All through this year Mr. Robertson's health continued to decline. In June a strong memorial was presented to him from Drs. Allen and Whitehouse, 'urging me,' he wrote 'to give up my work for some months, and prognosticating unpleasant consequences if I refuse.' In January he had already written to a friend excusing himself for remissness in sending the usual notes of his sermons.

The lassitude he suffered from prevented his enjoying the Exhibition; the crowd and noise irritated and wearied him. But his work did not suffer, nor his energy decrease. In June he began to lecture in the afternoons of Sundays on the Epistles to the Corinthians. He introduced the course by a masterly account of the state of Corinth and its parties at the time of the Apostle Paul. He continued these lectures till his death, and the last he ever preached was on the last chapter of the second epistle. They have now been published; though from notes so meagre and unfinished that no idea of them, as delivered, can be formed. All the colour and glow have perished; the thoughts alone remain. They are valuable, however, for their insight into St. Paul's character; for the way in which the principles applied by St. Paul to Corinthian parties and Corinthian society are. brought to bear upon the parties and society of this age; and especially valuable for their method of exposition. They form almost a manual of the mode in which the Epistles should be treated in the pulpit. For this reason they were likely to be more acceptable to clergymen and teachers of the Bible than to the generality of readers. And so it has proved. From ministers of all sections of the Church and of Dissent, even from those who differ most widely from Mr. Robertson's opinions, testimonies to the value of these Lectures have been received.

VOL. II.

As to these opinions themselves, an interesting letter, written to a Roman Catholic friend will be found-No. cxi. -in which he states his position in the Church, and the principles on which he taught during the year 1851.

In October he crossed to Ireland, for his usual rest, and returned to Brighton in November. It will be seen, from his letters, how strong an interest he took in the movements of Kossuth, and with what wise calmness, despite of all his enthusiasm for liberty and against oppression, he endeavoured to penetrate to the root of the question of Hungary.

He crowned the year and his exertions in the cause of social reform by a lecture to working men at Hurstpierpoint -notes of which have been published. The main ideas were borrowed from Channing's 'Essay on the Elevation of the Working Classes;' but he clothed them with. such new thought that he made them altogether his own. So closed for him the year 1851. It was a year during which his work, ever arduous and wearing, was rendered doubly so by misconception and attack, and by the pressure and pain of advancing disease. But he bore up nobly and endured, as seeing Him who is invisible. From this time. forth till his death, his life and energy were those of a racehorse, the spirit of which needs no spur, but which dies at the winning-post exhausted by its victory.

Letters from March 14 to December 5, 1851.

LXXXVIII.

To a Friend.

March 14, 1851.

Thank you most gratefully for the 'Stones of Venice.' There are no writings, which, at the present moment, offer such interest to me as Ruskin's. They give a truth to repose on which is real, whatever else is unreal; and as a relief from the dim religious light of theology, in which one seems to make out the outline of a truth and the next moment lose it in hopeless mystery and shadows, they are very precious-more precious than even works which treat of scientific truth, such as chemistry, for they do not feed the heart, and that is the thing that aches and craves in us just now to a degree that makes the resentment against such people as Miss Martineau on the one side, and the evangelicals on the other, almost savage. I have been and am reading the 'Modern Painters' again, with renewed enjoyment and sense of soothing.

You do not 'get a clear conception of truths.' You are 'less able wholly to understand.' Could it be otherwise? If, instead of a clearer conception, you are getting a grander idea, even though it should give a bewildering sense of indefiniteness and infinitude, is not this gain rather than loss? Who can 'understand? If a man understands spiritual truth, I should think he knows, because he feels little about it. If you are exchanging measurable maxims for immeasurable principles, surely you are rising from the mason to the architect. 'Seven times?' Nono-no-seventy times seven. No maxim-a heart principle. I wonder whether St. Peter wholly understood that, or got a very clear conception from it. A sublime idea he did, no doubt, which would for ever and for ever outgrow the outline of any dogmatic definition; but just so far as St. Peter could define less what he believed on that point, he would know more. And yet I dare say there were respectable Pharisees in that day who

would gravely shake their heads and say, that it was a dangerous thing to do away with old established rules, and throw a man upon the feelings of a vague unlimited principle.

It seems to me that this feeling of vagueness is inevitable when we dare to launch out upon the sea of truth. I remember that half-painful, half-sublime sensation in the first voyage I took ought of sight of land when I was a boy; when the old landmarks and horizon were gone, and I felt as if I had no home. It was a pain to find the world so large. By degrees the mind got familiarised to that feeling, and a joyful sense of freedom came. So I think it is with spiritual truth. It is a strangely desolate feeling to perceive that the‘Truth' and the 'Gospel ’ that we have known were but a small home-farm in the great universe, but at last I think we begin to see sun, moon, and stars as before, and to discover that we are not lost, but free, with a latitude and longitude as certain, and far grander than before.

LXXXIX.

I spent last evening with Mrs. Jameson and Lady Byron. The conversation turned at first chiefly on the gradual changes in the feeling towards the Virgin, which are marked by the forms of representation of her. It seems that the earliest appearance of the Virgin and Child dates in the fifth century; before that the Virgin was alone. The first representations of this change bore a striking resemblance to the heathen statues and relievos of Juno nursing the infant Mars. Then came pictures in which the Virgin is represented as crowned by her son-at first kneeling before Him, then sitting a little lower than He, then on a level with Him. For many ages she appears as intercessor between Christ the Judge and the guilty earth; in this respect personifying the idea which, among many modern Christians, is personified by Christ as the Lord of compassion: while He represented that conception which they now assign to the Father, offended wrath, needing intercession, and scarcely appeased. This shows, however, I think, the radical truth of the idea. Love and justice are really one-different sides of each other; love to

that which is like God is alienation from that which opposes Him. In this light, too, the heart realises Him as a unity, when the intellect is subordinated, and does not dialectically divide, that is, in our highest moral state; but when the understanding begins to busy itself with these conceptions, they are necessarily conceived of as two, not one, and the beings in whom they inhere are necessarily conceived of as distinct.

I look upon that Middle Age statement, and the more modern one, only as forms, and perhaps necessary forms, of thought, which are false in the higher regions of belief in which the heart, loving, lives. She showed me some exquisite forms of the Virgin, by the elder painters, when feeling was religious-Perugino, Fra Angelico, Raphael. Afterwards the form became coarse, as the religious feeling died off from art. I asked her how it is that the Romish feeling now is developing itself so much in the direction of Mariolatry; and she said that the purer and severer conceptions of the Virgin are coming back again, and visibly marking Romish art.

Briefly, I will tell you what I said in answer to her inquiries. I think Mariolatry was inevitable. The idea most strongly seized in Christianity, of the sanctification of humanity, attached itself to Christ as the man; but the idea naturally developed contained something more the sanctification of womanhood. Until, therefore, the great truth that in Christ is neither male nor female-that His was the double nature, all that was most manly and all that was most womanly-could take hold of men, it was inevitable that Christianity should seem imperfect without an immaculate woman. Swedenborgianism has therefore, it seems, a similar dream, and so has even atheism. I am told that Comte, the French philosopher, has broached a somewhat corresponding rêve in his 'Anticipations of the Future.' We only want, he thinks, and shall have, the glory of women to worship. He is an atheist. Alas! if he be right, we shall have to search elsewhere than in the ballgoing polkaing frivolities in female form which offer themselves as the modern goddesses.

From this the conversation turned on capital punishment. I