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prayer, prayer is said to work a change in our hearts and to conform our will to that of God. Instead of going to heaven or hell, the consequences of virtue are described in the joy and peace of the heart obedient to God, and of vice in the pangs and remorse of an evil conscience. Instead of throwing ourselves at the feet of Jesus, and being sprinkled with His blood, and being clothed with His righteousness, we are told that we must, by sympathy with the mind of Christ, and in conformity with what He requires of his disciples, work out our own salvation with fear and trembling."

He confesses, with an almost startling candour, that in his earlier days, when he was most thoroughly an Unitarian, he had doubted whether his friends were right in calling themselves Christians. If Christ were only a man, only a teacher, only an example, was it not "a departure from the Christian spirit" for men to call themselves by his name?

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forced upon him that those to whom he spoke were not ripe for it, had not felt the need of it. "I am inclined," he writes, to think that the preliminary preaching, Repent ye,' is what we now want; and when we are casting about in despair for something to lay hold of, then will be time enough to speak of the redemption which may be found in Jesus Christ." That which most shocks him in the state of feeling round him is the absence of any sense of needing that redemption. He reads a sermon by Mr. M. (qy. Martineau ?), who says that "we have passed beyond the thought and want of salvation, that redemption is as much a thing of the past as the old outward law," and feels that such words are at once "the most distinct disavowal of the essence of Christianity, and yet the most honest confession of the general state of the Unitarian mind," that he ever met with.

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A sudden and entire break-down in health The result of this change was to bring compelled him to leave Manchester and reTravers Madge into sympathy with a wider tire to Norwich, and the remainder of his circle of Christians, with many who were to life was that of an invalid, prematurely old; be found in the sects whose faith on these for many years that of what has been scoffpoints was in harmony with that which has ingly called a Christian “unattached,” joinbeen the characteristic faith of Christendom. ing any congregation of men like-minded Churchmen, Methodists, Independents, were with himself, working, wherever he was, ready to welcome one who felt and spoke as with the old love for souls, the old regardthey did. But with this adoption of "evan-lessness of self, the old power to win the gelical" doctrine there was the old craving hearts of the poor, gathering men round after righteousness, the old asceticism, show- that which was to him and them the "Table ing itself at once in self-denial and in deeds of the Lord,". a "Communion Service," of love. The " easy, worldly, respectable which one who was often present described religion of some Christians seemed to him as seeming more like the original one like the cold and clammy hand of death." than I ever felt it anywhere else. We all The new faith did not bring with it at first sat around a long table, and the bread and any conviction of the necessity of joining wine were passed round, and each spoke another visible society than that with which who wished, and the Master himself was he had hitherto been connected. His name present there to our hearts, and the poor remained on the roll of the Presbyterian room felt like the holy of holies." i. e., Unitarian-congregations of Lanca- After some years spent in his comparashire and Cheshire at the very time when tive retirement, he re-appeared at Mancheshe looked on Unitarianism as weighed in ter, in 1859, as the minister of a congregathe balance and found wanting. The Prim- tion of stragglers from various folds, tradesitive Methodists seemed to him to "keep people and working men, some from the more directly in view the objects which a Plymouth Brethren, some from the Baptists, Christian church ought to have, than any some from the Independents, many from other denomination." He himself preached the Methodists. Such materials did not wherever he found men willing to listen to promise much in the way of unity, and dihim in Independent chapels, or the like. vergencies of thought and feeling soon beIn the strength of his new faith, he went gan to show themselves. Travers had to back to Manchester in 1851, and resumed throw himself, as into a spiritual asylum his old work in his beloved schools in Mosley from the strife of tongues, into his old work Street; still, as before, loved and loving, with the rough street lads, and to teach received by the rough lads as an angel from them to pray, and repent, and love Christ, God, with clasped hands, and eyes that glis- and sing hymns, till the evenings which he tened with delight. But as he gave utter- spent with them seemed to him as though ance to that faith which had come as a mes- he had passed them" amongst the angels sage of glad tidings, the conviction was in heaven." The work lasted, however,

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"If I have not spoken much in my letters lately of that wonderful revelation to the burdened hearts of sinful men, that the blood of Jesus Christ, God's own Son, cleanseth from all sin,' it is not because my faith in this is shaken, or because I feel the need of it less than I did. Never, never did I feel the preciousness of this truth as I feel it now. Without it I should be in outer darkness, in misery without any comfort, in uttermost despair.'

But with this there is a wider view, a more hopeful recognition of the good to be found in those who had not yet received the truth as he received it, a stronger faith in the possibilities of the future. At one time the whole state of Christendom had seemed to him full of "wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; " now he had learnt the lesson, Meliora latent.

"God has, I believe, been instructing me in some things of late which I did not see before, and which I have perhaps, therefore, more frequently referred to, such as the true conversion of all who repent of sin and seek to live to God, though they may frequently stumble, and know nothing of the experience which so-called evangelical Christians and Methodists seem to regard as necessary; also the hope, rising to an assurance, that the work of redeeming mercy not confined to this world, and that the sentence of eternal death may at any time be remitted; also that all doctrinal exclusiveness in the church, and all attempts to judge of others' internal fitness for church membership, are alike evil and unscriptural; and, last of all, that

Christian influence is not confined to conversation on religious subjects, but that the Christian's character shines forth in the midst of the various pursuits, intercourse, and amusements in which he may be engaged. And here it is that, I think, we have been judging harshly, both doing harm and receiving harm. Perhaps I ought not to say we. I have, I know I have, misrepresented Christianity, and especially those truths which have brought me so much peace and comfort, by the course which I have taken."

And again, in the same strain, he writes :—

"I dare not say anything about the counsels

of God, more than He has revealed. When men say that the death of Christ satisfies His justice, or that the wrath of God against sin fell upon Christ, I think they are using rather venturesome language. Yet I cannot but feel that, by divine appointment, and by His own self-sacrisinful man, Jesus plunged himself into the abyss ficing love; and his oneness with poor, suffering, of human woe, even into that deepest human misery which we might have imagined it impossible for the sinless One to have experienced. In accepting this sacrifice God reveals His forgiving mercy to the whole human family. In that forgiving mercy all who seek His face find peace and joy. Forgiveness, in the sense of the removal of future punishment, does not seem to me to enter into the minds of the Apos tles, or to be that of which Christ speaks. We rejoice in forgiving love, inasmuch as we know from God, His ear is open to our cry, and His that, notwithstanding our sins and wanderings arms are always stretched forth to welcome us

home."

We cannot wonder that, in this state of feeling, he should note with especial joy his presence at a lecture given by Professor Maurice at the Working Men's College, and a conversation with him, and contrast the teaching which he found there with Mr. Spurgeon's more popular theology.

The remainder of the story of his life may be told rapidly. Old affections drew him, in 1861, once more to the Crown-Street congregation at Manchester, but more as an outsider, as a member not of that particular church, with its tests and limitations, but of the great family of the redeemed. A home mission for the ragged children and their parents occupied and exhausted the little strength that remained; the Lancashire distress roused him, in 1862, to fresh labours and exertions. When they were over, consumption had made such progress that the two years which followed were simply a time of patient, cheerful suffering and hopeful expectation of the end. In 1865, chiefly, it would seem, through contact with the Bishop of Norwich at Scripture readings at Lady Buxton's, at Cromer, he was drawn towards the Church of England — with which he had indeed been for some time in a secret, half conscious sympathy was baptized into membership with her, and became, till his death, a regular communicant. In March, 1866, the end came. The love of Christ still filled his soul. He read the story of his own life in the words of a hymn:

"O Saviour, I have nought to plead
In earth beneath, or heaven above,
But just my own exceeding need,
And Thy exceeding love.

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"The need will soon be past and gone, Exceeding great, but quickly o'er; The love, unbought, is all Thine own,

And lasts for evermore."

The Unitarian father and the Church of England son found to the last, in their trust in that love, a bond of union, and read and prayed together. And then the end came, as it has come to thousands of the saints of God, the sweet smile in the midst of sharp suffering, the eyes wide open as if he gazed on the celestial city, the whispered fragments of old hymns, now more precious and full of meaning than they had ever been before. The last words that ever passed from his lips were

"With God eternally shut in."

The life which had been so long "hid with Christ in God" found its natural, say rather, its supernatural outcome, in that consciousness of the beatific vision.

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| quantum, at once against the merely ethical teaching of modern Unitarianism, against the tendency, more or less developed in different Unitarian teachers, to ignore man's consciousness of sin and the need of an emancipation from it, and against the vehement, coarse assertion of the merely forensic and substitutive theories of the Atonement, which enter so largely into popular evangelical theology. It shows how that theology, while it presents to the soul that is oppressed with the disease of sin a remedy which is indeed a true remedy, and rescues it from death, fails to give it that which can sustain its life and lead it on to a strong and vigorous health, and too often narcotizes its spiritual energy and stops its spiritual growth.

And it suggests, also, a question which cannot be lightly passed over. Those who read it must, I imagine, feel that there was hardly any stage of Travers Madge's life of which they would not have said, Sit anima mea cum illo. The heretic, the schismatic, the unauthorized "celebrant" of what ecclesiastically was a mock communion, wins our admiration and our love throughout. We cannot admit for a moment, however much we may rejoice that he was led on from truth to truth, the thought that he had been called away at an earlier stage, he would have been on the

There is so much, from first to last, of fairness and openness in the way in which Mr. Herford has done his work such a total absence of any attempt to suppress or disguise what tells against his own creed that I am reluctant to note any omission. But I must own that the Memoir in one point creates a craving which it does not satisfy. The last stage in Travers Madge's progress through his "phases of faith," is summed up in half-a-dozen lines. Those left hand" among the accursed and conwho must naturally look on that stage as at demned. And if so, in this as a typical once the highest and the happiest, may be representative instance, may it not be so in pardoned if they express the wish that they twice ten thousand instances? May there had been told, not only of the bare fact, not be in others, as in him, an unconscious but how it was brought to pass by what faith in the midst of a verbal negation of influences, of individual teachers, or books, the truth? Is not Meliora latent a motto or trains of thought; what his feelings were for us also in our judgments or our hopes as to the Creeds, Articles, Prayer-Book, of for others? And if so, again, is it well to the Church of England, and the contending surround the witness which the Church parties within her pale. Those who hold bears to the truth with anathemas which at that that there is a special, though not nec- least seem to reverse that judgment and to essarily a decisive, value in the judgments shut out that hope? The damnatory formed on such points by one whose life clauses" of the pseudo-Athanasian Creed was preeminently saintly; who believe that have, it is true, been explained over and there is a substantial and unfailing truth in over again, as sentencing only the unbelief our Lord's words, that "whosoever willeth which knows itself to be unbelieving, the to do His will, shall know of the doctrine heresy which believes itself to be heretical, whether it be of God,” may legitimately de- the denial which involves not merely intelsire, with far other motives than mere curi-lectual error but moral evil, and in that osity, to know what he thought and felt on matters of vital interest. Far as they may be from accepting the ipse dixit even of a saint, the sic cogitavit of Travers Madge would have had a claim, surpassed by that of very few others, upon their most earnest

attention.

The thoughts which rise from the life which I have thus traced, even as it is, are obvious enough. It bears its witness, valeat

sense thousands of the clergy accept them, and tens of thousands of the laity are content at least to acquiesce in them; but in the ears of yet more, among both clergy and laity, they seem to say, and that with no faltering voice, that those who fail asleep, being as Travers Madge was till the last few years of his life, shall without doubt perish everlastingly." Is it not time to get rid of defences which do not defend,

happy country would be as thoroughly German as the once Slavonian provinces of Mecklenburg and Brandenburg.

warning which do not warn, words that have to be explained in a non-natural sense, aids to faith which surround the truth that attracts by its own beauty and completeness with that which simply repels, and rouses, as by way of protest against the denuncia-sided over by Dr. Rieger, the journals pubtion, a not unnatural antagonism?

E. H. PLUMPTRE.

From The Spectator, 18 March.
THE CZECH QUESTION.

THE reverses of Austria and the general expectation of a further concentration of States in Germany have given fresh vigour to the Slavonic revival in Central Europe, and particularly in the kingdom of Bohemia, where the "Czech question" has caused Prague to be proclaimed in a state of siege, and its prisons to be filled with the more prominent of the twenty thousand political offenders whom the Austrian Government has put on their trial for violating the laws which regulate the press and the right of public meeting. An accurate though friendly account of that revival will interest our readers.

Led by a Committee composed of Deputies to the Austrian Parliament and pre

lished in Bohemia profess to be animated by a fear of what the destiny of the Slavonic races of Austria might be in case of a further dismemberment of the monarchy. They assert that the German element in Bohemia, which constitutes, they allege, only one-quarter of the total population, is even now gravitating towards a great Germanic Empire or Confederation, and that it seeks to carry with it the alien population over which it rules by historical right. Irritated by the ingratitude with which the Austrian Government has repaid the loyalty of the Slavonic races in 1848, as well as by the attempts which have so long been made to put the Slaves to the wall ("Die Slaven an die Mauer drücken," a phrase attributed to Count Beust) the Czech national party view with considerable apprehension the possibility of their being thrown into the common German crucible. The immediate object of the national party in Bohemia is, therefore, to wrest from Austria, before the Notwithstanding the repressive measures expected agglomeration of German States adopted by the Austrian Government after takes place, such an autonomy as will perthe crisis of 1848, when the Hapsburg dy-mit the Czech to develop themselves indenasty was saved by its Slavonian subjects pendently of the present Austrian monarchy, and by Russia, the Bohemian or Czech na- and to acquire such an amount of political tional party, led by Dr. Palacky and Dr. importance and material strength as will Rieger, have actively employed the interval enable them to dispose freely of their own that has elapsed in educating the lower future at a convenient opportunity. The classes of their countrymen in a sense ultimate object of their desires is, however, of national dignity and importance. Their the formation of a Confederation which success has been very great. Out of a Bo- should include such other kindred races as hemian population of nearly five millions, may hereafter have the power or the inclionly three per cent. have not had the ad- nation to join it; such, for instance, as the vantages of education. No fewer than Poles of the present kingdom and the Slaeleven Slavonic journals, with an aggregate vonians of Turkey. This Confederation the daily circulation of 20,000 copies, are now leaders of the Czech national party desire devoted to the idea of Slavonic autonomy to place under the sovereignty of the House and federation, and the extent to which the of Hapsburg, which they anticipate will Slavonic language is used in Bohemia as the sooner or later be forced to abandon the medium of education and a vehicle of patri- last of its Germanic possessions, in the genotic thought may still further be estimated eral movement of German unity. from the fact that a society for the diffusion of popular literature at Prague publishes 25,000 to 30,000 copies of certain literary works with a political bias, while an Encyclopædia of Science, of which eight volumes, of the size of Chambers's Encyclopadia, have already appeared, meets with a demand of 5,000 copies. This great result had been attained in spite of the predictions of one of the most learned and patriotic historians of Bohemia, Dr. Pelzel, who in 1790 declared that within fifty years his un

They argue that a Slavonic Confederation, embracing a homogeneous population of about twenty-five millions, and including the kingdom of Hungary, with a spirited population of five millions more, will afford adequate compensation to the House of Austria for the loss of its Germanic possessions: while, on the other hand, it will be a step towards a satisfactory solution of the Eastern question, and will constitute that counterweight which the balance of Europe will require for the consolidation of Ger

many. It would further, they imagine, se- | the Russian tendencies of its Bohemian subcure the peace of Europe by tranquillizing jects, the Austrian Government has been France, whose legitimate influence on the much inclined to attribute to the Russian Continent of Europe would be established Cabinet a desire to promote disaffection in by the restoration of Poland within the lim- Bohemia, as a means of preventing the Galits of the present kingdom as regards Rus- ician Poles from receiving liberal treatment. sia, and inclusive of the greater part of Gal- Organ-grinders are now prohibited from icia in respect to Austria. This is, indeed, playing the Russian national anthem in Boone of the principal conditions on which the hemia, and a strict surveillance has been idea of Slavonic federation, as understood placed over all strolling musicians to prein Bohemia, is based, and the two Czech vent them from distributing, as it appears leaders gave much dissatisfaction in Rus- they have in some cases done, the photosia when visiting the Ethnographical Sla- graph of the Grand Duke Constantine's vonian Exhibition at Moscow in 1867 by youngest son, Wenceslaus, bearing, as he openly pleading the cause of their Polish does, the name of the patron Saint of Bobrethren. They boldly advised the Rus- hemia. sians to make peace with the Poles, and thus remove one of the greatest obstacles to Slavonic unity; "For," said Dr. Rieger, "we cannot but acknowledge that the Poles, a branch of the western Slavonic race, distinct from the Russian people both in their history and language, have an equal right to independent national existence."

But such being the bases of the proposed Slavonic State, it may be asked, how is it that the Czech movement excites so much sympathy in Russia, and how the Bohemians can expect to obtain the support of the Russian Government in plans evidently hostile to the reputed objects of the Russians themselves, viz., the denationalization of Poland and the ultimate absorption of the Danubian and Slavonic provinces of Turkey? The Czech argument on this point appears to be that it is necessary to draw a distinction between the practical policy of the Russian Government and the sentimental overtures of Russian Panslavists. A national awakening or revival has been as much required in Russia as in Bohemia. Slavonic patriots in both countries had felt the necessity of convincing their countrymen that their own nationality was capable of independent development. The Russians pointed to the ancient civilization and glories of Bohemia, while the Czechs and other Slaves under foreign rule encouraged their countrymen in their desires for independence by extolling the magnitude and power of the Russian Empire.

It may be that all this apparent sympathy and co-operation between the Western and Eastern groups of the Slave race may not be as real and lasting as the Russian Government may desire, or the Emperor of Austria fear. The Slavonic demonstration at Moscow in 1867, to which the Austrian Government attached so much importance, was not much patronized by the Russian Government, which had reason to be alarmed rather than pleased with the general tendencies expressed by the Bohemians, Servians, and other Slavonic visitors. It is certain that the Ethnographical Exhibition of Moscow was organized by sentimental politicians, and that both the superior officers of Government and the more reasonable section of the intellectual classes in Russia kept aloof from the demonstration. There are many weighty reasons why even the weakest and least developed Slavonic people can never be drawn into practical union with Russia. Russian rule is scarcely more popular among the Slavonians than that of Austria or Turkey. The Bohemians, Moravians, Poles, Croats, Carinthians, and Slovaks are, moreover, Roman Catholics; they have the advantage of an older and more perfect civilization, and they are the neighbours of the Romans, Servians, and Bulgarians, who look forward to their own independent supremacy in the East at no distant future. The presence alone of a resuscitated Poland in the midst of the proposed Confederation would probably be more than a sufficient guarantee against any intimate alliance with Russia.

While the Russian Panslavists have thus, on the one hand, devoted themselves to a study of Slavonic literature, and to an ad- Even Hilferding, the most distinguished miration of what had been achieved by their member of the Panslavist party in Russia, brethren in the past, the Bohemians have, confesses that the institutions of his country on the other hand, held up to admiration have not as yet inspired much sympathy the progress of Russia in the present, and among the Western Slavonians, who still, have eagerly reproduced in their journals he says, hold, with the Polish poet Mickiethe many words of sympathy and encour- wicz, that Russia is a blank sheet of paper, agement expressed towards themselves at on which nothing but her polity is written, Moscow and St. Petersburg. Alarmed at—a mass of rough humanity, whose social

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