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old religion, but that they should have it without
knowing the best that these preachers can do. And
that they are in this case is owing in part, certainly,
to the negligence of the Christian Knowledge Society.
In the old times they used to print and spread abroad
Bishop Wilson's Maxim's of Piety and Christianity.
The copy of this work which I use is one of their
publications, bearing their imprint, and bound in the
well-known brown calf which they made familiar to
our childhood; but the date of my copy is 1812. I
know of no copy besides, and I believe the work is
no longer one of those printed and circulated by the
Society. Hence the error, flattering, I own, to me
personally, yet in itself to be regretted, of the dis-
tinguished physicist already mentioned.

But Bishop Wilson's Maxims deserve to be circu-
lated as a religious book, not only by comparison with
the cartloads of rubbish circulated at present under
this designation, but for their own sake, and even by
comparison with the other works of the same author.
Over the far better known Sacra Privata they have
this advantage, that they were prepared by him for
his own private use, while the Sacra Privata were
prepared by him for the use of the public. The
Maxims were never meant to be printed, and have on
that account, like a work of, doubtless, far deeper
emotion and power, the Meditations of Marcus Aurel-
ius, something peculiarly sincere and first-hand about
them. Some of the best things from the Maxims

1 The Christian Knowledge Society has, since 1869, republished the Maxims of Bishop Wilson.

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have passed into the Sacra Privata. Still, in the Maxims, we have them as they first arose; and whereas, too, in the Sacra Privata the writer speaks very often as one of the clergy, and as addressing the clergy, in the Maxims he almost always speaks solely as a man. I am not saying a word against the Sacra Privata, for which I have the highest respect; only the Maxims seem to me a better and more edifying book still. They should be read, as Joubert says Nicole should be read, with a direct aim at practice. The reader will leave on one side things which, from the change of time and from the changed point of view which the change of time inevitably brings with it, no longer suit him; enough will remain to serve as a sample of the very best, perhaps, which our nation and race can do in the way of religious writing. M. Michelet makes it a reproach to us that, in all the doubt as to the real author of the Imitation, no one has ever dreamed of ascribing that work to an Englishman. It is true, the Imitation could not well have been written by an Englishman; the religious delicacy and the profound asceticism of that admirable book are hardly in our nature. This would be more of a reproach to us if in poetry, which requires, no less than religion, a true delicacy of spiritual perception, our race had not done great things; and if the Imitation, exquisite as it is, did not, as I have elsewhere remarked, belong to a class of works in which the perfect balance of human nature is lost, and which have therefore, as spiritual productions, in their contents something excessive and morbid, in

their form something not thoroughly sound. On a lower range than the Imitation, and awakening in our nature chords less poetical and delicate, the Maxims of Bishop Wilson are, as a religious work, far more solid. To the most sincere ardour and unction, Bishop Wilson unites, in these Maxims, that downright honesty and plain good sense which our English race has so powerfully applied to the divine impossibilities of religion; by which it has brought religion so much into practical life, and has done its allotted part in promoting upon earth the kingdom of God.

With ardour and unction religion, as we all know, may still be fanatical; with honesty and good sense, it may still be prosaic; and the fruit of honesty and good sense united with ardour and unction is often only a prosaic religion held fanatically. Bishop Wilson's excellence lies in a balance of the four qualities, and in a fulness and perfection of them, which makes this untoward result impossible. His unction is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his good sense, that it becomes tenderness and fervent charity. His good sense is so perfect, and in such happy alliance with his unction, that it becomes moderation and insight. While, therefore, the type of religion exhibited in his Maxims is English, it is yet a type of a far higher kind than is in general reached by Bishop Wilson's countrymen; and yet, being English, it is possible and attainable for them. And so I conclude as I began, by saying that a work of this sort is one which the Society for Promoting Christian

Knowledge should not suffer to remain out of print and out of currency.

And now to pass to the matters canvassed in the following essay. The whole scope of the essay is to recommend culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits, which we now follow staunchly but mechanically, vainly imagining that there is a virtue in following them staunchly which makes up for the mischief of following them mechanically. This, and this alone, is the scope of the following essay. And the culture_we recommend is, above all, an inward operation.

But we are often supposed, when we criticise by. the help of culture some imperfect doing or other, to have in our eye some well-known rival plan of doing, which we want to serve and recommend. Thus, for instance, because we have freely pointed out the dangers and inconvenience to which our literature is exposed in the absence of any centre of taste and authority like the French Academy, it is constantly said that we want to introduce here in England an institution like the French Academy. We have, indeed, expressly declared that we wanted no such thing; but let us notice how it is just our worship of machinery, and of external doing, which leads to this charge being brought; and how the inwardness

of culture makes us seize, for watching and cure, the faults to which our want of an Academy inclines us, and yet prevents us from trusting to an arm of flesh, as the Puritans say,-from blindly flying to this cutward machinery of an Academy, in order to help ourselves. For the very same culture and free inward play of thought which shows how the Corinthian style, or the whimsies about the One Primeval Language, are generated and strengthened in the absence of an Academy, shows us, too, how little any Academy, such as we should be likely to get, would cure them. Every one who knows the characteristics of our national life, and the tendencies so fully discussed in the following pages, knows exactly what an English Academy would be like. One can see the happy family in one's mind's eye as distinctly as if it were already constituted. Lord Stanhope, the Dean of St. Paul's,' the Bishop of Oxford,2 Mr. Gladstone, the Dean of Westminster, Mr. Froude, Mr. Henry Reeve, everything which is influential, accomplished, and distinguished; and then, some fine morning, a dissatisfaction of the public mind with this brilliant and select coterie, a flight of Corinthian leading articles, and an irruption of Mr. G. A. Sala. Clearly, this is not what will do us good. The very same faults,-the want of sensitiveness of intellectual conscience, the disbelief in right reason, 'the dislike of authority, which have hindered our having an Academy and have worked injuriously in our literature, would also hinder us from making our Academy,

1 The late Dean Milman.

2 The late Bishop Wilberforce,

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