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as the conviction of guilt. Why, then, does Mr. Kingsley seem to deny its existence? No fact is so clearly asserted in the Bible as the stupendous guilt of man, and the Gospel which it reveals consists in the proclamation of that plan which God has devised for its removal and man's restoration. Would that Mr. Kingsley preached that Gospel more clearly!,

(2.) The only religion which we discover in his writings consists in man's awaking to perceive the love of his Father God, and the ceaseless providence with which He has been guarding and preserving him. There is no new relationship formed between the soul and God; but the soul awakens to a fixed, unalterable relationship which is nowise affected by this change of spiritual consciousness. We respectfully ask Mr. Kingsley if the whole tenor of Bible-teaching does not show that there is a family upon earth to whom God has come into a nearer relationship than he holds to other men. We know how this doctrine may be abused, but the Bible assuredly speaks of some who are His children as others who are not. Can we believe that all men, good or bad, are His children alike? Does he see no differences between men-demean himself in no way differently towards them?

(3.) We would remind Mr. Kingsley how closely he approximates to the Pantheistic doctrine, that the Probation of Life has only one issue—in making men better, and that all men are on their passage, as Emerson would put it, even from prisons and the gallows to some holier development: a pleasant doctrine, which, amidst the distracting problems of the moral universe, we might sometimes passionately wish to believe. But the realities of life are against it; no less the dread forebodings of Revelation, which always agrees with the facts of life, if not with our fancies. Mr. Kingsley will not think that we misrepresent him in thus plainly stating what is the invariable drift of his writings, and what must be pernicious because it is so fearfully delusive. The commonest experience attests that the Probation of Life has two issues that under it men become worse, sinking lower into the blinding corruption of sin; or they become better, rising under new trials, to the possession of a more perfect virtue. And does not Scripture point to two roads, of which, alas! the downward is the broadest and the most crowded? We protest against Mr. Kingsley's representation of human life, not because we could not wish to believe it, but because our consciousness, our experience, our Bible, and all history contradict it.

Mr. Kingsley's description of the Brianite, or local Methodist preachers, we conceive to be as gross a violation of taste as it is utterly false in fact. We are grieved to think that Mr. Kingsley

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should stoop to imitate the scurrilous caricatures which Mr. Dickens has drawn of these self-denying men, to whose labours the agricultural population of this country is indebted for nearly all the religious life which has survived among them during the last century. Mr. Kingsley has dishonoured himself in traducing their characters and misrepresenting their doctrines. Had he known more of them, we are sure his generous heart had never allowed him to write so recklessly of a class of men entitled to much of that large-hearted charity which Mr. Kingsley can sometimes exercise.

Now we are in the croaking strain, we must have one word more. Tom Thurnall, as we have said, is admirably drawn. His individuality is distinct and strong; yet he represents a class that counts by thousands. Brought up religiously, he has no religion save strong affection for a father, and a vague notion that the Powers above will somehow do the right thing at last. Buoyant, dare-devil, infinite in cunning resource, he knocks about the world, indomitable, self-reliant, singing and laughing, though the very foot-ball of fortune. He learns at last that he has a Father in heaven, that lowly trust is better than audacious selfreliance. But meanwhile, his incredulity, like that of multitudes, is profound and scornful, when he hears the ministers of religion dwelling on the terrors rather than the hopes of Revelationor, to speak more correctly, aggravating its darker aspects, and passing by, or limiting, its brighter.

'Whether Tom were altogether right or not, is not the question here; the novelist's business is to represent the real thoughts of mankind, when they are not absolutely unfit to be told; and certainly Tom spoke the doubts of thousands when he spoke his own.

'Grace was silent still.

"Well,' he said, 'beyond that I can't go, being no theologian. But when a preacher tells people in one breath of a God who so loves men that He gave His own Son to save them, and in the next, that the same God so hates men that he will cast nine-tenths of them into hopeless torture for ever (and if that is not hating, I don't know what is)-unless he, the preacher, gets a chance of talking to them for a few minutes-why, I should like, Miss Harvey, to put that gentleman upon a real fire for ten minutes, instead of his comfortable Sunday's dinner, which stands ready frying for him, and which he was going home to eat, as jolly as if all the world was not going to destruction; and there let him feel what fire was like, and reconsider his statements.' '-Vol. ii. p. 109.

Certainly Tom was anything but right in his practical rejection of Christianity on such grounds. We do not think Mr. Kingsley has quite sufficiently insisted on this. He describes Tom as

going out into the fields on a fine Sunday morning, and recognising, in a pagan way, the beauty, wisdom, and beneficence about him. It was well for him, remarks the author, that he had even this natural religion—that he was faithful to the light he possessed. We think he was not faithful. For about this very time he had his New Testament in his hand, and is represented as busy with the Epistles to the Corinthians. With the undimmed, undistorted truth thus before him, his indifference to Christianity is inexcusable. It may be questioned whether, in a land like ours, a rejection of Christian truth, so long maintained as his, can be compatible with the excellences attributed to him. Still, in its main outlines, the character is as real and common as it is instructive; and such compounds of Alcibiades and Gallio are but too numerous.

It would be quite as wrong for any one to be offended with Mr. Kingsley for putting a misconception like that just quoted boldly into words, as it would be to blame a medical man for making a faithful report of a diseased district. The question is, -How did views of the Gospel so morbid come into the minds of such men? And next,-How may we clear them out straightway, and substitute a healthier view of Christianity?

There is one objection taken by Mr. Kingsley to the Evangelical section of the Church (whether within the English Establishment or without it), which we are at a loss to understand. -This appears to us one of the instances in which he comes forward as a mere random fault-finder, without having any preferable substitute to propose. Talking of American slavery, he puts the following reflections into the mouth of an intelligent American:

"The battle against Middle Age slavery was fought by the Old Catholic Church, which held the Jewish notion, and looked on the Deity as the actual King of Christendom, and every man in it as God's own child. I see now! No wonder that the battle in America has, as yet, been fought by the Quakers, who believe that there is a divine light and voice in every man; while the Calvinist preachers, with their isolating and individualizing creed, have looked on with folded hands, content to save a negro's soul here and there, whatsoever might become of the bodies and the national future of the whole negro race.'-Vol. iii. p. 142.

Now, with regard to slavery, as far as England is concerned, the Evangelicals were as active as the Quakers in their efforts to secure its abolition throughout the British dominions. They did care for the bodies and for the race. And so now, their sympathies are strongly with the Abolitionist party. But

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emancipation in America lies with the Americans themselves, and at present it is impossible to do more than teach the negroeshere and there, as we find opportunity. The supposed curse resting on the descendants of Ham is not to be laid, as Mr. Kingsley supposes, to the charge of Calvinism, but to that determination on the part even of professedly religious Americans to keep their slaves. The purpose being fixed, they are glad to hunt up a text to justify it. So the controversy concerning transubstantiation can never really rest on the words, 'This is my body; because the doctrine did not proceed from a misinterpretation of that text, but the text, on the contrary, was misinterpreted to justify the doctrine..

Once

But to return to the objection to Evangelicism, that it isolates and individualizes-is not national, universal. Puritanism did make itself national, and set up a Commonwealth. Would Mr. Kingsley prefer such a state of things? Does he wish to see religion brought, as in the Middle Age, under the control of the civil magistrate? Is he quite sure that the religion enforced by the sword of the governor would be his? And if it were, we are sure he cannot suppose that legislation would awaken, or persecution profitably direct, that inward light which does exist in men. What, then, would he suggest? If the English Church cannot or will not make itself, in his sense, truly national, what other party has any prospect of so doing? What is left, if we would not fall into endless anomalies and perplexities, but that we should rest satisfied with an invisible Church-with that communion of saints in all lands and times, wherein he believes as well as we? Meanwhile, each section of that church can but do its best to teach and enlighten men, as far as it has the power. If so to do be an undue isolating and individualizing of men, what else, we ask, did the Apostles, intheir first preaching of the Gospel, and settlement of a church here and a church there? Might not the same fault be found with them for not effecting a similar impossibility? Mr. Kingsley is too well acquainted with history not to know that the imperial patronage afforded to Christianity by Constantine ripened with fearful rapidity all the elements of corruption within it. Dante, who understood the Middle Age at least as well as any of its modern idolaters, bitterly regretted the consequences of that alliance. We should like to see Mr. Kingsley explain himself deliberately and at length on this matter.

There occur, in the course of the story, some excellent remarks on the study of nature, on description, and on the use and abuse of illustration. When Mr. Kingsley contends that he who would

describe a landscape must really take pains, first of all, to see it -must not abandon it to hunt after analogies, or distort and coax the reality before him into an unnatural harmony with them, we think him quite right. But sometimes he goes too far, and would seem unduly afraid of what Mr. Ruskin has condemned as the 'pathetic fallacy.' It is true, that we must first see the object; but it is also true that the poet should see into it -should not be blind to what it suggests, any more than to what it is. If the mere externals of nature are to be set down by themselves, without any indication of the communion between the soul of man and the hidden life of nature-without any colouring derived from that which is behind the eye-without any hint of those affinities between the worlds of matter and of mind which Platonist and poet alike have always loved to trace, then we must cancel the finest descriptive passages in Wordsworth, and nearly all those of Mr. Dickens.

ART. VI.-The Kingdom and People of Siam; with a Narrative of the Mission to that Country in 1855. By SIR JOHN BOWRING, F.R.S., Her Majesty's Plenipotentiary in China. In 2 vols. London: J. W. Parker and Son. 1857.

THE name of Sir John Bowring, well known to readers of newspapers and reviews, for thirty, or probably five-and-thirty years, has been for the last month placed in undue prominence before the public. Lord Derby, for some reason best known to the Protectionist leader, has chosen to treat a public question in a personal manner, and, with his well-known powers of wounding, has slashed and scarified his victim, the Chief Superintendent of Trade at Canton, in a manner as unusual as unjust. There was no epithet too strong, or too severe or stinging, to apply to an absent public servant. The Protectionist chief, the leader of the opposition in the House of Lords, did not disdain to apply the epithets of vain, shallow, and pedantic monomaniac to one who was not present to defend himself. Taking up the key-note, other noble lords followed in the same strain. Lord Ellenborough, who, of all modern Eastern governors, has been the most warlike, complained of the bellicose Doctor at Canton, laying peculiar emphasis on the last word, as though it conveyed some ludicrous or criminal idea; and Lord Malmesbury, who

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