The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1872-04-13 00:00:00

TIIE LATE PROFESSOR liIAURICE.

(Front the Saturday Review.)

This Easter-week we have lost a man about whom
opinions and feelings were much divided, who was by
many of the best and most thoughtful among us looked
on as the noblest and greatest of recent English
teachers, and who certainly had that rare gift of iu-
spiting enthusiasm and tiust among honest and
powerful minds in search of guidance, which belongs
to none but to men of a very high order. Professor
Maurice has ended a life of the severest and most un-
ceasing toil, still working to the utmost that failing
bodily strength allowed—still to the last in harness.
The general public, though his name is familiar to
them' probably little measure the deep and passionate
affection with which he was regarded by the circle
of his friends and by those whose thoughts and pur-
poses he had moulded ; or the feeling which his loss
causes in them of a blank, great and not to be filled
up, not only personally for themselves, but in the
agencies which are working most hopefully in English
society. But even thsse wits knew him least, anti
oily from the outside, and whose points of view least
coincided with his, must feel that there has been, now
that we look back on his course, something singularly
touching, and even pathetic in the combination shown
in all that he did, of high courage and spit it, and of
unwearied faith and vigour, with the deepest humility
and with the sincerest disinterestedness and abnega-
tion, which never allowed him to seek anything great
for himself, and, in fact, distinguished and honoured
as he was, never found it. For the sake of his genera-
tion we may regret that he did not receive the public
recognition and honour which were assuredly his due;
but in truth his was one of those careers which, for
their own completeness aud consistency, gain rather
than lose by escaping the distractions and false lights
of what is called preferment.
The two features which strike us at the moment as
characteristic of Mr. Maurice as a writer and teacher,
besides the vast range both of his reading and thought,
and the singularly personal tone and language of all
that he wrote, are—first, the combination in him of the
most profound and intense religiousness with the most
boundless claim and exercise of intellectual liberty ;
and next, the value which he set, exemplifying his
estimate in his own long and laborious course, on pro-
cesses and efforts, as compared with conclusions and
definite results, in that pursuit of truth which was to
Mui the ninst sacied of duties. Titers is no want of
earliest and fervent religion amusing us—intelligent,
well informed, deliberate, as well as of religion
to which these terms ea s hardly be applied. And
there is also no want of the boldest and most daring
fseedorn of investigation and Pidgment. But what
Mr. Maurice seemed to see himself, and what he en-
deavoured to impress on others, was that religion and
liberty are no natural enemies, but that the deepest and
most absorbing' forms of histinicaj and traititional re-
igion draw strength and seriousni se of meaning and
binding obligation from an alliance, frank and uncon-
ditional, with what seems to many the risks, the peril-
ous risks and chances of freedom. It was a position
tins criticism
etiq
taon formidablet,
teeirtitti
that,
ban
itoangga
inist
anti
energetic life, in which amidst great trials and changes
there was a singular uniformity and consistency of
character maintained, he did unite the two—the most
devout Christianity with the most fearless and un-
sininking baldness in facing the latest announcements
and possibilities of modem thought. That he always
satisfactorily explained his point of view to others is
more than can be said ; but he certainly satisfied
numbers of keen and anxious thinkers, who were dis-
contented and disheartened both by religion as it is
presented by our great schools and parties, and
by science as its painciples and consennences are
expounded by the leading philosophical authorities
of the day 'The other point to which we have
adverted partly explains the influence which he
had with such minds. He had no system to
formulate or to teach. He was singularly ready ti
accept, ass adequate expressions of those truths in whose
existence he so pers,stently believed, the old conse-
crated forms in which simpler times hal attempted to
express them. He believed that these truths are wider
and vaster than the human mind which is to be made
wiser and better hey them. Anil his aim was to reach
up to an ever more exact, and real, and harmonicus
hold of these truths, which in their essential greatness
he felt to be above bin- -to reach to it in life as much
as hi thought. And so to the end he was ever striving,
not so much to find new truths as to find the heart and
core of old ones, the truth of the truth, the inner life
and significance of the letter, of which he was always
loth to refuse thestraslitional form.