Sartor Resartus, he analyses the "hero-worship tendency. "We know," he says, "that where he discovers, as in Mirabeau, great force of mind, he is ready to plead this as a bar of all objections against character, and to insist that in spite of appearances, such brightness of life must carry with it soundness of conscience. But will he turn the problem round and abide by it still? When he finds deep hid in the retreats of private life a goodness eminent and saintly, a moral clearness and force, great in their way as Mirabeau's keen-sightedness, will he accept the sign in evidence of mighty intellect? Will he say that, notwithstanding the meek and homely look, high genius must assuredly be there? For him as for many gifted and ungifted men, the force which will not be stopped by any restraint on its way to great achievement, the genius which claims to be its own law and will confess nothing diviner than itself, have an irresistible fascination. His eye, overlooking the landscape of humanity, always runs up to the brilliant peaks of power, not indeed without a glance of love and pity into many a retreat of quiet goodness that lies beneath their shelter; but should the sudden lightning or the seasonal melting of the world's icebarriers bring down a ruin on that green and feeble life, his voice, after one faint cry of pathos, joins in with the thunder and shouts with the triumph of the avalanche. Ever watching the strife of the great forces of the universe, he no doubt sides on the whole against the Titans with the gods; but if the Titans

make a happy fling and send home a mountain or two to the very beard of Zeus, he gets delighted with the game on any terms and cries 'Bravo!'

Surely an admirable piece of criticism on certain aspects of Carlyle's teaching.

For sheer intellectual power the theological essays of Martineau stand, however, easily first. Many years ago an uncompromising materialist observed, "Dr Martineau is the most formidable opponent we have; and no one can read his brilliant and closely-reasoned attack upon the agnostic position of Tyndall without admiration for the dialectical power displayed.

As a rule, controversies between theologians and scientists make poor reading. The scientist has so much the better of it, so far as argument goes. With all his ability and dexterity Mr Gladstone fared badly in his famous controversy in the pages of the Nineteenth Century with Huxley.

On quite another footing were the dialectic duels between Martineau and Tyndall, and Martineau and Spencer.

Here was a case of Greek meeting Greek. And a prettier logical display of fencing it would be hard to find. Martineau was an ideal controversialist. He never lost his temper; but when very provoked would, under cover of the most polished courtesies of speech, send in a few rapier-like lunges that caused his opponent to wince.

One recalls Izaak Walton's instruction for the use Essays, Reviews and Addresses, Vol. I.

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of the frog: "Put your hook through his mouth and out at his gills, and in so doing use him as though you loved him."

Martineau certainly provoked his opponents very often in the gentlest, kindest, but most unmistakable fashion. To read his devotional writings you would have rated him a poet with much of the dreamy mystic in his composition. To read his criticisms you would think him a physicist with a taste for theology.

Some years ago a friend, wishing to make a compilation of extracts from his works, wrote to him for permission. In his reply he said, “Messrs Longmans recently applied to me for permission to issue just such a compilation of extracts from my books as you suggest. I declined it, from long and indeed constant experience of utter disappointment with all anthologies of this kind formed by lifting out of their context thoughts which in their place come home with force to the reader. When the impression strikes him he naturally refers it to the passage under his eye at the moment and is not aware how dependent it is upon the preparation with which he is brought up to it by the preceding course of thought and tone of feeling. Cut this away, the very same sentiment, flung upon him as a sudden fragment, will have no penetrating power to stir him from within, but only sticks upon his memory, perhaps by one sharp point of expression. I do not deny that there are writers of great depth and wisdom who, themselves thinking in epigrams, admit without injury of being thus taken

piecemeal; Carlyle sometimes, Emerson often. But these intuitional and poetic natures are exceptional. And level writers, dependent not on inspired glimpses, but on continuous and coherently linked thought, are wronged when they are pulled to pieces and made to play the prophet instead of the pleader. As my main work of life has been didactic, conformed to the methods and requirements of logic, ethics and philosophy, my literary habit has been moulded to the pedestris oratio and does not rise into the detached flights required by the compiler of oracles."

There is much truth in this characteristically modest letter, and one realises, directly an attempt is made to illustrate Martineau's excellences as a writer, how often they suffer by being wrested from their context. Still, they do give a suggestion as to the tone of his thought, and, couched in his eloquent diction, carry with them no little power.

In passing from Martineau the critic to Martineau the preacher we are conscious of a side of his character which would have surprised us much had we not some ground plan of his temperament to guide us. But the close observer will have noted behind the fine gauze-work of his dialectic a white flame of powerful emotion, and it is a significant characteristic of the man that in the pulpit he should drop the weapons of the controversialist and don the robes of the mystic.

His sermons are devotional poems, not trapped as so many are with a cumbersome theology; indeed, it would be hard to say to what theological school he

belonged, breathing at one moment the spiritual fervour and beauty of Catholic piety, at the next the clear intellectual individualism of Protestant thought.

If they have any fault it is an undue compression of thought, and, however adapted for leisurely reading in the study, must have demanded the closest attention to the sermons when spoken in Liverpool or London. He was not a great preacher in the same way as were Newman and Robertson.. His literary style is too heavily charged with ornament to give it that instantaneous power which the lucid periods of Newman invariably possessed. There was a lack of illustration and an avoidance of current problems which made them less attractive to the ordinary listener than the vigorous eloquence of Robertson. None the less even when delivered-as many have testified the sermons carried with them a singular charm and power.

The personality of the speaker with his tall spare figure, ascetic face and fine luminous eyes; the utter absence of ostentation; the musical voice-these things challenged immediate attention. If at the time the full beauty of the thoughts did not reach home they remained in the mind and gradually disclosed themselves, and the spirit of devotional simplicity, the atmosphere of high endeavour that they breathed, exercised an influence that fascinated even those to whom his theology was but a pretty dream.