especially in his later writings; making this disclaimer with reference to some passages in my article in which I had made pointed reference to the manifest influence over his opinions exercised by the spirit and teachings of the mystical Chelsea philosopher.

In my reply to this letter I thought it only frank and courteous to inform my frank and courteous correspondent that I was intending to publish the substance of my article, as part of a volume dealing generally with the Broad Church theology of the day, but giving especial attention to the theology of the school of Coleridge, tracing it from its Alexandrian and German sources down to its latest contemporary developments in the writings of Mr. Kingsley and his friend Professor Maurice. To this communication Mr. Kingsley replied in a letter,-now published, like the former one to which I have referred, in Mrs. Kingsley's Memories of her husband, the tone of which is in strong contrast to that of his first communication. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed at the idea of my article taking its place in a permanent form as an estimate of his theology. One of the things which he especially objected to was my fixing on the theology of Mr. Maurice and himself the descriptive epithet 'Neo-Platonic.' The letter ended as follows: For he who vents against any man such words as Rationalism, Pantheism, and Neo-Platonism, to which the public attaches a vague horror, not caring to understand in what the imputation consists, is doing the work of the devil, who is a liar and a slanderer, and a sower of division between man and man, and God will require an account of all idle words in the day of judgment.'

So ended his second letter to me. I replied in effect, that I had not called him a Pantheist or a Rationalist, that I had used no random or

invidious epithets, that, in the volume which I was about to issue, I should be especially careful to avoid all uncharitable constructions and all unfairly coloured language, that I must, nevertheless, continue to apply the epithet Neo-Platonic or Neo-Platonizing to certain views held in common by Mr. Maurice and himself, because that was the only word which described these views with philosophical precision; that, in short, the word was a true word, necessary to be used for the purposes of definition and criticism, and that I had proved it true from his own Lectures on Alexandria. I added that I desired always to remember the responsibility of which he spoke so solemnly, but that, in the language which he had too often used in his writings in regard to evangelical' opinions and teachings I feared he had not himself borne in mind the warning expressed in his own words. I also intimated that knowing, as he did, the true and practical saintliness of many Christians of the evangelical school, I could not but regard the language he had used as the more to be regretted. I enclosed, at the same time, some correspondence which I was at the moment carrying on, in reference to my criticism of some points of his own and Mr. Maurice's theology, with one who died (to my great sorrow) nine years ago; proffering that correspondence as evidence of the charitable carefulness with which I was considering and reconsidering every point and every expression involved in the controversy. To that letter Mr. Kingsley returned the following reply. Mrs. Kingsley has inadvertently so printed it-not quite the whole of it-in the Memories, that it appears as if it were the close of the former letter of protest, instead of being a separate letter:

spoken yours calmly and courteously in return. I fear that we shall not alter each other's opinions much, so leave the matter in God's hands, with many thanks for the enclosures' (the notes from my brother), which speak well both for the writer's head and heart.

'I shall be quite silent on any charges which you may bring against me. My business is attack, and not defence. If I cannot make myself understood the first time of speaking, I am not likely to do it by any subsequent word-splitting explanations.

"God be with you, whatsoever you write or think.

'Yours most faithfully,

'CHARLES KINGSLEY.'

This correspondence took place in the early part of 1857. Seven years afterwards I had the opportunity of writing in defence of Mr. Kingsley in his controversy with Father Newman. A little later I had the honour and happiness of becoming personally acquainted with him. It was my privilege to visit him at Eversley on several occasions. We also met often at Bristol, both in public and in private, at the gathering of the Social Science Association in 1868, when he was President of the Education Section. He visited me at Westminster, and I him at his house in the Cloisters, after he became Canon of Westminster. He was always the same-a model of Christian chivalry -devout, truthful, tender, brave, a God-fearing, Christ-loving, perfectly humane, whole reality of a man; and to me, in particular, perhaps, in part, because of our earlier passages of controversy, and, in part, because I represented another communion than his own, he always showed a mingled affectionateness and respectfulness which I felt to be very touching. His last conversation with me was very full-hearted; he told the tale of his illness in America, his return from San Francisco, travelling in sore pain and physical helplessness to Denver, where he rested for a while, in extreme illness and agony ; and his remarkable meeting there

with his brother, Dr. Kingsley, as related in the Memories, who, unknown to him, was just passing through on his way east to the Rocky Mountains. 'Some men,' he exclaimed, 'do not believe in God's Providence. But what a Providence was that!'

Having thus known Kingsley in his later years-on some points I may say intimately (for he was very confidential in his lengthened conversations with me), and having also read these fascinating Memories, prepared with such loving energy, and at the same time with such remarkable judgment, by his widow, notwithstanding the condition of physical feebleness in which she has pressed to a completion her labour of love and having, moreover, consented to prepare for this Magazine a series of papers, founded on the

volumes before me-I have felt it my duty to read over again the three chapters on Charles Kingsley' in my Modern Anglican Theology, written and published before I had ever seen Mr. Kingsley. I am bound to say, after reading them, that there is very little in them, indeed, nothing material, which, after the twenty years interval and with my later personal knowledge of Mr. Kingsley, I feel that I ought to retract. My analysis of his philosophy and theology seems to me to have borne the test of time. Indeed I am not aware that any error of importance has ever been pointed out in what I have written of the Coleridgean school of theology, and especially of Maurice and Kingsley. And yet what he said in his first letter was true; our points of agreement were more than I had thought, and, even where we differed, the difference was not always as great as it appeared. Like the rest of us, and especially like all men who are both candid and impulsive, Kingsley was not seldom inconsistent with himself;;

at all times he was probably more or less so he was governed by biases and feelings, more or less mutually inconsistent. But especially, at different times, he held opinions which materially varied from each other; he oscillated not a little; he altogether changed his views at times.

In the general mood of his mind there was, in one respect, a very great change in the later years of his life. In his final letter to myself, on the occasion of our early correspondence, he said very truly, 'My business is attack, and not defence.'

That was

his feeling in his earlier years. He believed himself to have a vocation to assail certain things which he held to be terrible evils, and among these things was popular evangelical theology, as he conceived it. He ought to have understood what that theology was, for he was brought up under its influence; and yet to me he always seemed like one who had never been introduced to the knowledge of evangelical theology in its purest and noblest forms. The words I am about to quote, which I wrote twenty years ago, seem to me now to be fair and just words:

We do not know what form Calvinism may assume in the country parishes of Hampshire among Baptists and Independents, nor have we a familiar acquaintance with the sort of doctrinal statements which constitute the staple of evangelical theology, as taught by the Calvinistic LowChurch clergyman; but to us Mr. Kingsley's descriptions of the doctrines he opposes seem like gross caricatures.'

But, however that may be, the motto, if I may call it so, quoted above from his letter, and on which he unquestionably acted in the earlier years of his course, had been abandoned by him long before his death. In the autumn of 1868, on one of my visits to him at Eversley, he referred to his early feeling of an aggressively militant vocation -describing it much to the same effect as in the words above quoted

and said he had entirely changed in that respect, that he was now making it his business to seek points of agreement with Christian people, and that he was content to leave alone points of difference on which he formerly made it a principle to insist. He expressed a generous regret at the extent to which he had carried his antagonism in former years, adding some kindly words about the Wesleyans in particular, against whom, indeed, he had never shown an unkindly feeling, but of some of whose doctrines and current phrases he had unconsciously given an incorrect rendering in one of his writings. He added as one consideration which made him feel the importance of cultivating as far as possible unity and fellowship among all Christian people who hold the Head,' and making the best and most of their common grounds of agreement, the spread of atheism, under various forms and aliases, on the one hand, and of Romanizing superstition on the other.

It was, I think, not far from the same period that I heard Mr. Kingsley preach a sermon in the Chapel Royal, Whitehall, on behalf of an organization which had been founded and had been always worked by Church people of the evangelical' school, with the origination of which, indeed, if I remember rightly, his own parents had been identified, in their Chelsea parish, nearly thirty years before.

In that sermon, delivered before a very distinguished auditory, he paid a most generous tribute to the worth and to the work of the old evangelical school of Preachers and of philanthropists-parochial as well as general-in the Church of England. That eloquent sermon was Kingsley's amende for any undue severity, any unfair attacks upon that party in his earlier writings.

He who five and twenty years before had been a vehement enemy of the

Athanasian Creed had in his later years become one of its stoutest defenders, assuredly a very notable transformation, yet I find no reason to believe that he had given up any point in his characteristic humanitarian theosophy. But he dwelt less and less on his special views; moreover, he had found means of transition from his philosophical foundations on to the common platform of evangelical doctrine and feeling. Nothing, for example, can well be more beautiful or touching or truly evangelical than his sermon on 'True Repentance,' contained in his volume entitled Good News of God. Almost to the last, however, he seems to have retained-I cannot but say strangely— his habit of misapprehending the true evangelical doctrine of future retribution. He too often expressed himself as if physical horrors, deliberate and infinite tortures, were the whole staple the first and last-of evangelical teaching and preaching on this solemn subject.* His own interpretations of the worm that dieth not' and the fire that is not quenched' are very extraordinary. But, strangest of all, he does not appear to recognize that the real question is whether or not the awful prerogative of freewill in a human being involves also the power of indefinite and incorrigible self-hardening. Does man determine or not-man, I mean, when standing in his full self-consciousness and personal development -his own character, course and future? If he does, and is morally responsible for so doing, then can it be maintained that every man will and must some day, in this world or in some other, repent and turn to God? that, however hard and depraved he may have become, and even although he has grown worse instead of better in the midst of all light and good influence, he certainly

will, after death, if not before, melt and change and be reconciled to God and His righteousness; be pardoned, renewed and made meet for Christ's kingdom? That is the question; a question which, till near the close of life, Mr. Kingsley never fairly faced.

At the same time, he did believe in retribution-severe and unfailing retribution-retribution both in this world and in the next. He believed, too, in the need of atonement,-that mere repentance could not justify the immunity of the sinner; nor repentance with suffering or retribution superadded warrant forgiveness. He believed that a divine atonement was necessary; and, although on this question of atonement his views may never have been evangelical,' they certainly approached nearer to evangelical orthodoxy in his later years. One seems obliged to conclude that, in his boyish days, the doctrine of eternal punishment had been burned in upon Kingsley's imagination in hues of lurid literality and in all material forms of horror.

But we find, from an important letter of his towards the end of the second volume, that Kingsley was not a Universalist to the last. His latest views, it cannot now be doubted, differed from those of Maurice. He must have greatly modified them. Nowhere else, I believe, but in the document quoted below has he indicated what his innermost and undermost last convictions were.

In a letter on the Athanasian Creed, after stating the importance of interpreting this Creed by the light of the intermediate state,' he writes the following important words:

'It is as well here to say that I do not deny endless punishment. On the contrary, I believe it possible for me and other Christian men, by loss of God's grace, to commit acts of ἀτασθαλία, sins against light and