competition without becoming competition itself, between bodies instead of individuals; or that the good of it can be other than that education which it may give to the working-classes, in transitu, in the points of foresight, self-control, and providence. But disagreeing with the views which Kingsley does hold, I still think it only fair to say, that I believe that sermon misrepresents them. In an address published, or soon to be published, I am told he has very strongly stated the opposite and corrective truths, even offending the men by the energy with which he has vindicated the necessity of unequal and even large accumulations of capital.

All I am anxious for, is that sympathy should be felt, or rather candour extended, towards the exaggerations of generous and unselfish men like Kingsley, whose warmth, even when wrong, is a higher thing than the correctness of cold hearts. It is so rare to find a clergyman who can forget the drill and pipeclay of the profession, and speak with a living heart for the suffering classes, not as a policeman established to lecture them into proprieties, but as one of the same flesh and blood vindicating a common humanity. And therefore Mr. Drew's protest, and the Bishop of London's cold condemnation, and almost equally cold retractation, appear to me so sad, as representations of Church-ofEnglandism. Besides, is it not in the nature of things almost to be wished, and certainly inevitable, that exaggerated statements on the one side should be balanced by even over-warm declarations of the opposite truth? We have been drilling the poor into loyalty and submission for 300 years. Is it not to be expected that at last, men looking with their own eyes into the 'glorious law of liberty' should express in rather indignant terms what is a surprising discovery to them-'You have left one great half of the Gospel untaught, its bearing, namely, upon man's civil freedom, and its constant siding with the degraded.' And the accumulation of capital, an abstract right, requires to be checked by a deeper right. Summum jus summa injuria. Christianity must come in to balance and modify political economy.

I do not know whether I am justified in sending this long

dissertation to your lordship, especially knowing from your public career how entirely you sympathise with all that is generous and, in the true sense of the word, free. I suppose I was incited to it by delight at finding that your lordship had so fairly and candidly judged Kingsley's discourse, and by a desire to modify the impression on some points which his own words have produced.

November 25, 1851.

My dear Mr. Hutton,-I must, in the midst of many small engagements, find one minute to reply to your letter.

In the co-operative plan I have a very limited hope. Eternal laws seem to me against them, and were they to succeed, it appears to me that it would only be competition in another form -of association against association, instead of that of individual against individual. And if this were to be prevented by legislative enactment, I think evils far worse than those of competition would result. The fatal objection to the Louis Blanc scheme is, in my mind, that it makes no provision for an original instinct in our own nature, that of individuality and property. Moreover, that the principle of rivalry is to be our only law, and left to work with pedantic cold-blooded adherence to maxim— let who will be crushed-I can never believe to be the intention of God. All goes on here by the antagonism of opposites, and I doubt not we shall find how to reconcile at last the two equally true and Christian positions

I. Shall I not do what I will with mine own?

2. No man said that aught which he had was his own.

If we were all Christians in fact as well as by right, the difficulty would be at an end; but I do not think that the attempts which begin with the society instead of the individual, will any of them solve the question. The latter, the Christian way, some day or other will. Meanwhile I rejoice at all efforts from the world side; even failures teach us something—

And for some true result of good

All parties work together.

Consequently, I wish God-speed to Mr. Maurice and his plans,

I had a long conversation lately with Lord Carlisle about it, and he seemed much of the same opinion.

I sympathise deeply with Mr. Maurice. I do not agree with him entirely, either theologically or economically. But he is quite after my own heart in this, that he loves to find out the ground of truth on which an error rests, and to interpret what it blindly means, instead of damning it. He loves to see the soul of good, as Shakspeare says, in things evil. I desire to see the same; therefore I love him, and so far I am at one with him. I do not pledge myself to one of his opinions, and disagree with many. But he is every inch a man, and a right noble one.

Mr. Drew, who was brought by all these circumstances into close contact with Mr. Robertson, has kindly communicated to me his impressions in the following letter :

My dear Sir, I will comply with your request that I would contribute a few pages to your forthcoming 'Life' of my muchbeloved and honoured friend from some of my correspondence with him, and from my recollections of our intercourse.

That many have been sorely impatient on account of the delay of the long-promised 'Life' is not at all surprising, and yet I am sure you have acted wisely in postponing it; for indeed Robertson is only now becoming adequately known, even to those who were most intimate with him; any image of his strong and lofty spirit which might have been presented before this time must have entirely failed in expressing the greatness by which we now know he was distinguished, even amongst the greatest of our generation. If the most inconsiderable men cannot be understood until they have been freed from their earthly environment of trouble and strife and toil, and death hath cast its softening, purifying, light around our memories of them, how truly may it be said that this transfiguration was needful in his case! Apart from ordinary causes of misconception, we remember his patient silence, his dignified reserve. Then, moreover, the seclusion in which much of his work-the mere amount of which has so much astonished us—must have been done, could only allow him to

be seen, by even his nearest friends, in fragmentary disclosures. They had, consequently, but the most inadequate conception of his power and depth and self-devotedness: only now is he rising before them in the nobleness of a character which far transcends even the highest estimate they could have formed of him. And when I remember how marvellously—if I may not use a stronger word—much of the material for our present knowledge of him has been preserved, I feel it is indeed the duty of all who can add any contribution to it, to furnish this at once, even though it be at the painful cost of acknowledging that they were separated from him by strong differences of feeling and opinion. You are aware that this was my own case, though I most thankfully remember that these differences never interfered with the cordiality-I may say the affectionateness-of the intercourse between us. Gladly would I forget the circumstances to which I am referring, but in anything like a complete account of him they must be brought forward: nor will I withhold any characteristic sentence of his concerning them, though some of those sentences were uttered as strong, sometimes indignant, condemnation of proceedings which I believed I had rightly as well as conscientiously adopted.

It was in connection with the circumstances I am alluding to, and which are detailed with sufficient fulness in another page of this volume, that a large portion of our correspondence was carried forward. He afterwards continued it, though it was at length abruptly terminated, in consequence, I fear, of somewhat vehement expressions on my part of dissent from his views on an entirely distinct subject. The closely-written pages in his firm clear handwriting which now lie before me seem to bring out, even more strikingly than anything of his I have elsewhere seen, some marked features in his character, which are so admirably described in one of those noble pages which picture the ideal minister of 'The Kingdom of Christ,' that I might almost think my friend was in the view of its gifted writer : Spiritual forms, which the majority have need to see reflected in sensible mirrors, rose up before him in their naked substance and majesty; good and evil were to him present, not as means

to some result, but as themselves the great ends and results to which all is tending. . . . He had a certain habit of measuring acts and events, not by their outward magnitude, but according to their spiritual proportions and effects. . So he reverenced poverty and helplessness; he understood that that truth is not the highest which is the most exclusive, but which is the most universal; and the immediate vision of God, and entire subjection of heart and spirit to His loving will, seemed to him the great gifts intended for man, after which every one, for himself and his fellows, may aspire. Robertson embodied this description; and he did so, I believe, in virtue of that purity and humbleness of spirit to which this vision of God and of His truth, and this entire submission to it, have been promised. His judgment was thus deep, just, and comprehensive, because he, too, had learned to seek his Heavenly Father's will, and not his own. His willingness to do that will gave him his profound insight into his Lord's teaching, and the strong conviction, which has passed into so many other spirits from his own, that it is of God.

Here, in his singular purity and truthfulness, and in his constant devoutness, we have the secret of what we need not scruple to designate his prophetic insight into truth, and habitual consciousness of its invisible and deep harmonies, and, along with this, his prophetic sympathy also with the weak and perplexed and overborne. Beneath all conventional and, indeed, all outward expressions of the mind of God, and through all the means and institutions through which His grace is working for our recovery, he ever looked to the realities and purposes to which they were subservient, and strove with all his concentrated energy, always doing with all his might the task of the present hour, to set forth what he then looked on in closest adaptation to the exigencies of his place and time. This often led him, after the manner of the ancient prophets, to speak as if he were disparaging other truths and ordinances, which, in fact, no one reverenced more deeply than himself. Nor was he unconscious of his liability to be misunderstood in consequence, and of the odium it might bring on him. Yet he deliberately maintained