know even though "in a glass darkly," for | Mr. Blanco White entertained the notion, common how can we imitate, or how love, without some with those in his unhappy condition, that the kind of vision, and how can definite vision be moral part of the gospel could be separated from transmitted from man to man without language; its dogmatical part. This we shall show from his and what are the creeds but the vision of God as own words, and we shall also endeavor to point out He is, transferred into language? So again, the steps by which he arrived at the position, and whatever the Catholic faith teaches concerning the to glance at its consequences. He originally church, it teaches us concerning the organ by rejected Christianity in Spain, because he could which these operations are to be effected in us, not find the proof of a living infallible judge in even as the schoolboy is taught the rules of school questions of religion, and because he found that in which he is to learn, and the workman those of the Roman Church, which claimed that character, the art which he is to practise. Now, singular as had not sustained it in practice.' When he came it is, considering that we have before us the case to England, the theory of religion presented to of a person of such a character and such a posi- him, on which his reviving affections fastened, was tion, we find in Mr. Blanco White's system no one very different from that of the formularies or recognition of the fact, we do not say that the of the theologians of the English Church, but Catholic faith is actually connected with Christian which has nevertheless, from time to time since practice, (which would be begging the question the Reformation, obtained various degrees of curfrom him,) but that the Catholic faith is taught by rency in the popular mind. We cannot describe it the church as being so connected, as being the more shortly, than by saying, it is a theory which proper and exclusive foundation of Christian prac-attaches no meaning to those words of the twentice; so that her demand is by no means that of an assent to a scheme of abstract dogmas; it is the demand for our conforming to a new law of heart and life, which new law (as she says) can only take effect under the influence of the faith and by the agency which it provides; it is the old charter of the gospel" testifying repentance towards God, and" therewith, but only in indissoluble conjunction therewith, also "faith in the Lord Jesus Christ." In discussing therefore the reception or rejection of Christianity, according to its credibility or incredibility, we must remember that it purports to be a system of belief and action inseparably combined, and therefore that if it be credible it entails the obligation not of a speculation but of a practical question, a question to be decided here and now, which cannot be relegated to the region of indifference, but which, even if our understanding refuse to act, our conduct must either recognize as true, or else repudiate as false.

He

tieth Article: "the church hath authority in con-
troversies of faith;" and which rightly asserting
the supremacy of Scripture, wrongly subjoins to it
the supremacy of the individual next to Scripture.
But he does not appear, either at that or at any
subsequent time, to have examined that view of
religion, according to which, without the promi-
nent assertion, or even without the assertion at all,
of an abstract infallibility, the church, distributed
in her regular organization through the earth, is
divinely charged with the functions of a moral
guide, and instructs the individual believer with a
weight of authority varying according to the solem-
nity of the subject matter, the particular organ
from which the judgment proceeds, and its title to
represent her universal and continual sense.
went therefore to the study of Holy Scripture, in
the year 1814, with the expectation that he could
find, firstly, a mathematical demonstration of the
canon, and, secondly, the limits and definitions of
faith so laid down upon its sacred pages as (if we
may so speak) almost mechanically to preclude
mistake in every case of pious and upright inten-
tion. He was naturally much disappointed to find
that the authenticity and inspiration of the Bible
were themselves questions, like that of the char-
acter of the church, and as we have said, like most
other questions, to be examined by the light of
probable evidence. As in the case of the church,
when he failed to find that sort of infallible teach-
ing which would go far to supersede faith and
moral discipline, he lost, and never recovered, the
very idea of her functions as a spiritual mother; so

Against this part, then, of Mr. White's doctrine, we contend, that Christianity does not require the highest degree of intellectual certainty in order to be honestly and obediently received; and that the very same principles which govern our action in common life, cognizable by common sense, are those which, fortified through God's mercy with a singular accumulation and diversity of evidence, demand our reception of the word and our implicit obedience to it; and that we cannot refuse this demand upon the plea that the evidence is only probable and not demonstrative, without rebellion against the fundamental laws of our earthly state, as they are established by a truly Catholic consenthe first imagined, apparently, that Scripture would in the perpetual and universal practice of mankind.

be to him all that the church had proposed to be; and when this expectation was falsified, he very And it is well worthy of remark, that Mr. Blanco speedily lost his hold upon Scripture, as an authorWhite did not deny that probability was in favoritative document, altogether. Then doctrinal doubts of the Christian Revelation. This is plain, from the passages on which we have been arguing. But even at a later time he allowed that the Christian revelation was proved up to "a certain-perhaps a slight-degree of probability." Upon his own statement, therefore, it stands that he followed the improbable; and as the evidence was conclusive neither way, he chose that side upon which the lack was greatest; and his doctrine is overturned by the very argument which he has taken for its foundation.

From this subject we pass on to observe, that

1 Life, III., p. 406; and II., p. 235.

at once began to assault him; his understanding wavered, and he had none of the extrinsic support which he would have derived from the divines and the reformers of the English Church, if it had been his lot to recommence his studies in their school, and if, like them, he had been content to receive, as the legitimate witness to the sense of Holy Scripture, the voice of the universal church. So that he very soon lost any portion of dogmatic faith that he had recovered. But having, as we see from his whole works, much more of affection than of conviction, he naturally clung to the moral

1 Life, I., p. 111.

teaching of Scripture as long as any strength of regular Unitarianism: but it is Unitarianism remained. He found the evidence on most contro- practically applied, Unitarianism (so to speak) in verted doctrines so equal, as he thought, that he motion, and thus it strikes more forcibly upon the conceived it best to have no opinion upon them eye. Some time later, however, he struck at the (1818); he imagined the purpose of Scripture very foundation of the moral code of Him who was to teach the spirit of Christian morality, not inaugurated His great discourse with the text that to fix a code of opinions; he placed before him- "blessed are the poor in spirit."" For Mr. Blanco self God's will as a rule of life (1821);3 having White writes thus concerning humility in 1840:doubts on the subject of particular and general "Humility could not be raised to the catalogue providence, he put that question as an abstract of virtues, except in a society chiefly composed of one! into the catalogue of non-essentials (1822); men degraded by personal slavery, such as history and in one year more (1823) he concluded that exhibits the early church. Slaves alone could find Christianity had no letter, and that the spirit of such a sanctified cloak for cowardice as humility; which it testifies could not be distinguished from for it is not a dignified endurance of unavoidable conscientious reason. But he does not appear, evil, but such a cringing as may allay the anger during that period of declension, to have been of an insolent oppressor. Such submission cannot shaken as to the morality of the New Testament. find acceptance in thine eyes, O God, for it classes Most true indeed it is, that as the church is the Thee with the despots of this earth. bulwark of the canon of the Scripture and the doc- "If he (our Saviour) ever uttered the rule of trine it contains, so that doctrine is the bulwark offering the cheek for a second insult, he must of the whole of its moral law; and there is usually have done it under the conviction that the Oriental silence for a little space between the enemy's sur-style he was using could not be misunderstood but mounting one of these inclosures and the attempt by idiots. In the multitude of slaves who to scale the next. But in the period of his second flocked to the church is to be found the source of and final lapse from the Christian faith, which fol- that humility which has lowered the standard of lowed the year 1830, and became rapid from 1833, modern virtue."" it is quite evident that, following the natural order of things, he became less and less firm by degrees as to the morality of the Bible. He began by holding that our duty was to receive Christ as our moral king, and to believe in God, and exercise the religious affections towards Him apart from all dogmas as to his objective nature.' But in 1836 he said

"Dr. Whately has endeavored to gloss over the false political economy of the Gospels, and indeed of the New Testament altogether, in regard to almsgiving but the thing cannot be fairly done. Christ and his Apostles thought that to give away everything a man possessed was one of the highest acts of virtue.""8

Next he defined prayer to be, properly speaking, "a longing or desire," an "act of the heart," and he adds,

Then, becoming rabid in his infatuation, he proceeds to stigmatize3" the mean ambition, the low and degraded character, and the worldly views" of the martyrs of that Lord who is “to be glorified in His saints and admired in them that believe:" and as if it had been written in heaven that the man who uttered this impiety should not be suffered to do it without at the same time exposing himself to ridicule, while he has thus the Christian church and her achievements in his eye, he proceeds to complain that thus

To create in us a habit of distrust and timidity, is to deprive us of that confidence which is the foundation of all high enterprise."5

Yet he knew something of the power of that system which is thus enfeebled and degraded by the doctrine of humility; for among the many causes that embittered his last days and made his life a torment, was the belief which he has re

"To make it an act also of the lips, in regard to God, may be excusable, under certain circum-corded that, during his latter days, contrary to the stances."'9

Then he established, incredible as it may appear that such should be the result of almost a whole life of criticism in one form or other, as a rule for judging of the genuineness of passages in the New Testament, the moral consequences which they had produced,10 and their conformity to that reason which he defined to be the voice of God within us." "I approve in them what I find worthy of approval, and reject what I see no reason to believe or follow."'12

On this ground we presume, as he does not name any other, he repudiates (in 1834) the narrative of the woman taken in adultery.13 With the lapse of time the evil proceeds. In 1838 he says Socrates would have been a very different, evidently meaning an inferior, person, if he had had bodily ill-health to bear; and he proceeds, in words which we will not quote, (they simply express the thought,) to the blasphemous remark that the same would probably have been the case with our Lord. This is, indeed, a sentiment quite within the creed 2 Ib., p. 368. 5 Ib., p. 405. 8 Ib., p. 200. 11 Ib., III., p.

1 Life, I., p. 344. Ib., p. 398.

7 Ib., p. 276.

10 Ib., p. 287.

12 Compare II., 235. 14 Ib., III., p. 36.

3 Ib., p. 378.
6 Ib., II., p. 4.
9 Ib., II., p. 263.
155.
13 Life, I.,

p. 281.

hopes he had once entertained, oxthodoxy was on the advance in the land which he had hoped would be its grave.

Lastly, we are obliged to observe, before quitting this part of the subject, Mr. Blanco White appears to have had most feeble ideas of the nature and heinousness of sin as a contravention of the divine will. Of the sins of his own early life he sometimes speaks in the terms of penitence, but we do not perceive that the idea of sin as such ever raised in him the horror which belongs to it. In his later life, we must say that his vehemence against the Christian doctrine of original sin consorts but too well with his faint impressions upon actual sin. Of the former he does not scruple to say that those who can believe in it are beyond the reach of reasoning. Upon the latter, besides a scoff in an earlier passage,' he says

"There is nothing like pure joy among us. Pleasure constantly assumes the appearance of sin -a word which perverts every mind among us. The Hebrew had a sounder notion of the state of man upon earth. See the opinions and sentiments expressed in the book of Solomon." 8

liar case. man who sought, and sought, humanly speaking, with integrity, for truth, and yet almost wholly missed it. We are disposed to look for the solution of this dilemma chiefly in the fact that the mind of Mr. Blanco White had in his early years suffered a wrench from which it never recovered; that the natural relation between his speculative-and that he maintained, for some period after his and his practical life was then violently and fundamentally disturbed; and that any promise of Scripture which describes the influence to be produced by one part of our human constitution upon the other, by the will upon the intellect, must be understood with regard to those cases in which the laws of nature are left fundamentally undisturbed. But, as the arrow truly shot misses the target if this be moved during its flight, such a promise must necessarily fail to operate in cases where, both before the period of anything like full free agency is attained and after it, the orderly connection ordained to subsist between conviction and conduct has been not only impaired, but deliberately and systematically severed. Now so it was in Mr. Blanco White's devotion to the ecclesiastical career, and in the fatal necessities subsequently entailed upon him by that false position. He accepted that calling, as we have seen, because it was the key which alone could unlock to him the golden stores of literature that he panted to enjoy. The artful piety of his mother, or her advisers, instead of proceeding by the rude method of sheer force, applied to him the principle of the common curb, which becomes tighter as the horse pulls harder. It was determined to conquer him through himself. He was not obliged to become a priest; oh, no there was the counting-house open to him; and it was well known that his abhorrence of this latter calling would stand instead of an attachment to the former, especially when it was backed by an enthusiastic love of his mother, and a disposition strongly sympathetic. It is not for us to condemn those who thus drove him into holy orders. There is every proof that his mother's motives were pure and high. The error of a want of due respect to natural bent is too common to excite surprise; but the case before us is one that loudly calls upon us to mark its fatal operation.

Still the case stands thus: here was a belief. No assimilating process had mixed it with the courses of his nature: the internal and experimental evidences which familiarity supplies, and the rooted persuasion which it thus engenders, had no existence for him; and when we recollect that he appears to have stood well, while he was an unbeliever, as a theologian, confessor, and preacher receiving holy orders, purity of conduct-all this opens to us clearly the yawning chasm within him, the total want of moral choice in the determining action of his life, and the fundamental discord between himself and his position that ensued.

Yet that which was fundamental for the time, needed not therefore have been perpetual and incurable. But, as is usual, error bred error. He found himself at once a priest and an atheist. When, in this awful state, he began to seek guidance and relief by touching timidly the minds of other priests, his friends, he found that "With him in dreadful harmony they joined;" they reëchoed the note of total unbelief. We assent, of course, to the proposition that he ought to have quitted his position in the church at all hazards: but we shall plead in mitigation of judg ment that we believe few, perhaps even of those who may say so, would, under all the circumstances of his time and place, have done it. In the first place, a man cannot justifiably overturn the whole structure of his life, and violently disturb the society in which he lives, except upon a full and mature conviction-and this can only be tested by time; and it is not easy to mark the moment, so bewildering becomes the work of introspection, when a conviction entailing such terrible results has been sufficiently ascertained. But let it have arrived: to testify to a positive truth, to a living principle, is not only a duty, but an animating and ennobling idea: it is not the same thing when a man has to bear witness to a blank, a void, an universal negative-when he is to deprive all his fellow-creatures, as to their moral being, of the clothing that covers them, the house that shelters them, the food that sustains them, and to present to them the great Nil in exchange. Such was the case of Mr. Blanco White It was not merely that his judgment was thus although others may not have reached the very taken by storm, but it was in a matter where the same extremes, yet upon the whole he had, as we decision was irrevocable: for the day that made have seen, but too ample countenance from exhim a sub-deacon cut him off forever from domes-ample. Nor was his case simply that of following tic life, which appears, we should say, to have a multitude to do evil. He saw, as he conceived, been an essential part of his natural vocation; and so he was placed in a course of daily and continual action, which had no support in the convictions of his interior mind: he had indeed called in the aid of powerful religious excitement-yet, as we have seen above, he records that even at the time he never overcame an inward sentiment of loathing for the peculiar exercises of devotion which produced it. Nature had been expelled with a pitchfork, and she took her revenge on her return. The knowledge of physical truth had placed the youth in collision with his ecclesiastical preceptors at the age of fourteen or fifteen; and as all instruction was delivered to him in the same tone and under the same seal of authority, it was natural and consequent that when a part had exploded he should vehemently question the rest. Upon the single issue whether the church-that is to say, the Church of Rome-had ever been mistaken, there was ventured the whole fabric of his

and

two classes in the priesthood: of these, one taught what they believed to be false; but the others held and taught the same things upon an authority which he had satisfied himself was worthless, and would not suffer any to teach otherwise besides the preachers of what they did not believe, and those who believed only in deference to the Church of Rome, there was no third class :-there were none with whom he could take refuge. The great men of heathen antiquity, too, who might present themselves as models to one in his circumstances, had, as he knew, dissembled more or less with regard to religion. And we must recollect that that duty of testifying to our own personal convictions, which is taught among us sometimes even to the disparagement of other duties, occupied no such place in the system under which he lived. It may nevertheless remain true that he ought to have braved the Inquisition-and, what was still more, that he ought to have placed his

dictions between conscience and conduct of his early career, quite enough to account for the fact that, notwithstanding his subsequent anxiety to attain the truth, his foot should have missed the narrow path which leads to her lofty palaces.

"Was tuned to notes of gladness;

parents on the rack of mental agony by the disclosure of his unbelief: but we must think that his breach of duty in dissembling was one which comparatively few among those, whose minds might be crude enough to have fallen into his error, could have avoided. Making all these ad- There may, however, perhaps be persons inmissions, however, the grave, the vast evil of the clined to the opinions of Mr. Blanco White, who case remains clear. The moral consequences of may contend that we do to him, and still more to maintaining a Christian profession for ten years those opinions, an injustice, when we represent the upon a basis of Atheism-the Breviary on the latter periods of his life as essentially and deeply table, and the Anti-Christian writers of France in unhappy and it may be argued, that all sympthe closet-must have been fatal to the solidity toms of that character are fairly ascribable to the and consistency of his inward life thereafter. At protracted and wearing, and sometimes acute the very time when the mind may be said to have maladies, under which he suffered, and to his frethe last hand put to the formation of its determi- quent loneliness. But those of us who have ever nate character-namely, from about twenty-five to witnessed the triumphs of faith upon the bed of thirty-five-it was his unhappy condition to be at sickness, and indeed probably every candid obfirst exercising all the offices, and to the last main-server, will not, we think, find in his circumtaining the profession, of a priest, while he knew stances any sufficient ground for that remarkable that he had inwardly ceased to be a Christian. prevalence of gloomy recollections which marks And surely it is not too much to say, while we his journal. There are, indeed, occasionally passedulously disclaim the office of the judge, that sages indicating comfort, and sometimes more after so long a period of contrast the most violent than comfort, when the momentary transports of and unnatural-after the habits of mind belonging intellectual activity were upon him. But his to such a position have been contracted, and record is like that "harp of Innisfail," which ever hardened, as in so considerable a tract of time they and anon must needs have been hardened-after the purposes and the general conduct of life have been so long and so entirely dissociated from inward convictions-it is too late to reestablish their natural relations to one other. We cannot with impunity Whenever he describes the general color of his thus tamper with the fearful and wonderful com- life, he describes it as miserable. So early as in position of our spiritual being-sincerity of inten- the end of 1831, he says!" For the last eighteen tion after this can only subsist in a qualified and years he has not enjoyed one day of tolerable eximperfect sense it may be sincere so far as de-istence." In 1835 he had, if we may so speak, pends upon the contemporaneous action of the will, the honeymoon of his Unitarianism. But, in 1836, but it is clogged and hampered by the encumber- he began to wish habitually for death-and death ing remains of former insincerity, and it can only with him had a terrible meaning. Latterly his reap a scanty share of the blessings that attend greatest comfort appears to have been found in upon a virgin rectitude: and thus, as the promises literature" My only enjoyment of life arises to the penitent become ambiguous, and at length from my books." In the year 1838 his complainbarren, in the progress of the hardening of the ings become almost incessant-and sometimes from heart, so the promises of guidance to the willing being piteous they grow frightful. In the mean must be understood with reference not to the mere time, he says, his religious convictions, as they inclination of the moment, but to the bent of the were fewer, were firmer than ever. This is genecharacter modified as it is by former conduct, rally the feeling of those who have just discarded and to those pizodes voor, those laws of moral what they think a falsehood, with regard to all retribution, which by the structure of our minds they continue to hold; and he was always in this we are made, every one of us, to administer against very predicament: but we could easily prove from his pages, with a redundancy of dark detail, that Sometimes in reading this work we have been these convictions were totally incapable of giving reminded, by the intensity of the sufferings which cheerfulness or even tranquillity to his life, and the writer describes, and of the prostration they that his closing years were years of habitual produced, of the religious melancholy or madness misery, mitigated only by intervals of partial reof Cowper, who was borne away by a rapid lief.

ourselves.

ance.

But

yet

it oftener told a tale
Of more prevailing sadness."

torrent into a strong sea. "2 We know not whether We have seen, then, how slender, in the later it be irrational to indulge the hope that bodily life of this unhappy man, were the relics of what disease may have been in a greater or less degree once at least had been, in some sense, the majestic the source of Mr. Blanco White's morbid specula- form of the Christian faith. As when a single tions, and that the severity of its pressure may at stone remains upon the ground, the solitary memoleast at times have placed his free agency in abey-rial of some mighty temple, in which it once had With regard to all such possibilities, let us its appointed place, but it is now shifted from its leave them to Him who knows and judges: only base-sustaining nothing, and itself unsustained-they may be useful in aiding us to check that im- wasting away beneath the elements. Wasting, patience of the understanding, which so often we fear, but too rapidly, unless the process should leads us into premature and incompetent con- have been arrested by some dispensation from clusions upon the personal merits of our fellow- above. He seems, indeed, to have been nearly stationary during the last three or four years of his

creatures.

But however much or however little foundation there may be for a supposition of this kind, we confess we find in the long protracted contra