The London Pulpit. James Ewing Ritchie

One would have thought such churchmanship as this would have satisfied any one. However, the cry of heresy has been raised, principally, it seems, because he denies the doctrine of eternal damnation – an awful doctrine, we do not venture to affirm or condemn here. Because he has done this, he has been branded with infidelity; and The Record, and The Morning Advertiser– neither of them journals distinguished for talent, but rather the reverse – hounded on the public indignation against Mr. Maurice, forgetting that no man has so earnestly laboured to Christianize – not the dark tribes of Polynesia, for then these journals would have been redolent with his praise – but the savages with white faces and dark hearts that we meet in our streets every day.

      It is melancholy to think that wretched theologians may aim their small shot at such a man, merely because his idea of God and Christianity may be less fearful, more loving and humane, than their own. Surely a man may love God and his neighbour as himself – may believe Christ suffered for the sins of the world – without being hooted by every ignorant or unreasoning fool, because, on other matters – matters merely speculative – matters too dark for man ever to fully inquire into or completely to understand – his opinions differ from their own. Proud as we are of our press, yet such exhibitions should make us mourn, that at times it can so far forget Christian charity and common sense, and descend so low. One thing is clear, that there is no tribunal in the Church that can satisfactorily settle the question of heresy; and another thing is clear, that whilst so many men differing so widely from each other are in the Church, the question with the majority of them cannot be one of principle but of pay. Churchmen should be the last to raise the cry of heresy, for it is a revelation to the world of what must ever be their weakness and their shame.

      Mr. Maurice, after all, is thrown away where he is: all his life he has been in an uncongenial position. The son of a dissenting minister, the habits he acquired have clung to him from his earliest youth. Hazlitt tells us how a man so nurtured grows up in a love of independence and of truth; and such a one will find it hard to retain a connection long with any human organization and creed. Then, as the brother-in-law of Sterling, Maurice would naturally be led to modes of thought and action other than those the Church had been in the habit of sanctioning. Eminently religious, he never could have been what he was to have been, a lawyer; but as an independent writer on religion, as a co-worker with Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, for instance, what might he not have done? Another mistake of Maurice’s is, that his mission is to the poor. His style is the very last that would be popular with such. In the pulpit or out, Maurice preaches not to the public, but to the select few – to literary loungers – to men of ample time and elevated taste – to men of thought rather than of action – to men freed from the hard necessities of life, and who can leisurely sit and listen to his notes of ‘linked sweetness long drawn out.’ Hence is it that he is more a favourite with intellectual dissenters than with churchmen, and that I believe at Lincoln’s-inn-fields his congregation is made up more of the former than the latter. They love his efforts at self-emancipation; they admire his scholarship, his piety, his taste. They eminently appreciate him, as he, like the intellectual power of the poet,