worn and hackneyed, yet they seized upon them as though they had never before been treated; and by the vigor of their thought and their ample learning they gave them a statement remarkable for nothing more than its freshness. In the main, they answered their opponents, not by rejoinder, but by implication, building a structure of doctrine over against which the Orthodox doctrines seem incredible. Thus peculiarly it was with Mr. Martineau. Three of his lectures were reprinted in America, in Studies of Christianity; and of the many who have read and admired them, probably not one to whom the fact was not told has ever suspected that they came out of the hottest of controversies. They suggest the scholar and thinker coming from his study with his most careful, albeit his most fervid word. He discredits the Orthodox doctrines somewhat as Newton in his Principia discredits the medieval astronomy, which, without noticing, he annihilates. Surely on the lines which he traversed no one who heard him or who read him needed afterwards to ask the positive attitude of the Unitarian mind. The only qualification to this statement might be in the fact that his presentations were somewhat in advance of the Unitarianism of the time. Indeed, with slight touches here and there, they might do service as Unitarian tracts even now; nor have Unitarians in their theological literature discussions of a similar character more nobly or more reverently toned.

Among the marvellous features of this controversy was the vast labor it implied in a period so brief. Taken in connection with the many other duties that engaged, it was an exhibition of intellectual prowess not often paralleled. The first lecture was given on the Orthodox side on the sixth of February; the last was given by Mr. Martineau on the seventh of May. Between these dates the whole labor must be compressed. Yet the shortest of Mr. Martineau's lectures, if given in full, could fall but

little short of three hours in average pulpit delivery, and one of them would reach four. His discussion of the Atonement, together with preface and appendix, reaches nearly to one hundred quarto pages. Mr. Thom's presentation of the Trinity is nearly as long. Mr. Martineau's five lectures with their prefaces and appendices would make a quarto volume of a little less than four hundred pages; and this, it should be remembered, not thought and learning crudely thrown together, but thoroughly organized, nobly elaborated and adorned.

CHAPTER V

MINISTRY IN LIVERPOOL (continued)

IT is safe to affirm that Mr. Martineau emerged from this controversy with a glad sense of relief. We can enter into the satisfaction with which he resumed the less distracted exercise of his regular and more congenial offices, the new delight of unhurried study and intercourse with friends.

But neither in his own consciousness nor in general esteem could he come forth from such a contest as he went into it. As well might he think to turn his dial back, as to be again the man that he had been. Shape it to his thought however modestly he might, there was the consciousness of powers which, though severely tried, had not failed; powers, therefore, that to other arduous tasks could be confidently applied. Abroad there was on the one side the new admiration of his friends and followers for the manifest splendor of his genius; on the other side a sort of admiration by inversion of the brilliant and powerful heresiarch that Satan had let loose for a season. It was, in a sense, a new attitude in which he stood; there was a new part that he must bear. A new part was, indeed, not far before him, in which his proved powers should be brought to other and severer proof, in which expectation should again be distanced by achievement.

Meanwhile there were sermons to preach, the young people to instruct, his parishioners to visit, the sorrowing

to comfort, the morally lame and blind to heal and restore as he might. With these offices, together with his books and his pen, we take courage to hope that he did not suffer from ennui.

Our next meeting with him outside his appointed walk is in the September following the controversy, at the opening of a new chapel in Manchester, on which occasion he preached a sermon on The Outer and the Inner Temple, which they who heard surely did not soon forget. He drew his lesson out of the Messianic idea, which, divested of its Jewish coloring, he showed to be not especially Jewish, but the property of mankind. It is involved in the great trust in Providence that ever looks for a better that shall come. Ignorance and sin shall pass; where now is strife the dove of Peace shall hover; and whatever power works to this end is the Messiah of God's appointing. But over against the Messiah that God in his wisdom appoints, we meet the Messiah which man in his foolishness expects and insists on having; and the two come into sorrowful collision. And the error being not national but human, it is ours to-day as it was theirs with whom Jesus walked and suffered. Then, turning to the times of Jesus, and placing the expectations that met him in contrast with the reality he was, God's Messiah and man's, - he draws out the impressive lesson:

"See, first, how the great Father rebukes every plan of partial and exclusive deliverance; and declares that any rescue of his must fold the earth in its embrace. The Hebrews would have had a divine Emancipator to be theirs alone; the child of a nation; the property of a class; the personal concentration of their collective peculiarities; the punisher of other men's hatred and contempt, by adopting and indulging their own. . . . He takes a village Christ, whose soul is human, and not Hebrew; whose spirit has become acquainted with men in the retreats of families,

not in the schools of Priests and Pharisees; and felt the presence of God in the stainless breath of his native hills, and the lilies of his native fields, more than in the smoke of altars, and the withered fragrance of incense; - one who would neither strive nor cry, who had no scorn except for narrow affections and mean pretences; from whose voice hearers, listening for denunciation, receive the tones more piercing far, of a divine forgiveness; and whose eye, when spectators look for the flash of resentment, fills only with silent tears. Nor was this all; for when his countrymen, enraged that his mind is not exclusively theirs, led him away to Calvary, God does but take the occasion to wrest from them his person too; permits his executioners to destroy the only part of his nature in which he resembled them, and then redeems the everlasting elements of his humanity for a blessing to all people and all times; and says to Death, 'Take now the son of David, but leave the son of Man; the Israelite is thine, but I suffer not my holy one to see corruption.' And so, the cross, which was to disown him as the Messiah of Jerusalem, made him the Messiah of mankind.” 1

The following year, 1840, he did great service by bringing out a second hymn-book. It was entitled Hymns for the Christian Church and Home. It was a careful and toilsome collection of six hundred and fifty-one hymns. The book contained, besides the ordinary conveniences for its special use, a reference to Scripture texts, of which the hymns are the designed or unpremeditated utterance, and a preface which no student of Hymnology can afford to pass. It attracted wide attention, and came into very general use in the Unitarian churches in England. It ran through a large number of editions, was in use, indeed, for a third of a century, till he himself superseded it with another collection.

1 Essays, Reviews, and Addresses, vol. iv. pp. 375-377.