THE SUPERHUMAN ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE INFERRED FROM ITSELF

BY

HENRY ROGERS

WITH A MEMOIR

BY

R. W. DALE, LL.D. Birmingham

EIGHTH EDITION

London HODDER AND STOUGHTON 27, PATERNOSTER ROW

MDCCCXCIII

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MEMOIR

BY

R. W. DALE, LL.D.

I. BIRTH—SCHOOL LIFE—HIGHBURY COLLEGE. II. POOLE AND LONDON:—LECTURESHIP AT HIGHBURY CHAIR AT UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE—“LIFE OF HOWE”. III. BIRMINGHAM:—CHAIR AT SPRING HILL COLLEGE—“THE EDINBURGH

REVIEW”—“THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH”. IV. MANCHESTER, SILVERDALE, AND PENNAL TOWER:—PRESIDENCY OF

LANCASHIRE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE—EDITION OF HOWE’S WORKS—“GOOD WORDS”—“BRITISH QUARTERLY”—“SUPERHUMAN ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE”—DEATH.

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Chapter 1.

BIRTH—SCHOOL LIFE—HIGHBURY COLLEGE. 1806-1829. Henry Rogers was born at St. Albans on October 18, 1806. He was the third

son of Mr. Thomas Rogers, a surgeon with a large and prosperous practice in that ancient city, a man of high character and generous temper, distinguished for the breadth and liberality of his intellectual culture as well as for his professional skill.

Of the school life of the future Edinburgh reviewer and author of “The Eclipse

of Faith,” I have not been able to discover many trustworthy traditions; but it is said that he had a great passion for reading, and that very early he showed excep-tional power in mastering languages. His first school-master was the Rev. John Smith, the pastor of a small Congregational Church at Redbourn, a village about eight miles from St. Albans. He was afterwards sent to Mr. J. C. Thorowgood, who, with his sisters, conducted a school at Mill Hill, which was originally in-tended to prepare boys for The great Nonconformist school in that village, but during Mr. Rogers’s school life Mr. Thorowgood had several pupils who were beyond the preparatory age. Mr. Rogers was accustomed to speak of him with great affection and gratitude, and their friendship was maintained till his old mas-ter’s death.

Mr. Thomas Rogers died when his son Henry was only fourteen years of age;

but it is said that he had discovered with delight clear indications of the boy’s in-tellectual originality and vigour, and was confident that he would achieve emi-nence. Two years after his father’s death he was “apprenticed”—after the custom of those times—to Mr. Ray, a surgeon at Mitton-next-Sittingbourne, in Kent, who was a member and deacon of the Congregational Church at Milton, and had been one of his father’s intimate friends. There are many traces in Mr. Rogers’s writ-ings of his familiarity with medical studies, and it is curious to notice that al-though he never practised, he had the proper professional hostility to Homoeopa-thy and all other medical heresies.

But he cared very much more for the poets than for his medical text-books, and

he began very early to write verse. When he was about nineteen he published a slim volume of 142 pages in paper boards—”Poems, Miscellaneous and Sacred, by Henry Rogers.” The preface is an interesting illustration of a pleasant struggle between his inborn modesty and the hope that, perhaps, even to him it might be given to have a seat, however humble, among the great heirs of fame. How could the doubt be settled except by publishing his verses? If there is any promise in them, he thinks that “it is the duty of the critic to give encouragement and advice, to cherish and foster the germ, and not nip it in the first moment of development; if, on the contrary, they betray no such latent power, he may kindly view them as a youthful indiscretion, and suffer them to fall into oblivion unmocked by the ob-sequies of criticism.” He proceeds:—

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“In determining to publish the following poems, however, at least to publish

them at this time,1 the author has not been influenced by the vain hope that they will meet with any extraordinary favour with the public, but chiefly by motives of a more personal nature. This may require some explanation. The author has for some time been an occasional contributor to the poetical department of one of the periodicals. In this asylum they would in all probability have remained to this hour, had not the officiousness of one or two individuals extracted several of them, without either the knowledge or consent of the author, and bestowed upon them a wider fame and more extensive circulation. Thus, a short time since, a friend discovered one of the fugitives surmounting a column of the ‘Public Ledger’; three or four more were inserted in a collection of poems entitled ‘Poeti-cal Sketches of Biblical Subjects,’ where they figure away in anonymous and un-deserved publicity with Byron, Cowper, Conder, and others. In a review of these ‘Sketches’ by one of the periodicals, one of the devoted few was selected as a specimen, and for a third time doomed to public exhibition. The author therefore thinks it but an act of justice to himself to collect the scattered fragments—the disjecta membra poetae—unless he would see them, like the leaves of Sybil, scat-tered to the winds.”

There is something entertaining in the indignation—not, perhaps, very vio-

lent—with which the young poet protests against the “officiousness” which had bestowed upon his verses “a wider fame and more extensive circulation.”

The volume was reviewed in the Eclectic—very probably by the editor, Mr.

Josiah Conder, who a few years before had lived at St. Albans, and had been an intimate friend of Mr. Thomas Rogers.2 The review is very kindly and gentle. If the author had been thirty, it would of course have been the reviewer’s duty to assume quite a different tone; but as he is only nineteen, his verses are full of promise, and he will some day do very much better. As the review contained a considerable number of extracts, the young poet was no doubt consoled for the reserve with which he was praised.

The volume was, within a very few years, suppressed by the author, and he

never cared to be reminded of it. I remember very well the start which he gave—the start of a high-tempered horse lightly touched by the unaccustomed whip—when a student, looking grave as a judge and innocent as the morning-star, in-genuously quoted one of the lines in class; the eye of the tutor was turned swiftly and suddenly on the offender, but it was not till after the class broke up that the rest of us learnt what had happened. It was the only trick, as far as I know, that was ever played on him by a student. He was very quiet and gentle, but we all knew too well the strength and the suppleness of his wrist to provoke him to use his rapier.

He had no reason, however, to be ashamed of his “Poems.”

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Of course they show that he had felt the power of the popular poets of his time, especially of Byron, but they are simple, unpretentious, and graceful; and there is no doubt that his early practice in verse-writing contributed to the music and grace of the prose of his maturer years.

Both his father and mother were persons of serious and earnest religious faith.

They had been “converted”—to use the word which they would have used them-selves, but which now seems to have almost passed away from the speech even of those who sincerely believe in the great experience for which the word stands—they had been “converted,” after their marriage; and in those days “conversion” still had the deep and passionate meaning with which it had been charged during the Evangelical Revival of the previous century. As one of the results of this great event, they were dissatisfied with the services and preaching of the Established Church, and they became members of a small Congregational Church in St. Al-bans, though they were warned by anxious friends that by leaving “church” for “chapel” Mr. Rogers would probably injure his practice. But in addition to his eminence in his profession and his acknowledged integrity, he had a charm of manner which attracted universal affection and confidence, and the most zealous of Churchmen felt that he was much too delightful a doctor to be dismissed even when he had become a Dissenter. Mr. Rogers was elected deacon of the St. Al-bans Church, and became an active and generous promoter of all good works in connection with the Congregational Churches of the county.

His children were therefore disciplined to the habits and breathed the air of an

Evangelical Nonconformist home. How early his third son felt the power of the Christian gospel is uncertain; but about the time that he left home for Milton-next-Sittingbourne, the reading of John Howe’s Discourse on “The Redeemer’s Tears wept over Lost Souls” made a profound impression on him. A year or two later the Rev. George Redford, of Uxbridge—afterwards Dr. Redford, of Worcester—was the guest of Mr. Ray, and his interest was strongly excited by the young medical student whom he found in the house. Mr. Redford discovered that medi-cine had no great attraction for him, and that he earnestly desired to become a Congregational minister. It was ultimately arranged that Mr. Rogers should re-move to Uxbridge, and spend a year under Mr. Redford’s roof while preparing for college. Mr. Redford was to assist him in his theological studies, and, in return, he was to assist Mr. Redford in his school and in his church work in Uxbridge and the neighbouring villages.

I knew Dr. Redford well in his later years. He was a man of robust intellect and

great industry, a good general scholar, and an excellent theologian of the old school. He had been touched by the fire of the Evangelical Revival, but repre-sented the traditions of the elder Nonconformity—its gravity and moral serious-ness, its solicitude for truth in religious thought and for reality in the religious life, its dread of illusions, its severity and simplicity, its impatience of what it regarded as the intrusion of a sensuous ritual between the soul and God, its sturdiness in refusing to acknowledge any other authority than that of Holy Scripture in the re-

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gion of religious belief and ecclesiastical order, its unchangeable purpose to “prove all things” as well as to “hold fast that which is good,” and its zeal for or-thodoxy which at times worked uneasily with its abhorrence of all restraints on “the right of private judgment.” To the last, Henry Rogers retained the impression which so powerful and definite a personality was certain to produce on an eager and sensitive youth. With all his varied speculative interests, his familiarity with the literature of creeds and churches remote from his own, his intellectual versatil-ity and grace, his humour and his wit, there was in him very much of the temper and spirit of the Evangelical Nonconformists of the eighteenth century; their intel-lectual method of dealing with religious truth was largely his; and the contents of their religious creed were, in substance, the contents of his own creed to the very end.

When he was twenty years of age he applied for admission to Highbury Col-

lege. His application was sustained by testimonials from the Rev. G. Redford, the Rev. John Dean, and Mr. John Ray, of Sittingbourne. The college minutes de-scribe the applicant as a “surgeon” and Mr. Ray as his “employer.” He met the Committee on August 1, 1826, and according to a custom which at that time, I believe, was general in Congregational colleges, preached a sermon to the grave and venerable men who were assembled to determine whether he should be ad-mitted to the college or not. The text he selected was Romans i. 16: “For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” According to the Min-ute Book of the Committee, “his tone of voice was rather low and indistinct; he has not been accustomed to preach; yet he appeared to possess the requisite quali-fications.” On December 8th of the same year, after the usual probationary term, he was fully admitted, “the report of the Tutors being satisfactory.”3 The Rev. Robert Halley—afterwards Dr. Halley, of Manchester—had just been appointed Classical and Resident Tutor; he was a very young man for the post, but the ap-pointment was a most admirable one. The Rev. William Harris, D.D., had the chair of Theology: and the Rev. Henry Forster Burder, M.A.—afterwards Dr. Burder—the chair of Philosophy.

Of the history of his thought and inner life during the three years that he was at

Highbury, which, if we had it, would probably throw great light upon some of the most striking characteristics of his later works on Christian apologetics, I find no trace among his papers. It was of himself that he was thinking when he said of the imaginary “Mr. Greyson”:—”Should any inquisitive reader ask to know a little more of Mr. Greyson’s history than is disclosed in his correspondence, I answer that his biography, if ever written,—and he took infinite pains lo prevent any one’s having materials for the purposes—must be written by one who knew him in his younger days, much better than I did.”4

In this suppression of “materials” for a biography he was completely success-

ful. But it is interesting to learn that the simplicity of his nature which impressed those who first knew him when he had reached middle life—his apparent uncon-

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sciousness that he had any exceptional intellectual power or that he had a larger range of knowledge than other men—equally impressed those who knew him at college. His fellow-student, the Rev. James Griffin, formerly minister of Rush-holme Road Chapel, Manchester, and now of Hastings, says, “He was as much distinguished by frank, open-hearted brotherliness as by his brilliant talents .... Though head and shoulders above most of us in real ability, he never seemed con-scious of any superiority, and to the least gifted of the brethren he was as unaf-fectedly fraternal in his deportment as if he had stood on a level with the humblest of them in intellect and acquirement.”5

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Chapter 2.

POOLE AND LONDON—LECTURESHIP AT HIGHBURY—CHAIR AT UNIVERSITY COLLEGE—“LIFE OF HOWE”. 1829-1839.

He left Highbury in June, 1829, and in August went to Poole as assistant to the

Rev. Thomas Durant, pastor of the Congregational Church in that town. Greatly as Mr. Rogers delighted in his books, he did not neglect his work as pastor and preacher. In all the multifarious duties of a Congregational minister, he showed activity and zeal. He remained in Poole for only three years, but his correspon-dence shows that during that brief period he won friends who retained their affec-tion and admiration for him as long as they lived, and to whom he must have been accustomed to write with unreserved freedom and confidence. Among the mem-bers of the congregation some, at least, discovered that he had rare accomplish-ments and powers. Indeed, Mr. Durant or his deacons, or both, must have had a keen discernment for the high qualities of young men. Mr. Rogers’s successors in the assistantship were the Rev. John Morell Mackenzie 1832-1837) and the Rev. Andrew Morton Brown (1837-1842), afterwards Dr. Brown, of Cheltenham. When Mr. Durant retired from the pastorate he was succeeded by the Rev Eustace Rogers Conder, afterwards Dr. Conder, of Leeds.

With Mr. Morell Mackenzie, his immediate successor, Mr. Rogers formed a

most intimate and ardent friendship. Mr. Mackenzie had had a brilliant career at Glasgow, and when he settled at Poole his literary enthusiasm, his intellectual fer-tility, which was united with large knowledge and sound judgment, his extraordi-nary memory, which, as Mr. Rogers thought, was inferior only to Macaulay’s, his buoyant spirits and the warmth and generosity of his temper, must have made him a dazzling kind of person.6 Mr. Rogers and he captured each other as soon as they met. They became fast comrades in speculative adventure and in literary research. Mr. Rogers’s affection and admiration for his friend were boundless, and after his tragic death—he was lost in the Pegasus when she went down off the coast of Northumberland in the summer of 1843—he could never speak of him without deep emotion. The shock of the death must have been the greater as he himself had intended to make the voyage from Scotland to England in company with his friend, but had been prevented by some unforeseen circumstances.

Mr. Rogers left Poole for London in 1832. In the spring of 1830 he had married

Sarah Frances, the eldest daughter of Mr. W. N. Bentham, of Chatham; and his first child had been born in 1831.”7 His first regular appointment was at Highbury, his old college, at which there had been more than one change in the staff since he was received as a student six years before. Mr. Halley was still clas-sical tutor; but Dr. William Harris, the Professor of

Theology, had been succeeded by Dr. Ebenezer Henderson, who at that time

was one of the best Hebrew scholars in the country; and Mr. Henry Forster Burder had resigned. Mr. Rogers, according to a minute of the College Committee dated

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May 25, 1832, was engaged to lecture on rhetoric and logic: these had probably been the principal subjects of Mr. Burder. Mr. Rogers retained the Highbury lec-tureship till he removed to Birmingham, in 1839.

But his Highbury lectures were very far from occupying his whole time. Before

leaving Poole he had begun to write for the Congregational Magazine, which for some years had been conducted with signal vigour and ability by the Rev. John Blackburn, of Claremont Chapel, Pentonville, and after coming to London he con-tinued to write for it. He also joined the staff of the Patriot, a new weekly Evan-gelical Nonconformist newspaper, edited by Mr. Josiah Conder. Mr. Rogers did so much work for the Patriot that there is a tradition of his having been for a time its editor; but this, I think, must be inaccurate; Mr. Josiah Conder was its first edi-tor, and he was immediately succeeded by Mr. J. Middleton Hare. It is possible, however, that if Mr. Conder Was occasionally unable to be at the office, Mr. Rogers, who had great versatility and was always ready to help a friend in a diffi-culty, was responsible for the paper. He also wrote a great deal for the Eclectic Review, the editorship of which passed about this time from Mr. Josiah Conder to Dr. Thomas Price. He made a conditional engagement to write in another monthly periodical. In a letter to Mr. Morell Mackenzie (1838) he promises that after May he will contribute regularly to the Christian Teacher, edited by Mr. Cunningham, if Mr. Mackenzie, who had asked him to write for it, will make the same promise. Mr. Cunningham, who was the author of “The Lives of Eminent and Illustrious Englishmen, from Alfred the Great to the Latest Times,” in eight octavo vol-umes—a kind of biographical history of England—became one of his intimate friends. He lived for many years at Windermere, and Mr. Rogers occasionally vis-ited him there. Whether Mr. Rogers wrote for his magazine I have not been able to discover. It was during the early years of his residence in London that he wrote a long and elaborate “Essay on the Life and Genius of Jonathan Edwards,” which was prefixed to an edition of Edwards’s works, published in 1834; similar essays for editions of Edmond Burke and Jeremy Taylor were written and published a little later.

In the midst of this literary activity he was struck down by a great calamity.

His first wife had died not long after he had left Poole, leaving him with three lit-tle children, and he had married again. His second wife—Miss Elizabeth Ben-tham8—died in the autumn of 1835, after giving birth to her first child. In his ag-ony he attempted, and not wholly without success, to find relief in writing his “Life and Character of John Howe,” which he had begun several months before, and had been obliged to lay aside. He went back to it with “inexpressible reluc-tance,” it was “so terribly associated with the thought of a happy past.” “But,” he adds, “I found, as I proceeded, that I became interested in spite of myself, and that my attention was so completely absorbed by it that I enjoyed for hours a sort of happy oblivion. No sooner did I find it attended with this result than I was im-pelled by the strongest motive—that of excluding the terrific images which haunted me—to pursue my task almost without intermission.”9 The “Life” ex-tends over more than 580 pages, and “with the exception of forty pages it was

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composed, corrected, and printed in little more than three months.”10 He was stay-ing in the house of his old friend Mr. John Brown, of Parkstone, near Poole, while he was engaged in this fierce fight with his sorrow, and the volume is inscribed “with feelings of grateful affection to the kind friend under whose roof the greater part of it was composed, and in whose family the author enjoyed the solace of a home when his own hearth was desolate.” It appeared in 1836.

Early in the same year he was appointed to the chair of English Language and

Literature at University College, London, and his two Inaugural Lectures were published.11 In the first he defends the usefulness of the principal subjects of his chair against an assault of Mr. Macaulay’s in his famous article on Lord Bacon, which had recently appeared and had created immense excitement. For the “tran-scendent genius” of the writer Mr. Rogers professes “unfeigned admiration”; but in the presence of the declaration by such an authority that “the study of gram-mar” does not make “the smallest difference in the speech of people who have always lived in good society,” and that “the old systems of rhetoric were never regarded by the most experienced and discerning judges as of any use for the pur-pose of forming an orator,” it was impossible for a young professor just beginning a course of lectures on grammar and rhetoric to hold his peace. In the second lec-ture he first gives an outline of his proposed course, and then discusses at great length the distinction between poetry and prose.

In 1837, under the title of “The Christian Correspondent,” Mr. Rogers edited a

collection in three volumes of “Letters by Eminent Persons of both Sexes; exem-plifying the Fruits of Holy Living and the Blessedness of Holy Dying,” with a preliminary essay by Mr. James Montgomery. In the advertisement by the edi-tor—whose name, however, does not appear—it is stated that “the merit of having originated the work” is to be ascribed to Mr. Montgomery, but that “the selection and arrangement of the materials” was entrusted to another hand. It is further stated that the selection had “involved, in some cases, a regular perusal, and in all cases a careful inspection, of not less than forty volumes of correspondence and several hundred volumes of religious biography.” There are three hundred letters, the earliest written by Cranmer, John Bradford, and Lady Jane Grey, the latest by Cowper, Kirke White, and Robert Hall. The arrangement is ingenious.

In addition to his literary work and his lectures at Highbury and at University

College, he had for some time two young men in his house as pupils; he preached occasionally in London and the neighbourhood; and for about a year he regularly conducted the services at the Congregational Chapel at Totteridge; where his old master, Mr. Thorowgood, was then keeping a school which achieved a great repu-tation among Nonconformists.

But an affection of the throat which stubbornly resisted all treatment, obliged

him, within three or four years after coming to London, to give up all hope of preaching often. When he appeared before the Highbury committee it was re-marked that his voice was “rather low and indistinct.” In London the weakness

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greatly increased, and in 1847, when I first knew him, it was generally husky. Even apart from the failure of his voice, it is doubtful whether his great powers would have found their most effective exercise in preaching to ordinary congrega-tions. His was not the temperament which is more at ease and more confidential with a thousand people in a public building than with a private friend at the fire-side, and which is never wholly free and unrestrained except when speaking to a crowd. He could indeed have written brilliant sermons which, notwithstanding his husky voice and his reserve, would have interested, delighted, and profited a con-gregation of intelligent people; but his conception of what preaching ought to be stood in his way. When talking and writing about the elements which contribute to make a good sermon, he would concede all that could be urged for passion, imagination, humour, and for beauty and energy as well as lucidity of style. He could admire preachers whose thought was masculine and who really cared for the great ends of the Christian ministry, even though their discourses had the elaboration and the pomp which were very common in the pulpits both of Non-conformity and the Establishment during the first third—perhaps the first half—of this century. But for himself his ways were different. In middle life—and I be-lieve it was the same from the first—his ideal of preaching was severely simple both as to matter and form. He had a great dread, not only of “purple patches,” but of any beauty or charm that was not of the very substance of his discourse. During my college years—if, to dismiss what I have to say on this subject, I may antici-pate the story of his life in Birmingham—I heard him preach once or twice in Carr’s Lane Lecture Room on Wednesday evenings, and am thankful that even then I had sufficient discernment to delight in the truth and purity of his thought, and in the transparent clearness of his style. But the “natural man” craved for something more. The fare was too severely plain for most tastes. There were no condiments. Any of his students who had delivered a crude sermon with a little impetuosity and fervour, a sermon with a climax or two in it, with something about the “eternities” and the “oversoul” and the “objective” and the “subjec-tive”—Coleridge, Carlyle, and Emerson were great masters of thought with young men in those days—and had thrown in, by the way, a description of a shipwreck or a thunderstorm or a “rose of dawn,” would, I am afraid, have been regarded by the greater part of the congregation as a much “finer” preacher than his tutor.

They would have carried away, indeed, a much clearer conception of what Mr.

Rogers had said than of what had been said by the ambitious and effervescing youth whom they admired, and it might remain with them for years—a real lamp both to thought and life—but they would not think very much of the preacher. This perhaps would be especially true of those who had received a little educa-tion—not very much—and who had the power of finding some joy in fairly good literature, though they had not learnt to care most for the very highest and best. With men in a ruder intellectual condition Mr. Rogers was more fortunate. He was kind enough in those days to take an occasional service in one or other of the village chapels which were supplied by “lay preachers” from Birmingham—excellent men, and some of them very good preachers, but of course not scholars: and I remember hearing that an aged agricultural labourer, born much more than

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half a century before the era of School Boards and compulsory education, had said, “Now there’s that Mr. Rogers, I like him; I can make out what he means: some of the rest is too hard for me.”

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Chapter 3.

BIRMINGHAM: CHAIR AT SPRING HILL COLLEGE—“THE EDINBURGH REVIEW”—“THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH.” 1839-1858.

In December, 1838, Mr. Rogers was invited to a chair at Spring Hill College,

Birmingham. The college had been opened early in the preceding autumn, and was intended by its founders to provide a more thorough and more liberal educa-tion for students preparing for the Congregational ministry than was at that time generally accessible to them. The course was to extend over six years; two years were to be given to arts, and four to theology. It was announced that “the full course and plan of education adopted by the Board requires the services of at least three tutors”—it would have been much nearer the mark to have said “three times three”; and I am inclined to think that even the members of the original Board were very sensible that it would be impossible with only three tutors to give effect to their bold and generous scheme. Mr. Rogers began his work in Birmingham in September, 1839.

In the official announcement of the invitation which had been addressed to

him, the subject of his chair is described as “Intellectual Philosophy”; in the list of tutors given in the first annual report of the college, which was issued just before he began to lecture, his subjects are “English Language and Literature, and Intel-lectual Philosophy”; in the second annual report he is described as lecturing in “English Language and Literature, Mathematics, and Mental Philosophy.” A few years later some other subjects were taken by him.

Mathematics he had not taught either at Highbury or at University College,

London, but his Edinburgh articles on Leibnitz and Pascal contain evidence of his interest in mathematical controversies and of his knowledge of the science. In-deed, in times of great trouble and during nights of sleeplessness, when no other reading was sufficiently absorbing to force his thoughts away from his distress, he found in the higher mathematics temporary relief. He was very much more than equal to the mathematical work required of him at Spring Hill; for the scheme of studies did not allow the higher branches of the science to be touched; all that could be attempted was covered by the demands of the London B.A.

His classes in Logic—“Whately” was his text-book—and in the English lan-

guage were excellent; of these subjects he had a large and accurate knowledge, and his treatment of them, though of a very informal kind, was extremely instruc-tive. Although “Intellectual Philosophy” was to have been his principal subject, he had very little time during the two years of the arts course to deal with it; but within the limits imposed upon him he was successful. His text-book was Dugald Stewart’s “Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind”; the men were re-quired to prepare definite chapters, and the matter of the chapters was freely dis-cussed in class. Sometimes the tutor gave a formal excursus of his own on a par-ticular point; sometimes he read a relevant passage from another author; but for

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the most part the hour was spent in animated conversation and discussion. When I happened to be in this class his youngest child was about five or six—perhaps younger—a bright, dainty little girl, who was a great favourite and pet with his students; some of his happiest illustrations were drawn from what “my little child” had said or done “yesterday” or “last week,” or “this morning just before I left home.” In his English language class, the pronunciation, the syntax, and the idiomatic phrases of “my little child” were equally useful and effective.

For the sake of the men who were reading for the examinations at the Univer-

sity of London, he took a class in English History—a subject lying quite beyond the obligatory duties of his chair. In those days “Keightley” was the most avail-able book for examination purposes, and this, therefore, was the book at which we had to work. After examining the class on the thirty or forty pages which had been assigned for the morning, discussion began as in the class on Stewart; and he was not at all particular how far the discussion travelled. It might start with Simon de Montfort, but he seemed quite content that it should find its way, if we pleased, to Lord John Russell or Mr. Bright. No question of a theological, political, or eco-nomic kind came amiss; Transportation, the Duty of the State in relation to Edu-cation, the Ballot, the Franchise—those, it should be remembered, were the days of the ten-pound householder—they were all welcome, and he was ready to talk about them all.

It was also his custom for many years to invite the senior students to meet him

in his private room two afternoons in the week, to read with him a succession of philosophical authors. Attendance was not compulsory, but those who attended at all attended regularly; in my time the class numbered six or seven men. Among the books that we read together were the “Ethics” of Aristotle, the “Theaetetus,” the “Apologia,” a few books of the “Republic” and some other dialogues of Plato, Des Cartes’ “Method” and Bacon’s “Novum Organum.” Butler’s “Sermons” formed part of the obligatory work of the college, or they would certainly have had a place in these afternoon readings. In some years I believe that Pascal and Leibnitz and Spinoza were read. Mr. Rogers’s delight in vigorous discussion, his quick wit, graceful fancy, and alert memory, made these very informal classes as agreeable as they were profitable. He allowed, and even encouraged, considerable discursiveness. When reading Plato, the conversation often drifted suddenly from the ancient antagonists of Socrates to the modern antagonists of the Christian faith; whatever difficulties any of the men felt about miracles, or about the scien-tific objections to the early parts of the Old Testament, were frankly argued, and were the subject of keen debate. When his “Eclipse of Faith” appeared, those of his students who had been at his afternoon readings for the previous two years, discovered that the imaginary conversations in that book bore distinct traces of the very real and ardent debates in which they had tried their strength against their tutor.

His knowledge of literature and his delicate appreciation of beauty of literary

form added a great charm to his lectures.

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He was always very resolute in making sure that his men had done the work he

had given out—woe to the idler who was not ready with his tale of bricks!—but except in his mathematical classes it was never very difficult to turn him aside from the direct track of his teaching to a dissertation on the style of Pascal or Plato, of Locke or South, of Addison, Swift or Goldsmith, of Burke or Paley; a question innocently interjected which looked in the direction of any of these great writers was fatal; he rose to it as a hungry trout, in the dusk of the evening, rises to a favourite fly. He was very felicitous in his quotations. He knew his Walter Scott as the old Puritans knew their Bibles. Shakespeare, Milton, Cowper, Byron were, I think, the English poets with whom he was most familiar, and whom he quoted most frequently. For humorous and even comic writers of all kinds he had a great weakness. Some of Dickens’s characters afforded him infinite and unfail-ing amusement: and it was plain that Judge Haliburton (“Sam Slick”) had given him many a merry half-hour.

But the home of his intellect and heart was with Butler, Pascal, Burke, Plato,

and Leibnitz—I have placed them, I think, in the order of their ascendancy over him. With these he lived. Their thought was wrought into the very substance of his mind. He was never weary of them; they were as great and as fresh to him when he was sixty as they were when he was thirty—perhaps greater and fresher. He can hardly be said to have caught their intellectual “method,” for each of them had a method of his own, and Burke’s method was very unlike Butler’s and both were unlike Plato’s; but in his way of looking at things their power over him was very apparent. He was a conspicuous example of the possibility of uniting the benefits which are to be derived from the widest reading and the most varied in-tellectual interests with the still higher good which comes from long years of con-stant and intimate friendship with a few of the immortals.

He began his work at Spring Hill, as I have said, in September, 1839; in Octo-

ber his first article (“The Structure of the English Language”) appeared in the Ed-inburgh. The stormy and brilliant youth of the great Review was over. Lord Jef-frey had withdrawn from the editorship in 1829, on his election to the office of Dean of the Faculty of Advocates, and had practically ceased to be a contributor; but his successor, Mr. Macvey Napier, was a man of large knowledge and great ability, and did his editorial work with admirable skill and excellent temper. The Review was still so great a power that the Whig leaders, whether in office or in opposition, attached great value to its support. But Mr. Napier’s position was one of immense difficulty. Lord Brougham was incessant and strenuous in his en-deavour to avenge in the Edinburgh the wrongs which he supposed that he had received from Lord Melbourne and the rest of the chiefs of the Whigs. His long connection with the Review, the large services which he had rendered to it, and the great position which he still held in the country, made it hard to resist him. His enormous vanity, his tyranny, his unscrupulousness, his furious energy as illus-trated in his letters to Mr. Napier about the articles that he was writing, or wanted to write, or insisted on writing, must have almost worried the unhappy editor to

15

death.12 But he had his compensations. Brougham himself, in his anxiety to main-tain his reputation and authority which were being ruined by his temper, exerted his great powers to the very utmost, and sent to the Edinburgh, in Napier’s time, sortie of the best things that he ever wrote. Among the other contributors, more or less regular, from 1839 down to Napier’s death early in 1847—during the whole of which time Mr. Rogers was on the staff—were Macaulay, James Stephen—afterwards Sir James, Empson, Nassau W. Senior, Hayward, W. R. Greg, Sir David Brewster, Lytton Bulwer, G. H. Lewes, John Stuart Mill, John Alien, Her-man Merivale, John Forster, Thackeray, Monckton Milnes—afterwards Lord Houghton, Richard Ford, Lord Monteagle (Spring Rice), and Lord John Russell. Some of these wrote only once, others very frequently. Lord Jeffrey also contrib-uted three or four articles.13 Mr. Rogers continued to write under Mr. Napier’s successor, Mr. Empson, a bundle of whose letters in an almost, if not quite, illegi-ble hand has been preserved among Mr. Rogers’s papers. Mr. Empson died in 1852, and was succeeded by Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who, about a year later, resigned the editorship on his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the reconstruction of the ministry of Lord Palmerston. He was succeeded by the pre-sent editor, Mr. Henry Reeve, and Mr. Rogers’s last article (“The Remains of William Archer Butler”) appeared in April, 1856.

In 1850, sixteen of his articles were republished in two handsome octavo vol-

umes; a third volume, containing five additional articles, appeared in 1855. In the latter year the whole of the twenty-one articles, rearranged, were published in three volumes, foolscap octavo.14

The Collected Essays are inscribed to two of his friends, the Archbishop of

Dublin—Dr. Whately—and Mr. Macaulay. He says in the preface that “There is another illustrious name which was to have been added to theirs .... I allude to the late Lord Jeffrey. Only a few days before his death, he had in the kindest terms assented to my wishes that he would permit me to offer him this tribute of my re-spect: his death now renders it impossible to misconstrue a somewhat fuller ex-pression of that respect into adulation. Many indeed are his claims on my grateful remembrance. Not only was he one of the intellectual benefactors of my youth—as he was of thousands beside myself—by his admirable Essays in almost every department of polite literature; but he had given not a few of the compositions in these volumes the advantage of his long-practised critical judgment, while passing through the press; and had expressed in reference to all of them—perhaps an un-merited—but certainly a most cordial and flattering approbation.”

The letter which contains Lord Jeffrey’s acceptance of the dedication has for-

tunately been preserved, and it will be read with interest.

“EDINBURGH, January 12, 1850. “My dear Mr. Rogers,—You cannot doubt, I think, that I shall be proud and

happy to receive any mark (public or private) of your kindness and regards—and

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that it adds not a little to the honour and favour that you propose that I should share it with such associates as you have mentioned.

“I am extremely glad that you are about to put your name to the papers that

have hitherto added to the reputation only of that anonymous monster called the Edinburgh Review, and at the same time to extend the circulation of a series of Essays which I sincerely believe to have sunk deeper into the hearts and convic-tions of thoughtful readers and to have influenced public opinion more benefi-cially than any contemporary publications. Old as I am—and consequently unapt to learn—I am confident that I have profited more by them than you could possi-bly do, even in your days of early training, by any suggestions derived from any writings of mine, so that, if you have at any time fancied yourself indebted to me, you may now have the satisfaction of knowing that the debt has been long since repaid with interest.

“You say nothing of your health in the letter with which you have favoured me,

from which I hope that I may infer that it is now substantially re-established. Empson15 is still delicate, and obliged to be very careful of himself—but not at all uncomfortable; and equal, I think, to all the work that can be required of him. We are all very tolerably well here—Mrs. Jeffrey, I rejoice to say, entirely free from any serious malady—And I, hobbling over the broken arches of the bridge of life, with as tranquil and easy a pace as that descending stage of our fated journey, I suppose, often admits of. It is soothing and gratifying to feel that hearts and minds like yours sometimes look with interest and indulgence on this concluding stage.

“With all good wishes, “Believe me always, “Your obliged and faithful, “F.

Jeffery.

“To Henry Rogers, Esq., near Birmingham.” From the first, Mr. Rogers’s articles attracted the notice and received the ap-

proval of very competent judges. Within a few days after the earliest of them ap-peared—that on “The Structure of the English Language”—Sir James Stephen16 expressed in a letter to Mr. Napier his satisfaction with it: “Whoever wrote the paper on Anglo-Saxon is to my taste a charming writer.”17 The papers which fol-lowed on “Sacred Eloquence,” “The British Pulpit” (October, 1840); “The Life and Writings of Thomas Fuller” (January, 1842), were read with general interest and admiration, but the subjects were not of a kind to rouse passion and provoke hostility. In an article on “The Right of Private Judgment” (January, 1843), he ap-proached the great religious controversy of the time. A writer in the British Critic, which was then the chief organ and representative of the Tractarians, had main-tained the position that “considering the special countenance given in Scripture to quiet unanimity and contentedness, and the warnings directed against disorder, irregularity, a wavering temper, discord and division; ... considering, in a word, that change is really the characteristic of error, and unalterableness the attribute of truth, of holiness, of Almighty God Himself, we consider that when private judg-

17

ment moves in the direction of innovation, it may well be regarded with suspicion and treated with severity.” “Nay,” continues this writer, “we confess even a satis-faction when a penalty is attached to the expression of new doctrines or to a change of communion.” Mr. Rogers attacks this apology for persecution with considerable energy, but I imagine that most Englishmen living in the year of grace 1843 regarded the discussion as purely academic, and I do not suppose that the article made much impression. But three months later he created a sensation, and the readers of the Edinburgh discovered that there had appeared in England a new master of theological controversy.

In “Puseyism, or The Oxford Tractarian School” (April, 1843),18 he assailed

with extraordinary energy the principal theological and ecclesiastical positions of the Tractarian party. The article revealed powers and resources of which he had given no previous sign. It is as brilliant as it is vigorous; the logic is keen and re-lentless; the wit and the humour are delightful; and, to use his own words in his account of Archer Butler’s “Letters on Development,” in reply to Newman, “the sharp air of controversy ... braced and animated his style.” The opening sentences indicate the mood in which he entered into the fight: “It may sound paradoxical, but it is nevertheless true, that with the disciples of the Oxford School we have no manner of controversy. Their principles, logical and ethical, are so totally differ-ent from our own, that it is as impossible to argue with them as with beings of a different species. There may be worlds, say some philosophers, where truth and falsehood change natures—where the three angles of a triangle are no longer equal to two right angles, and where a crime of unusual turpitude may inspire ab-solute envy. We are far from saying that the gentleman above mentioned are qualified to be inhabitants of such a world, but we repeat that there is just as little dispute between us as if they were.” Writing to Mr. Napier, Sir James Stephen says the article “is, in its style, without a rival in English literature, and has much of the power of the ‘Provincial Letters.’”19 Mr. Macaulay wrote: “I have just re-ceived the new Edinburgh Review, and have read three or four pages of the article on the ‘Puseyites,’ which I like very much.”20 Indeed it appears from letters writ-ten at the time, that its vigour and brilliance led some persons to suppose that Mr. Macaulay himself was the author.

The next article, on the same subject, “Recent Developments of Tractarianism”

(October, 1844), was not judged by Sir James Stephen quite so favourably: “His second discharge of artillery is plainly inferior to the first. It is of a looser texture, and did not, I think, lie in his mind as a whole before he began to write about it. Many passages are rather rough notes than studied compositions. Yet there are many admirable morsels, and the general tone of life and energy pervading the whole triumphs over all objections: I except the disquisition on Miracles, which seems to me to raise more difficulties than it removes.”21 The fact is that the sec-ond article, at least as republished, was even longer than the first, and extends over a hundred pages in the collected Essays: further, it examines in detail the more recent publications of the Tractarian school; and to fuse into one continuous stream of fiery criticism separate discussions of the separate doctrines and preten-

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sions with which the article deals was hardly possible. Within the limits of this sketch it is not possible to give an account of all the

numerous articles which Mr. Rogers wrote for the Review; but there are a few others to which there are special reasons for referring. In the number for January, 1846, there is one on “The Religious Movement in Germany” which has not been republished.22 It discusses the movement led by Ronge and Czerski, and provoked by the exhibition of the Holy Coat at Treves, in October, 1844. The authority of the son of Mr. Macvey Napier who assigns the article to Mr. Rogers is decisive: if it were not, the internal evidence would remove all doubt.

In July, 1846, he had an article on one of the great masters of his own thought,

“Leibnitz”; in January, 1847, on another, “Pascal.” The Pascal article was founded on M. Faugere’s edition of the “Perishes,” which contained, as Mr. Rogers said, the first authentic text of “the most popular work of an author who has been dead nearly two hundred years, and who has obtained a world-wide reputation—a work which has passed through numberless editions, and been translated into most European languages.” A translation of the greater part of the article appeared immediately in the “Revue Britannique”; M. Faugere himself published a translation of the whole. I believe that this article led to the intimate friendship between Mr. Rogers and Archbishop Whately. Two articles which ap-peared in 1847, “The Treatment of Criminals” (July) and “The Prevention of Crime” (October), lie rather outside his usual range of subjects. Sir James Stephen, who was at the Colonial Office, was keenly interested in Transportation, which had become a burning question. The hostility of the colonists had com-pelled the English Government to “suspend” the sending of convicts to Botany Bay and to Van Diemen’s Land; and it was becoming clear that, as the Australian colonies were certain to receive within a few years representative institutions and large powers of self-government, the “suspension” would have to be permanent; no Colonial Legislature would allow any increase of the convict population. What, then, were we to do with our criminals? The July article proposed a scheme which in its substance was afterwards embodied in a Bill brought in by Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary in Lord John Russell’s ministry (June, 1846-February, 1852). While writing the article, Mr. Rogers was in constant correspondence with Sir James Stephen, and had the advantage of being freely supplied with official information.

Lord Grey, who was Colonial and War Secretary, saw the article in proof, and,

as Sir James Stephen informed Mr. Rogers, expected “great good from it.” The October article insisted that for the prevention of crime the penal code should be “as merciful as a reasonable philanthropy can demand,” but “severe enough to be truly merciful—merciful, that is, to the entire community; that the criminal law, once laid down, should be vigorously and honestly administered; that it should be put in harmony with public opinion, without which the people will not prosecute nor jurors convict.” But the greater part of the article was an argument in support of the position that if the growth of the criminal population is to be arrested, the

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children of the country must be educated, and that it is the right and duty or the State to assist in educating them. The argument is mainly directed against those Dissenters who, under the leadership of Mr. Baines, for “whose abilities, honesty, and public spirit,” Mr. Rogers professes the sincerest respect, were maintaining that the interference of the Government in education was wrong in principle, was unnecessary, and would prove pernicious. In his main contention Mr. Rogers took sides with Dr. Vaughan and the Rev. Thomas Binney, who were Mr. Baines’s most conspicuous opponents among the Nonconformists. The article is far enough from the position which the great body of Dissenters occupied rather more than twenty years later, when they constituted the strength of the National Education League—it assumes, for example, that “in a country in the economic condition of our own, most would agree that it is not expedient to render education compul-sory”—but the very moderation of its tone disposed large numbers of men who believed that the State exceeded the limits of its authority when it attempted, in any way, to promote popular education, to consider seriously whether their theory of the State and its powers was really tenable.

In the April of the following year (1848) he returned to more congenial regions

of thought in his article on “The Literary Genius of Plato: The Character of Socra-tes.” The article closes with the singularly beautiful and impressive comparison and contrast between “the entire dramatic projection and representation of Socra-tes in the pages of Plato,” and the representation of our Lord “by the same most difficult of all methods, that of dramatic evolution by discourse and action” in the Four Gospels—a passage which in thought, in spirit, and in style, is more charac-teristic of the author than, perhaps, any other of equal length that could be found in his writings.

The French Revolution of February, 1848, which was followed by insurrection

and violent political convulsions in nearly every country in western, southern, and central Europe, and which provoked the Chartist demonstration of April 10th in London, suggested to him an article on “Revolution and Reform” (October, 1848). As might have been expected, the article is penetrated through and through with the philosophy and spirit of his great master in political thought, Edmund Burke. The measures of Reform which he thinks might be proposed with advan-tage in England, are of a moderate kind. It might, for example, be enacted “that no place with a certain (but not low) minimum of population should be henceforth without its representatives; that every place rising above such a minimum (as shown by the decennial census} should be at liberty to claim its privileges; and that way should be made for it by the quiet transfer of the right from the constitu-ency which stood lowest on the list.” A few constituencies “contemptible for their insignificance, or still more contemptible for their corruption, might be disfran-chised”; “the incurably infected classes of voters called, by an odd misnomer, freemen,” should certainly be disfranchised; and “the most rigid and summary punishment should be inflicted in every case of gross corruption duly proved be-fore a parliamentary committee.” But he thinks that the most pressing duty of every enlightened statesman is “the equalisation and judicious distribution of our

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taxation”; he is specially anxious for an equitable readjustment of the property and income tax, and of the legacy and probate duty.

In April, 1849, appeared his brilliant fantasia on “The Vanity and Glory of Lit-

erature,” and in October of the same year the article on “Reason and Faith: their Claims and Conflicts.” This is probably the most famous of his essays; and it is an excellent example of his apologetic principles and method. It was issued sepa-rately soon after its appearance in the Review, and was read by large numbers of persons with an enthusiasm of admiration. In the preface to a small volume of his Essays published in 1866, Mr. Rogers says that of the essay on Reason and Faith which gave the title to the volume (“Reason and Faith, with other Essays”), there had been, in different forms, eight impressions, and that it had been for some time out of print.23 On the articles which he wrote in 1850, 1851, and 1852 it is unnec-essary to make any comment. In April, 1853, under the title of “Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister,” he has a powerful attack on the existing law by which such marriages are forbidden. The article was not included in the Collected Es-says. It was followed (April, 1854) by the very fine article on “John Locke: His Character and Philosophy,” the main object of which is to rescue the great Eng-lishman from the hands of Condillac, Condorcet, and their disciples, and to prove that he did not belong to the camp of the sensationalists.

In October of the same year he had a review of the authorized edition of

“Macaulay’s Speeches.” Mr. Macaulay’s indignation had been provoked by an unauthorised and uncorrected collection of his speeches which had been published by Mr. Vizetelly, and issued in self-defence a collection edited by himself. The article begins with a lively discussion of the legal right to throw reports of lec-tures, sermons or speeches into a book, to “affix to it some celebrated name, though the man himself may not be responsible for the half of it, at least as it stands; make his reputation responsible for the handiwork; create, if not copy-right, yet copyright’s worth out of his brains; and all this not only without his as-sent, but in defiance of his strongest wishes.” Mr. Rogers thinks that the present condition of the law on this subject is intolerable. He would leave to the newspa-pers the full right which they already possess to report what they please—speech, sermon, or lecture; but he would make it illegal to reprint in a separate form any speech, sermon, or lecture, without the consent of the speaker, preacher, or lec-turer; and illegal, without such consent, to reprint any collection of speeches, ser-mons, or lectures. After the discussion of the copyright question, there are some admirable pages on the elements and conditions of effective eloquence; and then there is cordial praise of Mr. Macaulay’s speeches—praise supported by long ex-tracts. The article gave occasion to the following letter:—

“ALBANY, LONDON, October 20, 1854.

“My Dear Rogers,—It is odd that I should feel shy about writing to you. Yet so

it is. I really have some difficulty in opening my heart and telling you how much I have been gratified by your article on my speeches. My pleasure, I can truly say, does not arise from vanity. Indeed my vanity has often been much more agreeably

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titillated than by you. I see as plainly as any of my enemies that, where I am con-cerned, your kind partiality diminishes the value of your critical approbation; and it is precisely for that reason that I am delighted with your praises, and most de-lighted with them when I am conscious that I deserve them least. I had much rather that you should like my writings for my sake than for their own.

“I am glad that the Quarterly Review has noticed ‘The Eclipse of Faith’ in so becoming a manner—not that your place among men of letters depends on the Quarterly Review.

“I reckon on seeing you whenever you come to town. “Ever yours truly, “T. B. MACAULAY.”

Mr. Rogers wrote an amusing article on Huc’s “Travels in China” for the Ed-

inburgh of April, 1855, and another article on “The Remains of William Archer Butler” for July, 1856. In the article on Butler, for whom he had a great admira-tion and whom he heartily praised, there are some characteristic passages on the style proper to the pulpit—the style of Archer Butler’s sermons was not simple enough for his taste; and there is also an interesting discussion and criticism of some parts of Butler’s account of Platonism. This was the last paper that he wrote for the great Whig Review with which he had been connected for twenty-seven years.

It is interesting to observe that in the very letter (October 18, 1839) to Mr.

Macvey Napier in which Sir James Stephen expressed his favourable judgment of Mr. Rogers’s first article,13 he also asked Mr. Napier to tell him frankly whether his own articles were too theological for the Edinburgh Review.

After proposing two or three subjects for future essays, he says:— “I have another motive” [i.e., for writing], “which is to ask you to tell me, with

the frankness which I am convinced you both love and practise, whether, in the experiments I have made hitherto, I go further than suits you in announcing and insisting on my own religious opinions. I do not mean further than suits you indi-vidually, but than suits you in your editorial character.

“Various circumstances have combined to give to all my speculations a kind of

theological cast, nor do I think it would be in my power to shake off the habit ex-cept when I am using my official pen. But it has occurred to me that you or your readers or critics may judge that the Edinburgh Review is not quite the right place in which to indulge one’s self on these themes, unless it be done more sparingly. On the whole, I suppose this to be an ill-founded apprehension; but I should be glad to be assured that such is the fact.”25

If the apprehension was “ill-founded,” there was certainly some reason for it.

The general attitude of the Edinburgh towards religious faith in its early years had been at the best coldly courteous; it had shown no serious interest in grave theo-logical controversies, and no kind of sympathy with the glow and the fervour

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which are common to the saints of all churches. Sir James Stephen began to write for it about two years earlier than Mr. Rogers, and his articles were suffused with the warmth of religious emotion and sympathy. It was evidently a great delight to him that the Edinburgh staff had been strengthened by the accession of a writer for whom, as for himself, religious truth had a transcendent interest, and who showed in his articles a keen and passionate loyalty to the Christian Faith. Of all the distinguished men that became Mr. Rogers’s friends through his connection with the Edinburgh, Sir James, I think, regarded him with the warmest affection. In 1847 he stayed in Birmingham, on his way from Scotland to London, to make Mr. Rogers’s acquaintance, and the letters of his which are preserved among Mr. Rogers’s papers indicate that their mutual friendship was most cordial and inti-mate. In one of these (April 8, 1847) he suggests that Mr. Rogers should devote the rest of his days to what he elsewhere describes as the “noble design which died with Robert Southey”26—a history of the Monastic orders.

“I am writing,” he says, “about the necessity of a Protestant history of the Mo-

nastic orders; but I hardly expect to get the better of a passion for story-telling, to which I find myself continually sacrificing the propensity for speculation—at least when I have a pen in my hand. I will absolve you from the necessity of Re-view writing for the rest of your days if you will but make a serious beginning of such a work. It might be made as pathetic as Thomas a Kempis, and as amusing as Robinson Crusoe.”

Mr. Macaulay was another of the men whom he came to know well through

their common connection with the Edinburgh. In April, 1846, he appears to have seen Mr. Macaulay for the first time at the Albany, and a few days later Mr. Macaulay writes to him and hopes that he will repeat his visit. “It would have given me,” he adds, “great pleasure to introduce you, not after the fulsome fashion of blue-stocking parties, but in a quiet rational way, to a few estimable public men and men of letters with whom I am intimate. Hereafter I hope that I shall have an opportunity of doing so.” Mr. Macaulay must, I think, have repeated this proposal some years later; for I remember very well the humorous astonishment with which Mr. Rogers spoke of his friend’s scheme for giving him pleasure. That any one should suppose that he would find it an agreeable way of spending his time to meet at breakfast or dinner a number of politicians and authors whom he had never met before, greatly amused him. He could hardly have been ignorant —and yet perhaps he was—that he could talk admirably; but he liked to talk to men whom he knew and loved, and who knew and loved him. Brilliant social triumphs he probably thought were impossible to him; at any rate, he cared nothing for them. I doubt whether Mr. Macaulay ever succeeded in getting him to a dinner or breakfast party; but they continued to correspond in the most friendly manner, and the following letter of Mr. Macaulay’s to him may be inserted for two reasons: it gives an interesting account of Mr. Macaulay himself, and illustrates his friend-ship for Mr. Rogers. It was written soon after the appearance of the third and fourth volumes of his “History”:—

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“Albany, London, Jan. 21, 1856. “My Dear Rogers,—Your letter has gratified me very much, and not the less

because I know that I must deduct a great deal from the value of your critical ap-probation on account of your personal partiality.

“I have pretty well made up my mind to continue my task. In seven or eight years, if my life and my faculties should be spared so long, I may hope to bring the history down to the accession of the House of Brunswick. There I shall cer-tainly stop.

“I have applied to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the only place that I covet, the Stewardship of the Chiltern Hundreds; and on the first day of the ses-sion a new writ for Edinburgh will issue. I hope soon to escape from river fog and coal fog into a purer air and clearer sky, and to have before my library window a little turf on which I can walk in the spring and summer among lilacs and labur-nums. If I can find a spot that suits me within half an hour’s drive of Lady Trevelyan and her children, I shall have no reason to envy the possessors of Chatsworth and Burleigh.

At present I am almost as close a prisoner as if I were in Newgate. Twice or thrice a week only, in the mildest part of a mild day, I venture out. I have, how-ever, nothing to complain of.

I suffer nothing that can be called pain. I am never afflicted by ennui. The day is too short for the pleasant studies in which I have been indulging since I cor-rected the last sheet of my fourth volume. I have read Herodotus again, and Photius for the first time. I have made acquaintance with the old Jew Philo. I have, after an interval of thirty years, renewed my acquaintance with Pulci. I have laughed over Fray Gerundio again; and I am now deep in Lessing, the best, in my judgment, of all critics ancient or modern. I have also been reading Milman’s new volumes. His style is certainly open to criticism. But I think that his book is cer-tain to take a permanent place in literature. The quantity of interesting information which he has collected is prodigious.

“Ever yours truly, “T. B. Macaulay.” Of all the eminent men among Mr. Rogers’s friends, with the exception of the

Rev. Thomas Binney, Dr. Whately, Archbishop of Dublin, if we may judge from the number of his letters which have been preserved, corresponded with him most frequently. Mr. Rogers greatly admired the Archbishop’s treatise on “Rhetoric,” and used his “Logic” as a text-book for his classes at Spring Hill. He also had strong intellectual sympathy with the general conclusions which the Archbishop had reached both in apologetics and in doctrinal theology. On the other hand, Mr. Rogers’s writings were greatly admired by the Archbishop. There was a real kin-ship between their minds and their methods of dealing with truth of all kinds. They were alike in their intellectual intolerance of theories which are vague and molluscous, and in their delight in clean-cut definite thinking on all kinds of sub-jects. They had a common abhorrence of the principles and tendencies of the Tractarian party; and a common antagonism to the writers who insisted that, in order to reach the real substance of Christianity, it is necessary to eliminate the

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miraculous narratives from the Four Gospels and the characteristic and distinctive doctrines of the Christian Faith from the Apostolic Epistles. They appear to have written to each other frequently and with great freedom on all the subjects in which they were interested.

It would have been inconvenient to interrupt, by any reference to other topics,

the story of Mr. Rogers’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review, and the account of his relations to the distinguished men with whom they brought him into con-nection. But several years before he had written the last of his articles in the Edin-burgh he had published a work which added greatly to his reputation. “The Eclipse of Faith; or a Visit to a Religious Sceptic” appeared in the spring of 1852. It was published anonymously. Mr. Macaulay read it without suspecting the au-thorship. Writing to Mr. Rogers two months after its publication, he said:—

“I read ‘The Eclipse of Faith’ with very great pleasure, and yet, strangely

enough, I did not guess at the writer. I now feel that I ought to be ashamed of my want of sagacity. Since you do not wish to be known as the author of so amiable and eloquent a book, I will keep your secret faithfully.” Sir James Stephen was not more acute. “How could I,” he asks seven months later, “be so stupid as to receive a copy of ‘The Eclipse of Faith’ and not at once detect and thank the writer! I think that I was more than usually stupified by listening just then to my own daily lectures”—he was at that time Professor of History at Cambridge.

His old and intimate friend, the Rev. Thomas Binney, was staying on the Gare-

loch when the book came out, and wrote to him (June 3, 1853) a characteristic letter. His eyes, which had been troubling him, were regaining their strength, and he says:—

“While I have been here they have done me good service in enabling me to

read ‘The Eclipse of Faith,’ a book kindly sent to me ‘from the Author,’ which, if you have not seen, you ought to get, for it is very much in your way and would amuse and interest you greatly. Who the author is I am left to guess. I think I know—and I say, when referred to, that I think I know—but—I cannot positively assert that I do, and will not give up the name of the party I suspect ... Whoever the author may be he has done his part admirably, and has produced a very strik-ing book. I have been deeply interested with it, and have been amazed at its skill and acuteness, its Socratic art and resistless logic. I cannot express the delight and pleasure with which I read or heard many portions, nor the admiration I felt for the writer’s powers. It is truly a book of the times, and will be welcomed by many as a most valuable contribution to the cause of truth and goodness. I cannot but think that it will bring relief to many a weary spirit ....”

After suggesting that it would have been better if the book had been broken up

into chapters and printed in a larger type and published in two volumes, he pro-ceeds:—

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“I wish, if there is a second edition (and there ought to be) and you know the author, and have any influence with him, you would put before him what I have said.”

Archbishop Whately was probably in the secret before the “Eclipse” was pub-

lished. For writing at the close of September, 1850, when the general scope of the book was probably in the author’s mind, he refers to a letter which he had re-ceived from Mr. Rogers, in which there must have been some mention of the ef-fective part which a sceptic might play in criticising some modern forms of disbe-lief in the historic and supernatural elements of the New Testament:

“Dublin, Sept. 23, 1850.

My Dear Sir,—There was a gentleman whose little boy was perpetually dis-

obeying his injunction not to play on the brink of a deep pond. So one day he said, ‘I think you don’t consider well what a souse in the water is; now I will show you.’ He grasped him firmly by the collar and waistband, and, holding him face downward over the water, deliberately plunged him in, and kept him in for half a minute. ‘Now,’ said he, ‘go home and change your clothes, and reflect what it would have been to fall into the water without me at hand to take you out.’

“Hume and his followers led many to sport fearlessly on the brink of the bot-tomless gulf of universal scepticism, without considering what it really was. I took hold of them (in the ‘Hist. Doubts’27) and gave them a ducking; and perhaps some of them shook their ears and said, ‘Well, but after all, one must believe something; let us inquire what are the grounds on which some things are to be be-lieved and others not.’

“Something of this kind seems to be in your mind. (Of course I shall not men-tion you.) The idea strikes me as a good one, the more that it does not preclude a direct argument, but rather prepares the way for it. If you first show a man ex-perimentally that he will get bogged in the path he is on, he may be induced to accept, or even seek, your guidance into another. Accordingly my old friend Aris-totle often begins by showing the difficulties to which the theories of others will lead, and then proceeds to say ei de tauta me areskei &c. [“but, if these things do not please ...”]

“I have noticed briefly, by name, in the last two editions of the ‘Logic’ (just af-ter the parallel columns in the Appendix) Coleridge as a leader of those who de-spise all external evidence and judge of a religion according to its adaptation to their wishes and supposed wants. If this is made the basis of belief, it is, in fact, ‘every man his own god-maker.’ If it is allowed to come in as confirmatory of a belief already adopted on good grounds, and practically embraced, it is a most consolatory additional evidence.

“I have also treated on the same subject more fully (without Coleridge’s name) in the later editions of the ‘Lessons on Evidences’ under ‘internal evidence.’

“I think also there is something in the essay on the ‘Example of Children’ that touches on the point noticed by Powell. It is not without good reason that a child feels a general confidence in the kindness and good judgment of a parent; but if

26

he tries by his own reason each separate command or lesson—(‘Why does my father bid me do this? and Why did he say that?’ &c.)—he will show a want of confidence and will suffer for it.

“Believe me, dear Sir, “Very truly yours, “RD. DUBLIN.” The “Eclipse of Faith” is, in form, a Journal kept by a Mr. B—, while on a visit

to his nephew, Mr. Harrington, a gentleman who has been released by the legacy of a maiden aunt from the necessity of following a profession, and who is living in a “pleasant, old-fashioned, somewhat gloomy but picturesque house in ——shire.” The uncle is a serious believer in the Christian gospel; he has had his times of doubt and conflict, but has long ago reached firm ground, though even now the shadows which once darkened the whole heaven sometimes return; his mind is steeped in Plato, Butler and Pascal—to say nothing of authors of a less grave and dignified order. The nephew, after leaving the university, has spent more than three years on the continent; chiefly in Germany. He has been reduced to a posi-tion of complete scepticism in relation to all religious truth. He is not convinced that Christianity is false, but he is the victim of invincible doubts. Since returning to England he has examined the attempts of some modern writers to construct a religious system out of what remains of the Christian faith when the supernatural has been eliminated from it: “he declares the result wholly unsatisfactory; that, sceptical as he was and is with regard to the truth of Christianity, he is not even sceptical with regard to these theories; and he declares that if the undoubtedly powerful minds which have framed them have so signally failed in removing his doubts and affording him a rock to stand upon, he cannot prevail upon himself to struggle further.28

A day or two after the uncle’s arrival, another guest appears —Mr. Fellowes,

an old college friend of Harrington’s. Mr. Fellowes is a disciple of Mr. Francis Newman and of Mr. Theodore Parker—especially of Mr. Francis Newman. It is Harrington’s special duty, and he discharges it with great delight, to grasp Mr. Fellowes by the collar and waistband—to use Whately’s illustrations and give him a friendly “souse in the water.” There are informal conversations; there are what might be called set debates; there are essays read; there are passages of autobiography; there are stories of one or two charming dreams suggested by the evening’s discussions. There is an account of a dinner party which included a lib-eral Catholic living in the neighbourhood and his friend, a Catholic gentleman from Italy; a young surgeon who is “a rare, perhaps unique, specimen of conver-sion to certain crude atheistical speculations of Mr. Atkinson and Miss Martineau; a young Englishman (an acquaintance of Harrington’s), just fresh from Germany, after sundry semesters at Bonn and Tubingen, five hundred fathoms deep in Ger-many philosophy, and who hardly came once to the surface during the whole en-tertainment; three Rationalists (acquaintances of Fellowes), standing at somewhat different points in the spiritual thermometer, one a devoted advocate of Strauss: add to these a Deist, no unworthy representative of the old English school; one or two others further gone still; a Roman Catholic priest, an admirer of Father New-man, who therefore believes everything; our sceptical friend Harrington who be-

27

lieves nothing; and myself, still fool enough to believe the Bible to be ‘divine,’ and you will acknowledge that a more curious party never sat down to edify one another with their absurdities and contradictions.”29

But the principal discussions of the book are between the uncle, Harrington,

and Fellowes; and all the main points at issue between the historic faith of the Christian Church and the theism which, forty or fifty years ago, claimed to have preserved whatever is spiritual and permanent in Christianity, while rejecting its miracles and authoritative historic basis, are vigorously discussed. The book has the highest literary merits, and although, like all pieces of controversy, it loses something of its attractiveness and force by the lapse of time, no one can read it without feeling how great must have been its fascination when it first appeared; and, indeed, there are parts of it which still retain and must always retain their charm. The dialectical skill, the humour, the wit, the fun, the beauty, ‘the pathos, are delightful even to those who are not always sure that they agree with the au-thor’s method and who hesitate to accept some of his conclusions.

Its success was remarkable. An edition of a thousand was issued in April,

1852; a second thousand in October, and a third thousand in December of the same year; a fourth thousand in May, 1853, and a fifth in May, 1854.30

From old friends and from strangers, from eminent and from unknown men,

from all parts of England and from distant parts of the world, Mr. Rogers received congratulations and thanks. It appears to have been reprinted in America; for among his papers I saw, in type, a Preface intended for an American edition. Among the letters which reached him it is probable that none gave him more pleasure than one from his old friend Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh, author of “Rab and His Friends,” in which occurred the following sentences:—

“It is, next to Butler’s ‘Analogy’ and ‘Sermons,’ the most convincing book I

ever read on its subject. I could say much about it, as I said before, to any one but its author .... The humour is very genuine and specifically your own. I think I would have detected you by it alone .... I have been greatly reminded of the ‘Min-ute Philosopher,’ but the book has far more of itself than of any one else:—it seems to me essentially and in the best sense original in conception” (September 16, 1852).

In an extract which I have already given from a letter of Mr. Macaulay, the

“Eclipse” is described by two rather curious epithets—it is “amiable and elo-quent.” Whether Mr. Francis Newman, against whom a large part of it was writ-ten, thought it “eloquent,” I cannot tell; he certainly thought it the reverse of “amiable.” In an appendix to the second edition of the “Phases of Faith” (London: Chapman, 1853), he published a brief reply to the “Eclipse,” in which he makes bitter complaints against it. For example, Mr. Newman says:—

“But as to this Mr. Fellowes, who is he? His character (p. 33) is apparently in-

tended to be a portrait of mine, as the author conceives of me. Thus he insinuates

28

a mean, degrading, and laughable opinion of me, if the reader will accept it: but if the reader cannot go quite so far, and says it is unfair, then the author can back out; and protest that Fellowes is not myself, but only my admirer.”31

He also charges the author of the “Eclipse” with “misrepresentation,” which is

described as “systematic, continuous, and stealthy”32 and he refers to “a very gross case of garbling.”33 It was hardly to be expected that Mr. Rogers would leave an attack of this kind unrepelled; and accordingly there soon appeared “A Defence of ‘The Eclipse of Faith,’ being a Rejoinder to Professor Newman’s ‘Re-ply.’” In this volume of rather more than two hundred pages he not only defends the “Eclipse” against the injurious charges brought against it by Mr. Newman, but re-states some of his own arguments and assails afresh Mr. Newman’s positions. The fire and brilliance of the “Defence” are not surpassed—some think that they are not equalled—in any other of Mr. Rogers’s writings. Mr. Binney wrote to him (February 3, 1852): “It is the best thing you have ever done.”

He must have been greatly gratified by the cordial appreciation both of the

“Eclipse” and the “Defence” which appeared in September, 1854, in the pages of the Quarterly Review—the great rival of the Edinburgh with which he had been associated for so many years. The article was written by Mr. Conybeare. The opening and closing paragraphs I may venture to quote:—

“The ‘Eclipse of Faith’ having gone through five editions in less than two

years, is so generally known and appreciated, that it would be superfluous to rec-ommend it to the notice of our readers. Moreover, its subjects are too vast and various to be properly discussed in a single article; and its arguments must lose force and illustration by the condensation necessary in a summary abstract. Hence we should probably have passed over this work in silence, in spite of (and partly because of) its great merit, had it not been assailed with an asperity and unfairness that provoke us to give some account of the controversy which originated in its publication ....“Finally, let us thank Mr. Rogers for the addition he has made to the philosophical literature of England, and to the defensive armoury of Christen-dom; and still more for his promise to deal with Pantheism as he has already dealt with Deism. We trust that he may be spared to redeem this pledge in the amplest manner, and also to recast his present work by omitting those ephemeral topics which might hinder its permanent appreciation. If he lives to accomplish our ex-pectations, we feel little doubt that his name will share with those of Butler and of Pascal in the gratitude and veneration of posterity.”

Soon after the publication of the “Defence,” Mr. Rogers undertook a very wea-

risome task, which occupied a large amount of time and occasioned him great anxiety. Towards the end of the last century a Mr. Burnett, an Aberdeen mer-chant, bequeathed money to be expended at intervals of forty years in two premi-ums, which were to be given for two essays on the evidence for the existence of “a Being, all-powerful, wise and good, by whom everything exists.” It was also to be one of the special objects of the essays “to Obviate difficulties regarding the

29

Wisdom and Goodness of the Deity; and this, in the first place, from considera-tions independent of written Revelation; and in the second place, from The Reve-lation of the Lord Jesus; and from the whole, to point out the inferences most nec-essary for, and useful to, mankind.”

The writers for the second competition were to send in their essays before

January 1, 1854; and Mr. Isaac Taylor, the Rev. Baden Powell, and Mr. Rogers consented to act as adjudicators.34 The prizes to be won by the successful essay-ists were very heavy: the Rev. R. Anchor Thompson, a Lincolnshire clergyman, whose essay—”Christian Theism”—which occupies two handsome octavo vol-umes, was judged to hold the first place, received 1,800 lbs.; the late Principal Tulloch, of St. Andrew’s, whose “Theism” secured the second place, received 600 lbs. The number of essays sent in was 208; these were divided among the three judges, who began by throwing out those which had no chance of either the first prize or the second; the rest were then read by all three. The final selection of the best two caused them a great deal of trouble. They reached a decision on Nov. 13, 1854, and it was plainly a great relief to Mr. Rogers to have done with the busi-ness. Mr. Thompson, in the preface to his essay, expresses his obligation to Mr. Rogers “for some valuable observations” which suggested improvements in it.

On the death of Sir William Hamilton, in May, 1856, some of Mr. Rogers’s

friends were anxious that he should become a candidate for the vacant chair of Logic and Metaphysics in the University of Edinburgh. Archbishop Whately wrote (May 28, 1856): “I understand that you are put forward (though not by yourself) for the Logical Chair at Edinburgh. It would give me great satisfaction to hear of their electing you to a post you would so worthily occupy.” Sir James Stephen also wrote wishing him success. The letter of Mr. Macaulay on the sub-ject is worth giving at length.

“HOLLY LODGE, CAMPDEN HILL, LONDON, “June 2, 1856.

“My Dear Rogers,—A gentleman named Cunningham has written to me from

Edinburgh to beg that I will do all that is in my power to place you in the chair of Moral Philosophy, lately occupied by Sir William Hamilton. I need not tell you that whatever service I can render you is at your command. But, as I collect from Mr. Cunningham’s letter that you have not been consulted, I have not thought it right to take any step. I am not sure that you would accept the situation if it were offered to you; and I think it probable that you would not like to expose yourself to the risk of rejection. That risk, I am afraid, would be considerable. For though it is impossible that there should be any other candidate of half your merit, you would have much national and much sectarian feeling against you. If a philoso-pher were to be proposed who was Aristotle and Plato in one, there are electors who would vote against him if he was not a Scotchman, and other electors who would vote against him if he was not a Free Churchman. But it is for you to de-cide. Only let me know what your wishes are; and the little—the very little—that is in my power shall be done in conformity with them.

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“I write, not from my old chambers in the Albany, but from a pleasant library opening on a smooth sheet of turf where the thorns and laburnums are in full beauty, and where the roses are beginning to open. In my garden I see nothing but what is rural. I might imagine that I was in Devonshire or Worcestershire. And yet I am within a quarter of an hour’s drive of Hyde Park Corner. The place seems to have been made for me; and I would not change it for Blenheim or Chatsworth.35 I long to see you among my trees and flowers.

“Ever yours,

“T. B. Macaulay.” It was not with Mr. Rogers’s consent that his name was suggested, and I be-

lieve that he never had any thought of becoming a candidate for the chair. Early in 1857 he practically received the offer of another chair. The Rev. Dr. John Harris, the Principal and Theological Professor of New Col-

lege, Hampstead—a college intended for the education of students for the Con-gregational ministry—died at the end of December, 1856. The position was the most distinguished that could be held by any Congregational minister in England. Mr. Binney, who was a member of the college council, was extremely anxious that Mr. Rogers should occupy it, and wrote him letter after letter urging him to consent to be nominated, and assuring him that he would be elected with the most cordial unanimity; but Mr. Rogers was not to be moved, and therefore no formal invitation ever reached him.

In the same year, 1857, he published “Selections from the Correspondence of

R. E. H. Greyson, Esq. Edited by the Author of ‘The Eclipse of Faith’“ (London: Longmans & Co). R. E. H. Greyson was intended as an anagram of his own name: but there is an “r” short. The letters, of which there are rather more than two hundred, cover a large variety of subjects: some of them are grave, some hu-morous, some pathetic, some as changeable in their mood as an April morning. The book was less successful than might, I think, have been anticipated. But its serious discussions were not to the taste of those who read only for amusement; and there were many persons of another kind who thought that in discussing grave subjects the letters showed too much “levity.” Men are differently constituted. With Mr. Rogers, laughter and tears were always very near to each other; his hu-mour easily passed into reverence and his reverence into humour; behind his fun there was generally something very serious, and his “levity” was often but the foam of a wave which came from an ocean of infinite depth and mystery.

In 1858 he accepted an invitation to succeed the Rev. Robert Vaughan, D.D.,

as Principal and Professor of Theology at the Lancashire Independent College, in the neighbourhood of Manchester; and he left Birmingham, after living there for nineteen years.

31

They had been years of great literary activity. In addition to the reviews and books which I have mentioned, he had written, for the eighth edition of the “En-cyclopaedia Britannica,” articles on Gassendi, Robert Hall, Gibbon, Hume, Pas-cal, and Voltaire. Other writings of his belonging to this period will be found in the Bibliographical Note appended to this Sketch. Others, again, I fear that I have failed to discover. They had been years, at first, of great suffering, but afterwards of quiet happiness. When he came to Birmingham at the age of 33, he had twice gone through the agony of losing his wife; he remained a widower for about seven years, and then married Emma, daughter of Mr. John Watson, of Finsbury Square, London, one of the intimate friends of the Rev. Thomas Binney. When his third wife was about to give birth to her first child, he was filled with a great fear and horror lest the fate of the second should be repeated; and what he dreaded hap-pened: his third wife, like his second, died when giving birth to her first child. He was no stranger to those awful calamities which sometimes force from the heart the bitter and despairing cry, “Has God forgotten to be gracious?” The pathetic and terrible passages in some of his apologetic writings which speak of some of the darker aspects of the Divine government of mankind, were transcripts from his own experience. After his wife’s death, he had a severe illness which extended over many weeks; for some time I believe that his life was in danger. He gradu-ally recovered strength, and in 1847, when I first knew him, he was fairly vigor-ous, though at times he suffered from sleeplessness.

Shortly before removing from Birmingham he married Miss Fletcher, of Man-

chester, of whose father he wrote an interesting sketch in Good Words (July, 1864).

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Chapter 4.

MANCHESTER, SILVERDALE, AND PENNAL TOWER: PRESIDENCY OF LANCASHIRE INDEPENDENT COLLEGE—EDITION OF HOWE’S WORKS“GOOD WORDS”—“BRITISH QUARTERLY”—“SUPERHUMAN ORIGIN OF THE BIBLE”—DEATH. 1858-1877.

MR. ROGERS entered on his duties at the Lancashire Independent College, as

President and Professor of Theology, in the autumn of 1858. For the following account of his work there I am indebted to the Rev. Caleb Scott, D.D., who for some years was his colleague, and who on his retirement became his successor:—

“The name of Henry Rogers was, I need not say, familiar to me from the time

when theological and denominational questions first interested are. The writings of no man were more eagerly looked for by students for the ministry than his. The signal success of his method of teaching when at Spring Hill showed itself in the class lists of the London M.A. in Branch III.—Philosophy. Spring Hill College was then facile princeps amongst all oar colleges in the distinctions which its men won.

“The first time I saw Mr. Rogers was in 1865, in an interview which I had with

him before replying to the invitation presented to me in the spring of that year, to be at first his colleague and afterwards his successor here. The intimate associa-tion and friendship then commenced was to me as pleasant as it was helpful and stimulating. There were no invisible barriers between us. One could speak freely from one’s heart without any fear of the slightest betrayal of confidence, and there was no subject, whether it related to the college or otherwise, on which a talk with him was not of value. In the most generous and thoughtful way, he took care that the multifarious and onerous duties involved in the principalship of a large resi-dential college should only be gradually devolved on new shoulders. Hence he remained President until 1869. Indeed, such were his relations to each of his col-leagues and to the members of committee, that, however delicate the position of things might at any time be, there was never the slightest approach to misunder-standing, but always perfect harmony. All felt that something was to be gained from standing with him at the point of view from which he regarded any question. I have heard very eminent ministers speak of the ordeal they felt it to be to preach to a congregation of which he was a member. My free association with him en-tirely removed any such feeling in my case.

“He lectured when here on Homiletics, Theology and Apologetics. The chief

text-books which he used were Pye Smith’s ‘Four discourses,’ Davison on ‘Prophecy,’ Hill’s ‘Lectures on Divinity,’ Paley’s ‘Evidences’ and ‘Horae Pauli-nae,’ and Butler’s ‘Analogy.’ I was never with him in the classroom save in the sermon class. I do not think that was the class in which his conspicuous abilities as a teacher were most manifest. Many despise the text-book mode of teaching. The most competent judges amongst Henry Rogers’s students are unanimous in

33

their opinion that his teaching with Butler’s ‘Analogy’ as his text-book as nearly reached perfection as any teaching could. All real students who attended that class gladly acknowledged their indebtedness to their teacher, however much they might differ from some of the conclusions to which he came.

“In congenial society he was often brilliant. His conversational powers were

greater than those of any man I ever met. I often marvelled at the wonderful appo-siteness and naturalness with which he would illustrate the topic of conversation by some quotation from his mental store of English literature, which no man pre-sent but he could have given. His quotations were no hackneyed quotations, nor were they repeated from time to time but ever fresh and appropriate. The pleasant memories will never fade away from the minds of many beside myself of the flashing intelligence which lighted up his countenance, when, after the business of some laborious committee meeting was concluded and luncheon over, he in-structed and charmed us all by his words of wisdom and of grace.”

For several years, after removing to Manchester, Mr. Rogers appears to have

published nothing. His work as Professor of Theology was new to him. His read-ing and thought had made him very familiar with those provinces of speculation which lie on the confines of the neighbouring and not always friendly realms of philosophy and theology; and he had won high honour as a vigilant and coura-geous warden of the marches. Occasionally he had visited the more peaceful re-gions—though these, too, are sometimes agitated by angry conflicts—where saints and theologians had built up stately structures of religious doctrine; but now his home was to be there. It took him time to master, as a professor must master, his new subjects. The preparation of his lectures, and the administrative duties which belonged to him as president of the college, left him little leisure.

In 1862, four years after his settlement in Manchester, and when, I suppose, he

had travelled with his classes over all the new ground, he began to write for Good Words. A list of his articles is given in the Appendix.

In the same year came out the earlier volumes of his edition of the works of

John Howe, on which he spent almost incredible pains. For the intellectual force and elevation of the great Nonconformist he had the deepest admiration; but he was keenly sensitive to his defects as a writer. “Everywhere full of thoughts—thought often deep, subtle, and not seldom sublime—it is only now and then that he expresses himself with felicity and beauty commensurate with the grandeur of his conceptions.” But the vices of his style were aggravated, as Mr. Rogers thought, “by his system, or rather want of a system, of punctuation; by the unnec-essary multiplication of parentheses, of which there are sometimes as many as four or five in a single paragraph; by the superfluous use of italics, which, in the original editions, often extend to half the words in a sentence, and, so far from giving the key to the emphatic terms, distract attention by the seemingly em-phatic; and, lastly, by the obtrusion into the text, at least in the greater part of his works, of Scriptural and other references, even where the passages referred to are

34

fully cited.”36 These causes of difficulty and obscurity he set himself to remove. Without altering the text in the slightest particular, he thought that Howe could be made more readable by careful printing and intelligent punctuation. The success of the experiment is remarkable; but as the “Works” fill six handsome octavo vol-umes, and as in every page there were probably from eighty to a hundred minute corrections of the press, the labour and patience required were enormous, and his eyes received permanent injury. The later volumes were issued in 1863. He had not forgotten the profound impression made on him when a youth by Howe’s “Redeemer’s Tears wept over Lost Souls”; and in this way he endeavoured to ex-press his gratitude. His “Life of Howe,” originally published six-and-twenty years before, was revised and issued in the same form as the “Works.”

While he held the chair at Lancashire College, he wrote a few articles for the

British Quarterly Review. He had, indeed, contributed at least one article to that Review at an earlier date—an article on “Calvin and Servetus” (May, 1849), in which he endeavoured to ascertain the precise limits of Calvin’s responsibility for the burning of the heretic; and contrasted the infamy which has been inflicted on Calvin as compared with the lenient judgment pronounced on other men of his age—Cranmer, for example—who, as he contended, were guilty of the same of-fence with less excuse.37 In January, 1866, when he had been lecturing on theol-ogy for rather more than seven years, there appeared in the same Review an essay of his on “Systematic Theolog,” which is interesting as showing what was his conception of the science. To him Systematic Theology approached more nearly to what is commonly called Biblical Theology than to what is known as Dogmat-ics. He thought it the business of the theologian “to analyse for himself . . . the precise logical contents” of Holy Scripture; “modestly to trace their relations and coherence wherever and so far as he can, and to co-ordinate them with one an-other in their mutual relations; in a word, to elicit a system or fabric of truth from an analysis of the contents of Revelation.” He compares the task of the theologian with that of the student of Plato. “After exegesis had done its worst for every sen-tence in every dialogue of Plato, there would still remain the question which has tasked the energies of many a great thinker, ‘What is the entire system of philoso-phy which the diversified writings of the Greek philosopher were intended to pro-pound?’ And in relation to this object, many an accomplished grammarian has proved but a sorry commentator.”38

In the number for July, 1867, he had an article on “Abraham C. Simpson,” the

son of a Dr. Simpson who at the close of the last century and beginning of this was Theological Tutor of Hoxton Academy, which became Highbury College in 1826. The son was a man of large learning and powerful intellect, but of abnormal humility and self-distrust. His character is sketched by Mr. Rogers with affection-ate sympathy and admiration. In July, 1869, he had an article on the “History of Nonconformity in Lancashire” by his old tutor and colleague at Highbury, the Rev. Dr. Halley.

In that year he thought that he began to recognise in himself the indications of

35

failing strength, and he resigned the presidency of the college; for two years longer he continued to lecture; in 1871 he retired altogether. His Lancashire stu-dents presented him with an admirable marble bust of himself as a permanent memorial of his connection with the college, and of the honour in which they held him.39

On leaving Manchester he took a house at Silverdale on Morecambe Bay,

where he began to work at his “Superhuman Origin of the Bible inferred from It-self”—the first of a series of Lectures projected by the Congregational Union of England and Wales, of the same character as the “Bampton” at Oxford.+ An acci-dent which occurred to him—I think at Blackpool—occasioned him severe suffer-ing, and rendered him for some months incapable of all serious reading and writ-ing. He was stepping into a carriage and grazed his leg; violent inflammation set in, which for a long time resisted treatment. It was a year before the pain quite ceased.

In 1873, while he still felt discomfort from his accident, he settled at Pennal

Tower, Machynlleth, and there he published his “Lecture,” the preface bearing date December 8, 1873. Mr. Binney had assisted him in revising the proofs. Its object is to show “that the Bible is not such a book as man would have made if he could; or could have made if he would.” Apart from its main argument, the vol-ume is deeply interesting as a study of the peculiarities of the sacred writers. When he accepted the invitation of the Committee to prepare the volume, there was an understanding that it was to be printed without being delivered to a public audience. Mr. Rogers felt that his strength would be unequal to the strain. But it is curious to notice that the manner is in many respects quite unlike that of his other books. He was writing “Lectures,” and he wrote as if they were to be actually de-livered as lectures;—while writing, he had an imaginary audience before him in-stead of an imaginary reader. There is a sustained rhetorical movement in some of them which makes them very much more like orations than like reviews or chap-ters in a treatise. They suggest the sort of didactic sermons which he might have written if he had continued a preacher, and if his conception of what preaching ought to be had been less severe. His intellect had lost nothing of its acuteness or vivacity; nor was there any lessening of his literary skill; there are passages in his “Superhuman Origin of the Bible” which for grace, vigour, and ease are hardly surpassed in any of his earlier writings.

He had great delight in Pennal Tower and its neighbourhood, and was eager to

induce his old friends to share his enjoyment with him. He retained to the last his intellectual buoyancy and the freshness of his intellectual interest in all the re-gions of thought which had been for so many years familiar to him. Nor was the warmth of his affection for those he loved at all abated. But early in 1877 it was apparent that his physical vigour was failing. He was suffering from an internal abscess which gradually wasted his strength, and on August 20 1877, he died. At his death he was revising the proofs of the fifth edition of his last book. His wife, two sons and two daughters survived him. He was buried in the family-vault of

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his father-in-law, Mr. Fletcher, at St. Luke’s Church, Cheerham Hill, Manchester. It is no part of the purpose of this brief Biographical Sketch to estimate the

value of Mr. Rogers’s contributions to Christian Apologetics, or to attempt to de-termine his permanent rank among the men of letters of his time. On these ques-tions gratitude, affection, and veneration must impair impartiality of judgment. Nor would it be fitting for me to write an elaborate eulogy of the nobleness and beauty of his personal life; it would imply too sharp a reversal of the old relations between us. But there may be no impropriety in a few informal sentences intended to record some of his more obvious characteristics.

His ways of life, his tastes, and his pleasures were extremely simple. He occa-

sionally worked in his garden, and I remember his telling me with great pride of some wonderful asparagus that he had raised; he said, laughingly, that he owed his success to his having used all the advertisement sheets of many volumes of the Edinburgh in preparing the bed. On another occasion he appears to have been even more successful. He had buried in the bed the sheets of two hundred copies of his early “Poems,” and whenever the asparagus came to table, he called atten-tion to the peculiar delicacy and refinement of its flavour. Splitting and chopping wood was another kind of exercise by which he used to fight against the troubles of a man who had to spend a great part of his life at the desk. On days when he was released from his duties at college, he would sometimes borrow a horse from one of his tradesmen—it was not till some years afterwards that he had a horse of his own—and ride out to Lichfield, or some other place within ten or fifteen miles of Birmingham. More frequently he would take one or two of his children and stroll into the country. And there was very pleasant country within reach. For many years After he came to live in Birmingham, his house in Heathfield Road, Lozells, was on the very edge of the town; Barr Beacon and Oscott were in sight from his windows; and the glorious park at Sutton, where David Cox found some of his loveliest pictures, was within a short morning’s walk. After I left college and settled as a minister in Birmingham, he sometimes called on me soon after ten o’clock on Monday morning, and asked whether I was free for a holiday. What times we had! We tramped six or seven miles into Warwickshire or Worcester-shire, and towards one o’clock found some quiet village inn and ordered dinner; the resources of the house seldom went beyond ham and eggs, but he enjoyed it as much as if he were dining at Fishmongers’ Hall. After dinner came a pipe, which he enjoyed as much, and then came the tramp homewards. Of course there was abundance of delightful talk—talk on subjects upon which we agreed, and talk on subjects upon which we differed—talk about Mr. Francis Newman, for instance, whom he had slain in the “Eclipse,” but some parts of whose books appealed to me as they did not appeal to him about Locke, and whether the Frenchmen were right in claiming his great name to sanction a philosophy which recognises exter-nal experience as the source of all our knowledge—about the value of Des Cartes’ a priori proof of the Being of God—about Scott’s novels—about “Nicholas Nick-leby”—about Coleridge’s poetry, which he always greatly praised by way of add-ing emphasis to his depreciation of Coleridge’s philosophy—about Byron, for

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whose vigorous verse he never lost his early enthusiasm—about some of the shorter poems of Wordsworth, which he was never weary of repeating—about the “Excursion,” to which I thought that he never did justice—about Cowper’s Let-ters—about the quaintness of Sir Thomas Browne, who was one of his great friends;—and, of course, before our walk was over there were quotations from Butler or Pascal or Burke. For a year after I left college, I was generally preaching once on Sunday at the Congregational Chapel at Lozells, where he and his family were in the habit of attending. Much as I loved him, I was always unhappy when I saw him in the congregation. In the course of our Monday walks he would some-times talk to me in the kindliest way about my sermon on the previous Sunday, and make suggestions from which I hope that I may have profited; but they did not diminish the discomfort with which I saw him in his place on the following Sunday. I always felt certain that if the logic of my sermon halted, he could not help seeing how lame it was; and if there was anything at all “fine” in my notes, the only perfectly safe course was to omit it. There were other things that he liked to talk about—Mr. Bright and Birmingham radicalism, the agitation for the exten-sion of the franchise, the last cartoon in Punch.

The best conversationalist I ever knew used to say that as soon as a man begins

to tell stories, conversation is at an end; as a rule, the remark is just. A brilliant raconteur may provide a charming entertainment; but usually he either takes the whole active business of amusing the company into his own hands, or else pro-vokes the rest to the mere game of “capping” his tales; conversation—the real contact of mind with mind, in which confused thought becomes orderly and vague thought definite, in which a man discovers that he has riches which he never knew that he possessed and that he has a firm command of treasures which he supposed that he had lost—conversation, in which the sluggish brain is for an hour pro-voked to strenuous exertion, and the weary brain finds in vigorous play greater refreshment than in rest—conversation, I say, is usually at an end when a brilliant raconteur is accidentally reminded of a good story. But Mr. Rogers could tell in the course of an hour half a dozen very good stories, and yet keep up conversa-tion.

In these walks and talks I was often astonished by the fulness of his knowledge

of subjects with which, as far as I knew, he had shown no special acquaintance in his writings. I remember, for instance, a conversation in which he told me so much about the English Deists that I suggested that he should write a history of English Deism, and give Tindal and Collins and the rest an honourable burial. He laughed and said, “No, I think not. I do not care to have anything to do with them again. They are such unpleasant fellows to live with.”

He was a very modest man. His modesty was not mere shyness, which some-

times accompanies the stiffest pride. Nor was it that “voluntary humility”—that disciplined deference of manner—by which a good man, who knows that he is naturally haughty and that haughtiness is very unchristian, sometimes inflicts the greatest discomfort on people who are vividly conscious that they are his inferi-

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ors. Mr. Rogers had the modesty which comes from humility of the most genuine kind. He felt profoundly all that he said in his apologetic writings about the limi-tations of the human intellect. Other men might dwell with triumph on the wide and glorious realms which had been discovered and subdued by human genius; to him the eternal barriers which in all directions obstruct and defy the most adven-turous speculation were always present. He had been intellectually chastened and subdued by defeated efforts to penetrate the mysteries of the order of the universe.

With all his humour and wit, and his quick recognition of the ludicrous in lit-

erature and life, the shadows of the world—its sins, its sorrows, its illusions, the vanity of its hopes, the transitoriness of its pleasures, the troubles of childhood, the sufferings of the poor, the desolate loneliness which is often the lot of old age—pressed heavily upon him. He found consolation and strength and courage in the infinite wisdom and goodness of God; but, like Pascal, he was as pro-foundly impressed by the misery as by the greatness of man.

His sense of personal imperfection and unworthiness was deep and constant.

The beauty and glory of the character of our Lord Jesus Christ he dwelt upon with awe, with affection, and with delight; but to him it was less natural to think of that transcendent righteousness and sanctity as being in a very true sense a revelation of the quality of the life which God had already given him in Christ and a proph-ecy of his future perfection, than as an awful though gracious witness to his fail-ure and sin.

Whatever might be his own moods, he knew how to make his children happy.

His surviving daughter, Mrs. Edmund Miller, of Colchester, has been kind enough to write for me the following paragraphs. I should have been glad if she had writ-ten more.

“Among the most delightful of my early reminiscences are the evenings at

home, when our dear father used to devote an hour or so to reading aloud Walter Scott, Macaulay, and others of his favourite authors. How greatly the charm of the reading was enhanced by his keen appreciation of everything humorous or pa-thetic will be readily believed by those who knew him.

“Well do I remember his reading the ‘Antiquary’ and ‘Guy Mannering,’ and

the peals of laughter called forth by the sayings and doings of Edie Ochiltree, Dominie Samson, Dandle Dinmont, and other memorable personages in those wonderful tales.

“His evident delight in our enjoyment added another element to it, and those

‘evenings at home’ will not be forgotten by any who still live to remember them.” From one of the letters which I have received from his eldest son, Mr. Henry

Mackenzie Rogers (of Birmingham), baptised by, and named after, his old friend who perished in the Pegasus, I extract the following:—

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“I suppose it is natural for lads who are blessed with good fathers, to look upon

them as the highest standard of excellence. This was indeed my case when I was a child, and though I am now within ten years of the age at which my father died, I still retain the impression of those early days. His simplicity of character, his ten-derness and gentleness, his beautiful consistency of life and detestation of all that was mean and base, called forth the passionate love and admiration of his chil-dren. I remember well, when I was about twelve years old, saying to him, ‘I hope, papa, I shall die before you, as I could not bear to live if you were gone.’ His only reply was to press my hand, and burst into tears.

“To his children, the most beautiful and touching trait in his character was his

humility. When he was betrayed, which indeed was very seldom, in the presence of any of them, into a hasty expression of impatience or irritation, they can never forget how his regret would find utterance in the simple but affecting words ‘My child, forgive me!’

“He used to throw himself heartily into all our boyish sports, and nothing

pleased him better than to go skating with us in winter, or to play at cricket with us in summer. He was also a rare hand at chess. When a youth, I thought myself a fair player, and many a desperate conflict we used to have but he always won—often, indeed, after having given me a queen. I have heard him say, that nearly the only man who ever beat him was his friend Mackenzie. What my father was to me when I reached manhood, I dare not trust myself to say.

“He had an intense love for books of the right sort, and never could pass a sec-

ond-hand bookshop without prowling about it to see if he could pick up some choice volume at a low price, and if he succeeded, with what joy would he walk home with it under his arm. At the beginning of his career, when his means were slender, he nearly embarrassed himself by his frequent purchases.

“He was a born Reviewer, and it was astonishing with what rapidity and ease

he got at the pith of any book he had to review—spotting, as if by intuition, the weak or strong parts of the work. One of his old students once said to me, ‘If your father sees the outside of a book, he seems to know all about the inside.’

“When he lived in the Heathfield Road, his custom was, on the days when he

had not to attend Spring Hill College, to walk in the garden for an hour after breakfast, with his Greek Testament or Hebrew Psalter in hand, deep in medita-tion. He would then adjourn to his ‘workshop,’ as he termed his library, and with his ‘tools,’ as he called his books, all about him, he would set resolutely to work. He always stood at his desk when writing, and during most of the time puffed away at a long Broseley pipe—he maintained there was inspiration in the pipe—pacing up and down the room and writing alternately.. His pen sped at a great rate, and I have known him write no less than forty full-sized pages in the day,40 nor were the corrections afterwards numerous.

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“He was a master of shorthand, and nearly the whole of ‘The Eclipse of Faith’

was written first in this manner. I remember he and I were taking a walking tour in Scotland when he commenced this book, and I could never persuade him to turn out of his room until he had written so many shorthand pages.

“I never can think of my dear father, without associating with his memory my

aunts Maria and Mary Ann. Never had a brother two sweeter sisters, nor sisters a more devoted brother.41

In my childish way, I used to think, when I saw them together at home, of the

family at Bethany. My father was especially under deep obligations to the first-named, for, during several years after his second wife’s death and when domestic cares pressed upon him, she was a mother to his young children, and by her brightness and devotion cheered his sorrow-stricken heart. Not only so, but she acted as his amanuensis. I have often thought how the printers must have blessed her, when they got hold of the manuscripts written in her bold and legible hand. In after years the duty of amanuensis, which this beloved sister had fulfilled so admi-rably, devolved chiefly on his elder daughter, who felt it a great privilege to be of use to her dear father in this way.

“Both sisters survived him, and were present at his death. A few days before he

passed away, my Aunt Maria, who was clever with her brush, showed him a small oil painting she had just completed of Penhal Tower, with the mountains round. He looked at it with moistened eyes, and whispered, ‘Beautiful place! but I am soon going to a still more beautiful one.’”

Of the beauty of his family life I had occasional glimpses, both while I was one

of his students and afterwards. I remember the ease and gentleness of his manners both with his children and his guests; his delight in familiar passages from Haydn, Handel, and Mozart which his daughter rendered on the piano; the tears which sometimes streamed down his face while he was laughing at his own amusing sto-ries; the natural way in which he passed from the gayest and most ludicrous sub-jects to the most serious; his intense enjoyment of some odd or beautiful para-graph that he had found in a book the night before and which he would read, with criticisms comic or grave. But most clearly of all I remember the impression left on my mind by the prayers which he offered at family worship—for whether it was morning or evening that I spent with him, I do not think that worship was ever omitted. They were perfectly simple prayers—but they were the final expres-sion of a life of deep and varied thought and of severe suffering. They were the prayers of a man who had learnt much, only to discover how little it was possible for him to know, and who had passed through great vicissitudes of moral and reli-gious experience which had made him feet, in the very depth of his heart, what the penitent confesses when his religious life begins—that the only hope for sinful men is in God’s merciful redemption of the world through Christ. They were prayers in which grateful contentment with the common blessings of life which

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the good providence of God had conferred upon himself and those who were dear to him was blended with a sense of the insecurity of their tenure. They were pene-trated with a spirit of devout trust in God’s goodness, and perfect submission to His supreme authority. They were as severely simple in their form as in their sub-stance; but sometimes there occurred a felicitous phrase which remained long in my memory. One returns to me as I am writing. He had quoted, with a slight change, the pathetic words of the 103rd Psalm, “Like as a father pitieth his chil-dren, so dost Thou pity them that fear Thee,”—then after a brief silence, and in a voice which emotion made more husky than usual, he added, “and them that fear Thee not.” Whenever I have quoted the words since, it has been difficult not to make the same addition to them.

But of what avail are words? To those who never knew Henry Rogers, he must

remain unknown.

R. W. DALE. Birmingham. December, 1892.

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BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.

SEPARATE PUBLICATIONS. DATE. TITLE. 1826. Poems, Miscellaneous and Sacred. (Westley and Davis.) 1836. The Life and Character of John Howe, M.A. With an Analysis of his Writings.

(William Ball.) 1837. The Christian Correspondent: Letters, Private and Confidential, by William

Ball.) 1837. General Introduction to a Course of Lectures on English Grammar and Composition. (William Ball.) 1845. Remains of the late Rev. John Marell Mackenzie, M.A. With a Selection on. [Fullerton and Co.] 1850. Essays selected from Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Vols. I. and II. (Longmans.) 1852. The Eclipse of Faith: or a Visit to a Religious Sceptic. (Longmans.) 1854. A Defence of” The Eclipse of Faith,” by its Author. 1855. Essays selected from Contributions to the Edinburgh Review. Vol.

III. (Longmans.) 1856. Three Letters to a Friend on the Sunday Question: with a Parliamentary Speech

which will not be found in any of the “Debates.” (Longmans.) * The sketch of Mr. Mackenzie’s intellectual character given in the Memoir was written by Mr.

Rogers.

DATE TITLE. 1856. Essay on the Life and Genius of Thomas Fuller. Reprinted from the Edinburgh Review.

(Longmans.) 1857. Selections from the Correspondence of R. E. H. Greyson, Esq. Edited by the Author of

“The Eclipse of Faith.” (Longmans.) 1863. A Vindication of Bishop Colenso. By the Author of “The Eclipse of Faith.” Reprinted

from Good Words. (A. and C. Black.) 1866. Reason and Faith: with other Essays. (Longmans.) 1867. A Sketch of the Life and Character of the Rev. A. C. Simpson, LL.D. Reprinted from

the British Quarterly Review, with Additional Extracts from his Letters. (Pardon.) 1867. Essays from Good Words. (A. Strahan and Co.) 1874. The Superhuman Origin of the Bible Inferred from Itself. (Hodder and Stoughton.) 1874. Essays, Critical and Biographical, contributed to the Edinburgh Review. (New Edition.

Longmans.) 1874. Essays on some Theological Controversies. Chiefly contributed to the Edinburgh Re-

view. (New Edition. Longmans.)

ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED TO THE “EDINBURGH REVIEW.” Oct., 1839. Structure of the English Language. 2-5

Oct., 1840. Sacred Eloquence: The British Pulpit.2-5 Jan., I842. Life and Writings of Thomas Fuller.2-5

1. In the two volumes published in 1874 there are some essays not included in the volumes

published in 1850 and 1855; but some of the essays in the earlier collection do not appear in the later.

2. Republished in “Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review. By Henry Rogers.” Vols. I. and

43

II., 1850; Vol. III, 1855. (Longmans.) 3. Re-published in a separate form under the same title. Longmans, 1856. 4. Re-published in several forms, and finally in “Reason and Faith, and Other Essays, By Henry

Rogers.” Longmans, 1866. 5. Re-published in “Essays, Critical and Biographical, contrib-uted to the Edinburgh Review.” Long mans, 1874.

Date Title

Jan., 1843. Right of Private Judgment. 1-5 April.1843. Puseyism: or the Oxford Tractarian School. 1-5 Jan., 1844. Andrew Marvel.1-4 Oct., ,, Recent Developments of Tractarianism. 1-5 July, 1845. Luther’s Correspondence and Character. 1-4 Jan., 1846. Religious Movement in Germany. July, ,, Life and Genius of Leibnitz. 1-4 Jan., 1847. Genius and Writings of Pascal.1-4 July, ,, Treatment of Criminals. 1 Oct., ,, Pre-

vention of Crime.1April, 1848. Literary Genius of Plato: Character of Socrates. 1-4 April, 1849. The Vanity and Glory of Literature. 1-4 Oct. 1848 Reason and Faith: Their Claims and Conflicts. 1-3 April, 1850. Sydney Smith’s Lecture on Moral Philosophy. 1-4 Oct., 1850. History of the English Language. 1-4 April, 1851. Ultramontane Doubts. 1-5 Jan., 1852. The Genius and Writings of Descartes. 1-4 April, 1853. Marriage with the Sister of a Deceased Wife. April, 1854. John Locke: His Character and Philosophy. 1-4 Oct.,1854. Macaulay’s Speeches April, 1855. Huc’s Travels in China. 4 July, 1856. Remains of W. A. Butler. 4 ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED TO THE “BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW.”

May, 1449. Servetus and Calvin. Jan., 1866. Systematic Theology. July, 1867. Abraham C. Simpson.6July, 1869. Nonconformity in Lancashire, by Robert Halley. D.D.

ARTICLE CONTRIBUTED TO THE “LONDON REVIEW.” Vie de Jesus, by Ernest Renan.7

1. Republished in “Essays contributed to the Edinburgh Review. By Henry Rogers.” Vols. I. and II., 1850; Vol. III, 1855. (Longmans.) 2. Re-published in a separate form under the same ti-tle. Longmans, 1856.

3. Re-published in several forms, and finally in “Reason and Faith, and Other Essays, By Henry Rogers.” Longmans, 1866. 4. Re-published in “Essays, Critical and Biographical, contrib-uted to the Edinburgh Review.” Longmans, 1874.

5. Re-published in “Essays on some Theological Controversies of the Time. Contributed chiefly to the Edinburgh Review.”

6. Re-published separately, with Additional Extracts from his Letters. Benjamin Pardon, 1867. 7. Re-published in “Reason and Faith: with other Essays.” Longmans, 1866. ARTICLE CONTRIBUTED TO THE “FORTNIGHTLY REVIEW.” July, 1866. Les Apotres, by Ernest Renan. 3 ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED TO THE “GOOD WORDS.”

Feb., 1862. Vindication of Bishop Colenso.1March. ,, Ditto.1

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April, 1863. Coal. May, ,, Coal and Petroleum. Jan., 1864. On some recent Speculations touching the Scientific Apotheosis of Man.2April, ,, The Duration of our Coal-fields. July, ,, The Late Samuel Fletcher.3Jan., 1865. Thoughts for the New Year.3Feb., ,, On Public Executions.3March. ,, A Vision about Pre-Vision.2April, ,, Reasons for Scepticism as to certain Speculations of Modern Science.2May, ,, Ditto.2June, ,, Some Thoughts on Prose Composition.3July, ,, Report of “A Dialogue on Strikes and Lockouts.”3

Aug., ,, Railway Accidents.3Oct., ,, Ancient and Modern Wisdom: Reflections suggested by

Job, Cap. XXV.2Nov., ,, Atlantic Telegraph Expedition.2Jan., 1866. The Story of John Huss.3Sept., ,, Christianity Vindicated from Alleged Tendencies to Persecution.3Feb., 1868. The Story of Erasmus.4March, ,, Erasmus in Relation to the Reformation. 4 April, ,, Ditto.4

1. Re-published as “A Vindication of Bishop Colenso. By the Author of ‘The Eclipse of Faith.’“ A. and C. Black. 1863.

2. Re-published in “Reason and Faith: with other Essays By Henry Rogers.” Longmans. 1866. 3. Re-published in “Essays from Good Words”. By Henry Rogers.” Alexander Strahan and Co.,

1867. 4. Re-published in “Essays on Some Theological Controversies of the Time.” Longmans, 1874.

ARTICLES CONTRIBUTED TO THE “ENCYCLOPAEDIA BRITANNICA” (Eighth Edition).

1854. Butler. 1856. Gassendi. 1856 Gibbon. ,, Robert Hall. ,, Hume. 1859. Paley. ,, Pascal. 1860. Voltaire.

ARTICLE CONTRIBUTED TO “KITTO’S BIBLICAL CYCLOPIEDIA” (Third Edition). Edited by William Lindsay Alexander, D.D., &c. 1869. The Sabbath.

PRELIMINARY ESSAYS, CRITICAL AND BIOGRAPHICAL, were written for the follow-ing:— 1834. A Discourse of Natural and Moral Impotency. By Joseph Truman, B.D. Jackson and Wal-

ford. The Works of Jonathan Edwards. Holdsworth. 1835. The Works of Jeremy Taylor. Ball. 1836. Treatises on the High Veneration Man’s Intellect owes to God. By the Hon. Robert Boyle.

Rickerby. 1837. The Works of Edmund Burke. Holdsworth. 1868. Observations on the Conversion and Apostleship of St. Paul. By George, Lord Lyttelton.

Religious Tract Society.

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[In drawing up this Bibliographical Note I have been greatly indebted to Mr. W. H. Peet, of Messrs. Longmans, Mr. Canton, of Messrs. Isbisters, the Rev. W. Lovell, of the Religious Tract Society, and Mr. J. Boyle, of Bolton.]

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FOOTNOTES

1 It is curious to notice how his habit of using italics, by which some of his friends often declared that they could always, at a first glance, discover his hand in the Edinburgh, and about which they used to remonstrate with him, appears in the earliest piece of prose—as far as I know—that he printed.

2 The late Rev. Dr. Eustace Rogers Conder, of Leeds, was a son of Josiah Conder; his second Christian name was a memorial of his father’s friendship for the St. Albans surgeon. 3 It will be interesting to some readers to know that the following men were admitted at the same time:--Henry Winzar, Edmund T. Prust, George Taylor, Samuel B. Bergne, Benjamin Johnson, Thomas Cousins, Henry Edwards, John Bramall, Ebenezer Prout, William Ford, and John Kelsey. Jonathan Glyde was admitted later in the same session. A large proportion of them became considerable men in the Congregational ministry. For the particulars given in this note, and for others in the text, I am indebted to the courtesy of the late Principal of New College, the Rev. Dr. Newth, and to the Secretary, the Rev. W. Farrer. 4 “Selections from the Correspondence of R. E. H. Greyson, Esq. Edited by the Author of ‘The Eclipse of Faith,’“ vol. i., p. viii. 5 Memorials of the Past: Records of Ministerial Life.” By James Griffin. Pp. 109, 110.

6 At Glasgow he was a friend of Archibald Tait, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. There is a letter of his to Mackenzie early in the first volume of the Archbishop’s “Life” by Davidson. 7 Mr. W. N. Bentham was a relative of the famous Jeremy Bentham, and was himself a man of liberal education and master of several European languages.

8 Mr. Rogers’s marriage to Miss Elizabeth Bentham took place in November, 1834. At that time a marriage with a deceased wife’s sister was voidable, but was not ipso facto void. It could only be made void by a decree in an ecclesiastical court pronounced during the lifetime of both the parties to the marriage. The Act of August, 1835—the present law—made valid all such marriages con-tracted before that date, but declared that in future such marriages should be ipso facto void—not merely voidable.

9 “Life and Character of John Howe,” Preface, p. vi.

10 Ibid., p. v. 11 General Introduction to a Course of Lectures on English Grammar and Composition. By Henry Rogers.” 1837.

12 The letters are given in the very interesting volume entitled “Selection from the Correspon-dence of the Late Macvey Napier, Esq.,” edited by his son, Macvey Napier. London, Macmillan, I879.

13 The list of contributors is drawn up from the Letters and Notes in the Macvey Correspondence. I have no means of giving a similarly authoritative list of the contributors under later editors. 14 In 1874 most—but not all-of the essays contained in these three volumes, with some additional essays, were republished in two volumes. See list of Mr. Rogers’ works appended to this Memoir. 15 Mr. Empson, who was at this time editor of the Edinburgh, was Lord Jeffrey’s son-in-law.

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16 He was not yet “Sir James,” but it is convenient to call him by the name under which he is best known. 17 Selections from Mr. Macvey Napier’s Correspondence,” p. 207. 18 When republished, the title of the article was changed to Anglicanism, or, The Oxford Trac-tarian School,” in deference-partly to the objection of the Tractarians to be designated by a name which identified them with an individual leader—partly to an unwillingness to make Dr. Pusey responsible for all the opinions held by the different members of the school. 19 “Selections from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier,” p. 476. 20 Ibid., p. 249. 21 “Selections from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier,” p. 476.

22 The article has the name of Mr. Rogers attached to it in a note—page 519 of the “Correspon-dence of Macvey Napier.” Mr. W. H. Peet, of Messrs. Longmans and Co., has been good enough to furnish me with a list of articles written by Mr. Rogers after 1847, and not included in the Col-lected Essays. Mr. Peet’s list begins, apparently, with Mr. Empson’s editorship. I am also indebted to Mr. Henry Reeve, the present editor, for a courteous reply to inquiries on this subject.

23 “Do you know that a Glasgow painter has a picture of your Allegory of Reason and Faith—the one blind, the other deaf? ... It has sold for (I think) 250 lbs: certainly not less.” —Rev. Thomas Binney to Mr. Rogers, October 18, 1858. 24 See p. xxix.

25 “Selection from the Correspondence of Macvey Napier, Esq.,” p. 307. 26 “Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography,” by the Right Hon. Sir James Stephen, K.C.B., vol. i. p. 89. 27 “Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Buonaparte.” 28 “Eclipse,” pp. 3, 4. 29 “Eclipse,” pp. 167-8.

30 I am indebted for these figures to Mr. W. H. Peet, of Messrs. Longmans’.

31 Page 161. 32 Page 183. 33 Page I84. 34 At the first competition, forty years earlier, the first place was given to the late Principal Brown, of Aberdeen, and the second to the Rev. John Bird Sumner, who was afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury. 35 He had now the kind of house that he had wished for. See letter, p. xl.

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36 “The Works of John Howe, M.A. With a General Preface by Henry Rogers.” Vol. i., pp. v. and vi. London: Religious Tract Society.

37 This article was accidentally discovered to be Mr. Rogers’s by a reference to it in a paper found among the books of the late Rev. Dr. Henry Allon. The internal evidence is decisive as to its au-thorship. The record of the writers in the British Quarterly Review during the editorship of the Rev. Dr. Vaughan has been mislaid and cannot be found. The other articles attributed to Mr. Rogers in the text have his name written against them in the set of the Review kept by the late Dr. Allon. who for some years edited it with the Rev. Dr. Reynolds as co-editor, and afterwards edited it alone. I am indebted for the list to Mrs. Henry Allon, who has been good enough to look through the volumes for me.

38 British Quarterly Review, January, 1866, p. 179. 39 On the death of Mrs. Rogers, the bust was presented by his children to the Lancashire Inde-pendent College. I may also state that, in memory of her husband, his widow, in addition to found-ing a scholarship at Lancashire College which bears his name, gave and bequeathed considerable sums of money to Mansfield College; and his children, in memory of their father, presented to the same institution the greater part of his large and valuable library. + An earlier series, “The Con-gregational Lecture,” had died out many years before, after running for fifteen or sixteen years. The proper title of the new series is “The Congregational Union Lecture.”

40 Mr. Rogers once told me that he had written what would fill twelve pages of the Edinburgh between breakfast and two or halfpast, when he was accustomed to take a walk before an early dinner.—R. W. D.

41 I knew these ladies well. For many years they conducted a boarding school for boys in the Heathfield Road, within a few doors of their brother’s house. Not a few of our leading Noncon-formist families sent their children to this school, and the best testimony that can be given, as to the moral training they received whilst there, lies in the fact that many men, now occupying hon-ourable positions of usefulness, would be the first to acknowledge how much they owe to the early influence and teaching of these excellent ladies.—R. W. D.

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