CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND GIVEN IN 189I BY HENRY WILLIAMS SAGE _„ Cornell Universltv Library BX9869.M38 C29 1905 •James Martineau, theologian and teacher: olin 3 1924 029 480 526 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924029480526 JAMES MARTINEAU l--cu7i.e/y ^ The couplet is from one of Mrs. Barbauld's hymns. jiiij RELIGION IN THE HOME 9 Grave and reserved was the religious life of such a home. There was the Sunday worship at the Octagon Chapel, of which Mr. Thomas Martineau was sometime a deacon. It had been opened in 1756, and it was described the next year by John Wesley as ' perhaps the most elegant in Europe.' But 'how can it be thought,' added the great preacher, ' that the old coarse Gospel should find admission here ? ' Dr. John Taylor, for whom the meeting-house was built, ^ was, however, other- wise minded. In his conception religion was in- dependent of all sectarian distinctions. ' We are Christians,' he declared in his dedicatory sermon, ' and only Christians ; and we consider all our feUow-Protestants, of every denomination, in the same light — only as Christians — and cordially em- brace them all in affection and charity as such.' In such a spirit different forms of belief were able to subsist side by side without irritation and alarm, while a gradual change took place in the direction of a definite Unitarian theology.^ The pastor of James Martineau's boyhood was * The old meeting-house of 1687 was pnlled down owing to defects in the building in 1753. ' The memories of Presbyterian descent, however, were still preserved ; and James Martineau afterwards recalled ' his extreme abhorrence, when a child, of Matthew Henry's Cate- chism, which he always thought the dullest piece of religious instruction he ever had to do with.' — Speech at the Provincial Meeting at Chester, Inquirer, June 18, 1846. On the other hand he was early alive to reverence for the grandeur of the world. Pleading at the Sunday School Association, London, 1858, for the admission of ' real knowledge ' which should not be stamped as merely ' secular,' he said : ' I can recollect the period when, myself almost a child, I first acquired a picture of the universe, and I do not think any more religious impres- sion was ever produced on my mind.' — Inquirer, May 29, 1858. 10 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 [ch. i the Rev. Thomas Madge, who came to Norwich in 1811. He had been brought up in the Church of England, and his secession from the Establishment on doctrinal grounds led him to lay greater stress on the nature and contents of his new faith. Full of quick feeling, he was an enthusiastic student of Wordsworth, and Mr, Crabb Robinson records a visit to Norwich on Aug. 13, 1814, when he stole out from the theatre, whither he had accompanied some friends, to call on Madge, at whose apartments he foimd 'the great new poem of Wordsworth, The Excursion." Doubtless this admiration helped to shape ' the sweet and solemn impression ' which Harriet Martineau remembered as the effect of his preaching. In her brother James the silvery speech of the young minister wrought abiding memories. ' Some of my first awakenings of con- science and of spiritual faith,' he wrote to Mrs. Madge after her husband's death in 1870, ' came to me in the tones of that sweet voice, and the inward echoes were ever renewed when I heard it again, in preaching or in prayer.'^ From her earliest years Harriet had been easily moved by religious feeling, and she drew her chief pleasure from that source. She could remember waking one summer morning when she was five years old, in all the splendour of a crimson and ^ Memoir, by the Rev. W. James, p. 324. From another point of view, however, he wrote to the Rev. E. M. Daplyn, then minister of the Octagon Chapel, after his ninety-third birthday — ' Endearing as are many of my Norwich recollections, and the Octagon part in their history, they belong to an experience more or less apart from the opening of the chapter of continuous inner life, of what perhaps the orthodox Christian would call the crisis of conversion.' §iu] RELIGION IN THE HOME 11 purple sunrise. The ' baby ' was in his crib, and while the nurse slept she contrived to get him to the window, and flung open the casement. ' The sky was gorgeous,' she relates, 'and I talked very religiously to the child.' ^ A little later they were partners in games, as they were later stUl in studies ; and their games and their studies had a Biblical air. A story used to be told of a visitor who, inquiring after the children, was referred to the garden. James was buried in the earth with his head only above ground, and Harriet stood beside. ' Oh,' she ex- plained, ' we're playing at the resurrection, and I've promised him he shall rise again ! ' Next, she is poring over the geography of the New Testa- ment, making harmonies of the Gospels, and plod- ding through Belsham's Exposition of the Epistles ; while he, set to read the Bible on Sunday, flies from Genesis to Isaiah between the return from chapel and dinner, ' skipping the nonsense, you know, Mamma.'^ Pass on a few years, and the boy from school meets his sister at seven in the morning to study Lowth's Prelections in the Latin* before breakfast. Serious, no doubt, was the home atmosphere ; but its inmates had many interests ; and outside were the large families of cousins who frequently met at each other's houses. The elder brothers teased Harriet about her economic studies ; at Christmas games they charged her as a forfeit to ^Autobiography, i. 17. 2 The story is told with inevitable variations ; compare Life, i. 10 ; and the Christian Life for April 21, 1876. ' Autobiography, i. loi. 12 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 [ch. i make every person present understand the operation of the Sinking Fund ; and they addressed mock inquiries to her as to the state of the Debt. But the evening readings in history and biography and the new reviews went on uninterrupted. Harriet made herself a sort of ' walking concordance ' of Shakspeaire and Milton, and Mrs. Martineau's favourite poet was Bums. Moreover, the Taylor cousins were active in original production, and the Martineaus were called in to help. Large family gatherings were held at intervals, when essays and poems contributed by the circle of kindred were read, and plays of home-composition were acted, in which James could remember taking part.^ Mr. John Taylor, who wrote a number of verses and h5mins in wide repute, was the friend of Mackin- tosh ; and Mrs. Taylor was quite able to hold her own, composedly darning the family stockings while she conversed with Southey or Brougham. Sir James Smith, the botanist, was also an esteemed writer of hymns for the Octagon services, where he was deacon at the time of his death in 1828* Dr. Rigby, physician and agriculturist, grandson of Dr. John Taylor, apprenticed to David Martineau in 1762, was another kinsman. High in civic repute, he served as Mayor of Norwich in 1805, and his son Edward, who was only a year senior to James Martineau, was his comrade in the Norwich school; At the hospitable house of Dr. Alderson (the Mar- tineaus' family physician), another distinguished ^ Letter to Mrs. Ross (daughter of Lady Dufi Gordbn, and great-grand-daughter of Mr. John Taylor), in her Three Genera- tions of English Women, 1888, vol. i. § iv] THE HOME tIFE I3 Unitarian, his daughter, Mrs. Opie, widow of the painter, wrote her tales, and cultivated society, and planned her philanthropies. And through WiUiam Taylor,^ the friend of Southey, who had translated Lessing's ' Nathan,' Burger's ' Lenore,' and Goethe's ' Iphigenia in Tauris,' as early as 1790, the Uterary outlook was yet further extended. He taught Borrow German, and when the young Martineau was a student at York, and there were family plans for sending him to Gottingen, it is possible that William Taylor may have done a like service for him.2 Such a society could not fail to stimulate. William Taylor and Thomas Martineau had been school-fellows at Mr. Barbauld's, at Palgrave, in Suffolk : and when they became men, and Mrs. Barbauld sometimes paid a visit to Norwich, she always spent a long morning in the house in Magdalen Street. The children had learned her delightful ' Hymns in Prose ' ; ' we knew she was very learned,' wrote Harriet, ' and we saw she was graceful, and playful, and kindly, and womanly.' IV. At ten years of age James Martineau was sent as a day scholar to the Norwich Grammar School. Facing the western front of the cathedral, it was entered from the preciucts of the close, and day after day the lofty spire looked down upon the boys £is they assembled there ; but it did not become 1 1 765-1836. He was not one of the descendants of Dr. John Taylor, but was connected with the family of Maurice. * A notebook shows him already busy with his grammar in his first college year. 14 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 [ch. i a companion to the lad whose imagination had not yet been awakened. To the Rev. Dr. Jessop in 1888 Dr. Martineau recalled 'the old schoolroom in the Norwich close, where I consorted in the play- ground or competed in the class with Brooke and Stoddart, Borrow, Rigby, and Daliymple,i and learned to respect the scholarship of our master, Edward Valpy, and laugh at the vanity of our usher Banfather. As sole survivor of that group, I cannot but see its very sins dressed in a tender and softening light.' Borrow, Rigby, and Dalrymple, were his special companions ; but his friendship with the first-named had a dismal close. The story, as re- ported by Miss Cobbe in later years, has a touch of boyish melodrama. Borrow had persuaded several of his other companions to rob their fathers' tills, and then the party set forth to ioin some smugglers on the coast. By degrees the truants aU fell out of line and were picked up, tired and hungry, along the road, and brought back to Norwich school, where condign chastisement awaited them. George Borrow, it seems, received his large share horsed on James Martineau's back.^ The sensitive boy found the general scramble almost intolerable ; and though he retained grateful memories of his teachers (especially in geometry), he could never forget that he had ' suffered keenly iSir James Brooke, 1803-1868, Rajah of Sarawak: Charles Stoddart. 1806-1842, beheaded with ConoUy in Bokhara, June, 1842 : George Borrow, :803-i88i, author of The Bible in Spain, Lavengro, etc. : Edward Rigby, 1804 -1860, great-grandson of Dr. John Taylor, afterwards a distinguished London surgeon : John Dalrymple, 1803-1852, son of an eminent Norwich surgeon, and himself afterwards famous as an ophthalmic surgeon. There were then about 240 boys. * Life of Frances Power Cobbe, vol. ii. 117. Borrow, when invited to dinner by Miss Cobbe, withdrew his acceptance on learning that his old schoolfellow was to be one of the party. §ir] NORWICH GRAMMAR SCHOOL 15 under the smart of hopeless oppression and un- merited insult.'^ The instructor in drawing is said to have been ' Old Crome.' The artistic instinct of the boy was not, however, as yet articulate- He could remember the repute of Crome and Cotman, but only as contributing a sensible element to the local pride in his native city ' for which the in- habitants of the place were often ridiculed.'^ In truth, as wiU be seen hereafter, while he possessed in a remarkable degree the power of visualising old memories, and investing the most abstract thought with pictorial form, he was too deeply imbued with ethical principles to be in full sympathy with the temperament of the artist. The ' school years at Norwich were not happy, and the boy was for a time withdrawn, and placed under the care of Mr. Madge, who wisely turned his studies in fresh directions, and made him read poetry and romance. The tension of his hfe seems to have shown itself in a curious way in occasional sleep-walking, which brought him once as an in- voluntary intruder into the Sunday evening supper party, where Mr. Madge, Mr. J. Withers Dowson, and others, were frequent visitors after the services at the Octagon were over. About the age of thirteen or fourteen I was subject to som- nambulism ; and, one Sunday night, wound up my first sleep by marching down from the top room of the house in my night- gown straight into the supper-room, creating a confusion and stir which broke the spell and brought me to myself. The look of Mr. Madge's astonishment and of Withers Dowson's sweet compassion I can never forget. My mother led me out, ^ These impressions are reflected in the essay on Dr. Amoldi Essays, i. 68. 2 Letter to the Rev. E. I. Fripp, July 9, 1834. l6 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 fcH. i put my feet in hot water by the kitchen fire, and sent for Dr. Alderson, who got me into order after a day or two in bed. But the habit returned upon me at intervals, to the terror of some of my subsequent school-fellows at Dr. Carpenter's.*- V. Looking back over his boyhood from the vantage ground of middle hfe, the essayist, in pleading for a service of Christian consecration analogous to the Anglican rite of confirmation, once impersonally described the great transition of his youth.^ His guide through this passage, which he after- wards called his ' spiritual rebirth,'^ was Dr. Lant Ceirpenter, who had removed from Exeter to Bristol in 1817, and there established a small school in Jiis house in Great George Street. Bristol was also the home of some of Mrs. Martineau's kindred ; and in the school of her aunt, Mrs. Robert Rankin, Harriet first came under the influence of Dr. Carpenter at the Lewin's Mead Meeting, where he shared the pastorate with Mr. Rowe. Her enthusiasm for her new teacher led her father to place her brother James with Dr. Carpenter, when he was fourteen ; and the two years which he spent there (1819-21) supplied the great formative influence of his sub- sequent career. Dr. Carpenter was then in his fortieth yeai, full of eager activity in education as in philanthropy ; and the contact with him 1 Letter to his cousin, Mrs. Wilde, Jan. i, 1885. A tradition was preserved at Great George Street (Bristol) that he weis found on one occasion holding one of his room-mates (Lord Suffolk) out of a third floor window I After that incident he slept in a room by himself. 2 ' Dr. Arnold,* Essays, i. 66. 3 Letter to Rev. E. M. Daplyn. §v] SCHOOL AT BRISTOL 17 was SO stimulating to the young Martineau that he afterwards wrote — ' So forcibly did that period act upon me, — so visibly did it determine the subsequent direction of my mind and lot, that it always stands before me as the commencement of my present life, making me feel like a man without a childhood.'^ Soon after his departure from home his mother writes that his father, needing relief from the anxieties of business, will shortly visit him and report the delightful family meeting of Martineaus and Taylors which he had missed by his absence ;^ while two or three weeks later his sister Rachel informs him that he is ' regarded at Bristol as back- ward in writing and arithmetic, and well up in Latin and Greek.' To himself he appeared in retrospect ' a sallow stripling of fourteen, of shy and sensitive temperament, but superficially hardened by the rude discipline of a public school.'^ His comrades* foimd him ' serious and dihgent, and a little senti- mental, but he showed no particular sign of the power which developed itself a few years later." The school themes, however, now and then strike a personal note. When he writes on ' Fortitude,' the future Martineau speaks in the words — ' The ^ To Rev. R. L. Carpenter, Memoir of Lant Carpenter, p. 342. * Sixty-five dined together on that occasion in the Hall Concert- room. The Rev. PhiUp Taylor came over from Dublin to be present. Mrs. Martineau expresse.s herself to James as ' deeply impressed by the fine character manilested all through so large an assembly.' * Life and Work of Mary Carpenter, p. 9. * These included Samuel Greg (elder brother of Wm. Rathbone Greg), James Heywood, Samuel Worsley, Lord Suffolk, and one, perhaps two, of his brothers, * Samuel Worsley to Rev. R. L. Carpenter, April 11, 1857. l8 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 [CB. 1 habit of bearing the httle disappointments and misfortunes of youth, and not allowing weakness of disposition to overcome us, is the foundation on which the rest must be built ' ; and on ' Liberty ' he contrasts the growth of popular Hberties in Europe with the slave trade of Africa, and concludes (at fifteen) with a plea for CathoUc emancipation. This interest in pubhc affairs was largely quickened by Dr. Carpenter's method of awakening the rever- ence of his pupils for great men among the Uving and the dead. Of those -who were my companions around the dinner-table, when he read the daily papers to us, and made the parliamentary debates the vehicle for his fine lessons of constitutional wisdom, some have been actively engaged in the struggles of public life,^ and aU have watched from no disadvantageous point the course of social change, and the conduct of party leaders : and I con- fidently appeal to them, whether they have not found their school-day politics, caught from your father's conversation, or vindicated in their own debating society, an admirable pre- paration for the graver controversies which engage the legislator or the citizen. ... I shall never forget how the Manchester massacre kindled his generous indignation ; drew forth his stores of constitutional history in eloquent defence of the popular right of petition ; and suggested to him great maxims of civil freedom. And the sentences of Grattan's final speech in behalf of the CathoUc claims still ring in my memory, as they flowed from your father's fervent lips, and thrilled into me my first and last true love of the principles of religious liberty. Such an outlook on great public questions sprang from a conscience trained to sleepless vigilance. The primary force of Dr. Carpenter's whole mind was its moral feeling : ' I have never seen in any human being the idea of duty, the feeling of right, held in such visible reverence.' To this influence 1 The late Mr. Robert N. Philips, long member for Bury, once told the present writer that at the first Speaker's dinner which he attended after entering ParUament, the guests on either side of him bad been at Br. Carpenter's schooL §v] SCHOOL AT BRISTOL 19 James Martineau yielded himself a willing subject. He felt it exercised through the books chosen for classical reading, the moral treatises of Cicero, the Agricola of Tacitus, the selections from Juvenal, the dialogues of Plato. He felt it above all in the Greek Testament Class and in that of Moral Philo- sophy, where ' opportunities naturally arose for the opening of problems in the highest degree interesting to the affections and stimulating to the reflective faculties of young thinkers.'^ It was not only in the lessons of the class-room, however, that these deeps were sounded. He had been already instructed in the older literature of Presbyterian devotion, and when some of the writings of evangelical religion (which were much used by devout Unitarians) now fell in his way, the appeals and persuasions of WUberforce and Hannah More addressed themselves to a mind already prepared. He read them eagerly in his bedroom, not knowing that he thereby broke a household rule, and incurring the rebuke of his teacher for his ' sin of ignorance.'^ ' Practical Piety,' in particular, took a powerful hold on him, and brought to his mind a sense of sin which could not be accommodated to the metaphysic of Priestley,' but nevertheless sank deep and bore ample fruit in later years. The profound note of penitence in his maturest utterances was first sounded in this ■ boyish experience. Meantime he lived in the daily 1 Biographical Memoranda. ^ Speech to a deputation from Manchester College on occasion of his ninetieth birthday, April 23, 1895. ^ See the following chapters. 30 EARLV years, 1805-1822 fcH. I practice of strenuous duty, and the delight of newly awakened personal and religious affections.^ There can be no severer test (he afterwards wrote) of an in- structor's influence, than the degree of self-restraint which the mere thought of him may induce his pupils to exercise in his absence. To this test your father was more than once compelled to submit by attacks of serious illness, which confined him to his room ; and many of my former school-fellows will bear witness with me that when his desk was vacant, the schoolroom was no less silent and orderly, no less a scene of punctual and sustained industry, than if he had been present.* There were, in fact, no obscure reasons for this tranquillity. At the teacher's desk was James Martineau himself, and in the monitor's seat was Mary Carpenter, his junior by two years. ^ ' Mary has great influence among the boys,' reported her mother in the summer of 1820, ' and with her gentle voice, and mUd but firm expostulation, can maintain an astonishing degree of order among them.' The following scene in the Lewin's Mead Meeting-house, shows the same clear vision which marks other memories of the early days. 1 One other influence may here be named, though it did not acquire its full power for many years later — the writings of Channing. ' I can never forget,' he wrote to Mr. Schermerhom, March 20, 1880, 'my first introduction to his name. I was a school-boy of sixteen, when, in 1821, my master, the late Dr. Lant Carpenter, received from Boston a copy of the Dudleian Lecture on Evidences of Christianity, and both read it to his pupils in private, and, after a preface of enthusiastic commenda- tion, preached it to his congregation on the following Sunday. It laid a powerful hold on me, and seemed to find something in me that had never been reached before. This was but the be- ginning x>f an experience which was repeated and enlarged, as, one after another, his great sermons and essays came over and burned their way into new seats of thought and affection.' The experience, however, was not realised or understood till much later. See infra, chap. V. § ii. . 2 Memoir of Lant Carpenter, p. 343. * Letter of Dr. Martineau to J.E.C., Aug. 8, 1877. §y] school at BRISTOL 21 Instead of having my place with the other pupils in the long line of the family pew, I usually sat with an aunt in a seat at right-angles to the other, and with a near front view of it. And as I now range in thought over its series of vanished forms, not one of them is clearer than that intent young daughter, lost to herself and all around, and surrendered to the sweet pieties that flowed upon that winning voice. And at the end of the day, when evening prayers and supper were over, and the juniors had gone to bed, and the rest of us lingered for a precious half- hour of serious talk, she was privileged to sit with her arm in her father's — sometimes as a silent listener, at others helping us to draw from him his thoughts on some problems that perplexed us ; or, in lighter moods, tempting him to tell the stories of his college daj's.i These hours of worship wrought an abiding work in the boy's heart, and prepared the way for the change which came upon him ere he had left school a year. In Dr. Carpenter's house he recog- nised a religion of absolute sincerity, no far-off dream, but positively busy with the concerns of every day. To this cause did he ascribe the fact that ' he never disgusted even the most careless with religion, — a pre-eminence in which, so far as I know, he stands almost solitary among teachers.' There was something in his voice, mellowed by the spirit within, that made the reaUty of God felt ; something that broke through the boundary between the seen and the unseen, and opened that ' secret place of the Almighty ' whence sanctity descends on all human obligations. I can never lose the un- speakable sacredness which he diffused over the Sunday ; and aSter all the changes of twenty years, its morning and evening come to me still in the same colours that awed and refreshed my boyish mind. And often, amid the labours of that day, or under that preparatory travail of the soul whose severity few suspect, and which it is fitting to bear in silence, have I remembered the peaceful Sabbath hours purchased by yout father's faithful service, and thought any toil repaid which can shed such consecration on the seventh part of human life.^ *Li/« and Work of Mavy Carpenter, p. 12. * Memoir of Lant Carpenter, p. 351. 22 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 [cH. i VI. James Martineau left Bristol at midsummer, 1821. He had already decided upon a profession, and his work at school had been in part arranged as a direct preparation for the career of an engineer. In addition to the regular courses of instruction in science, including geology, natural philosophy,^ and chemistry, with illustrative specimens, diagrams, and experiments, he had been allowed to devote extra time to mathematics, and he carried with him a good knowledge of Euclid, the Conic Sections, Plane Trigonometry, and the elementary formulas of Spherical. It had been hoped that he might begin his career under the eye of kinsfolk in an engineering business, but they recommended an- other arrangement. The letters from January on- wards are concerned with these prospects : under the date of February 25 he noted afterwards, ' the account of them gives occasion to so much admirable advice and record of experience, that I keep the letter as equally characteristic of my mother's wisdom and high principle.' Finally an opening was found in the machine-works of Mr. Fox at Derby. Before settling there he went with his father and mother to Newcastle, to attend the christening of the first child of his eldest sister. The travellers went on into Cumberland, to visit an old friend of Mr. Thomas Martineau. In the garden of the house near Cockermouth, he saw the distant masses of the Lake hills, and there burst upon him ' the glorious surprise with which real mountains when ^ This term lingered on for more tlian a generation afterwards. |vi] AT DERBY, 182I 23 first seen fix the eye and fill the mind.'* Neither the tranquil charm of the Norfolk Broads, nor even the sea at Yarmouth or the other coast places to which the children were sometimes sent, seems to have awakened his delight like mountain beauty. For this he had hungered, not knowing the meaning of his longing ; for this, too, his readings in Words- worth had specially prepared him ; and to this he remained devoted even when he could climb no more. The return journey brought him to Derby, where his parents left him in the house of the Unitarian minister, the Rev. Edward Higginson.^ The ex- periment with Mr. Fox was not successful. The boy was only sixteen, but mind, conscience, soul, had been as it were reborn. His intellect was essentially constructive. He longed to work by principles ; his master thought it enough to put tools before him, and send him to the turning-lathe or the model room. He wanted scientific guidance ; he got the run of the shops. In the absence of adequate theoretic help, the taste for mechanics flagged, and the prospect of five years' service with 1 ' John Kenrick,' Essays, i. 401. 2 Concerning this gentleman he wrote in 1882 to Prof. F. W. Newman, apropos of Mozley's Reminiscences : ' Mozley's account of my father-in-law, Mr. Higginson, of Derby, is far from just ; though I can well believe, from the conspicuous chsiracter of such faults as he had, that the impression of htm in the minds of his orthodox neighbours is honestly reported. I myself greatly disliked the tone of the society in which he moved ; and it was in some measure a repulsion from it that drove me from Civil Engineering (which 1 -was learning at Derby) into the Ministry. . . Bat Mr. Higginson was neither a ' scoffer ' nor ' idle ' ; and Mozley's father would never have borne with patience the application of such terms to him.' 24 EARLY YEARS, 1805-1822 [ch. i no more result than the masteiy of a very limited class of machines filled him with dismay. The slow process of discouragement was unexpectedly precipitated into a change of purpose. The rehgious impressions made upon him at Bristol deepened as he was withdrawn from their source. A sudden and sorrowful incident brought about the crisis. In the adjoining town of Nottingham there lived a cousin, married to the young and pure-souled minister of the High Pavement Chapel, Henry Turner, to whom he became deeply attached. In January, 1822, Mr. Turner died. Beside his grave a new purpose sprang up in the heart of the young appren- tice.^ More than half a century later, as he took part in the meeting which . followed the opening of the High Pavement Church, April 28, 1876, he recalled that hour in moving words.'' Here in Nottingham it was that, under a sudden flash and stroke of sorrow, which few were able to remember, but of which many retained traces yet, the scales fell from his eyes, and the realities and solemnities of life first came upon him. Here it was that the religious part of his life first commenced ; in fact the light was so overpowering and so strong that it bore him from the workshop of his occupation, and turned him from an engineer into an evangelist. He well remembered, under the fervour of the first enthusiasm, how the voices that sounded in our various places of worship appeared to him to be beneath the exigences of the case — too sober and too cold ; and amid the broken Ught of an immature judgment he thought there ought to be some stronger and more spiritual ministry, that should less depend upon our self-help, but should take us off our feet, and fling us into a diviner life than that which prevailed among us. ^ Relating the incident to Mr. Newman, he says : ' I frequently visited the house, before and after.it became a house of mourning ; and the contrast of its spirit with what disappointed me at Derby, completed my conversion to a new mode of life.' * Reported in the Inquirer. JviJ THE NEW PURPOSE 2$ The sequel was thus narrated by himself : ' At the end of a year I avowed my wish to change my profession.^ My father, while warning me that I was courting poverty, suppressed his disappoint- ment ; bore without reproach the forfeiture of the premium he had paid for me ; and engaged to bear the expense of my theological education at Man- chester College, York.' * Two months after Mr. Turner's death he had written to his old master, Dr. Carpenter, with a reference to some inward struggles. ' I feel grateful to you for having so kindly given me your advice. I have sometimes felt a wish to apply to you for assistance in some difficulties which I have sometimes pain- fully felt in the regulation of my religious feelings and the dis- charge of religious duties ; but I felt how much better it would be to surmount them unassisted, which I trust I have in some measure done.' The same letter dwelt on his intercourse with the young widow : ' she is indeed the most holy example of tranquil, pious resignation I ever expect to see." To Mrs. Henry Turner Dr. Martiueau remained closely attached for more than seventy years. — When Martineau was at Derby, there was a child of three in the same town, who, in his adult years, wa.s to abandon the engineering profession for philosophy, and break a lance on more than one occasion with his senior in the same field, Herbert Spencer. CHAPTER II. COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827. The change of purpose which carried James Martineau to Manchester College, York, in the autumn of 1822, had not met with universal approval among his friends. But it opened to him one precious sympathy which he ever afterwards held in grateful remembrance. He was only seventeen, ' a shy and awkward stripling,' as he described himself in retrospect, yet (as will be seen) full of quick sensi- bihty and hidden fire. Warnings and discourage- ments naturally drove him in upon himself ; but in his eldest brother Thomas, who had vowed himself to the family profession of medicine, he found imexpected support. The difference of age which had before been a barrier, no longer checked their intercourse ; the reserve of earlier days was melted ; ' his heart opened to me many a secret admiration and reverence as he read his favourite poets or discussed the graver problems of Ufe.'^ And behind this influence lay another more precious still. In the home of the Rev. Edward Higginson at Derby, where he had lived during his apprentice- 1 Biographical Memoranda, quoted in the Life, i., 40. S ij MANCHESTER COLLEGE 27 ship, were three daughters, in one of whom he had already found an ' elevation of mind and steady enthusiasm ' able to bring him ' calmness of soul and fixity of purpose.'^ Fortified by this affection, which was to be cherished through four silent years, he prepared to resiune the studies which his engineering plans had interrupted. I. Manchester College was the heir of an honourable academic tradition. The Act which imposed the obligations of conformity upon every minister, in 1662, included the schoolmaster and the university teacher within its scope. Shut out at once from the national homes of knowledge, the Nonconformists were compelled to make their own provision for edu- cation, and especially for the training of a ' godly ministry ' ; and some ejected man of learning would open his house in the seclusion of the country, and give academic instruction to such as needed it. The first of these was established at Rathmell, near Settle, in Yorkshire, in 1670, by Richard Frankland, and before the end of the century sent forth more than three hundred students. One after another followed, till the fifth in the series, the Warrington Academy, where Dr. John Taylor, Priestley, Enfield and Gilbert Wakefield had taught, came to an end in 1785. Sixth in succession, Manchester College was founded in 1786 and solemnly dedicated by its Principal, the Rev, Thomas Barnes, D.D., ' to 1 Letter to Mrs. Thomas Martineau. 28 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. 11 truth, to liberty, to religion.'^ Its scheme included * a full and systematic course of education for divines, and preparatory instructions for the other learned professions, as well as for civil and commercial life ' ; and these advantages were to be enjoyed ' free from any subscriptions, tests, or obligations inconsistent with the sacred rights of truth and conscience.' In 1803 the College was removed to York, but its aims and methods remained unchanged. Fifty years afterwards the veteran teacher could recall his bitter sense of the privation which had kept him away from one of the Universities of his country.^ Yet this recollection was absorbed in the memory of the time when his mind had been roused to its richest activity, and the sense of responsibility awakened into an experience which if solemn was also joyous. He was already well prepared for the years which would exchange the instincts and vague aspirations of boyhood for deeper convictions and firmer principles. As he looked back from the distant heights of life to his College training, he still retained the freshest impres- sion of its meaning. The studies of his maturest age were founded on the class-work of half a century or more before. At York he had first explored wide fields of knowledge ; there, as he pored over 1 Discourse at the commencement, Sept. 14, 1786. It was then called the Manchester Academy, but it was sometimes designated Manchester New College before the end of the century, in contrast with the Collegiate foundation connected with the noble old Church (now the Cathedral). * Speech at the presentation of his portrait to Manchester New College, June 24, 1874. Compare the speech at a College dinner, at the Freemasons' Hall, June 23, 1859. Inqutrer. §i] LIFE AT YORK 29 ancient history and modem literature, new capacities of S5nnpathy had been awakened ; there intimacies with fellow-students were clothed with ideal light and glory ; and there the great masters of thought drew him into friendships which no griefs or dis- appointments of later years could shake or change. Well might he find compensations, after all, for his exclusion from ' the great ecclesiastical schools of divinity, where learning and piety are engaged to advocate foregone conclusions, and to plead the cause of the altar and the priest,' and, as he laid down the Principalship of the College, declare in emphatic words, ' I was myself its creation, moulded by it to the very marrow of me, formed by its clay, and shaped by its wheel.'^ The external arrangements were simple. Three houses stood in Monkgate, outside the ancient Bar, on the Scarborough Road, shut off from the thorough- fare by a wall, and forming within the enclosure a small quadrangle. In the centre lived the Rev. WiUiam Turner, M.A., tutor in Mathematics and Philosophy ; and the houses on either side were occupied by the students. A lecture-hall and class- rooms had been erected in the rear. At breakfast, dinner, and supper, the students gathered in Mr. Turner's dining-room ; tea was already the cherished opportunity for more intimate intercourse in their own rooms. Behind the College buUdings lay a piece of field for exercise and games, pole-leaping being much in vogue ; cricket was not played tiU 1827, when Martineau was a member of the club.^ ' Speech to Past and Present Students, June 24, 1885. ^Life, i. 27. 30 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. ii Most of all he loved his boat upon the Ouse, sent by his father all the way from Norwich. The level scenery around York, like his native Norfolk, lacked the mountains for which he always yearned, and the Minster with its noble organ made no special appeal to him. The Sundays were soon filled with Sunday School work, and missionary visits to the villages around. For those who were not thus engaged, there were the regular services in the venerable meeting-house at St. Saviourgate, where the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, the Principal of the College, ministered.^ Mr. Wellbeloved had come to York as a young man of twenty-three, to assist the Rev. Newcome Cappe in his pastoral office. When the Manchester Academy became Manchester College, York, the larger part of the teaching fell on him, and only a persistent industry and devotion enabled him to grapple with his varied labours. To a singular gentleness, modesty, and benevolence, he joined a quiet force and an occasional incisiveness of utter- ance which gave him dignity and secured him respect. He had found time to take an active share in local institutions ; his was the voice that could often soothe the unhappy sufferers in the York Lunatic Asylum ; while in another field his exact lore as an antiquarian brought him the goodwill of those who were widely separated from him on grounds of religion. Among the ten neat quarto volumes of notes which Martineau carried away from York, not the least prized were those which contained his reports of the Principal's lectures » For sixty-six years. Cp. below, chap. VII. § L §i] TUTORS AND STUDIES 3I on the ' Evidences of Natural and Revealed Religion,' ' Theology,' and the Hebrew and Chaldee languages. The characteristics of the teacher the pupil thus summed up a generation later. Well do I remember the respectful wonder with which we saw, as our course advanced, vein after vein of various learning modestly opened out ; the pride with which we felt that we had a Lightfoot, a Jeremiah Jones, and an Eichhom all in one, yet no mere theologian after aU, but scarcely less a naturaUst and an archaeologist as well ; the impatience with which, out of very homage to his wisdom, we almost resented his impartial love of truth in giving us the most careful epitome of other opinions with scarce the suggestion of his own. Many of us have found the notes taken in his lecture-room our best cyclopaedia of divinity during the first years of our active ministry, when books were forced aside by other claims ; and when at last some leisure for independent study has been won, and the entrance of the theologic sciences upon new phases has taken us into untried fields, then most of all, if I may generalize my own experience, have we been thankful for our training under a master of the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth. Whatever might become of the particular con- clusions which he favoured, he never justified a prejudice ; he never misdirected our admiration ; he never hurt an innocent feehng, or overbore a serious judgment ; and he set up within us a standard of Christian scholarship to which it must ever exalt us to aspire.i Some of his students found him too much addicted to the words ' probably ' and ' perhaps.' But he taught as weU assured the distinction of documents in the Pentateuch on which the modem view of Israel's history depends ; ^ he read the Messianic passages in the prophets by the aid of contemporary political events ; and he interpreted many of the predictions in the Gospels then supposed to relate I ' A Plea for Biblical Studies and something more,' Oct- 1855 : Essays, i. 53. ' Not, however, with the modem dates. 32 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. ii to the last judgment, in the light of the great catastrophe to the Jewish state when Jerusalem fell. Among the writers whom he bade his hearers consult, the treatises of Anthony Collins on the 'Scheme of Literal Prophecy,' ^ and of Jeremiah Jones * and Natheiniel Lardner * on the New Testa- ment, made the deepest impression on the young Martineau. ' To the study of their writings seventy years ago,' he told Mrs. Humphry Ward (June 7th, 1892), ' I owe by far the greater part of my present modes of critical opinion ; all that has come since being but the natural development and application {mutatis mutandis, no doubt) of what I learned from them and their compeers.'* Mr. Wellbeloved, however, was much more than a guide to the knowledge of others. Whenever he quoted an opinion as * little known and less regarded,' he was followed with an eager attention, for by this formula he was understood to veil the utterance of his own convictions. >- Published in 1727, and directed against the view that Jesus was proved to be the Messiah on the ground of prophecy. ' 1693-1724 : Independent minister, fellow-student of Seeker (afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury) at the academy of his uncle, Samuel Jones, at Gloucester. His work on the Canon was published in three vols., 1726-7, and was reprinted at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1728 and 1827. » 1684-1786 : Independent minister : best known as the author of the Credibility of the Gospel History, which occupied nearly thirty years in publication, 1727-1755 : other works from the same learned pen followed. * Life, ii. 239. ColUns's work he had commended to the Rev. George Crabbe (July 26, 1848), as 'not exceeded, for acute- ness and good sense, by any of the more elaborate disquisitions of recent times,' mentioning for especial praise his proof of the late date of the book of Daniel. §i] TUTORS AND STUDIES 33 The classical reading, with the allied subjects of history and literature, was directed by the Rev. John Kenrick. His studies at Glasgow, Gottingen, and Berlin, had secured him an ample range of learning, which his fine sense of proportion always kept in due check in the teacher's chair. Half a century later, when Dr. Martineau had himself had a generation of experience of the same diffi- culties and privileges, he looked back with admira- tion to the mastery and completeness of his old instructor. With his own memories of German class-rooms as a standard, he could yet say that in Mr. Kenrick's treatment of every subject, there seemed to be one constant characteristic, — a com- prehensive grasp of its whole outline, with accurate scrutiny of its separate contents. ' Nothing frag- mentary, nothing discursive, nothing speculative, broke the proportions or disturbed the steady march of his prearranged advance.'^ In his lectures on Ancient and Modem History the eager young student found the guidance which he needed through the tangled path of centuries, — as the movements of nations and the influence of personalities stood out in clear outline ; while a fastidious restraint presided over his judgments in literature and art, though 'not a fountain of true genius was left un- visited.' In James Martineau Mr. Kenrick found a pupil ready to follow wherever he led ; he might have to rebuke him for ' intemperate study ' ; he never needed to spur him out of slackness or in- difference. After all, the most precious of a teacher's lessons is that of his own character ; and in describing ^Essays, i. 408. 34 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. 11 John Kenrick Dr. Martineau also delineated him- self :— He was above ambition, incapable of pretence, eager to see things as they are, and assured that through the darkness that sometimes enfolds them, the only guide is the unswerving love of truth ; and, accepting life for service, not for sway, he never measured his sphere to see whether it was smaU or great, but deemed it enough to bear his witness where he stood, and help, as he might, the companions of his way.^ The head of the CoUege residence was the Rev. William Turner, who lectured on mathematics and physics, and then conducted his students through the science of mind to the principles of pohtical philosophy and social economy. Martineau's previous studies had carried him ahead of his College comrades in mathematics; its methods were not indeed altogether congenial to him, but for that reason he compelled himself to greater diligence, and under the ' admirable teaching ' of his tutor, succeeded in meistering Newton's Principia. He felt the value of the intellectual discipUne, and from time to time in later life resumed his reading to keep his mind open and his wiU alert. With the elements of psychology, metaphysics, and ethics he had already become famihar through the classes of his old schoolmaster. Dr. Lant Carpenter. Mr. Turner shared the same devotion to Priestley and Hartley, and limited his expositions to the great succession of the English and Scotch schools, from Locke to Reid and Dugald Stewart, from Butler to Bentham. Neither Coleridge nor Kant seems to have been named ; and the stormy voice of Carlyle had not yet found its most impassioned utterance. ^Essays, i. 421. §i] PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES 35 The note-books contain elaborate extracts from Briicker's History of Philosophy on the Greek Schools, but neither the classical nor the philosophical tutor lectured on any of the texts of Plato or Aristotle.^ Hartley's Rule of Life and Southwood Smith's Illustrations of the Divine Government were favourite manuals ; yet Mr. Turner acknowledged that he had not been able ' wholly to satisfy his mind ' on the subject of liberty and necessity.^ ' Though the direct argument for necessity appears unanswer- able, yet the views which are deduced from the doctrine even by necessarian writers are so startling, and it requires such an effort to accommodate our new views to the practice of life, and the use of necessarian language to common language, that there are still some difificulties left on my mind.'* Whatever misgivings Martineau may himself occa- sionally have felt, the sweep of a great conception had an intellectual fascination for him. It satisfied his desire for completeness. It harmonised with his previous scientific training ; and he readily inter- preted the human phenomena by the maxims and postulates he had already learned to apply in the field of external nature.^ He accepted Priestley as his master ; and in four ' orations ' on the ' Analogy of Natural and Revealed Religion,' com- 1 The Apology and the Phado were read, but with these (as welt as some of the easier dialogues) Martineau was already familiar. 2 This venerable controversy had become acute among Uni- tarians owing to the dominant influence of Priestley in contrast with Dr. Price. 3 This was in the year 1825 ; Christian Reformer, 1854, p. 206. ■* Compare his own retrospect in the preface to the Types of Ethical Theory. 36 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 £ch. 11 posed in the autumn of 1825, he thus expressed his indebtedness to the author of ' the celebrated Essay On the Analogy of the Divine Dispensations ' ; — So powerfully must the mind be struck on every review of that most interesting speculation, with its beautiful application of philosophy to religion, with its spirit of calm and rational piety, and with the inteUectual comprehension evinced in the ease and simplicity with which the sublimest truths are unfolded and illustrated, that it would be as impossible as it would be needless to forget the impression when endeavouring to gain enlightened views on the same subject. Sufficient is the privilege to catch one thought from such a mind ; sufficient is the praise to have reverenc^ such a teacher, to have followed such a guide. II. The companionship afforded by a small college, numbering only five-and-twenty or thirty students, was necessarily limited. It had one advantage, however, not usually present in a theological school ; there were men preparing for lay careers as well as for the ministry. Martineau's chief friends^ however, were found among the latter group. Some of them were destined in after years to win distinction in the circle of Churches which the College served, where the names of R. Brook Aspland,^ Samuel Bache,^ J. R. Beard,^ William 1 Son of the Rev. Robert Aspland ; left Manchester College 1826 ; afterwards minister at Chester, Dukinfield, and Hackney ; editor oiVbe Christian Reformer, 1845-1863 ; one of the Secretaries of Manchester College, 1846-185 7 ; Secretary to the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, 1859 till his death in 1869. * Student at Manchester College, 1826-29 ; afterwards minister of the New Meeting and the Church of the Messiah, Birmingham, 1832-68. * Student at Manchester College, 1820-25 : minister in Salford, at Strangeways, Manchester, and Sale ; first Principal of the Unitarian Home Missionary Board ; an ardent promoter of popular education, and an energetic theological writer. In 183S the University of Giessen bestowed on him the honorary degree of D.D. for Ills services to religious and general literature. §ii] FELLOW-STUDENTS 37 Gaskell,^ Edward Higginson,^ and Edward Tagart,' will always be held in honoured remembrance.* As Dr. Martineau looked back from the vantage ground of four-score years, three figures stood out before him, bound to him in common vows of duty and devotion,^ Franklin Howorth, John Hugh Worthington, and Francis Darbishire. For the first, who belonged to his own year, he felt to the end ' a deep and 1 student at Manchester College, 1825-28 ; Minister at Cross St. Chapel, Manchester, 1828-1884; one of the Secretaries of Manchester New College, 1840-46, and professor of English history and literature, 1846-53 ; afterwards Tutor and Principal of the Unitarian Home Missionary Board. * Student at Manchester College, 1823-28 ; afterwards minister at Hull, Wakefield, and Swansea ; an active writer, his best known works being The Spirit of the Bible, 1853-5, 2 vols., and Ecce Messias, 1871. * Student at Manchester College, 1820-25 .' afterwards minister at Norwich, and York St., and Little Portland St. Chapels, London ; Secretary to the British and Foreign Unitarian Asso- ciation, 1842-58 ; author of a treatise on Locke's Writings and Philosophy, 1855. * One more name may here be added, that of William Shiell Brown, afterwards minister at Hull and Bridgwater, and sub- sequently first minister of the Unitarian Church at Buffalo, U.S. In a letter dated Jan. 14, 1865, to the Rev. Dr. Hosmer, Mr. Martineau gave a remarkable sketch of his early friend, which contained one or two interesting autobiographical touches. • Brown was so much older, that for a session or two it never occurred to me to regard myself as on the level of his friendship. He was among the men — and I almost among the boys of the College. Af&nities of temperament, however, work their way through wider distances than this, and Brown, who, though rather a dreamer, was a quick observer, too, found out that some of his enthusiasms were strongly reflected in me. I well remember my surprise at his evident advances towards one much his junior, and as Uttle his match in the knowledge he most prized, of English literature. However we both of us reverenced Wordsworth in poetry, Berkeley in philosophy, Channing — then a new power among us^ — in reUgion ; so that there was a common atmosphere enough, at a time when the wings were growing, for many a flight together." Inquirer, June 2, 1866. 5 Speech to Past and Present Students, June 24, 1885. 38 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [cH. 11 reverential affection,' called forth by a singularly pure and elevated character ; but though they had sat at the same desk, and given answers in the same class, Howorth's interests were never intellectual.^ Neither of the other two lived on into maturer age. Worthington, who became engaged to Miss Harriet Martineau, died in 1827 ; and Darbishire also, who changed his career after leaving Collie, fell a victim to disease which made its first appear- ance at York and evoked his friend's tenderest plans for help. They shared advanced mathematical lessons from Mr. Turner, and a devoted and en- thusiastic friendship arose between them. In the midst of these somewhat exclusive intimacies, life in the Uttle College was not always smooth. There were occasional ' alienations and remon- strances,' sometimes even ' tragic scenes ' ;^ there were practical jokes, harmless enough to point a mirthful recollection in later days, though not always of a kind to exempt the perpetrators from rebuke.^ Beard was regarded as the idol of of the ' sinners,' while Martineau was counted chief of the ' saints.' * Saints and sinners united in 1 Speech at the Liverpool Domestic Mission, 1857. 2 Dr. Martineau to Mr. Thomas Homblower Gill, Aug. 28, 1882 j Life, vol. i. 33. 3 In one of these Martineau himself participated. A fellow- student, who afterwards became a large landowner in Hungary, related a generation later that it was once resolved to terrify a timid recluse. Martineau was carried into his room on the shoulders of a comrade, robed in white ; a large piece of red beef-steak had been tied round his neck, and his mass of black hair was crowned by a bowl of blazing spirit. * Christian Life, Sept. 2, 1876. §ii] MISSIONARY ZEAL 39 debate, in glee-singing, in Shakespeare readings, '^ and the production of the College ' Poz.'* Most significant, however, of these common efforts was the Unitarian zeal which carried the students into the puriieus of the ancient city, and further afield into the villages around. The energy and enthusiasm which afterwards marked Dr. J. R. Beard, may doubtless be traced in this movement, and Martineau willingly followed. In 1823 a sort of missionary society was formed within the College. Aided by a venerated friend on the spot, John Mason, the young preachers taught a Sunday School in a little chapel at Jubbergate in York,^ and planted small centres of worship in places like Malton, Selby, Bilton near Wetherby, Welbum, and other villages.* Mr. Wellbeloved, whose controversy with Arch- deacon Wrangham probably supplied an indirect stimulus to these endeavours, was not altogether ^ At this Club the members also contributed original essays. In his last year on April 27, 1827, Martineau ' gratified the members with the first part of an essay comparing the Practice of Shakespeare with the Rules of Aristotle.' The completion was promised for the next meeting. But the minute-book records no more gratification. The essayist ' pleaded headache in excuse.' ^ The Repository, a College Magazine. ' Originally opened in 1 796, by a group of seceders from a chapel in Lady Huntingdon's connexion. * It was estimated that about sixty worshippers used to assemble in each place. Report of the West Riding Tract Society, MiU Hill, Leeds, May I2, 1824, kindly communicated by Rev. A. Chalmers. The minute boolc of the College Society mentions that the Selby preacher at first ministered at Howden in the afternoon, but the gradual decline of attendance at the after- noon service and the discovery that most of the hearers ' were in reality Deists — and characters with whom it was disgraceful to be connected ' led to the discontinuance of the movement there. The same page declares the Society to be ' under the influence of the Catholic spirit of the Gospel.' 40 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. u favourable to them ; he did not approve of ' mush- room preachers ' ; and at a later period rebuked a too zealous distributor of Unitarizm tracts with the remark that, while still at college, he was not qualified to form a decided opinon. The impulses of the ardent, however, prevailed. It was resolved to build a little chapel at Welbum, near Castle Howard. Martineau, who helped to collect the necessary funds, was supposed, in virtue of his year's engineering, to have a general power of con- struction. So he was invited, though a junior, to draw the plans, and with characteristic courage allowed himself at nineteen to be installed as archi- tect and clerk of the works. The building was opened in the summer of 1825 ; the crowd of wor- shippers overflowed into a neighbouring field, where J. R. Beard preached to them with the simplicity of a young apostle.^ How Dr. Martineau judged these efforts in the light of later experience, the following letter to Mr. G. B. Dalby after his ninetieth birthday will suffice to show : — London, May 21, 1895. In recalling the services of the Jubbergate Chapel in 1825-27, you touch some very interesting memories, and place before me again the images of many a beloved companion or revered fore- runner, like the good John Mason, who had an influence never to be forgotten on the early experiences of religious life. So deep was the impression of what I owed to these early exercises of pulpit-duty, — ^which were rather reluctantly permitted by our College Tutors, — that throughout my responsible connexion with [the] College after its removal, I have always encouraged the Senior Students to lay themselves out for Sunday duty either in occasional preaching, or in regular Sunday School teaching. Learning itself seems to me to lose half its zest, and almost ^ its soul, if made a sole pursuit, and prosecuted by a mind cut o£E ^Monthly Repository, 1825, p. 166. §iii] MISSIONARY ZEAL 4I from the conflicting forces of life, unexercised in conscience, and dry in afiection. I am sure that the most effective study goes on concurrently with the intensest practical work, and that the persons from whom both are denianded, do best in each.^ III. The progress of the young student, to whom some honour fell from year to year among the modest distinctions of the College, afforded delight and satisfaction to his parents, and at last secured the approval of friends who had viewed his change of destination as a misfortune. The home relations during these years were always eagerly cherished, and involved an imusual series of heart-searching vicissitudes. Now the report of family gatherings on Christmas and New Year's days cheers the absent son and brother in the north ; he hears of the budgets of poems and other papers, and is duly informed that Harriet ' sang a humorous song.' Then comes a Festival, bringing a burst of happy intercourse with distant kindred gathered for the occasion, and musical parties at the cousins' houses, Sir George Smart assisting. Or the note changes, and anxiety for the student's health fills the mother's heart. The story lingered into later days that Martineau had worked twenty-five hours out of the twenty-four,^ Certain it is that his college 1 Compare the College Address, 1856, ' The Christian Student, Essays, iv. 43. — To the enthusiasm of this period was due the foundation of the Octagon Sunday School at Norwich, in a College vacation, with the help of * a few friends of about his own age.' Speech at the induction of the Rev. J. D. H. Smyth, Norwich, Inquirer, Nov. 8, 1862. (The date, 1822, must be at least a year too early.) 'Life of Catherine Winhworth (privately printed). 42 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. 11 toils were often interrupted by illness ; and at one time a year at Gottingen was proposed by way of change. But then the home was overshadowed by another care. The health of Thomas Martineau, the young surgeon, suddenly failed. He went with his bride and Harriet to Torquay, but the disease was stubborn and would not jdeld. At length it was resolved that the invalid should go to Madeira. The family held their last unbroken meeting one Sunday evening for worship at his Norwich home ; the veil of shyness and reserve was withdrawn, and ' brother James,' then only eighteen, poured forth his soul in deep words of prayer. Sorrow was added to sorrow ; the child who should have con- tinued the family name, was buried in the far-off isle ; and Thomas Martineau himself died on the return voyage to Marseilles late in the summer of 1824. To the young widow James Martineau became tenderly attached, and he opened his heart to her with unhesitating confidence. While Thomas was still abroad, the wise and watchful father proposed a Scotch walking-tour to James and Harriet. Brother and sister had been united in special friendship from their earliest years. They had read and argued together, of late about the freedom of the will, and each departure of the student from home left the partner of his thoughts plunged in grief. In 1823, when he went back to College, ' he told me,' wrote Harriet long afterwards,^ ' that I must not permit myself to be so miserable. He advised me to take refuge on each occasion in a new pursuit ; and on that partictilar occasion in ^Autobiography, i. 117. §iii] SCOTCH TOUR, 1824 43 an attempt at authorship. I said, as usual, that I would if he would : to which he answered that it would never do for him, a young student, to rush into print before the eyes of his tutors ; but he desired me to write something that was in my head, and try my chance with it in the Monthly Repository What James desired, I always did, as of course ; and after he had left me to my widowhood, soon after six o'clock, one bright Sep- tember morning, I was at my desk before seven, beginning a letter to the Editor.'^ So the pair started for London in July, 1824 ; there the divinity student heard Edward Irving pray and preach, attended Mr. Fox's chapel, breakfasted with Mr. Rutt, called on Mr. Belsham, and made his way out to Newington Green, where he met Sir James Mackintosh and the poet Samuel Rogers in Mrs. Barbauld's drawing-room. Lord Byron had sent her some Greek newspapers, and he translated a few sentences for his venerable friend. Just before the packet sailed for Edinburgh, July 27, he found time to write to his fellow student, Edward Higginson, reporting sums collected for the Welbum chapel, and announcing the despatch of plans and working drawings to the contractor. The journey was memorable, for to both ' it was a first free admission into the penetralia of natural beauty.' This was the aspect of Scotland which appealed to him then, rather than its associations of history and poetry, — it was Wordsworth, not Scott, who had kindled his imagination, — and this was the secret of its charm for him to his latest days. 1 The sequel may be read in the Autobiography. 44 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [="• " From Perth the pedestrians ranged as far north as the Bruar Falls, and westward to Loch Awe. They felt as if they were entering a sanctuary. ' We walked ever3rwhere with hushed feeling and reverent feet. We were perfectly at one both in the defects which limited our vision, and in the susceptibiUties which quickened it, neither of us caring much for the savage romance of Scottish traditions, and both being intensely aUve to the appeal of mountain forms and channeled glens, and the play of light and cloud with the forest, the corrie, and the lakeside.'^ The eager talk * ran over all surfaces,' and ' plunged into all depths,' metaphysics having already a large share. 1 was at that time, and for several years after, an enthusiastic disciple of the determinist philosophy ; and was strongly tainted* with the positive temper which is its frequent concomitant ; yet not without such inward reserves and misgivings as to render welcome my sister's more firm and ready verdict. While she remained faithful through life to that early mode of thought, with me those ' reserves and misgivings,' suppressed for a while, recovered from the shock and gained the ascendancy.^ In due time he went back to York, confirmed in the faith, to compose a series of three orations on ' Divine Influence on the Human Mind,' in which the constructive character of his thought was to take a great stride forward, declare the universal agency of the Creator, and assert that all human powers of thought, wiU, and affection, must be reinterpreted as the energy of the ever-present God. Behind the home-circle, however, there now lay ^ Biographical Memoranda, Life, i. 39. 2 Biographical Memoranda, Life. ii. 262. For the ' reserves and misgivings ' of his tutor, Mr. Turner, see ante, p. 35 His own change of view is described below, in chaps. VI. and IX. §iii] ROMANTIC FRIENDSHIPS 45 in his mind visions of the future that touched even College intimacies with a more radiant glow. With Francis Darbishire, a year or two younger than himself, he was knit in ' devoted and enthusiastic friendship.' They were ' like two lovers,' he wrote in 1882, ' and had not a thought kept from one another.' To him was confided the secret of the attachment to the Derby home ; during the years of suspended intercourse he was the sympathetic medium of communication ; and he was involved in the ' whole group of romantic loves and friendships ' centered there. Darbishire himself looked on this experience as a kind of * regeneration,' lifting him into a world of intenser affection no longer passionate but under calm and dear command. Martineau, on his side, described him to Alfred Higginson, then engaged in preparing for the medical profession, as his ' supporter and delight.' ' I should not be content,' he added, ' did you not know and appreciate him sufficiently to justify my growing affection for him. But I dare not speak of him now ; he is near me, and has just been talking to me ; and if he becomes my theme just now, I fear I shall say many things which will be too fervent to be intelligible.' To Mrs. Thomas Martineau James wrote of his friend's ' self-control and firmness,' while he deplored his own ' wa5^ward and irresolute spirit * : ' I know that the character which I have given of Francis and myself would be transposed by many, particularly of my former College friends ; but I am absolutely sure that they are mistaken ; every day's experience shows me that I am but too right.' So slow and 46 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. 11 halting are the steps of self-discipline and know- ledge. Here are one or two glimpses of his spirit vouchsafed to the same sister-in-law, as he looks forward to the future alike of work or home. York, May 11, i8ss. It is the great danger of young ministers, they must have their admirers, and if once they think of their powers whether mental or moral as their omn, if they make them the source of a deceitful self-complacency, instead of being grateful for them as the instruments of benevolent usefulness, as the means of executing the divine plans, our holy profession is degraded, it loses in our minds its alliance with Heaven, it is made to minister to an earth-bom passion which pollutes every spring of thought and action. My sister, may God keep me from frustrating the best wish, the fondest anticipations of my soul, from tainting the pure and exalted conceptions which I have of the ministry by any intermixture of motives and feelings so very base. I tremble to think of what I would be, and what you with others would wish me to be, compared with what I am. But I will not trouble yon with- my fears and hopes. As he is approaching his twenty-first birthday, which is to terminate his exile from Derby, he writes again : — York, March 7, 1826. The time is very near when the long deep silence will be broken, and the thoughts which have been accumulating shall be inter- changed. New motives are about to be presented to me, and brighter feelings with which to surround my hopes for earth and heaven ; if my affections do not become expanded and spiritual- ised, no earthly discipline can exalt and purify my soul I am engaged every Sunday for many weeks in consequence of the delivery of a course of doctrinal lectures at our three missionary stations : the preparation for this laborious task claims almost all my spare time. I am obliged to ioin in this on account of the paucity of our missionaries : and it does not always make me ill on Monday. I am in particularly good health just now, and well I may be, with seven hours' sleep and one hour's walk every day. Francis and I read to each other in the open air at great distances from each other, two days in every week ; ^ and this, together with half an hour's reading daily by myself in my own room, has a wonderful efiEect in strengthen- ing my voice. 1 He at one time cherished the idea also of open air study ; it was ' an early romantic hope,' Life, ii. 84. Jiii] HOME ANXIETIES 47 The same letter told of more home anxieties. The news from Norwich had for some time filled him with ' painful sympathy and sad thoughts and fearful expectation.' Severe commercial distress had rendered it necessary to organise an extensive system of pubhc relief and employment outside the poor-law administration.^ Business was at a stand- stiU. The Spanish trade in which Mr. Martineau had been engaged, had declined under new arrange- ments with France. He laid his affairs before his creditors ; the liabilities of the house amounted to about £100,000. Fifteen shillings in the pound could have been paid at once ; but he was confident of his abOity to pay all, and struggled on, while the various members of the family began to think how to turn their capabilities and industry to good account, as Harriet had already done. In the midst of these apprehensions, the long strain of affairs wrought its deadly work upon the head of the household. To anticipate, by a little, the comrse of the family history, it may be here related that early in 1826 Mr. Martineau fell ill. James had not 5delded himself for many weeks to the joy of un- restricted intercourse with his betrothed, when he was summoned from York to his father's deathbed. To his friend Edward Higginson he wrote on June 10, ' He requires either Henry or me always with him for help which only a man's strength can supply, and Henry is for the most part needed elsewhere.' It was a sorrowful and agitating time. On Mid- summer day Thomas Martineau died. The sequel * The large sum of ;£4,ooo was raised to provide cheap food, the purchasers contributing two-pence out of every sixpence. 48 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. « is soon told. The mother whose fortune was swallowed up in the calamities which had befallen the business, prepared with her eldest surviving son to wind up its affairs. Three years later the old Norwich house was closed, and finally all debts were completely paid. ' My father,* wrote his daughter Harriet, emphatically, ' did not fail.' These memories doubtless lay behind the speaker's words, when, thirty years later, James Martineau preached a famous sermon, ' Owe no man anj^hing.'^ IV. Meanwhile the fabric of his future thought was being prepared. He had already ranged among the poets, and was most at home with Milton and Wordsworth ; ethical S5nnpathies chiefly determined his affinities, though the force of Byron and the lyric spontaneity of Shelley had made a strong appeal to him. Through William Taylor* he had become acquainted with Lessing's ' Nathan the Wise ' ; and he could never forget ' the wonder and deUght, the awful sense of intellectual space,' opened to him by the essay on the ' Education of Human Kind.'* ' No one,' he wrote in his maturity,* 'could fall upon it in the eager season of inquiry and conviction, without being haunted for years by the shadows of 1 Liverpool, Nov. 30, 1856 ; Essays, i. 497. 'Ante, chap. I. p. 13. 3 A translation had appeared in the Monthly Repository as early as 1806, with the initials of H. Crabb Robinson. To this he expressed his obligation in a speech in 1872 : ' he did not hesitate to say that the whole course of his life had been influenced by that work.' Inquirer, May 25, 1872. ■*In 1854; Essays, i. 191. 5iv] EARLY COMPOSITIONS 49 great thought it flings around him.' Under these masters it is not surprising that his power of expres- sion advanced by amazing strides. Compared with the Bristol themes, his College compositions show a swift development. In November, 1823, he dis- courses of ' Why we derive pleasure from contem- plating ruins ' ; here are already distinction of language, habits of analysis, imaginative glow. Quaint is the defence of Friendship as ' Consistent with Scriptural Views of Social Duty,' designed to show that the command to love our neighbour as ourselves ' does not exclude more particular regards.'^ Or he adventures into other fields, undertakes to explain the origin and growth of benevolence, , boldly asserts that ' the science of mind is peculiarly | the philosophy of Christianity,' and, following his ; favourite masters, Hartley and Priestley, holds up', the Law of Association as ' the instrument for | constructing from the gross and corrupt materials of sense that fair and beautiful fabric of the spirit, which, unimpaired, adorned, and strengthened by the hand of time, shall stand an eternal monument to the wisdom and benignity of its Author.' One group of Essays written in the autumn of 1824 supplies interesting evidence of the freshness of his thought. He sets out to answer the question ' To what Conclusions do Philosophical Considera- tions lead respecting Divine Influence on the Human Mind ? ' This really involves an enquiry into the whole nature of the activity of God. Genereil laws, ^ This was converted into a sermon, and preached at Diss, in Norfolk on July 11, 1824, — his first appearance, presumably in the pulpit. 50 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [cH. 11 it is urged, can account for nothing ; they are only statements of facts. If the first movement in crea- tion required an intelligent cause, so does every effect now perceived. Philosophy can only detect invariable sequence ; but something more enters into our idea of causation. Vitis it is the function of religion to disclose, and it declares in no uncertain tones that ' nothing is without God.' The fields of earth, the boundless recesses of heaven, are the scenes of his ceaseless energy. He is felt in every breeze which blows ; he is seen in every form of beauty and sublimity. It is he -who alternately unveils the world in the brightness of the morning hour, and conceals it from the view that the eye of man may be rsiised to other scenes, and his heart impressed by the silence, the darkness, the magnificence of night. It is he who, cis if to allure our attention to his operations by the novelty of perpetual revolution, mysteriously unfolds the elements of vegetation, and reveals from the bare and desert earth the verdure of spring, the hues of summer, and the fruits of autumn. It is he who with unchanging regularity bears the planets on their mighty course, who guides within the sphere of mortal vision the light of more distant worlds, and who works, in regions too remote for human knowledge to explore, wonders which the eye may behold, but the mind cannot comprehend. By rapid steps the conclusion is reached that ' the powers, not only of sensation, but of thought, volition, and affection, must be resolved into the operations of the same Great Being.' Let anyone endeavour to recount the thoughts which have passed through his mind during a single day. How great their number I How diversified their complexion and their tendency ! Upon what a vast variety of previous impressions, of associations early established and perpetually maturing does every one of them depend I And aU these have been but the movements of God's spirit, and his is the power which blends thought with thought in such beautiful and complicated trains Could we at this or any moment in the history of human nature con- template the separate lot of all our race, and watch the secret workings of their hearts, we should find all these and countless other varieties of thought and feeling by which each is led to fulfil the purposes of his being. How wonderful then is the § iv] ESSAYS ON ' DIVINE. INFLUENCE ' 51 agency of him without whom not a thought nor an emotion can arise. Truly ' nothing is without him ' : the annals of nature and of time are but the wondrous history of his agency : should he for one moment suspend it. the next would find every trace of created existence perished, and the Creator reigning alone in unshared felicity. At the outset of the second Essay the philosopher of nineteen is surprised to find himself assailed with inconsistent charges of pantheism and atheism ; and modestly confesses that he had written in ignorance that there was a controversy on the question of power. He seeks the origin of our idea of causation, and finds it in experience, com- mencing from our first voluntary act ; and the conclusion is once more affinned that ' all uniformity in nature is the immediate result of the harmonising agency of God.' But the third essay brings him into conflict with the doctrine of the effects of prayer : and he rises finally on metaphysic wing into the vision of the Eternal. All that our argument requires is that nothing subordinate to God should be erected into an independent agent, that his will be reverenced as the only sanctuary of power ; and whether we consider him as directing the stream of time, appointing its devious course, and preparing the receptacle of its destination, before its first fountain has sprung to light, or as rolling it onwards as its current proceeds, it is still the same. Indeed the distinction between these two modes of agency is merely apparent, and relative to our limited conceptions. In proportion as our views extend, and we gather our ideas from a wider range of duration both past and future, the distinctions of time become less percep - tible, and retrospection and expectation melt into one present emotion. With God, therefore, whose knowledge and whose thought includes the whole compass of time, all ideas must coalesce, the most distant events are contemporaneous, the remotest purposes coexist. The difference therefore between an all-embracing will at the moment of creation, and a succession of separate voUtions for the production of every effect, is not real, but amounts to no more than a variation in the manner of conceiving of the same operation of the Divine Intelligence. Still therefore does philosophy combine with Revelation to 52 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. n teach respecting God that he is the cause, the means, the end ; that ' of him, and through him. and to him are all things ' ; that ' nothing is without him ' ; that ' he worketh in us both to will and to do.'* There are no ' reserves and misgivings ' here. To this period Dr. Martineau turned in later retrospect : In youth, if ever we receive a ' serious call' it is the most elementary religious truths by which the mind becomes entranced. Who can ever forget the intense and lofty years when first the real communion of the Uving God — the same God that received the cries of Gethsemane and Calvary — and the sanctity of the inward Law, and the sublime contents of life on both sides of death, broke in a flood of glory upon his mind, and spread the world before him, stripped of its surface-illusions and with its diviner essence cleared ? 2 1 These passages have been cited at length to dispel all doubt as to the philosophical position from which Dr. Martineau started. In his interesting Recollections of James Martineau, the Rev. A. H. Crawford asserts that his teacher, ' owing to his lingering Deism, sometimes failed to appreciate the fuU extent of God's habitual immanence in the creation.' The repeated allusions to ' the depressing influence of his old indwelling Deism,' ' the old poison of Deism,' ' the fetters of his old Deism,' are based on some imaginary scheme of his development, and are without foundation in the actual history of his thought. Dr. Martineau never was a Deist. The general argument of the three essays (apart from the discussion ol eternity in the last), and the texts cited at the close, will be found in a sermon of Dr. Lant Car- penter's on Divine Agency and Conversion, with an appendix of ' propositions respecting Divine Agency,' published in 1822. The sermon was actually preached in 18 18 ; and with the views which it embodied Martineau doubtless became acquainted between 1819 and 1821. In an earlier sermon (1810) Dr. Carpenter rejects the doctrine that ' when God first created all things, He communicated to them all those properties, and fixed those laws, which would enable them through every succeeding period to contribute their part to the accomplishment of those purposes ' (philosophical Deism) : on the other hand, all power is the agency of God, and the laws of nature are the modes of its operation : Sermons, p. 451. On the writings of Hartley, the fountain head of these views, see chaps. IV. < iv. ^ Loss and Gain in Recent Theology, 1881 ; Essays, iv. 330. This is the other side of the picture of the positive temper to which he confesses in his Preface to the Types of Ethical Theory : but the phrase ' the sanctity of the Inward Law ' really belongs to a later mode of thought. } v] ESSAYS ON ' DIVINE INFLUENCE 53 It was doubtless with a just recollection of the steadying moral effect of such a conception on a nature already susceptible to every appeal of good, that Dr. Martineau thus described in his Study of Religion the result of the idea of God's omnipresence : Were the experiences of early life laid open, during its years of growing fervour and self-discipline, it would probably be found that both in the orisons of the closet and in the encounter with temptation, the attempt to reaUse this thought played a great part and wielded the chief power. The consciousness of his spirit whether at noon or night, abiding through every change, calm aUke on the restless sea or on the steadfast mountain, with centre here or on the horizon or behind the moon or in the milky way, and radius touching every point of life or thought, holds the mind in sleepless wonder, and renders the risings of passion impossible.^ Under these influences the young student's power was rapidly maturing. In the spring of 1826 his mother reports to her ' dear bairns ' that his old schoolmaster, Dr. Carpenter, ' had heard of James's performance at Manchester,'* and invites him to preach at Bristol in the next vacation. The prospect was cheering to the father who was face to face with death. 'Whether James accepts this proposal or not, it is gratifying that our dear lad is becoming known and approved, and our hearts are full of joy because we think he will be estimated as he deserves. As to his pulpit powers, I never was more surprised than to find they are so good, and if he is able now * study of Religion (1888), ii. 171. The whole passage with its description of the fuller religious consciousness of Pantheism deserves careful study. For a definition of the Deism which he never held, see the same volume, p. 143. * At the great Cross St. Chapel. 54 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. 11 in his delicate state to preach with spirit and energy in such a place as Cross St., when his health is better we may hope that he will be still more powerful in the pulpit.' The preacher's work was not, indeed, always performed under favourable conditions. He is at Derby on Saturday morning in September (1826) with a Sunday engagement at Manchester, and a place booked and paid for on the Defiance coach. But the coach comes in full, and the pro- prietor sends him round by Birmingham ; and he only reaches Manchester at seven the following morning. Next day, after his Sunday services and a second night journey, he is in his place at York. Three weeks later Miss Higginson remon- strates with him for excess of toil : he has preached three times on the previous Sunday at Thome, and walked sixty mUes to and fro : not without reason was it that the next letter should narrate her distress at his being again ill : nor again, was it without reason that he should afterwards describe himself as converted from an engineer into an evangehst. The last year of College (1826-27) was full of the student's hopes and fears. Even before it began Miss Higginson reports (Sept. 13) that her brother Edward, who has been at Loughborough, brings him an invitation to settle there. Later on comes a proposal from Taunton, and then another from the Ancient Chapel, at Toxteth Park, Liverpool : but prospects are darkened by ominous consulta- tions with a doctor at York about his fitness for ministerial work. The result was that he accepted an invitation from Mrs. Carpenter, of Bristol, to §v] FAREWELL TO YORK 55 take temporary charge of the school, during her husband's absence from ill health. This plan had the advantage of relieving him from the immediate strain of pulpit duty, but in consenting to undertake the work which threw that into the background, he reserved his freedom in the future to dedicate himself to its high, if also its exhausting, calling.^ Meanwhile he rearranged the College library — ' books,' wrote Miss Higginson, ' are one of your passions,' — and prepared for his farewells. There was a students' party at Bishopthorpe three miles away, which could be reached by road or river. Tea at the village inn was followed by a game at bowls ; in days before temperance agitations had invaded theological colleges, the healths of departing comrades were drunk in punch. On that occasion, as one of the little band well remembered, ' Mar- tineau expressed regret for having confined himself so exclusively to one friendship during part of his College course, and said that, if he had his time over again, he should wish to avoid that error, and be more generally companionable.'* His last sermon was delivered before the Trustees of the College, from i Cor. iii. 21-23^ ; a few days later he preaches on July 4 one of the annual sermons of the Eastern Unitarian Society at Halesworth, Suffolk, from John iv. 35. Around him are the fields ripening for the harvest, and he enlarges ' on the exertions 1 Correspondence with his mother, Jan. 19, 1827. " Recollections of Mr. Alfred Paget, Leicester, who left at the same time. Life, i. 43. ' ' Wherefore let no one gloryin men. For all things are yours, whether Paul, or ApoUos, or Cephas,' etc. 56 COLLEGE YEARS, 1822-1827 [ch. 11 which the present age demands, and the facilities it affords for the diffusion of knowledge and truth.'^ On August I he leaves Derby for Bristol. He has not allowed himself much of what he afterwards described as ' that richest of all vacations which lies between the University and the world.'* 1 The preacher next morning was the Rev. Michael Maurice, father of Frederick Denison Maurice, who was not yet ready for his life-work. After the meeting there was a collation, when the thanks of the Society were voted to Lord John Russell for bis readiness to assist the Dissenters in obtaining the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Monthly Repository, 1827, p. 850. See below, chap. IV. § i. 2 Essays, i. 403. CHAPTER III. FIRST MINISTRY : BRISTOL AND DUBLIN, 1827-1832. At Bristol James Martineau re-entered as teacher, the home from which as pupil he had carried away life-long impressions. There was the familiar house with the same punctual administrator of all its details at the head in the person of Mrs. Carpenter, and the same three sisters of whom he had taken a boy's leave six years before. But in the interval he had ' become a man.' The school-work which immediately engaged him was arduous. Dr. Carpenter had never spared him- self ; it was not likely that his representative would be more self-considerate. Remonstrances began to flow in upon him without delay ; but the natural adjustments of new labour gradually brought greater ease, and after some weeks his chief correspondent was satisfied that he was not finding his multiform engagements, including the supply of Lewin's Mead pulpit for one or two months, too much for him. Such duty was full of interest to him. But it was also full of toil. ' I never could write to order,' 58 FIRST MINISTRY, 1827-1832 fCH. lu he once said in his last years (1896), ' I only make a mess of it till it spontaneously comes, and I cannot help it ' ; and throughout his ministry the preparation of sermons involved a kind of effort not far removed from severe, if purifying, pain. Moreover, even before he left College, his sister Harriet had sent him prudent advice to be reticent in matters of opinion which might startle his hearers ; one of his old school-fellows had already been shocked by a remark, couched no doubt in the strain of his Principal's teaching, about the prophecies. Under these circumstances composition could never be easy to him. Tradition, long preserved at Great George St., related that he would shut himself up on Saturday evenings with a caddy of green tea, In the morning the sermon was finished, and the caddy was empty. Bristol had ceased to be the second city of the kingdom, but it contained men of no less distinction than Martineau's native Norwich. John Prior Estlin, one of the ministers of Lewin's Mead Meeting (1771-1817), had been the friend of Priestley and Mrs. Barbauld, Southey and Coleridge. The scien- tific eminence of his son, Mr. John Bishop Estlin, the beloved adviser and friend of Dr. Carpenter, ' a figure most dear while visible, and sacred ever since,'^ brought Martineau at once into intimate relations with an active group, which included Dr. Prichard, who had already taken the first steps in his studies of anthropology^ ; the Rev. W. D. ^ Letter to Miss Estlin, May 1 1, 1895 : Life, u 49. 2 His Researches as to the Physical History of Man had just been issued in a second edition, 2 vols. 1826. Si] AT BRISTOL 59 Conybeare, the early master of Sedgwick in geology, who founded the Bristol Institution and Museum in conjunction with Sir Henry de la Beche ; John Foster, the essayist ; and Robert Hall, the preacher. Martineau's own scientific tastes inclined him to botany. When Mary Carpenter (then away from home) reached her twenty-first birthday in April, 1828^ he sent her (with characteristic elaborateness of expression) ' a few specimens from the simplest and most graceful department of Nature's pro- ductions.' They were plants from his own modest herbarium. In the great Baptist preacher Robert Hall, Martineau found indeed no model for imitation ; he never attempted in these years to pray or preach extempore ; but in the sermons at the Broadmead Chapel he discerned an attitude of spirit which became afterwards his own. Not tiU the speaker had lost himself, he would say, and all consciousness of his hearers had faded, could he discharge his true function, and pour out his soul before the only Holy. The essence of the sermon was soliloquy. So the months ran swiftly on, and 1828 opened. Various interests gleam through the family letters. Now it is the singing of ' Tom Moore,' whom Miss Higginson has met at the house of Mr. Strutt : — ' he sits down to the instrument and plays a soft and sweet accompaniment, and with the tiniest voice imaginable, and face upturned as if it saw nothing but the subject of his song, sends every word distinct and clear, and with its own peculiar expression, to your heart.' Now it is the petitions of Dissenters for the repeal of the Test and Corpora- 60 FIRST MINISTRY, 1827-1832 \ca.m \ tion Acts^ ; and then the alternations of hopes and plans for the future. The first mention of a vacancy at Dublin reaches him in February ; early in March he decides to give up his school engagement at mid- summer ; then he is invited to preach at Dublin and is warned not to be metaphysical ; while in April his future wife writes joyously ' I have an idea that you and I shall be young at heart to the last day of our lives, how long soever they may be.' The visit to Dublin was not decisive ; the congrega- tion at Lewin's Mead learned that Dr. Carpenter would close his school and resume his pastorate, and they begged Martineau to remain as his junior colleague ; there was even a plan for a school in the neighbouring village of Frenchay, and a ministry in the little chapel there.^ At length, however, the chief difficulties were overcome. The farewells were said at Great George St. The boys wrote of the happiness they had enjoyed in his society, the advantEige they had derived from his instruction, and his unprecedented kindness in their hours of recreation and amusement : and he in reply spoke of ' the humble and humbling distance ' at which he had followed their other instructor. ^ To the three sisters he wrote in terms very different from those * This was carried in 1828, see below, chap. IV. § i. 2 Long the scene of the labours of the Rev. Michael Maurice. 3 Many years after he wrote (in i86