1848.] Martineau's Discourses. 113 more bitter and pugnacious in words, at least, than these non-resistant Come-outers. So far as denunciation corrupts public sentiment and engenders ill-will, we are inclined to believe that they contribute their full share to keep up the spirit of violence in the community. We would commend this point to their special consideration, and would say to them and to others, in the language of the Apostle, "Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and evil-speaking be put away from among you, with all malice; and be ye kind one to another, tender-hearted, forgiving one another, even as God, in Christ, hath forgiven you." C. H. ART. VII. MARTINEAU'S DISCOURSES.* WE read Mr. Martineau's "Rationale of Religious Inquiry" soon after it came out, about ten years ago, but were not much interested in it. Afterwards, hearing it spoken of as one of the most remarkable works of the age, we supposed that we must have done it great injustice, and therefore took it up again, but with the same result as before. It did not fulfil the expectations to which the title naturally gave rise. It is not sufficiently comprehensive and complete for a philosophical treatise, and is altogether too loose in its style, arrangement, and definitions. It seemed to us the hasty work of a very able man, and, while the actual performance left us disappointed, it left us also with high expectations of what the author might still do. The public evidently do not agree with us, for a third edition has been called for in England; and there is perhaps no living Unitarian preacher, except Dr. Dewey, whose works are uniformly received with so much favor as Mr. Martineau's. The present volume is to us far more interesting and satisfactory than either the "Rationale" or the first of the series to which this belongs. The author has here taken. what seems to us his true position. Standing on a high eminence of moral and religious truth, he, with earnest thought and vigorous pen, would make known to others what he himself sees. He seldom attempts any thing like an elaborate *Endeavours after the Christian Life. Discourses by JAMES MARTIVol. II. London: J. Chapman. 1847. 12mo. pp. 350. NEAU. process of reasoning. He paints men to themselves as they are in the light of his truth. He holds up the prevailing objects of human ambition, and the motives to piety and virtue as they appear to him, to make such appeal as they may to the human heart. He is not a formal apologist for religion, but, having proved its reality by his own experience, and felt the entrancing sweetness of its hopes and affections, he would call others to taste these sublime enjoyments, and know how good they are. The best sermons he would regard, not as a passionate appeal even to the religious sensibilities of a congregation, but as a sort of soliloquy, in which the soul manifests its purest and best experience. "Preaching," he tells us in his preface, "is essentially a lyric expression of the soul, an utterance of meditation in sorrow, hope, love, and joy, from a representative of the human heart in its divine relations." Again, he says, "The thoughts and aspirations which look direct to God, and the kindling of which among a fraternity of men constitutes social worship, are natives of solitude, . . . . . and would not [before a congregation] spontaneously rise, till the presence of a multitude was forgotten, and by a rare effort of abstraction the loneliness of the spirit was restored." We shall not stop here to inquire whether this comes nearest to the true idea of preaching. As there are divers gifts among ministers, so, we suppose, there may be many best ways of exercising them in addressing religious assemblies. This one is Mr. Martineau's method. We learn from some who have heard him that he is a dull preacher, and from others that he is the most interesting preacher they have ever listened to. After reading the volume of sermons before us, we can understand this difference of judgment; for few sermons, in their immediate effect, must depend more on the state of mind in which they are heard. They could not, unless accompanied by remarkable powers of oratory, chain down and enforce attention; but rather, like a beautiful evening, if we are in the mood for them, and give ourselves passively up to them, they will steal over us and lift us up, and unfold to us rare visions of spiritual life and joy; while, at another time, we may read on for pages and be attracted by nothing that we find in them. The character of these discourses we have already intimated. They are not appeals either to our reason or to our passions; but rather, religious meditations on man and the 1848.] Characteristics. 115 world, in the midst of a beautiful universe and under the varied experience of actual life. As meditations, they are lofty, beautiful, and sometimes inspiring; but they do not remind us of the glow of devotion which we find in the writings of St. Paul, still less of the tender affection which breathes out from the words of Jesus. And here, we think, is their defect as a volume of Christian sermons. They are full of reverence, and yet do not lead us to fall on our knees and pray. They are pervaded everywhere by a true regard for the well-being of man, but they do not quicken our affections and bind us by stronger ties of sympathy and love to our fellow-men. They are too purely intellectual, recognizing the beauty of faith and worship and love, but not breathing them into us. They exhibit in terms of pungent severity the folly of our worldly schemes, they point out to us the better way, and show us magnificent prospects opening through an interminable extent of being; but they do not lovingly take us by the hand and lead us to our Father, or to Jesus, the compassionate Saviour. Indeed, while we find often enough in them the acknowledgment of God as our Father, and of Christ as the purest representative we can have of him, and while one prominent object of the volume is to show that God is not an antiquated being, but now, as much as in the days of Abraham and Moses and Paul, is everywhere present in the world, they do not give us the impression of a Father who is actually with his children, who hears their prayers and has compassion upon them and a near personal connection with them. He is rather an abstract being, an infinite law, a boundless presence, and heaven is shadowy and unreal, rather than a joyous union with God and the spirits of the blessed, such as the heart longs and prays for in its better moments. In speaking of St. Paul, Mr. Martineau says, "His ardent and generous soul had fastened itself on no one living object, but on an abstraction, a thing of his own mind, the truth. . . . . . Christ and God, the objects of his most earnest love, were viewless and ideal here, and would become realities only when death had transferred him to the future." This seems to us characteristic of Mr. Martineau, as he appears in his writings; but not of St. Paul. God and Christ can hardly at this hour be to him, in his glorified estate, more dear and awful realities than at the time when he was writing his Epistles; and it is the warmth of the emotions, which bound him directly to them as living beings in whose presence he stood, that gives to his words now their peculiar glow and power. To him the two worlds were united in one. If he could not behold the spirit of God, neither could he behold the spirit of his daily companion; but his intensest longings and affections found utterance in prayer, and by prayer he was brought, not into an ideal, but a real, personal relation to God. These walls of flesh seemed dissolved, so that spirit might really commune with spirit. Now this lowly faith, through which the soul is brought nigh unto God, pouring out its fervid petitions, and feeling in its own renovated powers answering returns from his infinite love, so that prayer is not merely a soliloquy in the presence of the Most High, but communing with him,-this lowly, but quickening faith, binding us to God, is what we do not often find in the volume before us, and its partial absence will account for nearly all the deficiencies in the sermons. The sermon, for example, which is called "The Shadow of Death," is full of just and beautiful thoughts; but it does not come up to our idea of what it should be. It seems to make heaven far off and unreal. "We look at earth," it says, "as comprising all the good which we have ever experienced; we look at heaven as repeating some. And though in words we may be assured of the superior intensity of the latter, in thought we can but dwell on it as it has been felt." P. 43. "It is not in ordinary human nature to prefer the fragmentary happiness of heaven, as alone it can appear before our thoughts, to the complete and well-known satisfactions of this life in its peaceful attitudes." P. 44. "And then, too, the domesticities of life! O God! they would be too much for our religion, were they not themselves in pure hearts a very form of that religion. If we could all go together, there would be nothing in it; but that separate dropping off, that departing one by one, that drift from our anchorage alone, that thrust into a widowed heaven, - who can deny it to be a lonesome thing? It is mere ignorance of the human mind to expect the love of God to overpower all this." - p. 46. And yet, in thousands of cases, the love of God has overpowered it all. The soul, when most blessed in its earthly affections, has, with a keen sensation of joy, been lifted up to his eternal presence. Heaven is not, to the Christian, made up merely of fragments from our earthly happiness. 1848.] Defects. 117 What devout and loving spirit, however blessed here, does not seek a closer and dearer sympathy? What earthly af fection can satisfy us, so that we yearn for nothing more? Who, when his spiritual desires have once been quickened, and he has known the world as it is, does not, in his loftier musings, rise to the contemplation of a better condition of things, and earnestly long to realize it in his own experience? Who, when once he has cherished these loftier hopes, would not feel a chill running through his whole frame, if it were announced to him that he and his friends should remain here as they now are for ever? Not only the infinite aspirations which rise to God would seek a more perfect union with him as their only rightful consummation, but our social affections would gladly transfer us and those whom we most love to a purer world, and our moral feelings, struggling as in a perpetual warfare here with outward temptations and inward passions, yearn for the final triumph and that higher organization within and without, through which they may attain to perfect peace. To more heavenly natures, says Mr. Martineau, in another and far nobler discourse, The Sorrow with Downward Look," "We attribute a perfect moral beauty, a godlike symmetry of goodness, which fills us with reverence, trust, affection, which draws from us the sigh of hope, and refreshes us in the weariness of our harsher life. . . . . . This entire coalescence of the order of goodness and the order of desire, this instant and spontaneous adaptation of the will to the conscience through every stage of moral progression, distinguishes our notion of saintly excellence, and furnishes our clearest image of a higher world." pp. 30, 31. Again, in yet another discourse, he says, "In proportion as our nature rises in its nobleness, does it realize its immortality. As it retires from animal grossness, as it opens forth into its true intellectual and moral glory, do its doubts disperse, its affections aspire; the veil is uplifted from the future, the darkness breaks away, and the spirit walks in dignity within the paradise of God's eternity."— pp. 67, 68. And to those who have attained to this lofty experience must it be a lonesome thing" to "drift from their anchorage here," to join the society of the blessed above, and be united, as they never can be here, with the merciful Father |