The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

Letters, 1860-I86S

369

have any moral purpose at all. The effervescence of their
spirituality has passed away, and cunning, and activity, and
political tactics, have filled up the vacuum. Build churches,
fill them with Low Church ministers, or set up the authority of
the Church-that is the great end. One healing word of the
evils of mankind, one voice in behalf of truth among the socalled orthodox clergy, I cannot hear. I am rather afraid that
the Established Church, which has many advantages, rather
increases the evil-you have not the chances of Dissent.
I often feel that I should like, if I could, to write about
this. What seems to be wanted is a restoration of natural
religion, not in the narrow abstract sense, but as based on the
past history of man, and as witnessed to by conscience and
faith, and supported by our first notions of a divine Being.
Natural religion should so leaven and penetrate Christianity
(without the word 'natural religion' ever appearing) that the
doubtful points and doctrines of Christianity should drop off
of themselves. Utilitarianism and German theology have both
of them, in different ways, a zeal for criticism and for truth
which is very commendable. But neither of them have ever
found a substitute for that which they were displacing. They
have never got hold of the heart of the world. The attempt
to show the true character of the Pentateuch and the Gospel
History is very important negatively. But it does nothing
towards reconstructing the religious life of the people.
To
SCOTLAND, September, I864.
This is a farm-house in which I am writing: it is full of
religious books of the worst and most unmeaning kind; The
Arminian Skeleton, &c. The people's ways seem to be honest
enough, so I suppose that they are not much affected by them.
Still a great opportunity seems to be utterly lost in the
education of the common people. Half the books that are
published are religious books. And what trash this religious
literature is! Either formalisms or sentimentalisms about the
Atonement, or denunciations of rational religion, or prophecies
VOL. I. B b