state of repose and assurance, may well give the results of his inquiries for the benefit of those who are undergoing the same course of discipline, that he may assist their progress and shorten the duration of their trial; but when his last word is a perhaps, and the only doctrine that he is in a condition to promulgate is, that free inquiry can end only in misery, and this by an exhibition of nothing but its deleterious effects, it is manifest that he is himself unqualified to be a teacher, though he may scatter seeds of wisdom, and occasionally exhibit valuable truths under a strong light. This he has done not unfrequently; and the mind that can so express itself should not be designated as weak, though the will which guides it may sadly vacillate, and the character that is formed be even imbecile.

From the book as it is, we must be permitted to do what every reader will do, with or without the author's leave,-to draw our own moral or practical inference; and it is this, that had it been his-that is, Sutherland's or the author's-good fortune to be trained in another school of theology, we see no reason to think that he might not have remained in it, to the great comfort of his own mind and the edification of others; for though, in the emancipation of himself from the creed in which he was educated, he has wandered farther than a dispassionate investigation may justify, yet, with respect to by far the greater number of those objections, the united force of which at length overpowered the affections of his childhood and drove him beyond the Christian pale, these properly belong to the grosser misrepresentations and perversions of the simple gospel, of which, in spite of Church formularies, no inconsiderable number even of clergymen are aware, and now and then are able to acknowledge.

We take as an example what Sutherland says of the Atonement, in his conference with the bishop:

"That each should have his exact due is just—is the best for himself. That the consequence of his guilt should be transferred from him to one who is innocent (although that innocent one be himself willing to accept it), whatever else it be, is not justice. We are mocking the word when we call it such. If I am to use the word justice in any sense at all which human feeling attaches to it, then to permit such transfer is but infinitely deepening the wrong, and seconding the first fault by greater injustice. I am speaking only of the doctrine of the atonement in its human aspect, and as we are to learn any thing from it of the divine nature or of human duty. To suppose that by our disobedience we have taken something away from God, in the loss of which He suffers, for which He requires satisfaction, and that this satisfaction has been made to Him by the cross sacrifice (as if doing wrong were incurring a debt to Him which somehow must be paid, though it matters not by whom), is so infinitely derogatory to His majesty, to every idea which I can form of His nature, that to believe it in any such sense as this confounds and overwhelms In the strength of my own soul, for myself, at least, I would say boldly, rather let me bear the consequences of my own acts myself, even if it be eternal vengeance, and good requires it, than allow the shadow of my sin to fall on the innocent." *

me.

"I know that in early ages men did form degraded notions of the Almighty, painting Him like themselves, extreme only in all their passions; they thought He could be as lightly irritated as themselves, and that they could appease His anger by wretched offerings of innocent animals. From such a feeling as this to the sense of the value of a holy and spotless life and death,—from the sacrifice of an animal to that of a saint,-is a step forward out of supersti2 N

VOL. V.

tion quite immeasurable. That between the earnest conviction of partial sight and the strong metaphors of vehement minds, the sacrificial language should have been transferred onwards from one to the other, seems natural to me, perhaps inevitable. On the other hand, through all history we find the bitter fact, that mankind can only be persuaded to accept the best gifts which Heaven sends them, in persecuting and destroying those who are charged to be their bearers. Poetry and romance shadow out the same truth as the stern and mournful rule under which Heaven is pleased to hold us, that men must pay their best to it as the price of what they receive. I understand this; I can understand, as I can conceive, that as the minds of men grew out into larger mould, these two ideas united into one, in such a doctrine as that which we are now taught to believe.

"But if I am to believe that in plain prose it is true as a single fact-not which happens always, but which has happened once for all-that before the world was made it was pre-determined so, and we must obey the Bible, and allow that this is justice and this is mercy,-then in awe and perplexity I turn away from the Bible, not knowing, if it use our words in a sense so different, so utterly different, from any which we attach to them, what may not be the mystical meaning of any or every verse and fragment of it. It has but employed the words which men use to mock and deceive them. A revelation! oh, no! no revelation; only rendering the hard life enigma tenfold harder." Pp. 70-72.

Now, unquestionably, in the eyes of the Calvinistic and Evangelical clergy, this will be pronounced a deadly heresy; but clergymen are not wanting who concur in that view of the atonement which Unitarians announce, and which extract from it all that is hostile to common sense and to the moral sense. Mr. Penrose, for instance, maintains that the atonement-meaning thereby an at-one-ment-operates by reconciling, not God to man, but man to God, through the gospel doctrine; deriving its sanction and its completion from the life and death of Christ. Even Coleridge, at the height of his ill-understood and much-misrepresented orthodoxy, expressed in strong terms his detestation of the ordinary interpretation of the doctrine.

Among the passages selected for reprobation is an invective against the Bible Societies. In language less vehement, the late Dr. Wordsworth and the whole Roman Catholic Church proclaim the same opinion; and from Coleridge proceeded that felicitous compound, Bibliolatry, which has fixed an indelible brand on a superstition as gross and as mischievous as any that the Church has ever promulgated against the Bible Christians. To the same profound thinker our author is indebted for that image which Coleridge applied to the doctrine of plenary inspiration, designated by him as a sort of "superhuman ventriloquism." As others have copied passages depreciating the Old Testament, we do the author but justice in copying this acknowledg

ment:

"Yet still, as a whole, it is by far the noblest collection of sacred books in the world; the outpouring of the mind of a people, in whom a larger share of God's spirit was for many centuries working than in any other of mankind, or who at least most clearly caught and carried home to themselves the idea of the direct and immediate dependence of the world upon Him."

As to the authority of the Old Testament, Sutherland is represented as having been first led to abandon Newman by his reference to the famous opposition between Science and Scripture as shewn in astronomy-Science declaring that the earth moves, Scripture, that it stands

still. Sutherland, being convinced that he must in this single instance acknowledge the Scripture was in error, inferred that he could be never sure it was not, and therefore denied its authority. It is curious to remark how extremes meet. Archdeacon Hare, in his late excellent Letter to the Editor of the English Review, says he had heard of some one who had said, that if a single date in the Old Testament could be proved false, he would renounce it,-asks, Of what worth is such a faith? Clergymen like Archdeacon Hare, and we believe there are no small number of them, will submit the history or fable of the Fall to a construction compatible with the science of geology; so they will not be shaken in their faith by surrendering the chronology of the Old Testament to the learned investigations of such writers as Kenrick, Bunsen, and a host of German scholars. Now, with an earlier conviction of this truth, Mr. Froude would have felt that a Christian need not be shaken from his faith because he could not acquiesce in the early Judaic representations of the Supreme Being.

The author's views of another doctrine we shall be expected to make known. Of the Incarnation he writes,

"Instead of a man to love and to follow, we have a man-god to worship. From being the example of devotion, he is its object; the religion of Christ ended with his life, and left us instead but the Christian religion. The afflictions which, by an act of his own will, as being himself the source of all power, he inflicts upon himself,—what afflictions are these? The trial of humanity which gives dignity to the persevering endurance through life for truth's sake, and which gives death its nobleness, is the constancy of the mind to good, with uncertainty of the issue, when it does but feel its duty and does not know the consequences. The conviction of the martyr that the stake is but the gate of Paradise, diminishes the dignity of the suffering in proportion to its strength. If it be absolutely certain, the trial is absolutely nothing. And that all-wise Being who knew all, who himself willed, created, determined all,—what would the worst earthly suffering be to Him, to whom all the gates which close our knowledge were shining crystal? What trial, what difficulty was it to him? His temptation is a mockery. His patience, meekness, humility—it is but trifling with words, unless He was a man, and but a man."

We may safely submit such an extract to the judgment of our readers without a comment. If they be classed among the author's blasphemies, we cannot lift up a stone against him.

The most vehement of these blasphemies, however, is directed against that pet doctrine of the orthodox, the eternal misery of the condemned. "I know," he says, "that a holy father of the church defines one mode of the happiness of the blessed to be the contemplation of the torments of the damned." And he treats this opinion with disrespect, forgetting, probably, that that exemplary society, the Christian Alliance, included this doctrine among the essentials of Christianity, while they held the practice of Slavery to be permissible, though not to be recommended, and that the Bishop of Exeter included a denial of this doctrine among the gravamina of a body of Socialists. Of sinners our author thus writes; and whatever the framers of Christian creeds may have decided, we cannot think the sentiment unsuitable to a follower of Christ:

“Oh, Arthur! when a crime of one of our fallen brothers comes before ourselves to judge, how unspeakably difficult we find it to measure the balance of

the sin-cause winding out of cause, temptation out of temptation; and the more closely we know the poor guilty one, the nature with which he was born, the circumstances which have developed it, how endlessly our difficulty grows upon us! How more and more it seems to have been inevitable, to deserve (if we may use the word deserve), not anger and punishment, but tears and pity and forgiveness! And for God who knows all-who not only knows all, but who determined all-who dealt us out our natures and placed us as it pleased Him. What more could have been done to my vineyard that I have not done? Alas, then! if Omnipotence could not bring but wild grapes there, why was the poor vineyard planted? It never asked to be. Why fling it out into these few miserable years, when it cannot choose but fall to ruin, and then must be thrown into hell-fire for ever? I cannot tell. It may be from some moral obliquity in myself, or from some strange disease; but for me,...... to know that one single creature is in that dreadful place, would make a hell of heaven itself.........I believe that fallen creatures perish, perish for ever; for only good can live, and good has not been theirs: but how durst men forge our Saviour's words, ‘eternal death,' into so horrible a meaning ?"

It is difficult to suppose that our author should not know that this milder interpretation of the doctrine of eternal punishment is neither a novel nor an infrequent interpretation; and in general we remark that he seems always to have taken the worst and most offensive of the representations of the Christian doctrine as the real Christianity-a very ordinary, and perhaps most frequently an involuntary occurrence. We are tempted to quote Mr. Froude's remarks on the Catholic theory of salvation:

"Was the Christian sacrifice necessary, or was it not? That is, could mankind be saved without it? You will answer, at least Catholics always do answer, They could not.

"To derive the benefit of that sacrifice, is it necessary to be within the Church, and receive it through the sacraments? If Yes, then all beyond derive no benefit, and so are lost. If No, then what do you mean? There is no such thing as partially necessary;' a thing is necessary or it is not. You will say then, Not necessary; but necessary in such and such circumstances, wherever God has made it possible. But if God had pleased, it would have been universally possible; and with an attached natural penalty of eternal damnation, which can only be counteracted by a miracle, it is hard to conceive Him leaving men without the one essential.

"Well, then, do you mean these sacraments are essential to the living a saintly life? But others live saintly lives. If they do, you say that is by the extraordinary mercy. But the Catholics do not number a tithe of the human race as a rule, we do not find a larger proportion of good men among them than among others; and if, out of every age and nation, those who fear God are under the influence of His grace, and are in the other world to become members of His church, a larger number by far will be taken from those beyond the pale than from within it; and, therefore, the Catholics will receive by the extraordinary, the others by the ordinary, channels. The extra sacramental is the common way; and how strange a system you make the Almighty to have constructed, when it does but answer a tenth of its purpose, and the rest is by method of exception. Surely this is worse than Midsummer madness! The fathers are right; you are ridiculous. It may be that sacramental grace is essential; but the alternative is absolute,-it is or it is not. Begin to make exceptions; hand your line, here a little and there a little-a curve for the pious Lutherans, an angle for the better sort of heathens-and you will soon make your figure a helpless, shapeless no-figure. Take up the swimmers into the ark, and they will soon outnumber the good family there; and ark and all

will go down, and you will have to take common chance in the water with the rest.

"No! the earthly Canaan was given to the chosen people without respect of virtue, as Jewish history too painfully shews. So with your theory is the heavenly. You need not come in with your text, Many shall come from the east and the west,' giving it the human sense which shall save the heathens in the next world. For you it means, and must mean, the call of the Gentiles under baptism. If you recoil from this conclusion, then, in God's name, have done with your covenant and your theory; and do not in the same breath allow and disallow human excellence as a title to heaven, or the doctrine of the infinite divisibility of matter must be called in to help you in your dividings."-Pp. 128-130.

These extracts are sufficient to give the reader a notion of the author's style as well as his turn of mind. We have laid the book down with a strengthened sense of the evil of that generally-received system called Orthodox or Evangelical Christianity, which can by its hateful character turn a mind so constituted as Mr. Froude's is from the impartial contemplation and consequent love of real Christianity, of which he certainly knew nothing in his youth, when impressions were permanent and influential. When Sutherland was told by his bishop that he was charged, not with having taught Socinianism, but with not having said a word to prove that he held opinions which Socinus did not hold, he was silent. He might have answered, "In that I followed the example of our common Master."* A knowledge of the sad tendency of orthodoxy to repel from the church of Christ the purest and the tenderest of mankind, constitutes the strongest reason why Unitarians should strenuously exert themselves to make their doctrine known. As to those who are satisfied with their orthodox faith, the Unitarian has little inducement to strive for their conversion, since he does not believe in the guilt of involuntary error. It is for the sake of such men as Froude, whose work does not betray one ignoble thought, one ungenerous feeling,-in whom the love of truth and of mankind is manifest. We cannot think him to be in an healthy state of mind, and we should not willingly entrust to his care the training up of youth, with his gloomy views of human life; but we do not withhold from him our esteem, nor should we withdraw from him our friendship.

It is known that he is the younger brother of the Mr. Froude whose posthumous writings were at one time the pride of the Tractarians, and then became their reproach. It is curious that such a fountain should have fed two streams that have run in opposite directions, like the Rhine and the Rhone from one mountain. That Mr. Sewell, the most violent of the Tractarians, who has not yet crossed the Roman line, should be active in burning this book in Exeter College, is not to be wondered at, as little as that those also should spread their calumnious abuse of it who can at the same time, with their two-edged sword, smite both the Romish Church and the liberal Nonconformist. H. C. R.

See Field's "Words of Christ," a little book which very strikingly shews how far Christ carried his reserve by maintaining silence as to all the great doctrines of orthodoxy. This was not the intention of the author; for he thinks himself orthodox, at least as to the Trinity, being metaphysically a worshiper of the three in one. It is an excellent little book, notwithstanding.