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The days with which those men of the past had been familiar were memorable days. The courtier conventionalities of the preceding century had come to an end. The outburst in France was felt everywhere as a great disturbing power. Antagonism at home and abroad grew up in all directions. Those men could remember the invasion of Egypt by the first Napoleon; had seen mail-coaches rush through towns and cities, decorated with laurels and blue flags, bringing news about the siege of Acre and the battle of the Nile, and had listened many a time to the half-muffled bells which told so often how victory and death went together. In his later lifetime, Napoleon spoke of the Englishman who had defeated his policy at Acre, as the man who had marred his destiny ;' and the Englishmen about Sir James Stephen in his schoolboy days believed as much.

But brave men get no harm from a sense of danger. Perilous times render them wakeful, stimulate them to action, and show what is in them. In the early years of this century, the great death-struggle to which all Europe became committed, was allied with a struggle in this country, hardly less determined, in behalf of great principles-principles of freedom and humanity. Negro emancipation was one of the many questions which Englishmen, with such a war upon their hands, took up, and could prosecute with a strength of purpose which we may

be sure would not have been so great had they been men with no other work to do. The great coadjutors of Wilberforce in that controversy, were Mr. Zachary Macaulay, father of the nobleman who has since done so much honour to that name; and Mr. James Stephen, Master in Chancery, father to the truly eminent and estimable man of whom we wish to speak in this place with the respect and affection due to his memory. The late Sir James Stephen was some ten years older than Lord Macaulay, but the friendship which had bound the sires to each other descended to their sons. Sir James was not wanting in reverence towards the great historian, but we still hear, and have no wish ever to forget, those affectionate tones in which he sometimes spoke of him as 'dear Tom.'

Sir James Stephen was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and took his degree of B.A. in 1812. He was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, and practised as a Chancery barrister from 1812 to 1823. During nearly all those years he had been connected officially with the public service as Counsel of the Colonial Department. On retiring from the bar in 1823, he retained this office during the next ten years, conjointly with that of Counsel of the Board of Trade. He subsequently became Assistant Under-Secretary, and soon afterwards permanent Under-Secretary, for the Colonies, and he continued in that position until 1847On his retirement from the Colonial Office he received the honour of knighthood, and in 1849 was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. The facts especially observ. able in his history are-the combination, on a scale so large and so successful, of the man of business with the man of letters; and still more, the combination with those qualities, of a religious culture, so broad, so deep, and so refined, as may be traced, in part, in his writings, and as was more fully known to those who had a place within the circle of his friendships.

The experiences of our Colonial Office must often have been not a little ungenial to a man of such a temperament and of such habits. Our countrymen who seek their fortune in the colonies consist largely of two classes-officials whose selfishness generally takes the form of indolence and avarice; and adventurers whom the same feeling prompts to rashness and insubordination-so that the negligence and wrong are likely to be the greatest, where the disposition to submit to them is sure to be the least. Hence the storms so often coming up in colonial history. We all know that the most restless blood of the mother country commonly finds its way to the extremities. And here is a man with the clearest perception of the ethical relations of things, and the most trained and sensitive feeling in regard to them, having specially to do with a department the least likely to be observant of such distinctions, or even to understand them. To say that the UnderSecretary was eminently successful is to say that he must have had many enemies.

The name of 'King Stephen,' cast at him as expressive of the sway which he long exercised, was the highest compliment that could be paid to that ceaseless labour, and scientific skill, with which he mastered, not only the great elements, but the smallest details, relating to our vast and varied colonial empire. To be abreast with all that was doing, he often burnt his lamp far into the night-or lighted it long before the world about him was afoot; and only thus could he have been what he was. When a field-day approached in either house on a colonial question, heavy was the demand made on the Under-Secretary for the needful ammunition. As round after round came off within the ring, the lookerson rarely suspected how much of the flooring that took place was due to the bottleholder who had been so attentive to his duties in the lobby.

With all this stress of occupation, Sir James Stephen was a domestic man, and so apportioned his time, that when certain hours of the evening came, he might generally be found at the fire-side with his

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family. The friend who dropped in upon him at such times often saw him at his best. The topics of the day were sure all to interest him, if not from the ordinary point of view, from some point of his own; and he not only spoke concerning them as few men could have spoken, but he discoursed, delivered essays upon them. Indeed, it was a fault of his conversation when the listeners were few, that it ran so much into this form. As a friend of our own once said of Coleridge, it was versation, not conversation; and mild, intelligent, and often beautiful as it was, you sometimes felt it would have been more satisfactory if larger space had been left for interrogation, if not for exception.

It was at such moments that you became aware how much this man, living as amidst a pyramid of memorials and despatches, was a man of reading in all sorts of literature, and a man of exquisite literary taste. Some of the magnates connected with the Edinburgh Review were well known to him. He once ventured, in after-dinner talk with the said magnates, to complain of the cavalier style in which they were wont to dispose of religion whenever it happened to come in their path. The sinners pleaded that they were not conscious of their sin, and challenged their censor to join their confederacy, and to show them how to mend their ways. Suffice it to

say,

that in 1838 Mr. James Stephen began to write in the Edinburgh; and from that time the old scoffing spirit of the buff and blue may be said to have been exorcised. The attraction which the genius of Mr. Macaulay had given to the Review for many years previously, was in a great degree perpetuated, for some years to come, by the genius of his friend. The writings of the two contributors, indeed, possessed only a limited resemblance. Both are largely historical, but there is a marked difference between them. Lord Macaulay's convictions have respect almost exclusively to what is true in literature and politics. Sir James Stephen's are concerned mainly with what is true in religion and philosophy. The one, accordingly, was a fitting successor to the other, as covering ground farther in advance.

But even Sir James has left room for a successor. It was impossible not to admire the largeness and candour with which he habitually looked on men, on parties, and on principles. He had his own way of seeing something to commend almost everywhere. He appeared to see all error as having relation to some truth, and seemed inclined to deal softly and cautiously with it for the sake of that truth. This disposition gave a singular amiability to his character as a man, but it in a great measure disqualified him for the work of a reformer. It was at times a strange, almost a perplexing thing, to see in the same mind, so strong an adhesion to great principles, with so little of a tendency to do real battle for them. He could admire energy, decision, even the work of destruction, when perpetrated by others-as in the case of a Luther or a Knox, but always seemed to feel that his own vocation did not lie in that direction. Hence he never brought the force and thoroughness to the side of religion and philosophy, which Lord Macaulay has never failed to bring to the side of literature and politics. We are satisfied, however, that his modesty, along with the kindliness of his nature, had much to do with this peculiarity. As a man of letters, he had come late into the field, and it was in accordance with his notions of good taste that he should bear his faculties meekly. As an ecclesiastical historian, toofor it was in such history that he found what was most congenial to him he never seemed to forget that he was a layman whose life had been largely given to the world's business, and not a man whose days had been separated to such studies. These considerations, acting on one of the most benevolent of hearts, taught him to judge leniently as a critic; and when he did take upon him something of the function of the divine, he was disposed by such recollections to do so most reverentially. When we call to mind what is being done every day through our periodical press by the merest novices in literature; and the manner in which men wholly incompetent to concern themselves with religious subjects are constantly

meddling with them, such refinements of feeling seem hardly to belong to our sort of world.

On the whole, the mind of Sir James Stephen bore a nearer resemblance to the mind of Mr. Gladstone than to that of Lord Macaulay. But here again the likeness is with a strong differ ence. Mr. Gladstone is both statesman and scholar—a man capable of hard secular work, while possessing genuine literary sympathies. He is also especially influenced by Christian forms of thought. The great and good men of Christian history are so present to his ima gination, amidst the shadows of the past, that he is always prepared to uncover before them and to do them homage. Their sanctity, their learn ing, their humane influences, when contrasted with what is around them, and would come into their place if they were absent, raise them, in his view, almost to the place of incarnations of wisdom and goodness. In all these respects the resemblance is strong between the late Under-Secretary for the Colonies and the present Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But here the resemblance ends. Mr. Gladstone's faith in the fixedness of the machinery of the Church, and in the sin of schism as conse quent on a departure from it, had no place in the mind of Sir James Stephen. He believed that the religious truth of which the New Testament is the record, and the religious heart as there delineated, were designed to be perpetual, and will so be to the world's end. But he found nothing more in that book of which so much might be said. The broils between churches, accordingly, were to his mind only so much evidence of the weakness of human nature. This was the root of his large religious charity. He reverenced the lawn which, to use his own words, 'was without a spot,'" and he could reverence the man no less, whom he knew to be equally pure, though no lawn had ever been seen upon his person, and though it would not have been accepted had it been tendered to him.

It is not a common mind, there fore, that has passed from among us. What a model to the official

And surely we are justified in loving to read, or if it be well read by another, to hear, many a passage in the Old Testament, about the meaning of which we are all but wholly in the dark. In truth, as has been argued by a contemporary on this very matter, intellectual gratification can be produced in the absence of a perceived meaning, by the lively perception that there is a meaning. And such gratification was doubtless largely ministered to the crowds who listened to Mr. Mansel.

But the whole phenomenon of the attention which his speculations have received has perhaps a more important ground than this. The sense of an impending collision of first principles in all that is most momentous, may very well have disposed men to welcome a champion who seems gallantly arming himself for the struggle; while a vague aversion to all that is German, combined with an uncomfortable feeling that it can only be overcome by a master of all that is German, will lead them to approve of one who appears to present the requisite condition, and professes to do the requisite work.

There is another point of view from which the interest taken in, and approbation bestowed on, Mr. Mansel, affords ground enough both of wonder and of solemn musing. It is but seven and twenty years since the same pulpit of St. Mary's was occupied by a Bampton lecturer who treated of matters that bore on received religious persuasions; and few are ignorant of the excitement and the wrath wherewith not the University of Oxford alone, but the whole Church of England, was moved. Yet when we compare the positions of Bishop Hampden with those of Mr. Mansel, we are lost in wonder at the change wrought in less than thirty years. For now we find the latter greeted with a torrent of approbation for that, but a hundredth portion of which well nigh visited the former with heavy penalties. We are not at this moment pre

judging Mr. Mansel; we are but speaking of the impression which he must make alike où friend and foe; of the relation which, be they sound or fallacious, his speculations and conclusions bear to what most people deem Faith and Orthodoxy; and we but express the measurement of obvious phenomena when we say that if Hampden was unsound sevenfold, Mansel is unsound seventy times sevenfold. Yet the former was proclaimed a heretic; the latter seems gladly accepted as a champion of the faith. Even when some time had been given for consideration, the journals supposed to be most zealous in behalf of orthodoxy had but little to say against him, seldom modifying their praise by anything beyond a courteous whisper of hesi tation as regards some of his posi tions. There may have been one or two exceptions, but none of any significance, till Mr. Maurice's volume broke the weather, and substituted for the sunshine of admiring contentment and complacency, with which Mr. Mansel had been hitherto environed, the thunders of indignant denunciation directed against him as the enemy and the subverter of all faith.

Here, then, we have one eminent man of the day accepted, or on the point of being accepted, as the champion of orthodoxy; and another, on whom it has been commonly thought that orthodoxy, with however little of justice, looks askance, denouncing the former as the enemy of all faith. It is time that we give such of our readers as may wish for it some account of the matter at issue.

Mr. Mansel's speculations are professedly based on a well-known essay by Sir W. Hamilton, which appeared first as an article in the Edinburgh Review, in 1829, and was afterwards republished in the volume of his collected Discussions, &c. Probably, for those who had previously read this paper, a good deal of trouble was saved in following Mr. Mansel, which was inflicted