Theologian, the son of a Unitarian minister, was born at Normanston near Lowestoft, 29th August 1805, and studied at Trinity College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, but as a dissenter, left in 1827 without a degree, and commenced a literary career in London. He wrote a novel, “Eustace Conway,” and for a time edited the “Athenæum.” Influenced by Coleridge, he resolved to take orders in the Church of England, at Oxford took his M.A., and was ordained a priest in 1834. He became chaplain to Guy’s Hospital (1837), to Lincoln’s Inn (1841–60); in 1840 professer of Literature at King’s College, London, where he was professor of Theology 1846–53. In 1860 he accepted the incumbency of Vere Street Chapel, which he held until his election to the chair of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge in 1866. He died in London 1st April 1872. The publication in 1853 of his “Theological Essays,” dealing with the atonement and eternal life, lost him the professorship of Theology in King’s College. His principal books are “Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy,” “Religions of the World,” “Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament,” “Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament,” “The Kingdom of Christ,” “The Doctrine of Sacrifice,” “Theological Essays,” “Lectures on the Ecclesiastical History of the First and Second Centuries,” “Gospel of St. John,” “The Conscience,” and “Social Morality.”
Personal
My decided opinion is, that Maurice is quite as able a man as Merivale, and infinitely a safer one than either Merivale or Twiss. He is a man who has always paid particular attention to philosophy, and has always taken his philosophical premisses as much from the spiritual world revealed to us in the Bible, as from the sensible world by which our bodies are surrounded. He would, as I understand, if elected, endeavour to try the popular principles of political economy by the test of principles higher and more certain than themselves; and particularly to recall the attention of his hearers to that interference of moral considerations, which in practice will be sure to affect, if not materially to disturb, those results which modern economists have generally reasoned out by mere arithmetical calculation. All this seems to be very much needed in the present state of the science; and Oxford is just the place from which it ought to come.
Mr. Maurice we rarely see, nor do I greatly regret his absence; for, to tell you the truth, I am never in his company without being attacked with a sort of paroxysm of mental cramp! He keeps one always, with his wire-drawings and paradoxes, as if one were dancing on the points of one’s toes (spiritually speaking). And then he will help with the kettle, and never fails to pour it all over the milk-pot and sugar-basin!
The Maurices are wearisome and happily rare. All invitations “to meet the Maurices” I, when it is in any way possible, make a point of declining. One of the most entirely uninteresting men of genius that I can meet in society is poor Maurice to me; all twisted, screwed, wiredrawn, with such restless sensitiveness, the utmost unability to let nature have fair play with him. I do not remember that a word ever came from him betokening clear recognition or healthy free sympathy with anything. One must really let him alone till the prayers one does offer for him (pure-hearted, earnest creature as he is) begin to take effect.
| For, being of that honest few, | |
| Who give the Fiend himself his due, | |
| Should eighty thousand college-councils | |
| Thunder “Anathema,” friend, at you; | |
| Should all our churchmen foam in spite | |
| At you, so careful of the right, | |
| Yet one lay-hearth would give you welcome— | |
| Take it and come—to the Isle of Wight. |
I suppose I must have heard him, first and last, some thirty or forty times, and never carried away one clear idea, or even the impression that he had more than the faintest conception of what he himself meant. Aubrey De Vere was quite right when he said, that listening to him was like eating pea-soup with a fork, and Jowett’s answer was not less to the purpose, when I asked him what a sermon, which Maurice had just preached before the University, was about, and he replied—“Well! all that I could make out was that to-day was yesterday, and this world the same as the next.” John Stuart Mill, who had known him early in life, said to me about this time, “Frederick Maurice has philosophical powers of the highest order, but he spoils them all by torturing everything into Thirty-nine Articles.” The fact that he should have exerted a distinctly stimulating and liberalising influence over many more or less remarkable people, is sufficiently strange; but it must be remembered that he was a noble fellow, with immense power of sympathy, and an ardent, passionate nature, which often led him to right conclusions in spite of his hopelessly confused reasoning. To listen to him was to drink spiritual champagne.
I thank you very much for the papers of Maurice’s College. I was interested deeply and delighted with them; as for him, he is one of my heroes. I cannot too personally express how much I honour him—indeed envy him, I might almost say—but that there is no such alloy in the feeling with which he inspires me.
In more than five-and-twenty years, I have known no being so utterly unselfish, so utterly humble, so utterly careless of power or influence, for the mere enjoyment—and a terrible enjoyment it is—of using them. Staunch to his own opinion only when it seemed to involve some moral principle, he was almost too ready to yield it, in all practical matters, to anyone whom he supposed to possess more practical knowledge than he. To distrust himself, to accuse himself, to confess his proneness to hard judgments, while, to the eye of those who knew him and the facts, he was exercising a splendid charity and magnanimity; to hold himself up as a warning of “wasted time,” while he was, but too literally, working himself to death,—this was the childlike temper which made some lower spirits now and then glad to escape from their consciousness of his superiority by patronizing and pitying him; causing in him—for he was, as all such great men are like to be, instinct with genial humour—a certain quiet good-natured amusement, but nothing more.
Always in the same way he caught at every opportunity of pouring forth his gratitude for and appreciation of anything that was done for him by whomsoever it was done; as much for the thoughtfulness and affection with which all his servants waited on him, as for any other service. Quite to the last, if a cab was to be fetched, or some message outside the house to be delivered on a wet day, he was sure to slip out himself to get it done rather than let a maid-servant be exposed to bad weather. This was characteristic of his habit in all household matters. Some time before he left London evidence had been given that it was a great temptation to servants to be sent round to pay the tradesmen’s bills. From that time he nearly always went round himself and paid the bills, both in London and in Cambridge, as a duty to the servants. One hardly can go into details because this kind of taking upon himself the rough and leaving to others the smooth, and if possible at the same time contriving to give some one else the credit of what had been done, extended to every little detail of life. If visitors called on him or were staying with him, who differed from him in points of opinion, his reticence in explaining, urging or enforcing any opinions of his own, unless he was almost forced to speak out, was always marked. No doubt his shyness was partly the cause, but much more than this the dread of trying merely to substitute his opinions for others, to proselytise in any way, was the reason for it.
He was a good man, one of the best of men: incapable of a mean or self-seeking or dishonest action: with a tenderness of conscience which to the outer Philistine will appear Quixotic; and a self-depreciation which those who did not know him thought could not be sincere. He was also a great man, both in mind and heart: though one of the humblest…. To read through this biography is to rise into a purer atmosphere. So humble, so unselfish, was this great and saintly man, that mean souls commonly judged him an impostor: roughly concluding (through the necessity of their nature), that as no human being could be so wise as Thurlow looked, so no mortal could be as good as Maurice seemed.
It is hardly too much to say that the voice and manner of the preacher—his voice and manner in the reading-desk, at least as much as in the pulpit—have lived in my memory ever since, as no other voice and manner have ever lived in it. The half stern half pathetic emphasis with which he gave the words of the Confession, “And there is no health in us,” throwing the weight of the meaning on to the last word, and the rising of his voice into a higher plane of hope as he passed away from the confession of weakness to the invocation of God’s help, struck the one note of his life—the passionate trust in eternal help—as it had never been struck in my hearing before, though I never again saw or heard him without again hearing it…. A simpler and homelier man there never was in this world; indeed he was one who, though he could hardly speak without showing that his mind was occupied with invisible realities, had a quite pathetic sense of his own inadequacy to do what he desired to do, and the tenderest possible sympathy with the like incapacities of others.
No man could be in a sense less self-asserting than he was. His shy humility was from early years a marked feature of his character. But along with an almost morbid self-depreciation there was also from the first—certainly from the time that he turned his thoughts to the Church—an intense spirit of religious confidence. Generalizing from his own family experiences, he was led to certain conclusions which he held as absolute truths. These conclusions were entirely unlike those to which his sisters and mother had come. But they were held with the same tenacity and disregard of consequences. If more enlightened, they were not the less downright. When his mother assured her astonished husband that “Calvinism was true,” she said what her son would never have said—but the spirit of the saying may be traced in many of his utterances.
He was one of the best men, and one of the greatest, whom I have ever known. His intellectual eminence never betrayed him into the slightest touch of scorn; and though he lived for years amid the roar and bray of religious obloquy, almost utterly neglected and unrewarded by those who dispense the patronage of the English Church, which he had so nobly served, he suffered neither neglect nor depreciation to weaken his high faith in human nature, and was incapable of an uncharitable thought. If ever there was a man who, living in the world, was not of it; if ever there was a man who, in the midst of religious virulence and vulgarity, was sustained by habitual intercourse with all that is high and noble in human thought; it was he.
The most saintly personality of the nineteenth century, Newman, Pusey, and Keble not excepted. To me he made the phrase “Virtue went out of him” intelligible, for, as his life went on, the veil of the flesh seemed to wear so thin that the soul, almost ready for its emancipation, seemed to radiate goodness and to shine through. Yet was Maurice of all men most companionable, despite a certain shyness which made him seem to himself, and to himself only, to use his own words, “in most companies a bore.” His greatness was never oppressive; his goodness was never obtrusive, but a light went wherever he passed. No one felt mean beside him; the cleverest and most self-conscious forgot themselves, and became simple and charming; whilst the stupidest discovered unsuspected worth and abilities in his presence.
Maurice was rather below middle height, but a singularly noble and expressive countenance gave dignity to his appearance. His voice and manner in conducting divine service were especially reverent and impressive. He suffered from severe illnesses, partly due to overwork, but behaved like a man in strong health. He rose early, often saw his friends at breakfast, and afterwards worked till his dinner-time, unless interrupted by business, dictating most of his writing. His manuscripts were elaborately corrected and rewritten. Maurice’s character was most fascinating. Kingsley called him the “most beautiful human soul” he had known; and an early friend says that he was the “most saintlike,” or, if he “dared to use the words,” the most Christlike individual he had ever met. Those who knew him well would generally agree in the opinion. He was exceedingly gentle and courteous in personal intercourse, beloved by his servants, and an easy victim to begging impostors. He was absolutely unworldly, shrinking from preferment when it was within his reach, as in previous days he had frankly uttered the convictions which then made preferment impossible.
He was the most hospitable of men, and yet his son tells us that he doubts if he ever gave an invitation without a certain shyness and hesitation, as though it was something of a liberty for him to take to ask any human being to come to his house. This shyness it was almost impossible for him to set aside. He had none of those qualities which make the bustling clergyman successful in his work. He lacked assurance. He lacked self-esteem. Though it is a peculiarity of his books that they are almost always autobiographical, that he speaks in the first person, and has much to say about himself, it is because he will not presume to speak for other people. He is never a critic unless he is forced to be so. It is his own duty with which he is most concerned. His books were composed in a hurry, and he did not regard them as likely to be of permanent reputation.
General
There is something in Maurice, and his master Coleridge, which wakens thought in me more than any other writings almost: with all their imputed mysticism they seem to me to say plain things as often as most people.
I am reading Maurice’s “Theological Essays,” and find them, notwithstanding a good deal of interest in parts, on the whole shadowy and unimpressive. I hardly think a man has any business to write till he has brought his thoughts into distincter shapes and better defined relations then I find in Maurice. He seems to me to have a mere presentiment of thinking, a tentative process in the direction that never fairly succeeds in getting home. But I have thus far read only some half-dozen of the Essays.
The most philosophical writer of the day.
He was not a great speaker or a great thinker; he was not a bold reformer; he had not a very subtle intellect; I doubt whether his writings will be much read in coming time. He was simply a great character, a grand influence. He sent a new life into the languid and decaying frame of the State Church of England. He quickened it with a fresh sense of duty.
His writings always betray a certain indifference to form. They have often, hardly one would say a crude, but still an unformed character. It is not a lack of appreciation of art, for that appears in a very high degree, nor is it a disdain of the art of composition, but it is the characteristic of one who, having a word to utter and a message to give, is chiefly intent upon that. There is thus no regard for a formal rhetoric, and no cadence of tone nor balance of words, and no antithesis is allowed to divert him from the object of his thought. The expression is thus rarely obscure, although often involved. The style is simple and homely, while yet often interrupted by phrases and passages of singular beauty, and sometimes rising into great eloquence. It most frequently has the form of a direct address, as if of a person to a person, and there is a reluctance to use any other form. There is humour and strong irony, and sometimes a rare satirical power, but this always has a side of truth and is never unkindly.
It was, after all, in this—in his personal influence—that Mr. Maurice was greatest. True, he was a great and rare thinker. Those who wish to satisfy themselves of this should measure the capaciousness of his intellect by studying—not by merely reading—his Boyle Lectures on the religions of the world; and that Kingdom of Christ, the ablest “Apology” for the Catholic Faith which England has seen for more than two hundred years. The ablest, and perhaps practically the most successful; for it has made the Catholic Faith look living, rational, practical, and practicable, to hundreds who could rest neither in modified Puritanism or modified Romanism, and still less in scepticism, however earnest. The fact that it is written from a Realist point of view, as all Mr. Maurice’s books are, will make it obscure to many readers…. Much has been said of the obscurity of Mr. Maurice’s style. It is a question whether any great thinker will be anything but obscure at times; simply because he is possessed by conceptions beyond his powers of expression.
He, if any one, was an English citizen, even more than he was an English churchman. He, whilst clinging passionately, devotedly, to the ages of the past, yet was, if any one, full of all the thoughts and events of our own momentous century. Not a wave of speculation in Europe, not a public event of joy or sorrow in England, but called forth a sympathetic or indignant cry from that travailing soul. None of our time have in this respect so visibly been as the ancient prophets, reflecting all the movements of the age, yet themselves not led captive by them. For this was the contrast which makes his life so deeply instructive. In the midst of all this, he was in all those senses in which we have spoken of peace, the most peaceful, the most pacific, the most peace-making of men. Peace in himself; for, amidst the strife of tongues and the war of parties, he remained self-poised, independent, in a world above this world, in a land that was very far away, with utterances sometimes obscure, sometimes flashing with lightning splendour, yet always speaking from his own heart and conscience that which there he had truly found…. A true Pontiff of the English Church, a true paladin in the English State. He has built bridges that will not easily be broken across the widest chasms that separate class from class, and mind from mind. He has, with a more piercing sword than Roland’s Durandel, made a breach in the mountain-wall of prejudice and ignorance that will never be entirely closed.
The two features which strike us at the moment as characteristic of Mr. Maurice as a writer and teacher, besides the vast range both of his reading and thought, and the singularly personal tone and language of all that he wrote, are, first, the combination in him of the most profound and intense religiousness with the most boundless claim and exercise of intellectual liberty; and next, the value which he set, exemplifying his estimate in his own long and laborious course, on processes and efforts, as compared with conclusions and definite results, in that pursuit of truth which was to him the most sacred of duties…. Mr. Maurice’s desire to give the simplest and most real form to his thoughts as they arose in his own mind contributed more often than he supposed to prevent others from entering into his meaning. He asked them to put themselves in his place. He did not sufficiently put himself in theirs.
I have so deep a respect for Maurice’s character and purposes, as well as for his great mental gifts, that it is with some unwillingness I say anything which may seem to place him on a less high eminence than I would gladly be able to accord to him. But I have always thought that there was more intellectual power wasted in Maurice than in any other of my contemporaries. Few of them certainly have had so much to waste. Great powers of generalization, rare ingenuity and subtlety, and a wide perception of important and unobvious truths, served him not for putting something better into the place of the worthless heap of received opinions on the great subject of thought, but for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first, and that all the truths on the ground of which the Church and orthodoxy have been attacked (many of which he saw as clearly as anyone), are not only consistent with the Thirty-nine Articles, but are better understood and expressed in these Articles than by anyone who rejects them.
The general attitude of Mr. Maurice towards the speculation of his time may be easily defined. He was, it may be said, one product of the great reaction of the early part of this century. The fossilized theology of the preceding generation was to him unspeakably barren. The heresies which it encountered shared its faults. Paley and Horsley were as flat and unprofitable as Bentham and Priestley. Utilitarian moralists seemed to him to leave out of their calculations the animating principle of society; and their calculations were frigid and materialising. They made a machine out of a living organism, and reduced to a mere caput mortuum the body in which they should have recognised the inspiration of the divine spirit. On the other hand, Mr. Maurice’s culture was too wide, his sympathies too keen and generous, to permit him to join the purely reactionary party. He sought therefore to escape from the prison-house under the congenial guidance of Coleridge, whose influence upon his mind is generously recognised in the preface to the “Kingdom of Christ.”
The first theologian of their time, who had done more than any other man to widen and deepen English thought.
Mr. Maurice never erred, as a less practically devout nature might have erred, by theorizing away the facts of the inner life; conscious of a conflict between right and wrong within himself, God was for him not an impersonal force but a Righteous Will to which his loyalty was due, and from any pantheistic tendency to efface the distinction between good and evil Mr. Maurice was wholly free. A special gift of Mr. Maurice indeed lay in his power of lifting up into consciousness, without murdering or dissecting them, the things of the spiritual life; he saw them in the round, and contemplated rather than analyzed them.
Maurice, in his volume “Learning and Working,” has given four lectures on “The Religion of Rome” that show the author’s genius at its best.
The “Prophets and Kings,” simple as its pages seem in the stately rhythm of their majestic thought, could never have been written save by a Platonic scholar, and a man of literary and dramatic genius; but what shall we say of his great work, the work of his life, which repeated editions and ceaseless labour had wrought to the point at which we have it in the last years of his life—the “Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy?” He would be a bold man who would undertake to criticise this book. Colonel Maurice cites the testimony of specialists in any particular period, and of teachers, who have used the book. They testify, in the only way in which, in the case of a book of such extent (not less, indeed, than the entire history of human thought), it is possible for anyone to testify, to its value. If I might venture to add anything to what they have said, I should wish to call attention to the intellectual instinct which realised the later Latin genius, and, with it, the situations of absorbing interest, in which it was developed, amid the conflicts and alternating vices and virtues of the old and new faiths. No one, I imagine, can read the pages which describe the Emperor Julian, Augustine, Gregory the Great, and others, without being aware of the presence of this graphic perception, to which only genius attains.
I have mentioned Professor Maurice, and probably no man exerted a stronger impulse over my development. From his lectures on literature and history, in which I was his pupil for three years, I pass to his writings. His was a mind with which no one could be in contact without a sense of elevation. He was absolutely removed from everything that was mean, false, and petty in the popular theology and religious controversy of his day, and he always stood before us as a living proof that a man could be a prophet, a profound thinker, a man of the deepest spirituality and the loftiest moral nobleness, and yet be for all the party “religious” newspapers of the day, as well as for many of the secular journals—
| “The very butt of slander, and the blot | |
| For every dart that malice ever shot.” |
Mr. Maurice’s literary works, all more or less Sermons and Lectures reproduced, have not attained any lasting celebrity. His “Doctrine of Sacrifice” is an attempt to show how vicarious suffering is really the rule of life, but was supposed by many to weaken while appearing to defend the principle of the great Atonement. His “Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament” has a clearness and picturesque force of narrative which gives it a distinct and attractive place among his many works, since these were gifts by no means common in his writings.
It is not too much to say that Maurice’s life and writings will be read chiefly by those who knew him. I doubt whether, with the exception of the thick volume “Moral Philosophy,” the “Kings and Prophets,” and perhaps the sermons on the Lord’s Prayer and the “Theological Essays,” any of Maurice’s books are read by the present generation, and even the above named are not much read. In his own lifetime, I was told years ago by Macmillan, his devoted publisher, that the sale of each new book averaged about 800. The same people bought about the same number of copies, and some were published at a loss. This is not because they did not carry weight, but because they were not generally intelligible, except to Mauricians. But the men who read them were mostly accomplished writers and preachers themselves, and through each one of such readers Maurice practically addressed tens of thousands…. There were peculiarities about Maurice’s mind which those who were out of sympathy with him—like Pusey, Mansel, and to some extent Jowett, and even his friend J. S. Mill—were apt to set down to affectation or even insincerity. The extreme subtlety of Maurice’s intellect, which led J. S. Mill to say that he was the greatest metaphysical force at Oxford wasted upon theological hairsplitting, was a distinct hindrance to that clearness of statement which carries conviction to the average intellect. His readers sometimes felt they were being juggled with: each sentence was clear, but the whole page was misty, whilst the conclusions were jumped and the words, as it were, forced—difficulties were got done with, but somehow were not really solved.
A very generous and amiable person with a deficient sense of history, Maurice in his writing is a sort of elder, less gifted, and more exclusively theological Charles Kingsley, on whom he exercised great and rather unfortunate influence. But his looseness of thought, wayward eclecticism of system, and want of accurate learning, were not remedied by Kingsley’s splendid pictorial faculty, his creative imagination, or his brilliant style.
While the thought of Maurice does not lend itself easily to brief summaries, yet it is not difficult to trace in all his writings one common element which binds them together in a consistent whole. That “religious realism” which enabled him to grasp the fatherhood of God as an actual relationship which could not be broken may be discerned in every attitude of his mind. He looked upon religious institutions, not as identical with their divine idea, but as witnesses to a higher reality. Because the reality existed independently of its acknowledgment, he could be charitable while holding the strongest convictions, dogmatic while rejoicing in the largest freedom of thought. What to the popular mind seemed like divine indifference to human affairs was to his mind the visible token of His presence. The religious doubt from which others fled in alarm, he welcomed as an aid to the deeper knowledge of God.
The want of clear outline is one of his chief defects. Though always suggestive, he is often somewhat elusive; and perhaps it is for this reason that his influence seems to dissipate itself without producing anything like the effect anticipated from it. The practical outcome of the school of Maurice is poor in comparison with that of the school of Pusey. This however was not wholly Maurice’s fault. The Oxford school has drawn strength from what, nevertheless, may ultimately prove to be its weakness,—the appeal to authority, so tempting to many minds for the relief it promises. Maurice is not chargeable with this fault to the same degree. But neither is he entirely free from a kindred fault. He too, like Newman, argues to a foregone conclusion. In Mill’s opinion, more intellectual power was wasted in Maurice than in any other of his contemporaries, and it was wasted because all Maurice’s subtlety and power of generalisation served only “for proving to his own mind that the Church of England had known everything from the first.”
It is hardly too much to say that it was the doctrine of Maurice, rather than that of Pusey or Newman, which for forty years—Maurice began his work in 1835; he died in 1872—“kept the whole of his forward movement in the social and political life of the English people in union with God and identified with religion,” a doctrine which, idealized and transfigured in the two great poets of the century, Tennyson and Browning,… has, during this last decade of the century, turned so wisely the current of our English Christianity to the consideration of the great social problems of the age, and is at this moment so profoundly affecting, moulding, inspiring, transfusing the social ideals of the present.
