short, power is never felt as power, except by those who abuse it. Like other things that awaken desire at a distance, no sooner is it entered than it is found to be not more triumphant happiness, but deeper life; utterly disappointing to him who wants more for himself; ennobling to him who can dispense and administer for God. (From Hours of Thought on Sacred Things.) The Beneficence of Change. If, then, the very law of life is a law of change; if every blossom of beauty has its root in fallen leaves; if love, and thought, and hope would faint beneath too constant light, and need for their freshening the darkness and the dews; if it is in losing the transient that we gain the Eternal, then let us shrink no more from sorrow and sigh no more for rest, but have a genial welcome for vicissitude, and make quiet friends with loss and Death. Through storm and calm, fresh be our courage and quick our eye for the various service that may await us. Nay, when God himself turns us not hither and thither, when he sends us no changes for us to receive and consecrate, be it ours to create them for ourselves, by flinging ourselves into generous enterprises and worthy sacrifice; by the stirrings of sleepless aspiration, and all the spontaneous vicissitudes of holy and progressive souls; keeping always the moral spaces round us pure and fresh by the constant thought of truth and the frequent deed of love. And then, when, for us too, death closes the great series of mortal changes, the past will lie behind us green and sweet as Eden, and the future before us in the light of eternal peace. Tranquil and fearless we shall resign ourselves to God, to conduct us through that ancient and invisible way, which has been sanctified by the feet of all the faithful, and illumined by the passage of the Man of griefs. (From Hours of Thought on Sacred Things.) God in Humanity. : Divine guidance has never and nowhere failed to men; nor has it ever, in the most essential things, largely differed amongst them but it has not always been recognised as divine, much less as the living contact of Spirit with spirit-the communion of affection between God and man. While conscience remained an impersonal law, stern and silent, with only a jealous Nemesis behind, man had to stand up alone, and work out for himself his independent magnanimity; and he could only be the pagan hero. When conscience was found to be inseparably blended with the Holy Spirit, and to speak in tones immediately divine, it became the very shrine of worship: its strife, its repentance, its aspirations, passed into the incidents of a living drama with its crises of alienation and reconcilement; and the cold obedience to a mysterious necessity was exchanged for the allegiance of personal affection. And this is the true emergence from the darkness of ethical law to the tender light of the life divine. The veil falls from the shadowed face of moral authority, and the directing love of the all-holy God shines forth. (From The Seat of Authority in Religion.) Two excellent works have been written about Dr Martineaunamely, James Martineau, a Biography and Study, by A. W. Jackson, A. M. (1900); and The Life and Letters of James Martineau, by James Drummond, LL.D., Litt. D., and C. B. Upton, B.A., B.Sc. (2 vols. 1902). In the latter the full and accurate history of the career of Dr Martineau is not more important than Mr Upton's admirable critical estimate of his mental progress and ultimate philosophical standpoint. WALTER LEWIN. Richard Chenevix Trench (1807-86), Archbishop of Dublin, was born at Dublin, and passed from Harrow in 1825 to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1829. After a voyage to Gibraltar (its object to fight in the cause of Spanish liberty), he took orders and became curate at Hadleigh, incumbent of Curdridge, and in 1841 curate at Alverstoke to Samuel Wilberforce, afterwards Bishop of Oxford and of Winchester. During 1835-55 he published seven volumes of poetry-The Story of Justin Martyr, Sabbation, Genoveva, &c. In 1845 he became rector of Itchenstoke; in 1847 theological professor in King's College, London; in 1856 Dean of Westminster; and in 1864 Archbishop of Dublin, an office which he resigned in 1884. He died in London, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In philology Trench contrived to fascinate his readers with the 'fossil poetry and fossil history imbedded in language;' his English Past and Present (1855) and Select Glossary of English Words (1859) are among the most suggestive and entertaining works on the subject, though critical studies in English have been greatly developed since his time, and some of his etymological His ecclesiconclusions are no longer tenable. astical scholarship is shown in his Lectures on Medieval Church History (1877) and his Sacred Latin Poetry (1855), which, in spite of some serious imperfections, is still the best English anthology of the hymns of the Medieval Church. Notes on the Parables (1841), Notes on the Miracles (1846), and Studies on the Gospels (1867) are among his best-known theological works. His verses show culture and fine feeling, but do not secure for him distinction as a poet. On Proverbs. The fact that they please the people, and have pleased them for ages; that they possess so vigorous a principle of life as to have maintained their ground, ever new and ever young, through all the centuries of a nation's existence-nay, that many of them have pleased not one nation only, but many, so that they have made themselves a home in the most different lands; and further, that they have, not a few of them, come down to us from remotest antiquity, borne safely upon the waters of that great stream of time, which has swallowed so much beneath its waves-all this, I think, may well make us pause should we be tempted to turn away from them with anything of indifference or disdain. And then, further, there is this to be considered, that some of the greatest poets, the profoundest philosophers, the most learned scholars, the most genial writers in every kind, have delighted in them, have made large and frequent use of them, have bestowed infinite labour on the gathering and elucidating of them. In a fastidious age, indeed, and one of false refinement, they may go nearly or quite out of use among the so-called upper classes. No gentleman, says Lord Chesterfield, or 'No man of fashion,' as I think is his exact word, 'ever uses a proverb.' And with how fine a touch of nature Shakespeare makes Coriolanus, the man who with all his greatness is entirely devoid of all sympathy for the people, to utter his scorn of them in scorn of their proverbs, and of their frequent employment of these : Hang ’em ! They said they were an-hungry, sighed forth proverbs; That, hunger broke stone walls; that, dogs must eat; That, meat was made for mouths; that, the gods sent not Corn for the rich men only. With these shreds They vented their complainings.' Coriolanus, Act i. sc. 1. But that they have been always dear to the true intellectual aristocracy of a nation there is abundant evidence to prove. Take but these three names in evidence, which, though few, are in themselves a host. Aristotle made a collection of proverbs; nor did he count that he was herein doing ought unworthy of his great reputation, however some of his adversaries may have made this a charge against him. He is said to have been the first who did so, though many afterwards followed in the same path. Shakespeare loves them so well that, besides often citing them, and innumerable covert allusions, rapid side-glances at them, which we are in danger of missing unless at home in the proverbs of England, several of his plays, as Measure for Measure, All's Well that Ends Well, have popular proverbs for their titles. And Cervantes, a name only inferior to Shakespeare, has not left us in doubt in respect of the affection with which he regarded them. Every reader of Don Quixote will remember his squire, who sometimes cannot open his mouth but there drop from it almost as many proverbs as words. I might name others who held the proverb in honour - men who, though they may not attain to these first three, are yet deservedly accounted great; as Plautus, the most genial of Latin poets; Rabelais and Montaigne, the two most original of French authors; and how often Fuller, whom Coleridge has styled the wittiest of writers, justifies this praise in his witty employment of some old proverb; nor can any thoroughly understand and enjoy Hudibras, no one but will miss a multitude of its keenest allusions, who is not thoroughly familiar with the proverbial literature of England. . . . Our own Make hay while the sun shines is truly English, and could have had its birth only under such variable skies as ours-not certainly in those southern lands where, during the summer-time at least, the sun always shines. In the same way there is a fine Cornish proverb in regard of obstinate wrongheads, who will take no counsel except from calamities, who dash themselves to pieces against obstacles which, with a little prudence and foresight, they might have avoided. It is this: He who will not be ruled by the rudder must be ruled by the rock. It sets us at once upon some rocky and wreck-strewn coast; we feel that it could never have been the proverb of an inland people. Do not talk Arabic in the house of a Moor-that is, because there thy imperfect knowledge will be detected at once-this we should confidently affirm to be Spanish, wherever we met it. Big and empty, like the Heidelberg tun, could have its home only in Germany; that enormous vessel known as the Heidelberg tun, constructed to contain nearly 300,000 flasks, having now stood empty for hundreds of years. As regards, too, the following, Not every parish priest can wear Dr Luther's shoes, we could be in no doubt to what people it appertains. Neither could there be any mistake about this solemn Turkish proverb, Death is a black camel which kneels at every man's gate, in so far at least as that it would be at once ascribed to the East. Gibraltar. England, we love thee better than we know- Joy was it and exultation to behold Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815-81) was born at Alderley Rectory, Cheshire, the second son of the future Bishop of Norwich, who was one of the Stanleys of Alderley, and related therefore to the Earls of Derby. At Rugby (1829-34) he was the favourite pupil of Dr Arnold and the original of George Arthur in Tom Brown's Schooldays; at Balliol College, Oxford, he won the Ireland and the Newdigate, and graduated with a first class in 1837. In 1839 he was elected a Fellow of University College, and took orders, becoming successively canon of Canterbury (1851), Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, canon of Christ Church, and chaplain to the Bishop of London (1858); and Dean of Westminster (1864). He was also chaplain to the Prince of Wales (whom he accompanied on his tour in the East, 1862) and chaplain-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. He was the most prominent figure in the Broad Church movement, and scandalised High Churchmen by championing Colenso, preaching in Scottish Presbyterian pulpits, and administering the Eucharist to Unitarian and Presbyterian revisers of the Bible. Probably nothing gave more offence than his vigorous denunciations of the compulsory use in religious worship of the (so-called) Athanasian Creed. A popular preacher, he was also a favourite at Court: he celebrated the English marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, and it was in his house that Carlyle met Queen Victoria. Dean Stanley's principal works are- The Life of Dr Arnold (1844), one of the best of English biographies; Sermons and Essays on the Apostolical Age (1846); Memoir of Bishop Stanley, his father (1850); The Epistles to the Corinthians (1854), his one purely theological work; Sinai and Palestine in connection with their History (1855), containing some of his most attractive writing; Historical Memorials of Canterbury (1855); Lectures on the Eastern Church (1861); History of the Jewish Church (1863-76); the delightful Historical Memorials of Westminster Abbey (1866); and Lectures on the Church of Scotland (1872). His main aim as a Christian divine and as a Churchman was to promote mutual understanding and sympathy between the most opposed schools of thought; he always maintained that the essence of Christianity was practically independent of dogma, rites, or ceremonies. He not merely contended for toleration, denouncing with equal warmth the prosecution of ritualists and of rationalists, but insisted earnestly on such wide 'comprehension' in the National Church as to make enemies within and without, and even disciples and friends, doubt whether such comprehension could be attained without the effacement of essential belief. The charm of his character and the beauty of his charity did more to conciliate esteem than his logic to enforce conviction: his personal influence was weightier than his books, of Rising wild amidst garden shrubs [is] the solitary obelisk which stood in front of the temple, then in company with another, whose base alone now remains. This is the first obelisk I have seen standing in its proper place, and there it has stood for nearly four thousand years. It is the oldest known in Egypt, and therefore in the world-the father of all that have arisen since. It was raised about a century before the coming of Joseph; it has looked down on his marriage with Asenath; it has seen the growth of Moses; it is mentioned by Herodotus; Plato sat under its shadow of : all the obelisks which sprang up around it, it alone has kept its first position. One by one, it has seen its sons and brothers depart to great destinies elsewhere. From these gardens came the obelisks of the Lateran, of the Vatican, and of the Porta del Popolo; and this venerable pillar (for so it looks from a distance) is now almost the only landmark of the great seat of the wisdom of Egypt. (From Sinai and Palestine, I. xxxiv.) The Children of the Desert. The relation of the Desert to its modern inhabitants is still illustrative of its ancient history. The general name by which the Hebrews called 'the wilderness,' including always that of Sinai, was 'the pasture.' Bare as the surface of the Desert is, yet the thin clothing of vegetation, which is seldom entirely withdrawn, especially the aromatic shrubs on the high hillsides, furnishes sufficient sustenance for the herds of the six thousand Bedouins who constitute the present population of the peninsula : 'Along the mountain ledges green, The scattered sheep at will may glean So were they seen following the daughters or the shep- of his better self and of God's grace against these evil habits. Often he struggled and often he fell; but he had two advantages which again and again have saved souls from ruin-advantages which no one who enjoys them (and how many of us do enjoy them!) can prize too highly-he had a good mother and he had good friends. He had a good mother, who wept for him, and prayed for him, and warned him, and gave him that advice which only a mother can give, forgotten for the moment, but remembered afterwards. And he had good friends, who watched every opportunity to encourage better thoughts, and to bring him to his better self. In this state of struggle and failure he came to the city of Milan, where the Christian community was ruled by a man of fame almost equal to that which he himself afterwards won, the celebrated Ambrose. And now the crisis of his life was come, and it shall be described in his own words. He was sitting with his friend; his whole soul was shaken with the violence of his inward conflict-the conflict of breaking away from his evil habits, from his evil associates, to a life which seemed to him poor, and profitless, and burdensome. Silently the two friends sat together, and at last, says Augustine, when deep reflection had brought together and heaped up all my misery in the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm of grief, bringing a mighty shower of tears.' He left his friend, that he might weep in solitude; he threw himself down under a fig tree in the garden (the spot is still pointed out in Milan), and he cried in the bitterness of his spirit, 'How long? how long?-to-morrow? to-morrow? Why not now? -why is there not this hour an end to my uncleanness?' 'So was I speaking and weeping in the contrition of my heart,' he says, 'when, lo! I heard from a neighbouring house a voice as of a child, chanting and oft repeating, "Take up and read; take up and read." Instantly my countenance altered; I began to think whether children were wont in play to sing such words, nor could I remember ever to have heard the like. So, checking my tears, I rose, taking it to be a command from God to open the book and read the first chapter I should find.' . . . There lay the volume of St Paul's Epistles, which he had just begun to study. 'I seized it,' he says; 'I opened it, and in silence I read that passage on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying. But put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, to fulfil the lusts thereof." No further could I read, nor needed I; for instantly, at the end of this sentence, by a serene light infused into my soul, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.' We need not follow the story further. We know how he broke off all his evil courses; how his mother's heart was rejoiced; how he was baptised by the great Ambrose; how the old tradition describes their singing together, as he came up from the baptismal waters, the alternate verses of the hymn called from its opening words Te Deum Laudamus. We know how the profligate African youth was thus transformed into the most illustrious saint of the Western Church, how he lived long as the light of his own generation, and how his works have been cherished and read by good men, perhaps more extensively than those of any Christian teacher since the Apostles. It is a story instructive in many ways. It is an example, like the conversion of St Paul, of the fact that from time to time God calls See Life by Mr R. E. Prothero and Dean Bradley (1894); Stanley's Letters and Verses, edited by Prothero (1895); and Recollections of A. P. Stanley, by Dean Bradley (1883). Henry Alford (1810-71), born in London, in 1829 entered Trinity College, Cambridge, and having taken a good degree, in 1834 gained a fellowship. Incumbent of Wymeswold, Leicestershire (1835-53), and then of Quebec Chapel, London, in 1857 he became Dean of Canterbury. Besides upwards of a hundred articles, some of them contributed to the Contemporary Review, of which he was the first editor (1866-70), he published near fifty volumes, among them, besides collected sermons and hymns, The School of the Heart and Other Poems (1835), Chapters on the Greek Poets (1841), A Plea for the Queen's English (1863), and an annotated Greek Testament (4 vols. 1844-60), which largely followed the German critics, represented 'moderate liberal' views on inspiration, and was long the standard work in England. Several of his hymns are widely popular, as 'Come, ye thankful people, come,' ' Forward be our watchword,''Ten thousand times ten thousand.' There is a Life of him by his widow (1873). Norman Macleod (1812-72) was the third in a succession of Scottish parish ministers bearing the same name—the grandfather in Morven, the father in Campbeltown and next in the Gaelic church in Glasgow, the grandson first at Loudoun in Ayrshire, then after the Disruption of 1843 at Dalkeith, and finally from 1851 in the Barony Parish of Glasgow. Spite of many sympathies with Chalmers and the Evangelicals, the third Norman clung in 1843 to the idea of the National Church, helped greatly to build up the Establishment after the staggering blow of the Disruption, and was erelong recognised as a leader of the Church. An eloquent preacher, he became a royal chaplain in 1857, and was the intimate and valued friend of Queen Victoria and her family. His liberal sympathies led him to protest against the more rigid Sabbatarianism as Jewish rather than Christian, and his views on the historic significance of the 'decalogue quâ decalogue' raised in 1866 suspicion of his orthodoxy. But in 1867 the Assembly honoured him with a commission to visit the mission field in India, and in 1869 raised him to the Moderator's chair. For many years he edited the Christian Instructor; but it was as first editor of Good Words (1860) that he became known to the reading public not merely as a tactful and enterprising editor, but as a constant contributor of stories and miscellaneous articles, some of which were also published as books. His genial manliness and somewhat of his gifts of humour and pathos are reflected in his stories, which are, however, rather lacking in power and literary finish. Wee Davie and The Starling are short tales of Scottish domestic life; The Old Lieutenant and his Son (1862) is on a larger canvas, but hardly so successful. He wrote also a biography of a cousin, The Earnest Student (1854), Reminiscences of a Highland Parish (his grandfather's, 1867), books or addresses on parochial needs and social duties, and records of two Oriental tours. Of his verses, a curling song became popular, and a religious poem, 'Courage, brother! do not stumble,' was at once admitted into British hymn-books, and is now regularly sung as a hymn. There is a Life of him (1876) by his brother, Dr Donald Macleod, who succeeded him as editor of Good Words. James M'Cosh (1811-94), an exponent of the Scottish philosophy, was an Ayrshire farmer's son who, becoming a minister of the Church of Scotland, joined the Free Church (in which he held several cures), in 1851 was appointed Professor of Logic at Belfast, and from 1868 to 1888 was president of Princeton College in the United States. His Method of the Divine Government (1850; 9th ed. 1867) was followed by The Intuitions of the Mind (1860); and in these and in an examination of Mill (1866) he defended what he considered the Natural Realism of Reid against both the empirical school and the relativist views of Kant, Hamilton, and Mansel. He published also a comprehensive work on The Scottish Philosophy (1875), and books on psychology, evolution, fundamental truths, and morals. James Spedding (1808–81) was born at Mirehouse near Bassenthwaite, 26th June 1808, the younger son of a Cumberland squire. From Bury St Edmunds he passed in 1827 to Trinity College, Cambridge, of which he became a scholar, and of which at his death he had long been an honorary Fellow. From 1835 to 1841 he held a post at the Colonial Office; in 1842 he attended Lord Ashburton to America as private sercretary; and in 1847 he might, had he chosen, have become Under-Secretary of State, with £2000 a year. But he had already devoted himself to the task of his life-' to re-edit Bacon's works, which did not want any such re-edition, and to vindicate Bacon's character, which could not be vindicated.' So wrote Edward FitzGerald, the oldest of Spedding's many brilliant friends-Tennyson and Carlyle were also of the number—and he added: 'He was the wisest man I have known; not the less so for plenty of the boy in him; a great sense of humour; a Socrates in life and death, which he faced with all serenity so long as consciousness lasted.' It was in St George's Hospital that Spedding died, on 9th March 1881, having eight days before been run over by a cab. Hardly any writer of equal parts and eminence is so completely identified with the one work to which he chose to devote his best energies for thirty years the study of Lord Bacon, the editing of his works, and the writing of his life. In Evenings with a Reviewer (written in 1845, but privately printed) he had little difficulty in showing, not without caustic comments, that Macaulay was not justified in the very low view he took of Bacon's character. It was Spedding who did by far the principal part of the magistral edition of Bacon's Works (7 vols. 1857-59) undertaken in conjunction with Ellis and Heath; the accompanying Life and Letters (also in 7 vols. 1861-74), pronounced by Carlyle (who ought to be a judge on that point at least) 'the hugest and faithfullest bit of literary navvy work I have met with in this generation,' was all Spedding's own. The general conclusion of more recent critics is that Spedding is decidedly too favourable to Bacon, and is on some points even an apologist -the shorter works by Dean Church (1884) and Dr Abbott (1885) are useful commentaries on Spedding's arguments and conclusions, which must, however, always receive respectful consideration, and, as against Macaulay, are in large measure universally accepted. Sir Leslie Stephen has said that 'Spedding's qualities are in curious contrast with Macaulay's brilliant audacity, and yet the trenchant exposure of Macaulay's misrepresentations is accompanied by a quiet humour and a shrewd critical faculty which, to a careful reader, make the book more interesting than its rival.' Spedding produced in 1878, in two volumes, an abridged and popularised Life and Times of Francis Bacon. He was one of the first scholars seriously to examine-and denounce-the attribution to Bacon of Shakespeare's plays. No man, he summed up, who knew Bacon's work and Shakespeare's well could ever mistake five lines of the one for five lines of the other. Other works are a pamphlet on Publishers and Authors (1867), Reviews and Discussions not relating to Bacon (1879; reprints from serials), and a share in the Studies in English History, mostly written by Mr James Gairdner (1881). There is a Life by Venables prefixed to the 1882 edition of Evenings with a Reviewer. The following short extract shows Spedding's method of dealing with the crucial question of Bacon and Bribery. I know nothing more inexplicable than Bacon's unconsciousness of the state of his own case, unless it be the case itself. That he, of all men, whose fault had always been too much carelessness about money—who, though always too ready to borrow, to give, to lend, and to spend, had never been either a bargainer, or a grasper, or a hoarder, and whose professional experience must have continually reminded him of the peril of meddling with anything that could be construed into corruption-that he should have allowed himself on any account to accept money from suitors while their cases were before him is wonderful. That he should have done it without feeling at the time that he was laying himself open to a charge of what in law would be called bribery is more wonderful still. That he should have done it often, and not lived under an abiding sense of insecurity-from the consciousness that he had secrets to conceal, of which the disclosure would be fatal to his reputation, yet the safe keeping did not rest |