connected much more nearly, for Dr. Temple, the present Bishop of London, was his friend, and Jowett was almost his most intimate friend. Mr. Prothero has found it necessary to tell, at some length, the whole story of the battle royal which took place over a work which now looks the very incarnation of harmlessness; but it is not necessary to follow him; the two names I have just cited are sufficient. Dr. Temple has for many years held one of the most influential Sees in the English Episcopate, and the disappearance from this earthly scene of the late Master of Balliol has called forth so deep and general a feeling throughout society, that we may safely say that the fight in which they were protagonists has resulted in victory for them all along the line. Visits to Spain, Denmark, Hungary, and Mount Athos were useful relaxations amid heavy labors, professorial and controversial, all of them adding much to Stanley's intellectual equipment; but no considerable change in his life took place until, soon after the death of Prince Consort, it was arranged that he should accompany the Prince of Wales to the East. The story of his second journey in the lands to which he had already devoted so much time and thought is pleasantly told in two chap ters of the second volume-the 18th and "You will not wonder that I find life very dull, a burden which I can bear cheerfully but which I would gladly lay down." He left Oxford to go to the East in the midst of a tempest about Essays and Reviews, and he had hardly got back there when this tempest was intensified by the publication of Bishop .Colenso's first volume. His steady defence of the Bishop of Natal was infinitely creditable to him, for it would have been difficult to have found in the year 1862 two distinguished Anglican ecclesiastics whose intellects, tastes, and temperaments had less in common. Bishop Colenso was one of the most arithmetical, Dean Stanley one of the least arithmetical, of the reasoning creatures of God. The one seemed born to lead a regiment of grenadiers; the other, though diagged into strife by attacks upon himself and his friends, was essentially a man of peace: the one had a hard positive intelligence; the other the eye and the heart of a poet. They shared, in fact, no leading characteristics save the love of what ap. peared to each of them to be the truth, and the fact that on the tombs of both of them might with great propriety have been inscribed the words which were once used with reference to the great Italian, Gioberti, "Bienheureux ceux qui ont faim et soif de la justice, car ils seront rassasiés." In some very interesting letters addressed to the Bishop which are reproduced in these volumes, Stanley brought out very clearly the totally different way in which they approached the study of the Old Testament. The Bishop, revolted by the absurdities of the old fashioned methods of interpretation in which he had been brought up, had too much the air of one who was attacking the documents themselves which had been so foolishly interpreted while Stanley, who had never paid much attention to the follies of popular expositors, only concerned himself with bringing out whatever of best and most beautiful he found or thought he found in those venerable records. Yet when the cyclone burst, when the Metropolitan of Cape Town, who had exactly as much power to depose, censure, or to excommunicate Bishop Colenso as Bishop Colenso had to depose, censure, or to excommunicate him, affected to do so, Stanley throughout upheld the sound legal doctrine which was triumphantly vindicated by the Privy Council, the only tribunal which had a right to speak decisively on such a matter. Not less creditable was his steady defence of the position of the Ritualists. With them he had even less sympathy, if possible, than he had with the Bishop of Natal, yet he steadily stood by them because, although their lights and vestments and postures said nothing important to him, and although he did not believe in some of the doctrines of which these things were the external signs, yet he considered that the great glory of the Anglican Communion was its width, or, in other words, that the wise compromise enforced by Elizabeth had enabled the Lion of Rome and the Bear of Geneva to lie down side by side, pro. vided always they kept the peace toward each other. His own views at this period are well set forth in three sermons "On the Bible, its form and substance," which he published, and which unconsciously replied, from his point of view, to the questions raised by the Bishop of Natal, as did also the first volume of his Lectures on the History of the Jewish Church. That work was not completed for many years, but I may say a word here about it. It is unquestionably a delightful book, a book which every one ought to read and from which no one is likely to rise without a great many new and fruitful ideas. The author, however, is always thinking too much of the edification of his hearers, too little of merely repre senting the facts as they seem to him to have occurred. It is the Bible History seen under a painted window and not by mere white light. Renan's Histoire du Peuple d'Israël may be erroneous in many particulars. The next century, or some still more distant century, may produce a much better book; but at least its author has approached his subject more as a narrator, much less as a teacher. It is in no way a "Tendenzschrift; the other is. As if Stanley had not troubles enough already, he had soon to occupy himself with a direct attack which was made about this time upon one who, as I have already remarked, was almost his most intimate friend. Dr. Pusey, of whom Pío Nono said so well to Stanley in words originally used by Abraham à Santa Clara, that he was like a church bell, "Il sonne, il sonne, il sonne, mais il n'entre pas dans l'Eglise," had the folly in 1862 to league himself with two men, who had done their best in former days to crush him, with a view to prosecute Jowett for heresy in the Vice-Chancellor's Court at Oxford. This outrageous proceeding annoyed Stanley grievously until he convinced himself that the prosecutors would not be able to effect much. It scandalized all reasonable men. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, probably about the most cautious of Liberal Statesmen, sent a message to a young Liberal Member on his own side, asking him to bring in a Bill to quash the jurisdiction pendente lite. The person to whom he applied sent back to say, that he would like to consult Stanley before taking so strong a 66 measure. Stanley thought that it would be dangerous to do so, believing that the Anti-Liberal Party would be strong enough to be able to substitute a more powerful Court of Heresy for a very weak one. This was communicated to Sir George Corne wall Lewis, who replied, "I should like to see the House of Commons institute a new Court of Heresy." Before, however, anything definite was done, the ridiculous instrument of oppression which had been set in motion against Jowett broke down, so to speak, by its own weight, and turned out to be as obsolete in law as it had all along been in reason. In the year 1863, a good deal through Stanley's influence, the question of subscription was agitated in the House of Commons, and the foundation was laid for the settlement of 1865, which, imperfect as it was, has lasted to our own time. 66 Ever since the death of the Prince Consort, Stanley had been becoming more and more connected with the Court. On December 23d, 1863, he married Lady Augusta Bruce; and in January, 1864, he was installed as Dean of Westminster. This was the last of his great migrations. From the beginning of 1864 to his death, seventeen years afterward, the Deanery at Westminster was his home, and, ably seconded by his wife, he did all that in him lay to make it a centre of good influences for rich and poor. Here, too, he suffered not a little from the contradiction of sinners," but the Dean of Westminster has an exceptionally strong position, and silly or malignant people attacked him in vain. One of his first. acts was to organize a series of sermons in the Abbey by the heads of the different ecclesiastical parties. Many responded to his call, but Dr. Pusey and Dr. Liddon both refused to do so at first, though the good feeling of the latter led him subsequently to accept the Dean's invitation. Stanley defended Essays and Reviews as well as Bishop Colenso in Convocation. He supported the Ritualists in the same assembly. He rejoiced in the acquittal of the High Church Mr. Bennett, who had been assailed by Low Church fanatics, almost as heartily as he did at the termination of the long and disgraceful attempt to prevent Jowett receiving his legitimate salary as Professor of Greek, and much more than he did at his own election to be Select Preacher in the teeth of a stupid, but numerous, opposition. opened the Nave to the lectures of eminent layman, such as Professor Max Müller, and to eminent clergymen of other Protestant churches, such as Principal Tulloch of St. Andrews. He had Sebastian Bach's Passion Music performed as a portion of the Good Friday service. He encouraged the interment in the Abbey of many of the most distinguished Englishmen who died during his tenure of office. He restored the Chapter House, the cradle Не |