1
10
1
-
https://d1y502jg6fpugt.cloudfront.net/25778/archive/files/6135383cac2ea4bfb4f734a58f8b45ec.pdf?Expires=1712793600&Signature=nF1iOk8PJsgS%7EpgBMsrlDqU26mlTFI2mZ65l-Pd3oQmvGNuI4nNV3rjjjEhZPgDp-ldhON19mIoBcp9M5NIZ3y0m-XedKyosKHRJqY2ZQl-Geio2hNMeXjlQaHP-wnkBe2Dv%7EYnk6shkMumuwb5dFWDFCVmfWJiz7jZgDdT3MbzqZb4TjeUtE-xKq%7EEs7AdcHh2o4misPEY8tDQBTBnJNv19gb6vcBQpTBFKDChqP4lPhoZD39mwEOvkpAgnFPRc%7EM9MvV9on1cOWVeBNqN5u6fhcIAQJF2Bq2ahCXbR4A6ReDtY5g6qGT1uhjf-vjHPiEfKLhDlVOrPwhsCIzczng__&Key-Pair-Id=K6UGZS9ZTDSZM
aef544a340e85d54415865461e0cf37b
PDF Text
Text
[price sixpence.]
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
A STUDY ON THE LIVES
OF
STERLING AND MAURICE.
MONCURE D. CONWAY.
AUTHOR
OF
“THE
PRINTED
EARTHWARD
FOR
THE
PILGRIMAGE.”
AUTHOR.
XI, SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
�»«rii
i?.
�THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
r.
Amid the manifold currents of religious thought and
belief, the question which most concerns us is, not so
much the point at which a man may be at any given
moment, as the direction in which he is moving.
Which way is his face set ? The ship which is leaving
London to go down the river is virtually nearer the
sea than the ship at Gravesend which is pressing its
way towards the city. The question of direction is
important above all others in any consideration of the
religious life of an age. Dr. van Dollinger recently
delivered, at Munich, some admirable lectures upon
the religious history of England, which have been
widely circulated in this country. The real aim of
those lectures was to clear the way toward some union
between the English Church and the wing of the
Catholic Church which that reformer represents. It
is plain that he looks to the Ritualistic and High
Church elements in the English Church as represent
ing the nearest point of contact between the two.
And so they do apparently, but really it is otherwise ;
�4
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
though for the moment the advanced Catholics and the
English Ritualists are near each other in their super
ficial forms, they are animated by different spirits, they
are following contrary tendencies, and their proximity
is only that of two trains moving in opposite directions
which have for a little paused side by side at a junc
tion. Hence we have the remarkable phenomenon
that since the brave utterances of Dr. von Dollinger
have been heard, there has been almost no response
to them' from the Ritualists, whereas they have been
warmly welcomed by Rationalists within and out
side of the Church. These have felt that, whatever
may be the forms which still cling to the new
movement in the Catholic Church, it is in their
direction, it is for freedom, whilst the tendency of
those in this land who have surrendered the religious
liberties amid which they were born is toward that
very Papal authority against which the others have
rebelled.
These currents and counter-currents are not less
notable when they are found controlling the lives and
thoughts of individual men. Everywhere around us
.we see minds passing each other, seemingly near, but
bound for different latitudes of thought; everywhere
hearts torn asunder by the mastering tides they
cannot resist. These experiences do indeed make
the religious changes and evolutions of our time
a perpetual tragedy. It is significant of the un
happy condition of society in this respect, that the
birth of a profoundly religious nature implies a new
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
5
spiritual tragedy. It means the fresh divorcing of
earnest hearts, alienation of tenderest natures, the
reluctant estrangement of friends at the sad parting
of the ways. Who can tell what heart-breaks have
been suffered ere the brothers Froude or the brothers
Newman parted for paths that led on the one side to
Rome, on the other to Reason ? But there are hearts
that have a deeper relationship than that of blood,
and such were the two whose characters and lives have
suggested what I have to say at present. These two
men—John Sterling and Frederick Denison Maurice—
were intimate friends at college ; they were originally
united by the deeply religious temperament common
to both; they sat together under the instruction of
the same cultivated and earnest teacher, Archdeacon
Hare; they sat together at the feet of the greatest
thinker of their time, Coleridge; they were alike brought
under the quickening genius of Thomas Carlyle ;
their interests and lives were cemented by their inter
marriage with gifted women,, who were sisters, and by
their union in thefounding and editing of IheAthenceum.
But one had been born a Unitarian, and had turned
his back upon the door it opened toward liberty; the *
other had been born in the Church, and had steadily
set his face toward that door which the other had
abandoned. They passed by each other. Though
their hearts clung together to the end, their minds
passed each other. In a letter which I received some
years ago from Professor Newman, to whom Sterling
left the guardianship of his eldest son, he says :—r
�6
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS t
“ Though Sterling had totally renounced Christianity,
among his last words to me were, ‘There are no better
persons in the wide world than Frederick Maurice
and his wife.’ ”
Now observe this anomaly! Here are two culti
vated, sincere, true-hearted friends. If you had asked
them any question concerning a triangle, or a Greek
verb, they would have given one reply; had you
asked them their opinion concerning any political or
scientific or even ethical question, they would have
given probably the same answer, the answer of com
mon sense and common conscience. Guided thus by
the simple reason common to them, they could pass
arm in arm, and see eye to eye, amid the thousand
problems and concerns of life, until they come at last
to theology: one step into that, and lo, the two friends
fly wide as the poles asunder !
This is not an unusual case. It occurs every day.
Religion, since it became merged into theology, has
become the great dividing force of the world. And
that because theology has built up in the very heart of
a world, developed and civilised by reason, another
world that holds reason at a distance, and claims a
magical or supernatural influence that sets aside both
reason and law.
Into this little enchanted circle of the elect John
Sterling was partly born, and partly manipulated by
those agents of the Church who are always on the
look-out to allure talented youths into its pale, to keep
it from mouldering away. “ Have they not,” cried he
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
7
in the Debating Club at Cambridge, when discussing
the Church Articles, “a black dragoon in every parish,
on good pay and rations, horse-meat and man’s-meat,
to patrol and battle for these things?” He little
deemed in those days that he himself would ever
become a valuable recruit of the same patrol, and one
may estimate what kind and degree of force must have
been brought to bear in transforming the clear-seeing
radical of Cambridge to the curate of Herstmonceux But I cannot go into the details of his life.
His friend Carlyle has written the biography with an
inspiiation which makes the book one chapter of
England’s Holy Scriptures. No one can realise com
pletely the religious conditions amid which he or she
is bon, without reading that wonderful Life of Sterling.
I think any mind which reaches to the sense of that
book, will realise how serious are the dangers beset
ting thought in this age. We read in ancient fables
of youth walking between good and evil genii; of
Hercules between Virtue and Vice, and the like ; and
we recognise their meaning when we see the young
passing amid the temptations and the good influences
of the world.' But we are apt to think of the scholar,
fhinker, poet, if we know that they have risen above
;he coarse forms of evil, as freed from the worst
dangers of life. But it is not so. There is a mental
/ice corresponding to every moral vice.
Beside
jvery thinker, however pure his outward life, walk the
lark and the luminous powers. At every step they
ire allured by the proud estate of Error, and by the
�8
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
bribes of Falsehood. Temptations to utter smooth
things instead of right things; to leave the lonely
path of individual conviction for the gay bazaar where
opinions are bought and sold; temptations to hypo
crisy and cant, and conformity to social prejudice ;
these waylay the thinker at every step, and in most
cases prove too strong for the pleading of the faithful
intellect within.
These contrary influences, towards the close of the
last generation, were in a sense embodied in two
■remarkable men who appeared in London. When I
say that the evil intellectual influence of that period
was represented by Coleridge, I do not wish to say
anything to the personal discredit of that eminent
man. Had he not been a richly-endowed intellect,
and a man of high spiritual feeling, he could, not
indeed have exerted the influence over the young
men around him that he did exert. But he had not
courage ; he dimmed his light with opium; and
opinions which were only morbid with him, and of
whose evil tendencies he was partly unconscious, unfor
tunately chimed in with sluggishness of conscience
and temptations to untruth in the less peculiar minds
around him. He had spun a shining web of specu
lations out of his brain, in which all the dogmas
managed to nestle, and to appear what they were not.
He threw the disguise of philosophy around the
Trinity, plated over the Vicarious Atonement until its
base metal was no longer discernible, and so per
suaded young men who were commissioned to ra
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
9
tionalise the world, that the foolish systems of belief
around them might, by a little modification, become
the dicta of pure reason. All this,- true to his drugged
intellect, became false in nearly every mind that was
inoculated by it.
The contrary spirit, which had already animated
the brave protest of Shelley, was ultimately more fully
embodied in Thomas Carlyle. Whatever may be
thought of particular views of Mr. Carlyle, no one
can trace his long career without seeing that he has
been a type of the truthful and truth-speaking man.
During his long life there is no falsity he has seen and
not stigmatised, no sham with which he has not
bravely grappled. Amid pretences, servilities, trucklings to popular prejudice, abasements before fashion
able idols, he has for nearly half a century pursued,
amid early poverty as amid later success, the unsullied
path of intellectual rectitude, and never suffered a lie
to be wrung from his tongue. In the days when
many of the thinkers, who now fill the high places of
the country, were choosing what Power they would
serve, Carlyle appeared as the prophet of fidelity to
conviction, as the eloquent witness to self-truthfulness
and self-faithfulness, calling on each to bear his bur
then, and accomplish his task on earth. He spoke
to young men, says Emerson, with an emphasis that
deprived them of sleep. This Voice in the wilderness
was not less revolutionary because it was unconscious
—perhaps has always been to some extent uncon
scious—of its own practical bearings upon established
�10
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
dogmas and superstitions; but, at its tremendous
affirmation of the reality and grandeur of life, a hand
of flame appeared on every wall of church or cathe
dral, with authentic warning to the scholars in their
fine livings that they must hasten to the side of Truth,
who had no bishops’ palaces or even parsonages to
bestow, but camel-hair for raiment and wild-honey for
food. Carlyle and Coleridge we know often met,
conversed not unkindly however warmly, parted as
friends ; neither saw in himself the St. George, or in
the other the Dragon, of any moral conflict, nor could
the young men who gathered with equal reverence
to the oracles at Highgate and Chelsea recog
nise their fatal and eternal antagonism; but true
it is that for those cultivated youths, as time has
shown, the two men were really the reappearance of
Indra and Ahi, Apollo and Python, Siegfried and
Fafnir, in the sphere of Thought—the arrow of Light
piercing once more the Cloud-monster !
Between these two voices—-that of Coleridge trying
to patch up old dogmas so that young thinkers might
subscribe them, and that of Carlyle calling them to a
height from which the Church stood revealed as a City
of Destruction—many a youth made the bed whereon
he has since had to lie in peace or pain.
' But what I say of these two men must not be
pressed too closely in a chronological sense. There
was a foreground to them, or, we may say, the inter
necine Coleridge-element and Carlyle-element struggled
for some time before they took that personal shape in
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
îî
cultivated society, which especially influenced Sterling
and Maurice, and the youth of their time.
II.
It is near fifty years since that beautiful vision first
visited the young and reverent thinkers of the English
Church, whose outer signs the prosaic world has in
in these last days recognised and named “ The Broad
Church.” As of old, when its morning-stars appeared,
the watchers by night were sore afraid. But to those
who dreamed that dream of a Church broad enough
for Humanity, wide enough to include every thought,
every truth of the living age, it was as the consummate
flower of the Ages of Faith. Amid crumbling creeds,
and mouldering altars, they saw a National Church
emerging to be the home of all souls, the nest in which
the freest and purest minds might lay their young. In
this new Church all the old fetters were to turn to wings.
A soft mystical mist for them enveloped the ancient
formulas, and through it loomed in attractive grandeur
one central idea into which Christianity was to pour
its flood of life—the Incarnation. To this one doctrine
they saw the great religions of all races pointing ;
around it they saw the Heavenly Kingdom revolving ;
and to it they beheld mankind gravitating, as the
unifying principle of the world. Just so soon as the
dogmas which encrusted and deformed it were all
�12
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
cleared away, that doctrine of the manifestation of
God in Christ was to become the spiritual axis of
Humanity.
The fine enthusiasm which this idea kindled in
ardent and cultivated minds made the Broad Church
movement in its earlier years a romance. So true is
this that its first love could only express itself in the
language of fable and poetry. Nearly every promi
nent man in the movement began his career by writing
a religious novel. Some of these productions have
been suppressed, others altered, as one after another
their writers have fallen away from following the
dreams of their youth ; but there is no other way in
which a student of this time can get so near to the
heart that then beat in the Broad Church revival, as >by
reading such books as Sterling's “ Arthur Coningsby,”
Maurice’s “Eustace Conway,” Froude’s “Nemesis of
Faith,” Arnold’s “Oakfield,” Kingsley’s “Yeast,”
Smith’s “ Thorndale,” and Clough’s “Bothie of Toberna-Vuolich.” These works are not, indeed, all repre
sentative of the Broad Church, but they all help to
indicate the conditions of thought out of which it
arose, and together constitute an impressive chapter
in the religious history of England. In them we see
the old, hard, dogmatic strata softening, crumbling off
into tender stems and buds, and struggling to mingle
in the life-blood of man.
Notwithstanding the varieties of scene and character
represented in these novels, and the various literary
ability in them, they are, with one or two exceptions,
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
)1
K>
1}
Ik
?i
w
CH
9
9
b
FÉ
iq
fil
8ïl
ff!
B
10
nil
fffi
rii
ri?
ad
ufi
ÖE
really one book with two endings. They tell the story
of the modern Pilgrim’s Progress. In each we meet
the same hero—the young man of genius who has
abandoned the old creed as a City of Destruction, and
is pressing forward to the Celestial City of Truth. The
end of this pilgrimage is always, whoever be the pensman, written by either Coleridge or Carlyle, or by the
Coleridge or Carlyle principle in the universe. When
Coleridge is inspirer the young pilgrim having wan
dered in wildernesses of doubt, and through the deeps
and bye-ways of speculation, is sure to end at last in
the old church—its ancient furniture somewhat re
paired—to dwell there comfortably for the rest of his
life. His devious ways, his rationalising episodes,
have all led up to the grand discovery that by a little
metaphysical alchemy all he once saw as dross is
transmutable to pure reason and much fine gold. But,
on the other hand, where Carlyle inspires the story’s
end,* the pilgrim’s way leads to something more tragical,
so far as worldly result is concerned, but something
more heroic than a snug parsonage and a comfortable
living. The young man ends in the wilderness, under
the cold night, his little lamp, fed with borrowed oil,
burnt out; a sufficiently bleak region he has reached,
but the holy stars are over him;not a mere “smoke
canopy” mistaken for a heavenly vault, and he can
look up to the unattainable worlds of light with no
falsehood over his eyes, and follow their leading with a
steadfastness equal to their own.
As the embryologist can read an animal’s future in
1
�14
the parting of the ways:
•
its egg—prophesy, this will move on the ground,
that will soar in the air—so may one in these religious
novels find described the various careers of those who
wrote them. This is particularly true of those which?
in 1827, Sterling and Maurice both began writing.
Sterling’s appeared in 1833, under the title of
“Arthur Coningsby;” Maurice’s appeared a year or
so later, under the title of “ Eustace Conway;” each
was a prophetic chart of the spiritual voyage its writer
was destined to pursue.
Mr. Carlyle in his “Life of Sterling,” referred to
“ Arthur Coningsby,” unfortunately, from memory.
“It was,” he writes, “in the sunny days, perhaps in
May or June of this year (1833), that “Arthur
Coningsby” reached my own hand far off amid the
heathy wildernesses; sent by John Mill; and I can
still remember the pleasant little episode it made in
my solitude there. The general impression,it left
on me, which has never since been renewed by a se
cond reading in whole or in part, was the certain
prefigurement to myself, more or less distinct, of an
opulent, genial, and sunny mind, but misdirected,
disappointed, experienced in misery, nay crude and
hasty; mistaking for a solid outcome from its woes
what was only to me a gilded vacuity. The hero an
ardent youth, representing Sterling himself, plunges
into life such as we now have it in these anarchic
times, with the radical, utilitarian, or mutinous heathen
theory, which is the readiest for inquiring souls; finds,
by various courses of adventure, utter shipwreck in
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
*5
this; lies broken, very wretched; that is the tragic
nodus, or apogee of his life-course. In this mood of
mind he clutches desperately towards some new
method (recognisable as Coleridge’s) of laying hand
again on the old Church, which has hitherto been
extraneous as if non-extant to his way of thought;
makes out by some Coleridgean legerdemain, that
there actually is a Church for him; that this extant
Church, which he long took for an extinct shadow, is
not such but a substance; upon which he can anchor
himself amid the storms of fate; and he does so, even
taking orders in it, I think. Such could by no means
seem to me the true or tenable solution.”
Nor had any such solution presented itself to
Sterling when he wrote “Arthur Coningsby.” Mr.
Carlyle’s memory has, for once, misled him. Arthur
Coningsby, the hero of the story, does indeed suffer
the wreck, as told in the passage I have just quoted,
and it is sad enough ; but he does not suffer the last
tragedy, of recovery through the intervention of self
deception and moonshine. He returns from the Reign
of Terror in Paris, where his radical hopes and dreams
went down like sunken argosies, to try to find, not
his old faith, but his old heart, in England. But she,
who through all had held it, was hopelessly in the
power of “ tyrannous fanaticism,” estranged as if she
had been a nun from this uncomprehended Bird of
the Desert. Then his heart breaks. He betakes
himself to a mouldering ruin on the sea-side, there
amid crumhlin<r walls which symbolise his perished
�16
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:
visions, to consider whither he will fly from a world
which has become to him a valley of desolation.
Thence he writes to his nearest friend a bitter letter
of farewell. “A man,” so he writes, “ can propose to
himself but one of two objects—the world without
and the world within. I have almost equal contempt
for both........ Of religion, poetry, philosophy, formerly
in my eyes the three great subjects of human study,
and elements of human power, I think but as of fine
dreams, from which I have wakened and found myself
in darkness........ What can I hope for in all Europe
when there is scarcely one of its provinces in which
I have not heard the very same dull desperation which
I feel, expressed alike by its starving peasants and its
surfeited nobles? Our formal creeds and conven
tional systems, and worn-out modes of existence, con
tain no seed of strength or happiness
There is
another continent, Henry, than ours, in which, for a
time at least, I may perhaps find peace. I came
hither after a life of artificial society in fields and
eities, and found myself amid a lonely wilderness
of ruin, in which there is scarcely a breath of
actual life, or a shadow of present meaning. I sat
one evening upon the mouldering wall of the
terrace. The hum of insects, the occasional chirp
of birds, the wide, continuous whisper of the forests,
and the faint regular murmur of the dreaming ocean
were the only sounds that reached me. The black
woods sank on either hand to the waters, and the
sky before ’ me was steeped in splendour.........The
�STERLING AND MAURICE,
U
HI
xl
id
j£
QI
qf
els
$
di
4
fii
nJ
i'£2
.
55
(¿j
3
M
,flj
if
o<
afll
f££
Ic
¡XV
17
West, in which glades of delicate primrose were
mingled with wide fields of the richest crimson,
seemed an island of the immortals, and broad gar
lands and scattered flowers, of the same effulgent
hues, encircled it, and were relieved upon the blue
and quiet sky. One faint star, the star of the West,
rose trembling into view; and I thought, in the ex
travagance of lawless fancy, Is not that the genius,
and are not those the meadows, of a happier region
than any I have wandered in ? Why cannot I pursue
that radiance to its fountain, and win for myself a
heritage in that occidental paradise ? This was
idle dreaming. But in that instant there dawned
upon my mind, and piled itself against the heavens,
a vision of the American wilderness.......Your civili
sation seems to me a long, busy play, without plot or
end, and in which none of the characters perform
their parts even tolerably, except the confidants and
lacqueys. I will go and gaze upon another mode of
humanity......Consider me henceforth a sachem, a
hermit, an exile, a madman, what you will; as lost,
dead, gone for ever, but not as forgetful of your long
and undeserved kindness. Some future wanderer
in the western forests will perhaps stumble or pause
at a low mound in some dark thicket, but there will
be neither inscription nor emblem to inform him that
the bones of an English outcast were there laid in
earth by the hands of the red warriors.” So ends one
of the most impressive and eloquent books ever
written. But no, even that last wild sentence is not
�18
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS .“
the end; for on the blank beneath there is copied a
fatal sentence from JBschylus : 11 And evermore shall
tne burthen of the agony of thy present evil wear
thee down j for he that shall deliver thee exists not in
nature/’
With such sad spiritual convulsion had the morbid
religious conditions of his time afflicted this young
man, even in the preface of his life.
In ful
filling the dreary destiny so prefigured, he did in
deed shrink from, the bleak path for a brief space,
as we have seen, thereby losing perhaps the joy of
gaining inwardly the blessed Isles of Light which
his hero followed in the West. But this swerving
was not enough to mar the intellectual and moral in
tegrity of his life, whatever it may have cost him in
health, happiness, and repose.
It was perhaps the saddest day of Carlyle’s life when,
he heard that John Sterling had fallen a victim to the
Coleridgean “moonshine” as he called it, and entered,
the Church as a clergyman. For he knew well that it
was not his friend’s true place, and that the penalty to
be suffered must be inevitable. Friends of Sterling
have told me that this step was in good part due to
Sterling’s ill-health. Once in helping to put out a fire,
he had stood in the water for some time, and so con
tracted disease of the lungs. This weakness prevented
his giving his mind very patiently and thoroughly to a
subj ect, so that he was liable to stop at a mere resting
place of inquiry as if he had reached the goal. His
mind, too, was troubled with many doubts, and in a
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
19
moment of weakness he imagined that he could escape
them if he threw himself into ministerial work. More
over there occurred a disastrous episode in Sterling’s
life at this time connected with a Spanish revolution,
which had brought on a momentary reaction in his
mind favourable to all kinds of Conservatism. He
was under the shadow not only of doubt, but of a
dreary failure which caused the military execution of
two of his friends, and torturing considerations to him
self. In after years, Sterling, with a sad humour, said
his case at the time he entered the Church was like
that of “a young lady who has tragically lost her lover,
and is willing to be half-hoodwinked into a convent, or
in any noble or quasi-noble way to escape from a world
which has become intolerable.” The results of this false
step could not be avoided. John Sterling had not been
long inside of the Church before he found the utter
hollowness of it; he found that instead of leaving his
doubts outside he had multiplied them, and made their
solution more difficult; he found himself there as in
the halls of Eblis, where the silent figures move about
with forced serenity, each hiding an incurable disease
which none would name or confess. But Sterling
could not suppress his cry; he escaped from the
dwelling-place of the slowly perishing. After a minis
terial career of exactly eight months, he discontinued
his functions through illness, but it proved to be his
eternal Adieu to the Church.
But, alas, it was years before he could disentangle
himself, and clear his relationship with men, of all the
�20
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:
consequences of that eight-months’ error. He must
encounter the old patrol of “ black dragoons,” which
was not so bad; but he must untwine the withholding
arms of affection, and reach the path of truth over
the bruised hearts of those to whom he had in one
weak moment, committed himself. And thus in weary
explanations of his reasons for believing light to be not
darkness, nor two to be three, and in polite defence
against the plaintively pious who wished to convert him
(once two gentle ladies, whose “ timid omniscience”
he found reason to admire !)—were passed time and
strength which might have been bearing him onward to
clear and solid results of life. When through this pain
ful labyrinth he had at length made his way, he started
eagerly on the old path from which he had swerved,
and resumed that literary task which waited for his
beautiful genius, but the brief morning was past, its
roses already fading, and the untimely night at hand !
The great lesson of Sterling’s life is the solemn
warning it gives against the perils of intellectual waste
fulness.
Most impressively has it been enforced,
while with the tenderness due to the memory of one
who was rather a victim of his time than a falterer on
the path, by his friend and biographer, Carlyle. “Poor
Sterling, he was by nature appointed for a Poet, then,
— a Poet after his sort, or recogniser and delineator of
the Beautiful; and not for a Priest at all! Striving
towards the sunny heights, out of such a level and
through such an element as ours in these days is, he had
strange aberrations appointed him, and painful wander
�Sterling
and
Maurice.
21
ings amid the miserable gas-lights, bog-fires, dancing
meteors, and putrid phosphorences which form the
guidance of a young human soul at present! Nor till
after trying all manner of sublimely illuminated places,'
and finding that the basis of them was putridity, artifi
cial gas and quaking bog, did he, when his strength
was all done, discover his true sacred hill, and passion
ately climb thither when life was fast ebbing! A
tragic history, as all histories are ; yet a gallant, brave,
and noble one, as not many are. It is what to a
radiant son of the Muses, and bright messenger of the
harmonious Wisdoms, this poor world, if he himself
have not strength enough, and inertia enough, and
amid his harmonious eloquences silence enough, has
provided at present. Many a high-striving, too-hasty
soul, seeking guidance towards eternal-excellence from
the official black-artists, and successful professors of
political, ecclesiastical, philosophical, commercial,
general and particular legerdemain, will recognise his
own history in this image of a fellow pilgrim’s.”
Years ago I sought the grave of John Sterling, in
that beautiful ground of Bonchurch, beside the sea, an
emblem of his purity, his freedom, but also, alas, of his
unrest. Beside his grave I read the letter he wrote to
his friend Carlyle, from his- death-bed : “ I tread the
common road into the great darkness, without any
thought of fear, and with very much of hope. Certainty
indeed I have none. If I can lend a hand there, that
shall not be wanting.” I read, too, his letter to his eldest
son, written also with the shadow of death upon him :
�22
THE PARTING OF ’jHÉ WAYS \
tl When I fancy how you are walking in the same
streets, and moving along the same river, that I used
to watch so intently, as if in a dream, when younger
than you are, I could gladly burst into tears, not of
grief, but with a feeling that there is no name for.
Everything is so wonderful, great and holy, so sad and
yet not bitter, so full of Death, and so bordering on
Heaven. Can you understand anything of this ? If
you can, you will begin to know what a serious matter
our life is; how unworthy and stupid it is to trifle it
away without heed; what a wretched, insignificant,
worthless creature any one comes to be, who does not
as soon as possible bend his whole strength, as in
stringing a stiff bow, to doing whatever task lies first
before him.” Every word is wrung from his own
experience. He is feeding his son with red drops
from his heart. Out of his grave grew a graceful
fuchsia whose tints seemed to me the red of his deepveined breast and the whiteness of his purity. I
brought away a bloom to press in some sacred volume
of his thoughts; but I bore away also the lesson, that
life is long enough for all who live it truly, but is too
short for us to do over again what has been already
done for us. I have sometimes met with the notion
that there is a certain advantage in beginning with the
popular superstitions for the sake of the experience
gained in growing out of them. Even so great a man
as the historian Niebuhr, on the birth of his son
Marcus, writes to a friend that he means to teach
little Marcus all that he (the father) had unlearned,
�STERLiN^
and
Maurice.
23
Mid will make him believe all of Homer’s Mythology,
in order that his mind may be an epitome of the
history of the human mind. But the wise economy
of life is to start from the advanced ground won for us
by those who have gone before. The astronomer does
not need to discover over again every planet that has
been discovered, but uses the accumulated knowledge
of the past as the basis and point for a new departure.
And in no region of life can men afford to throw
away experience. Poor Sterling takes his backward
step, puts on the customary chains, and then spends
the best strength of his life in breaking those chains
and recovering the old free ground he had left.
Arriving there he finds all the old problems from which
he shrank still to be dealt with, but the time and
means of dealing with them are gone. So he wanders
on without attaining any solid rest for his mind ; the
idol falls, but he is unable to raise the true God in its
place ; and so he can only say to his son, and say to
us, with his last breath : “ Bend your whole strength
as soon as possible to doing whatever task lies first
before you.”
III.
We have seen that while John Sterling was uncon
sciously tracing out the path of his own destiny fortyfive years ago in “ Arthur Coningsby,” his nearest
friend, Frederick Maurice, was also writing a romance
�24
THE PARTING OF THE WATS :
of similar character—“ Eustace Conway.” This, too,
is an ominous book. The account which Mr. Carlyle,
under a mistaken impression, has given of Sterling’s
novel is closely applicable to that of Maurice, with
which indeed he would almost seem to have confused
it. This is indeed the apotheosis of the Coleridgean
Moonshine ! Eustace Conway, wandering amid the
same desolations of heart and brain as Arthur Coningsby, meets a German metaphysician—meets him
in Newgate prison!—who sprinkles the phosphorescent
light of decaying creeds over him, and the work is
completed by an exceedingly monotonous and end
less clergyman, the book ending with marriage-bells
for Eustace, and the embowered parsonage easily
imaginable just beyond. The story is fatally familiar;
it lives, moves, preaches around us daily: we need not
dwell on it. That Pure Reason naturally branches out
into thirty-nine great truths, and that these, by a happy
coincidence, are precisely the thirty-nine articles of the
Church which commands the religious authority and
endowments of the country,—this is the Rock upon
which the pious fictions of England are based, from
Maurice’s novel to the Establishment itself. But no
casuistry can make it other than the abdication of
Truth from the throne of the heart; to one who has
painfully and faithfully followed the leading of Reason,
its marriage-bells break out into a wild clangour of
despair, compared with which the spiritual loneliness
of Coningsby were Paradise.
But there is one thing notable about the novel with
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
2§
which Mr. Maurice began his literary life, that is the
view of human nature implied in it. There is an
amount of wickedness in the book quite appalling.
Desperadoes and libertines, abductions and seductions,
Newgate and other doubtful places, follow each other
in quick succession through the book, and one feels at
first as if its author had never known honest people,
But as one reads further it becomes sufficiently plain
that all this wickedness is theoretical. The tempta
tions are fanciful, the sins unreal, the crimes ludicrous j
they prove not only the innocence of the author, but
of the Cantabs, who manifestly furnished him with
inadequate models for the vices depicted. Never
theless, the generally disparaging view of human nature
implied in “ Eustace Conway,” has a certain interest
in connection with the author s change of faith which
must have occurred about the time that it was written.
It seems to me clear that the author of the novel in
question had received by inheritance some kind of
dogma of Human Depravity. And I think that it is of
the utmost importance that Unitarians of the present
day should be careful to weigh well, not only this, but
several expressions directly concerning Unitariamsm
in Dr. Maurice’s writings, if they would fairly estimate
his abandonment of that faith. In a majority of
cases there would, perhaps, be reason to suspect the
motives of a scholar who should pass from a Unitarian
family to the Church. But in the case of Maurice
we find that after suffering the chief crosses of heresy,
and surrendering the college prizes whose loss it en-
�THE PARTING OF THE WAYS i
tailed, he enters the least popular wing of the Church.
He was never a seeker of popularity or wealth; and his
fidelity to conviction, while he has seen men inferior
to him in every way promoted over his head, himself
ignored by a Church which could neither bend nor
bribe him, compels us to admit that his abandonment
Unitarianism was due rather to its defects than to
his. At the time the change was made, it was by no
means a downward step that he made; and it is a fair
criticism upon the average Unitarianism of that period,
surviving now as a mere party in the same denomina
tion, that it could not satisfy a man so devout and
disinterested as Maurice. It was a critical, scholarly
religion; but passionless, bloodless, without any
ardour of humanity. It was timid too, and made a
virtue of not prejudicing the minds of children, but
leaving them to grope their way to liberty, so that each
generation of Unitarians were expected to do their
fathers’ work over again. Then it was ever afraid of
being compromised by some brave mind. “I could
never,” said Sterling, to a friend who mentioned it to
me, “ I could never be a Unitarian. They take two
bites at a cherry.” His friend Maurice seems to have
disliked them because they tried to bite the cherry at allWhat kmd of Unitarianism he was acquainted with
may be gathered from the following passage from his
“Kingdom of Christ,” vol. i. p. 184:—“The more
thoughtful disciples of Unitarianism began to be struck
with another strange contradiction between the prin
ciples on which it rested, and the system in which
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
27
Vhey are embodied. The Unitarians were the great
assertors of the absolute unqualified love of God, in
opposition to all mythologies and theologies v hich had
preceded.
And Unitarianism was the first of all
theologies or mythologies which denied that the
Almighty had, in his own person, by some act of con
descension and sacrifice, interfered to redress the
evils and miseries of his creatures ! Every pagan
religion had acknowledged the need of an incarnation;
the modem Jew and Mahometan, nominally rejecting
it, is yet continually dreaming of it, and testifying to
its necessity—it was reserved for this religion, to make
it the greatest evidence and proof of love in a Divine
Being, that He merely pardons those who have filled
the world with misery j that He has never shared in
it; never wrestled with it; never devised any means
save that of sending a wise teacher, for delivering man
kind out of it.”
It would appear from this that the doctrine of the
love of God taught by the Unitarians, among whom
Mr. Maurice was born, was an oasis amid a desert of
orthodoxy. It was held along with the incongruous
concession that the universe is an arena for the struggle
of hostile camps. There is need that God should
wrestle with somebody or something; that the misery
and sin in the world are here without his consent,
and that he is driven to “devise” means of deliver
ance. The depravity of so many characters in
« Eustace Conway ” here appears in theological dis
tinctness, as if Unitarianism had never conveyed any
�the parting of the ways
:
other impression. Nay, the doctrine of the Unity of'
God must have been a mere arithmetical statement
in his conception of Unitarian tenets, else it could
hardly have admitted of the proximity of the quiet
assumption of a Universe of antagonistic, irrecon
cilable moral Powers.
In contrast with this dry,
fragmentary form of belief, there stood before him
the new movement or revival in the Church, then in
its first glow of enthusiasm; its very greatness of
promise concealing the hard fatal lines which it could
not overpass.
Undefined, an unevolved point of
light suggesting endless possibilities, arose that dream;
it has preceded a sad awakening, but it was a grand
one, and, until heart and flesh failed, was bravely
pursued.
By none more bravely pursued than by Frederick
Maurice. My belief is that his life casts a new and
less favourable light upon Coleridge than even that of
Sterling does. Maurice could never forgive Carlyle
for having called Coleridge’s teaching “ moonshine,”
and yet his own embodiment in warm, sincere life of
what had been mere metaphysics with Coleridge, sug
gests an aptness in Carlyle’s word. One day, when
Leigh Hunt and Charles Lamb had been listening to
a long talk from Coleridge about the high reasonable
ness of Trinitarian dogmas, the former remarked, as
they were coming away, what a dreadful thing it is to
hear a man like Coleridge preaching such pious false
hoods. “ Ah,” said Lamb, “ Coleridge always will
have his fun.” This is not the only story one hears
�STERLING AND MAURICE,.
?£
current among the old friends of Coleridge which
suggests the superficiality which some felt in his
utterances. But in Maurice there was no fun in the
Highgate oracle; in him the Moonshine took flesh
and dwelt among us. To him fell the sad task of
pressing the Coleridgean doctrine that white is black,
and that the blacker black is the more is it white, to
the last logical extreme. For he was sincere. And
through his sincerity and bravery the intellectual
phantasm has been urged until it has dissolved into
thin air.
Perhaps the theological literature of this century
contains no writing more remarkable than one in
which Mr. Maurice defended the damnatory clauses
of the Athanasian Creed, in the name of charity.
“ To the best of my knowledge and recollection,” he
says, “ I never have felt tempted while reading this
Creed, however I may have felt tempted at other
times, to indulge one hard thought about the state of
any man who is living now, or has lived in former
times. I do not think that the Creed calls upon me
to do this; nay, I think that its awful language forbids
me to do it. I dare not ask myself who has com
mitted the fearful sin of ‘ confounding the Persons and
dividing the Substance,’ which it denounces. It may
not be the man who has used the most confused and
heretical forms of expression; it may not be the man
who has even seemed to the Church to be most selfwilled and refractory; it may be the man who is rest
ing most contentedly in his orthodoxy; it may be
�30
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
myself. Nay, have I not a witness within, that every
wrong act which I have done, or wrong thought which
I have cherished, so far as it has diminished , my sense
of the distinction between truth and falsehood, right
and wrong, has been of the nature of that sin which I
describe by the words ‘ Confounding the Persons,’
and has brought me into the danger of committing it ;
that every self-willed, unkind, schismatical act or
thought has been of the nature of that sin which I
describe by the words ‘ Dividing the Substance,’ and
has tended to bring me into it ?”
Even those who did not know the entire sincerity
of the writer of the above sentences, might be con
vinced of it by the absence from them of any con
sciousness of the amusing, not to say grotesque, dis
regard of any law of connection between means and
ends. With all the resources of language at command,,
to enjoin truthfulness and rectitude on the congrega
tion by describing falsehood and iniquity as “ Con
founding the Persons,” and to inveigh against self-will
and unkindness as “ Dividing the Substance,” would
seem to be a touch beyond the old grammarian’s
curse, “ May God confound thee for thy theory of
irregular verbs !” Would Mr. Maurice have selected
just those phrases to hurl against moral wrong? Were
they the natural physiognomy of his own face when it
grew awful in the contemplation of wrong? Were
“confounding the Persons and dividing the Sub
stance ” his own language against injustice, cruelty,
licentiousness ? It is impossible not to see that
�STERLING AND MAURICE'.
3*
Nature made one Maurice, Coleridge another. But
the latter was a real product, too—not a mercenary
one by any means—and it can only be explained, as
I think, by reference to that law of natural selection
which gradually evolves the paradox of the animal
world, and the paradox of the theological world,
under the long pressure of anomalous environment.
We who now live are witnessing the fading of the fine
dream of a Regenerated Church into emptiness. It all
ends in the barring of the doors against Reason and
the opening of them to Rome. Instead of becoming
more liberal, the Church has steadily become more
intolerant; instead of becoming more rational, it has
become more completely entangled in incredibilities..
The young men whom the leaders of the revival
allured into the Church, find themselves in a prison;
the thinkers who upheld for them the standard
“Subscription No Bondage,” are vainly endeavouring
to tear off the creeds with which they find them
selves freshly labelled, labels not to be torn off but
with the surplices to which they adhere ! The early,,
hopeful successes of these earnest and large-minded
men have already begun to reveal their unreality.
Dr. Arnold, and after him his pupil Dr. Temple,,
build up Rugby School into a centre of liberal thought;
and when they have passed away, the Church puts
a stupid Puseyite at the head of the School, to undo
all they have done. Maurice is set to teach Moral
Philosophy at Cambridge, and is followed by a
mere dogmatist. Such is the overpowering might of
�32
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS:
organised Error, that in the end it surely grinds up all
individual truth and' force to its own behest. The
history of the Broad Church is a simple record of the
waste for our generation’ of some of the finest intel
lects of the country.
One of the most startling exemplifications of
this was afforded by the ministry of Dr. Maurice
himself. After he had adopted the Coleridgean
notion that the Church creed and pure reason
are. harmonious, and that a man need only preach
popular superstitions profoundly to teach advanced
philosophy - he was settled at Vere Street Chapel
where his impressive ministrations were continued for
many years.
When, on becoming a Professor at
Cambridge, he resigned his Vere Street pulpit, the
event was deemed one of public importance, and a
great deal was written about him in the press. Among
other things there appeared in one of the papers a
letter written by one who had always attended the
Church, and he gave a statement of what had been
the doctrines and teachings which he had heard
during those years. The doctrines which this writer
represented as those taught by Dr. Maurice, were not
very different from those which are familiar to the
hearers of Mr. Martineau. Well, this letter was immediately followed by one from another of Dr.
Maurice’s parishioners, who had listened to him with
the same ieuerence during the same length of time,
and he declared that the teachings had been precisely
the reverse of what the first letter-writer had stated, in
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
33
every particular ! The two letters were written with
equal ability, and both in evident good faith ; and it
was plain that during the whole time these intelligent
hearers had been listening to two preachers as dif
ferent as the Archbishop of Canterbury from Bishop
Colenso ! Startling as such a discrepancy is, it is
after all natural. The new wine had been put into
old skins, and while a few recognised the wine as
new, more tasted only the savour of the old skins.
It is very rare that a clergyman can preach as vigor
ously as his gown. I heard Dean Stanley preach a
very heretical kind of Darwinism years ago, but the
seed, wrapped in Scriptural phrases, fell on the solemn
arches of the Abbey, fell on numerous prayer-books
and choristers, and when it sprang up it was as ortho
dox as if it had been sown by the dullest Evangelical
parson.
It seems to me astounding that, with such experien
ces as these behind them, some thinkers of the present
day should indulge the notion that the Church can be
reformed, and therefore, ought not to be disestablished.
With the Voysey decision paralysing every tongue in
the Church, with the Athanasian Creed put in new repair
for use on heretics, we are told that we are to hold on
to the Church and transform it into the Temple of
Pure Reason ! For that very object the Broad Church
arose; and the monument of its effort is built of the
wasted intellects of men who have seen the Church
steadily growing not broad but narrower; of minds
which having uttered their thought (however uncon-
�34
the parting of the ways
:
sciously) through a mask of dead formulas leave behind
a sharp debate whether they held the doctrine that
two and two make four or amount to ten !
Well do I remember the mornings I have passed
listening to Dr. Maurice, now nine years ago. There
was indeed vagueness in the theological statements,
and sometimes even ambiguity. I remember to have
thought once that the preacher was proclaiming the
sanctity of human reason, till he came out with a
conventional phrase to the effect that the necessity of
humbling the intellect of man constituted one of the
great purposes of the Incarnation. Again, while
dwelling on what seemed to methe hope of final salva
tion for all men, he broke in with mysterious utterances
implying the eternal nature of evil, if not the existence
of a personal Devil. Whenever he became theological,
it was to my eyes like a lamp trying to shine through
a London fog. I felt that he was at heart a rationalist
and a transcendents list, but the spell under which he
laboured of expressing himself through the language
of the second or the third century, rendered the
translation of his terms into plain English difficult.
This was, however, but incidental—the occasional
knot which the stem reached and passed in climbing
to its beautiful flower. There was a charm in Maurice’s
preaching which made one forget that it had faults.
The very face of the man was one on which every high
aim had impressed itself. It was the look of one
who had got every base passion under foot. The
white silken hair falling about a forehead radiant with
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
35
noble purity; the blonde face, smooth as a woman s,
the soft luminous eye beaming through the sombre
Church like a bit of blue sky; the voice, tender and
flexible, now deep and sonorous with emotion, now
clear and argumentative, again affectionate and cordial
-—these all helped to feather and direct the arrows of
light which the orator sent deep into the heart, to
defend its angels and slay its dragons. When I passed
from the Church after hearing him, I might feel
puzzled if asked just what doctrines he had been en
forcing, but invariably felt that I had been enriched,
enlarged, uplifted under a quickening and refining
influence. His earnestness roused, his spirituality
raised, his. hopefulness cheered, the listener’s mind.
As he rose to the higher strain, the dark old pulpit
seemed to vanish away, and he stood upon the pure
pedestal of his own character.
It was impossible not to recognise that it was not
alone the lofty mind of Maurice which cast its charm
around those who listened, but even more the singu
larly noble and devoted life he was living before us.
In his service to mankind he was lowly; but a city
that is set on a hill cannot be hid. There was no true
cause, no high purpose, which he did not aid. He
had a sympathy as wide as human sorrow. One of
our finest artists, Mr. Madox Brown, has painted a
remarkable picture entitled “Work.” In it rough
labourers are engaged on the street in all manner of
work—with brick and mortar, wheelbarrow and pick.
Some fine ladies are trying to pass the confusion they
�36
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS :
have made without soiling their dainty dresses. There
are two spectators of this scene—Maurice and Carlyle
who stand side by side. Carlyle’s face is breaking
into laughter at the scene, especially, we may suppose,
at the ladies holding their silks ; but Maurice’s face
is full of sadness as he gazes on the toiling men. The
expressions are characteristic. Carlyle sees in hard
work only so much happiness ; the implements of toil
are so many pinions bearing the labourer upward.
Maurice felt to the end that all this toil meant a
hard, weary lot • he recognised in it some mysterious
curse , and as he passed his life amid the labouring
poor, trying to uplift them, the doctrine of the descent
of the Son of God among men to save them was con
genial to him. He was not a sad man; he was ever a
hoper, with face set to the sunrise; but he had a
sympathetic nature, which could never see any hard
ship without feeling some of its weight on his own
shoulders.
The reputation Dr. Maurice has won is that of a
heretic. I believe this is due not only to the fact
that he was rudely ejected from his professorship at
King’s College by’the Principal, Dr. J elf, for denying
Eternal Punishment, but to the emphasis which his
life gave to practical truth. His theology is read
by the light of his humanity. He would never
sacrifice man to creeds, and he was willing to work
with an Atheist in a good cause. He has written
many theological books, but his more real monu
ment is that Working Men’s College which he built
�STERLING AND MAURICE.
37
up with aid of many a heretic ; and after the controver
sies he has aroused are forgotten, it will be remembered
that around his grave there gathered the aristocratic and
the poor, thelearned and theunleamed, theorthodoxand
the sceptical, all drawn by the sweet attraction of a soul
which dwelt with God as a child, with man as a brother.
That man should live such a life became at the
last John Sterling’s only creed; and by that creed
these two friends, whose minds Theology sundered,
are reunited in the memory they both leave. The
grave will hide more and more the incompleteness
of the one and the theological entanglements of the
other ; the common spirit of humanity by which they
were animated survives to remind us again, that though
Dogma may have power to divide noble intellects,
and to waste many energies in the struggle with in
credible creeds, or in the vain attempt to give them
life, Dogma has not the power to prevent every faith
ful soul from blending with every other in the real
service of Humanity.
Let me apply to these brother-spirits a poem written
by Arthur Hugh Clough, when he too was parting from
a dear friend, who left him on the path of inquiry to
find in Romanism a refuge from thought :
Qua cursum ventus.
As ships, becalmed at eve, that lay
With canvas drooping, side by side,
Two towers of sail at dawn of day,
Are scarce, long leagues apart, descried;
�3$
THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
When fell the night, upsprung the breeze,
And all the darkling hours they plied,
Nor dreamt but each the self-same seas
By each was cleaving, side by side :
E’en so—but why the tale reveal
Of those whom, year by year unchanged,
Brief absence joined anew to feel,
Astounded, soul from soul estranged ?
At dead of night their sails were filled,
And onward each rejoicing steered ;
Ah, neither blame, for neither willed,
Or wist, what first with dawn appeared !
To veer, how vain 1 On, onward strain,
Brave barks ! In light, in darkness too,
Through winds and tides one compass guides—
To that, and your own selves, be true.
But O blithe breeze, and O great seas,
Though ne’er, that earliest parting past,
On your wide plain they join again,
Together lead them home at last!
One port methought alike they sought,
One purpose hold where’er they fare,
O bounding breeze, O rushing seas,
At last, at last, unite them there !
�THE EARTHWARD PILGRIMAGE. By Mon
cure D. Conway. Price 6s. 3d.
MAZZINI.
By Moncure D. Conway.
Price 3d.
To be had of the Author, at 11, South Place.,
Finsbury.
�BUDDHAGHOSHA ’S PARABLES. «Translated
from Burmese, by Capt. H. T. Rogers, R.E. With an
Introduction, containing Buddha’s “ Dhammapada, or
The Path of Virtue,” translated by F. Max Muller.
8vo, 12 s. 6d.
THE WHEEL OF THE LAW • or Three Phases
of Buddhism. Illustrated from Siamese Sources by the
Speculation of a Siamese Philosopher. A Buddhist
Gospel, or Life of. Buddha. A visit to the Phra Bat,
or Holy Footprint of Siam. With copious Notes. By
Henry Alabaster, Esq., Interpreter to Her Britannic
Majesty s Consulate-General in Siam. Demy 8vo, 14s.
A CATENA OF BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES,
from the Chinese. By S. Beal, B.A., Trin. Coll.. Cam
bridge ; Chaplain in Her Majesty’s Fleet, etc. Hand
some, 8vo, 15s.
THE CREED OF CHRISTENDOM : its Foun
dation and Superstructure. By William Rathbone
Greg. Second Edition. Crown 8vo, 6s.
THE MARTYRDOM OF MAN. By Winwood
Reade. Crown 8vo, pp. 552> handsomely bound in cloth.
14s.
EREWHON; OR, OVER THE RANGE.
Second edition. Post 8vo, pp. viii.—246, cloth.
{Nearly ready.
THEODORE
PARKER’S
CELEBRATED
DISCOURSE ON MATTERS PERTAINING TO
RELIGION. New Editions. People’s Edition, stitched,
is. 6d.; ditto, in cloth, 2s. 6d. Library Edition, with
ParkePs Portrait, cloth, 3s. 6d.; ditto, with Portrait,
and Introduction by Miss Cobbe, cloth, 6s.
London: Trubner & Co., 8 & 60, Paternoster Row.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The parting of the ways: a study on the lives of Sterling and Maurice
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel, 1832-1907
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: London
Collation: 38, [2] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 1. A selection of titles available from Trubner & Co. on back page.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[Printed for the Author]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[n.d.]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3328
Subject
The topic of the resource
Free thought
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (The parting of the ways: a study on the lives of Sterling and Maurice), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Frederick Denison Maurice
Freethought
John Sterling
Morris Tracts