the hatred of him who said, "Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee?" -with which he regarded some of the malignant forms which sectarianism assumes among us:

"I have just had sent me the 'Record,' in which your letter appears, and thank you heartily for the generous defense of me which it contains. The 'Record' has done me the honor to abuse me for some time past, for which I thank them gratefully. God forbid they should ever praise me! One number alone contained four unscrupulous lies about me, on no better evidence than that some one had told them, who had been told by somebody else. They shall have no disclaimer from me. If the 'Record' can put a man down, the sooner he is put down the better. The only time I have ever said any thing about Socialism in the pulpit has been to preach against it. The evangelicalism (so called) of the Record' is an emasculated cur, snarling at all that is better than itself, cowardly, lying, and slanderous. It is not worth while to stop your horse and castigate it; for it will be off yelping, and come back to snarl. An evangelical clergyman admitted some proofs I had given him of the Record's' cowardice and dishonesty, but said, 'Well, in spite of that I like it, because it upholds the truth, and is a great witness for religion.' 'So,' said I, 'is that the creed of evangelicanism? A man may be a liar, a coward, and slanderous, and still uphold the truth!""

Vehement! some may say; but surely in such vehemence there was heavenly wisdom! Are not these words of his in profound concord with the divinest that have been addressed to us? Did he not speak thus because, in closest personal communion, he had deeply inbreathed the spirit of Him who, of all, spake sometimes most severely, as well as most lovingly and tolerantly? Was not this intense feeling, that so flowed out from him on all sides, part of the "reasonable, holy, and living sacrifice," which could not-should we, in love for him, desire that it might-have been prolonged? When I think of the consuming pain this broadly intense sympathy must have cost him, I recall as selfish and inconsiderate the wish that he were still here to help us in the great conflict of our generation. Robertson would have helped us all, by his deep insight and large open-heartedness, on whichever side of the strife we are contending. Of his genius and his energy we are bereaved, but all may endeavor to maintain his sympathy and tolerance; and I shall be glad that I have overcome the reluctance to send you some of the words he addressed to me, if any shall be helped in that endeavor by reading them.

Sincerely yours,

G. S. DREW.

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 color 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.

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 endeavored 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 Hurst pierpointnotes 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 race-horse, 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 clearer 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 66 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?" No-no-no-seventy times sevNo 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 forever and forever 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.

en.

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 out 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 familiarized 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 realizes Him as an 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 ball-going, polkaing frivolities in female form which offer themselves as the modern goddesses.

From this the conversation turned on capital punishment. I declared for it, wishing that it should be abolished for murder, and inflicted only on those who are guilty of wrongs to women. For murder is a trifle-life is not of so much value-and the tenderness for human life is not one of the noblest signs of our times, for it is not commensurable with a hatred of wrong; whereas in the other case society is worse than unchristian; that which is wrong in a woman is doubly so in a man, because she does with personal risk what he does with risk to another, in personal security and damnable selfishness.

XC.

I rejoice that you have taken up Ruskin; only let me ask you to read it very slowly, to resolve not to finish more than a few pages each day. One or two of the smaller chapters are quite enough-a long chapter is enough for two days, except where it is chiefly made up of illustration from pictures; those can only be read with minute attention when you have the print or picture to which he refers before you; and those which you can so see, in the National Gallery, Dulwich, etc., you should study, with the book, one or two at a time. The book is worth reading in this way: study it-think over each chapter and examine yourself mentally, with shut eyes, upon its principles, putting down briefly on paper the heads, and getting up each day the

principles that you gained the day before. This is not the way to read many books, but it is the way to read much; and one read in this way, carefully, would do you more good, and remain longer fructifying, than twenty skimmed. Do not read it, however, with slavish acquiescence; with deference, for it deserves it, but not more. And when you have got its principles woven into the memory, hereafter, by comparison and consideration, you will be able to correct and modify for yourself. Together with this, I would read carefully some other book of a totally different character; some narrative of human action and character-if stirring and noble, so much the better. I have just finished the first volume of Major Edwardes's "Punjaub,” a history of wonderful adventures, but too long. I could not recommend it to you, but some day I will give you a very brief epitome of it.

I am endeavoring to do my work more regularly, simply, and humblytrying as it is, and against the grain, and deeply as I feel the need of some physical enterprise.

Tell, with my kind regards, that Louis Blanc's theory requires something besides a warm heart and a quick perception to fairly judge. There are certain laws of society, as certain as the laws of matter, which can not be reached intuitively, or by feeling, but require study-very hard study; and the misfortune of his theory is, that appealing to those whose feelings are quick, and sense of the wrongs of things as they are-acute, it is very fascinating; but whether it is true or not, demands a far calmer study of the laws of the universe than his superficial theory generally gets. Feeling says, "Relieve the beggar, and you can not be wrong;" Fact says, "The relief of beggary can be proved the worst injury to the community." Socialism and Fourierism will draw in many generous spirits, but it must bring about, at last, evils tenfold greater than those it would relieve. I never read any thing more pitiably self-destructive than the digest of Louis Blanc's doctrine, in a catechism by himself. Succeed it can not, but it will probably be tried some day, perhaps on a large scale; and if so, the social disorganization which must ensue, and the agonies and convulsions in which society will reel to and fro, and the reaction from it, will be, perhaps, the most terrible lesson which the world has ever learned.

This is the invariable result of protection-the forcible compression and hindrance of the laws of nature until they burst. Louis Blanc thinks God has made very bad laws, and he would make better. So thought a wiser than Louis Blanc, or fifty Louis Blancs-Plato. He considered the partialities of maternal love very pernicious, and would have prevented a woman knowing her own child, making her the mother of all the children of the State. Of course maternal partialities are full of evil; but, on the whole, that being God's system, will work better than the universalism and state education of Plato, however sublime the conception may seem. The only difficulty is to create the feeling which is to be the motive, that is all. Mr. the other day was very learnedly descanting before some ladies upon the modern invention of throwing red-hot shot and red-hot shells. Red-hot shot I had heard of at Gibraltar. But I humbly ventured to ask respecting the red-hot shells-how they got the powder in? That is the difficulty in Louis Blanc's system. Nevertheless, it will be tried; and, like the red-hot shell system, the result will be-an explosion.

MY DEAR

XCI.

To one entering London Life.

--Gavazzi's Exeter Hall orations and this electro-biology are of the exciting class of stimuli which I reckon dangerous and useless. The first leaves nothing behind, morally or intellectually; the second belongs