purely supernatural terms.

But the Unitarian was more theological-i.e., it seized the conception of deity, emphasized and criticised the incredibilities of the orthodox idea of God, and endeavored to accommodate the idea of Him to the reason which deism had done so much to make shallow and superficial. The changes had been accomplished mainly by the extraordinary and aggressive energy of Priestley, and corresponded to the adoption of a philosophy which agreed more with his doctrines than with the traditions of his Church. That philosophy was empirical, especially as empiricism had been interpreted by Hartley, and seriously modified the fundamental ideas of "spirit" as applied to God and of "soul" as used of man. But Priestley's philosophy, though it had all the aggressive qualities of his combative and not always tolerant personality, had been worked into harmony with the doctrines which had been called Socinian and were now coming to be known as Unitarian. The change of emphasis, though its effect did not at once appear, could not but modify the traditional ideas. These had avowedly been built upon the Scriptures and assumed their authority. This authority the new philosophy had at first made all the more necessary. The empiricism which deduces religious ideas from impressions of sense has to deal with this fundamental problem;-grant that man is without any ideas till the senses convey them into his understanding, how shall the knowledge of God and the obligations of religion be got into his mind? This made it all the more necessary that the grand organ of religious knowledge should be outward, authoritative, created by the act and the inspiration of God. Hence the Unitarian was most conservative in his interpretation and-as we may now say-though it was not said then, deferential in his use of Scripture. Some

most conservative as well as enlightened critics were reckoned by Dr. Martineau among his spiritual ancestry. Thus he spoke of one of his tutors as "a master of the true Lardner type," referring to Nathaniel Lardner whose discussions on "The credibility of the Gospel History" made William Paley's "Evidences of Christianity" possible. But besides the authority of Scripture the Unitarian theology held strongly to the belief in the miraculous, especially as expressed in the resurrection of Christ, to an ethical doctrine of His death, and to a supernatural, though not a divine theory of His person. A subscribing, then, is not the only conservative church. A church may be all the more conservative that it is non-subscribing; and it is the simple historical truth to say that James Martineau began his ministry in the most conservative of all the religious societies of England and this conservatism he exemplified. He censured in his earliest book-which deals with "Reason, the Bible, and the Church"-the rationalists of Germany "for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other." He also held that "in no intelligible sense can anyone who denies the supernatural origin of the religion of Christ be termed a Christian." His mind soon reacted against this conservatism and the reaction was hastened by the change in his philosophical principles. As became one not only of a mathematical mind and mechanical training but one who had been educated in a society where the influence of Priestley was all-pervasive, he had "carried into logical and ethical problems the maxims and postulates of physical knowledge," and

had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room "interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of external nature"; and served in willing captivity "the 'empirical' and 'necessarian' mode of thought even though 'shocked' by the dogmatism and acrid humors of certain distinguished representatives."

But the transcendentalism which was native to his mind soon emancipated him from this yoke, and the more stress he threw upon the freedom of man the more he needed an absolute law or categorical imperative to guide him in his choices. But the more emphasis Martineau threw upon the law man carried within, the more did he feel himself bound to emancipate man from the traditions and the dogmas which gave him a law from without. From this came the gradual surrender of those dogmas or positions which had been a note of the Unitarian Churches. The miracles were surrendered, the moral preeminence of Christ was affirmed, but His physical transcendence denied. Authority was taken from without and planted within, and the system of the later Martineau stood out as one which was formally Christian but essentially theistic and ethical, a refined and beautiful individualism (for the individual it expressed was refined in spirit and beautiful in character) but it was only nominally Christian.

Martineau's function as a religious teacher had a very different course. The more he emancipated himself from the traditions and doctrines of his school the freer became his religious spirit, the more eloquent his religious speech. The successive hymn-books that he issued, his "Endeavors after the Christian Life," and his "Hours of Thought" showed how strong was the passion of devotion within him and how rich the expression it craved. It

appears at every point; the traces of the friend who perhaps more than any other contributed to his emancipation, W. E. Channing, whose "pure and powerful soul" rested in the immovable faith "that moral perfection is the essence of God and the supreme end for man." One of Martineau's most impressive essays is on "Personal Influences in Present Theology," and were one to select the influences that mainly contributed to the formation of the man, we should place together Channing, Emerson, Theodore Parker and Schleiermacher. But pre-eminently within himself in his own rich and beautiful nature were deposited the seeds that made him the religious teacher he became. He told us more than once that when he sought religious inspiration it was not to the thinkers of his own school or the teachers of his own faith that he went, but to the great mystics and saints of other communions. In this he was perhaps rather less than just to the society which claimed him. Take out of his history men like W. E. Channing and he would neither have had the religion nor the outlook that made him the teacher he was.

But as we have already hinted, the main significance of Martineau as a thinker was philosophical rather than theological. It is as an interpreter of our ultimate philosophic and ethical ideas as constituting the basis and essence of religion that he has a claim upon our grateful remembrance. He realized, as no other man of his age did, the intellectual worth and the moral value of the theistic idea. If it be true that every man is born either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, a Stoic or an Epicurean, then we may say that Martineau was by intellectual necessity a Platonist and by moral compulsion a Stoic. As the one his endeavor was to discover and express our highest transcendental ideal-which to him

was no mere abstraction, but living and concrete being-the God who was the soul of nature. As the other he was ever in search of a moral law which should bind men to the throne of the eternal and imperatively command the person it so bound. His emancipation from the earlier empirical and necessarian philosophy into which he had come by inheritance was due to what we may call the growth of his own nature, which was essentially too moral to live in bondage to physical conditions or ancestral causes, and too intellectual to be satisfied with anything less than a rational interpretation of the universe. He was indeed so constituted that he could as little have been a sceptic like Hume, or a Necessarian like Priestley-as Hume could have been a moralist like Kant, or Priestley a transcendental dreamer like Coleridge. And the very growth of Martineau's mind was conditioned and governed by the evolution of collective and objective thought which gave him his opportunity. In his early days the rival forces in English philosophy were represented by Hamilton and the elder Mill., And it is curious that alike in their difference and in their agreement they furnished the antithesis needed for the dialectical development and the reasoned expression of his own mind. Hamilton's great classical contribution to the discussion of our highest philosophical idea had been published just as Martineau was entering upon his ministry, and about the same time James Mill's "Analysis of the Human Mind" had appeared. It would hardly be correct to say that they differed in their psychology but agreed in their metaphysics. But it very nearly approached this point. Hamilton stood by the old Scotch philosophy which had come to him in criticism of Hume from Thomas Reid, through Dugald Stewart, and argued that perception must be pre

sentative rather than representative. But he took Kant's doctrine of relativity and argued that in its ultimate expression thought must be so conditioned that it could never know the Infinite. Hamilton never brought into relationship the two parts of his system, and should have explained how the knowledge of the real worldwhich he owed to Reid-could be reconciled with the doctrine of relativity in the higher knowledge which he owed to Kant. The theological deductions from Hamilton's doctrine of the absolute were of two possible kinds: One of these was drawn by Mansel, and signified that since we could not know we could not criticise the abstruser and more fundamental doctrines of faith, and must therefore rely for our knowledge of them and for their authenticity to us upon the authority by which they were revealed and authenticated or defined. The other alternative deduction was drawn by Mr. Herbert Spencer and signified that since we could not know the ultimate cause or the unconditioned reality, we had better be content with our ignorance and explain the universe we could know in the terms of matter, motion and force. The alternatives were equally offensive to Martineau; in his earlier period he contested the first, in his later period he contested the second. In a universe where will was free causation could not be unknown, or where conscience was supreme in man there could not be an unethical nature or laws that were indifferent to morality. There is no finer example in the history of thought of the value of the theistic temper or of the victorious force that lives in moral idealism. It is largely owing to him that our age was not swept off its feet by the rising tide of materialistic and pseudo-scientific speculation. The qualities of his rhetoric made him the more efficient an apologist for his the

istic idea, and clothed it in an elegance of form that commended it to the fastidious in literary feeling. He commended it with a fervor that made it impressive to the religious emotions. He justified his criticism by psychology, and made the man who lived in an age of doubt realize the intellectual energy and the ethical force that lived in our ultimate religious ideas. The services he rendered on this side of his activity are hardly capable of critical appreciation. I am content for my own part to speak as a pupil and as a distant admirer, and say that at critical moments the name of James Martineau was a tower of strength to the feeble, and his words-like Luther'swere not only half battles, but equal to whole victories.

I have said little or nothing touching one side of his activity. Literary criticism was never his strong point, least of all was he strong in that which concerned such a literature as the historian of the Christian origins has to handle. He was indeed deficient in historical imagination, though abstract ideas he could embody in imaginative forms. He belongs to the great religious personalities of the nineteenth century. He did in England something of the same work that Schleiermacher achieved in Germany. Their philosophies differed, their personalities

agreed. He was more a contrast than a parallel to John Henry Newman. Newman was never happy in the presence of conscience; Martineau was never happy away from it. The one pursued an unwearied quest for an external authority in religion; the other unweariedly argued that we had within us an ample and adequate authority The Contemporary Review.

and needed no other. Newman had a greater sense of sin than Martineau, and his Church was an institution for the reconciliation of man and God. Martineau had a finer imagination, a purer and more spiritual nature than Newman, and his quest was for the sovereignty of God, the reign of a categorical imperative over his soul. He had much less historical insight than Maurice; but far more philosophical lucidity, the reason that could see the relations between the Maker and the man He had made. He had none of the casuistry which made it so agreeable to Maurice to reconcile the re

volted mind of to-day to the history or the books or the symbols from which it had revolted. But he saw as Maurice never did into the godlikeness of man and the manlikeness of Godi.e., he correlated the two in a synthesis which the soul of the other may have desired but never achieved. Curiously indeed he had more affinity with Herbert Spencer than with either of the religious thinkers just named. Spencer's view of the universe seemed to him inadequate and unreal, and his view seemed to Spencer fantastic and arbitrary. But both men found everywhere a single energy, though to Spencer it might be an unconditioned force, and to Martineau a divine will.

In any case, we gratefully recognize the services he rendered to the theology and the religion of his time. He was a prophet of the ideal and the ethical, and we can devoutly say: Would that all the men who prophesy were as pure in thought, as noble in purpose, and as spiritual in imagination as he.

A. M. Fairbairn.

It was early in August 1897. I had been more than a year in Japan, and had not seen Karuizawa-an omission, I was told, which indicated both moral and mental obliquity. Mental, because Karuizawa spells Asama, the largest active volcano in Japan; and moral, because Karuizawa in summer means missionaries, who flock there from all points of the compass to revel in the upland air, to strengthen their bodies, and to question their souls as to what their Mission really is. So I hastened to set myself right, and one brilliant morning took the train at Uyeno and sped northwards out of glowing Tokyo heat.

Karuizawa is a rather English-looking moorland spot 3000 feet above the sea, in the very heart of Japan, some 90 miles to the west and north of Tokyo: it is about half-way on the Government line which crosses from one side of the island to the other. The first sixty miles we steam through level country, irrigated and glistening with a rich variety of crops; then leaving behind us Takasaki and the slow volume of the Tonegawa, we begin to rise rapidly from the fertile plain, as we ascend a deep valley which runs up into the everlasting hills; and now we stop for ten minutes at Yokokawa, in the heart of a beautiful picture. On the left towers a most dramatic escarpment, facing us like a spectacular mountain battlement: it is Miyogisan, with its jagged spires that crowd the sky in this region of purple shadows and dark indigo rifts of rock. Our engine is changed here, for the Abt rail begins, and we are lifted 2500 feet in the next seven miles. (This section cost the Government £30,000 per mile, a prodigious outlay in Japan.) We start

away on our rack-rail climb, every window bristling with heads: the contrast is striking between the wild irregular beauty of the gorge and the clean simplicity of the line, soaring up with gentle bend to right or left; tunnel follows tunnel, and the air grows each minute easier as we mount "1 in 15": everywhere sumptuous depths of luxuriant wood, with waterfalls as common as paving-stones in a hot city. Now comes the final tunnel, right under the rampart face, a range which hereabouts for miles is split into deepcleft pinnacles ("candles" the Japanese call them) and strange fantastic architectural forms. We emerge on an uninteresting featureless plain, covered with coarse grass instead of verdant plots of rice.

I stepped out on the little platform, thinking it terrible anti-climax, the most un-Japanese spot I had seen; just a few wooden houses near the station -was this the Karuizawa dear to so many foreigners? But the voice of a missionary was heard in the bookingoffice-and they often prove very useful people. He kindly offered to escort me up a sandy road to the village, which lay a mile away. It was growing dusk when we entered the village street, some quarter-of-a-mile in length, and we might easily have passed by the "Manpei Hotel"-one of an inconspicuous wooden block-had there not been a couple of white tourists smoking out of a window on our right. No doubt of their nationality; that querulous soulless stare which is their way of saluting a new arrival: "O Lord!" it seems to say, "how long must we suffer Outsiders?" But the Head of the house knows how to make up for their deficiencies, as he hastens out to