PAGE 17
My Father’s Memoir
by
[Footnote 14: In his own words, “A personal Deity is the soul of Natural Religion; a personal Saviour–the real living Christ–is the soul of Revealed Religion.”]
When oppressed with this feeling,–“the burden and the mystery of all this unintelligible world,” the hurry of mankind out of this brief world into the unchangeable and endless next,–I have heard him, with deep feeling, repeat Andrew Marvel’s strong lines:–
“But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariots hurrying near;
And yonder all before me lie
Deserts of vast eternity.”
His living so much on books, and his strong personal attachment to men, as distinct from his adhesion to their principles and views, made him, as it were, live and commune with the dead–made him intimate, not merely with their thoughts, and the public events of their lives, but with themselves–Augustine, Milton, Luther, Melancthon, George Herbert, Baxter, Howe, Owen, Leighton, Barrow, Bunyan, Philip and Matthew Henry, Doddridge, Defoe, Marvel, Locke, Berkeley, Halliburton, Cowper, Gray, Johnson, Gibbon, and David Hume,[15] Jortin, Boston, Bengel, Neander, etc., not to speak of the apostles, and above all, his chief friend the author of the Epistle to the Romans, whom he looked on as the greatest of men,–with all these he had personal relations as men, he cordialized with them. He had thought much more about them–would have had more to say to them had they met, than about or to any but a very few living men.[16] He delighted to possess books which any of them might have held in their hands, on which they had written their names. He had a number of these, some very curious; among others, that wild soldier, man of fashion and wit among the reformers, Ulric von Huetten’s autograph on Erasmus’ beautiful folio Greek Testament, and John Howe’s (spelt How) on the first edition of Milton’s Speech on Unlicensed Printing.[17] He began collecting books when he was twelve, and he was collecting up to his last hours. He cared least for merely fine books, though he enjoyed, no one more so, fine type, good binding, and all the niceties of the book-fancier. What he liked were such books as were directly useful in his work, and such as he liked to live in the midst of; such, also, as illustrated any great philosophical, historical, or ecclesiastical epoch. His collection of Greek Testaments was, considering his means, of great extent and value, and he had a quite singular series of books, pamphlets, and documents, referring not merely to his own body–the Secession, with all its subdivisions and reunions–but to Nonconformity and Dissent everywhere, and, indeed, to human liberty, civil and religious, in every form,–for this, after the great truths, duties, and expectations of his faith, was the one master-passion of his life–liberty in its greatest sense, the largest extent of individual and public spontaneity consistent with virtue and safety. He was in this as intense, persistent in his devotion, as Sydney, Locke, or old Hollis. For instance, his admiration of Lord Macaulay as a writer and a man of letters, an orator and a statesman, great as it was, was as nothing to his gratitude to him for having placed permanently on record, beyond all risk of obscuration or doubt, the doctrine of 1688–the right and power of the English people to be their own lawgivers, and to appoint their own magistrates, of whom the sovereign is the chief.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] David Hume’s Treatise on Human Nature he knew thoroughly, and read it carefully during his last illness. He used to say it not only was a miracle of intellectual and literary power for a man of twenty-eight, but contained the essence of all that was best on the philosophy of mind; “It’s all there, if you will think it out.”
[16] This tendency was curiously seen in his love of portraits, especially of men whose works he had and liked. He often put portraits into his books, and he seemed to enjoy this way of realizing their authors; and in exhibitions of pictures he was more taken up with what is usually and justly the most tiresome departments, the portraits, than with all else. He was not learned in engravings, and made no attempt at collecting them, so that the following list of portraits in his rooms shows his liking for the men much more than for the art which delineated them. Of course they by no means include all his friends, ancient and modern, but they all were his friends:–