but he laboured incessantly, and his work constantly seemed to reinvigorate him. He was a man amongst men, and he did whatever his hand found to do with his might. He never got any ecclesiastical rank, but he was greater without it. The Church of England, which owed him so much, was at one time not unwilling to brand him and cast him out, and there was even an attempt made to get up a childish agitation in Marylebone on his appointment to Vere Street Chapel. The present Bishop of London (1871) conferred upon himself the distinction of appointing Mr. Maurice to the Preachership at Whitehall, and when he died, he had held for some years the chair of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge. At the same time he was the incumbent of a church at Cambridge. He had formerly been chaplain at Lincoln's Inn, a Professor at King's College and Boyle Lecturer, and he continued to the last, Principal of the Working Men's College. He never was anything like a rich man, yet few suspected his great and lavish generosity; but his hatred. of imposition was such, that once when we were driving together, he insisted upon stopping the cab and getting out rather than being overcharged sixpence. 'I won't be imposed upon,' he said, in his nervous but determined way, 'I hate it.' Yet he has more than once during his necessary absence from town referred people to me who had traded vilely upon his eager benevolence, with a request that I would investigate their cases, and distribute money for him. The discovery of unworth was to him intense pain, yet he never seemed to lose his indomitable faith in human goodness. In the midst of all his social and philanthropical work, he remained to the end an intense and indefatigable student; he dictated much; he spoke much; he read and wrote immensely. The works by which he will be best remembered are probably the 'Kingdom of Christ,' 'Theological Essays,' 'Sermons on the Lord's Prayer,' and the 'Moral Philosophy.' But there was not a phase of theological controversy during the past fifty years upon which Mr. Maurice did not manage to have his say. People complained of the obscurity of his books, as they complained of the obscurity of his sermons, but the man himself interpreted both. You could not always tell what he had been talking about, each sentence was clear, the page was hard to grasp, intellectual coherency seemed to be at times lost, but there remained something better, a spirit that seized, a power that moulded. It was the reiteration of something to him intensely real. He might be said 'to sing to one clear harp in divers tones,' and the refrain seemed ever this, 'You have not laid hold of God, He has laid hold of you.' So labouring and so loving, he drew to his most peaceful close; and many of us here present saw him laid to rest, not in Westminster Abbey, as so many wished, but in his own family vault. And now that we shall never see him again we can only remember how kind he was, how tender, and true-hearted, and helpful to all who were drifted across his path. Was there ever a man so patient, so indulgent to the foolish, the arrogant, the bigoted, and sinful; so ready to spend himself and be spent for others who were weak, to work for them, to help them, to suffer with them, to wrestle with them in prayer, by sympathy, by his great unconscious, personal goodness? There is no one like him left that I know of; his death is our immense and irreparable loss. There are some here to whom he was so much, so dear, so great, that they stand even now looking upwards like Elisha, when he cried after his master, 'My father, the horsemen of Israel and the chariots thereof.' To me indeed he is the last of the prophets. And his last words were most prophetical. As he was in his life so he was in his death, mighty in his power to bring home the influence of a Divine Spirit to the human heart, which is a much higher way of prophesying than merely by foretelling events. For some time he had been talking incoherently, and no one could tell what his lips were striving to utter ; but almost with his parting breath he became quite lucid and distinct, and they who bent over him heard that he was saying the closing words of the Communion Service-words which always seemed to mean so much more to him than to others: He began with ‘. . . THE KNOWLEDGE OF THE LOVE OF GOD, AND OF HIS SON JESUS CHRIST OUR LORD, AND THE BLESSING OF GOD ALMIGHTY, THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE HOLY GHOST, BE AMONGST YOU;' and then, with a great effort, correcting himself, 'BE AMONGST us, AND AMEN.' REMAIN WITH US ALL. |