strange to say, politics. She says of herself that her mind was desperately methodical; and no doubt to this passion for method her rapid progress must be attributed. The facts and ideas she acquired were immediately sorted," so to speak, and put away on different shelves of her memory for future use. They were not heaped upon one another,-rudis indigestaque moles,-crushing and keeping down with their weight the reflective powers.

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But even a good thing may be abused, and latterly Miss Martineau carried her systematizing processes to an extreme. Everything that would admit of it she tabulated, like columns of pounds, shillings, and pence. On one occasion she adopted Dr. Franklin's youthful and absurd plan of arranging his day's virtues and vices under heads. "I found at once," she says, "the difficulty of mapping out moral qualities, and had to give it up,-as I presume he had too. But I tried after something quite as foolish, and with immense perseverance. I thought it would be a fine thing to distribute Scripture instructions under the heads of the virtues and vices, so as to have encouragement or rebuke always ready at hand. So I made (as on so many other occasions) a paper book, ruled and duly headed. With the Old Testament I got on very well; but I was annoyed at the difficulty with the New. I knew it to be of so much more value and importance than the Old, that I could not account for the small number of cut and dry commands. I twisted meanings and wordings, and made figurative things into precepts," before I would give up; but after rivalling any old

Puritan preacher in my free use of Scripture, I was obliged to own that I could not construct the system I wanted."

To a mind so keenly apprehensive and so restless, religious truth necessarily became an object of early interest. Bred up in the cold atmosphere of Unitarianism, she groped her way painfully towards the light, but her egotism prevented her from finding it. Nothing would serve but that she must have a creed of her own. She could not be contented with the "idea" of Christ's religion which the New Testament embodies, but constructed a Christianity without Christ. The creed of her girlhood was a thing of shreds and patches, something to this effect: She believed in a God who, in her opinion, was milder and more beneficent and passionless than the God of "the orthodox," inasmuch as He would not doom any of His creatures to everlasting torment. She did not at any time believe in the Devil, but regarded him as an allegorical personification of Sin, while she thought eternal punishment stood for eternal detriment. She believed in eternal and inestimable rewards of holiness, though she says of herself that she never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one through any consideration of loss or gain. To the best of her recollection, she always feared sin and remorse extremely, but punishment not at all. A mental analysis made in mature womanhood may err, however, on many points of childish thought and belief. But it is not impossible that, as she says, the doctrine of repentance and forgiveness never

availed her much. Probably it was presented to her more as a doctrinal dogma, as an article of the theological system, than as a living truth. Forgiveness for the past was as nothing to her, because it did not seem to involve safety in the future; and she felt that her sins could not be blotted out by any single remission of their consequences, even if such a remission were possible. Hence it appears that while she had constructed for herself a Deity much milder and more beneficentin her modest opinion than the God of the Christian believer, she did not love Him sufficiently to desire His praise or dread His anger. To a large extent she seems to have borrowed her religious ideas at first from “Paradise Lost" and "The Pilgrim's Progress." Afterwards they were modified by the conclusions which she drew with hasty self-sufficiency from all kinds of premisses and assumptions. Thus, she speaks of a time when she satisfied herself that the dogmas of the resurrection of the body and the immortality of the soul could not both be true; but why the one should be incompatible with the other she does not enlighten us. She adhered to the former, she says, after St. Paul: which would seem to imply on her part a strange conviction that St. Paul does not teach the soul's everlasting life!

While we condemn her arrogance of speculation, we must in justice own that she struggled after light. She prayed "night and morning" until she came to mature age; but unhappily she had not been taught to address herself to a personal Saviour, and in the name of Jesus

Christ to lay her petitions and her perplexities before "the great white throne." What warmth and beauty might have been poured into her daily life had she but realised the truth, the central truth of Christianity, that Jesus the Son of Man was also the Son of God, and that it was He who reconciled man to God by His sacrifice on the cross! She studied the Bible continuously and most earnestly; both by daily reading of chapters, after "the approved but mischievous method," and by close consultation of all the commentaries and expositions on which she could lay her hands. She procured the works of Dugald Stewart, Hartley, and Priestley; ventured boldly into the maze of metaphysics, and spent weary hours on the insoluble problems of foreknowledge and freewill. But not having hold of that clue which lies in the Divinity of Christ, she wandered astray in barren tracks of thought, until she ultimately became a Necessarian, and accepted as a cardinal truth the invariable and inflexible action of fixed laws. The effect upon her theological system was immediate and immense. She alighted upon the astounding discovery that the practice of prayer, as prevailing throughout Christendom, was wholly unauthorised by the New Testament. How she arrived at this "discovery" she does not tell us, and in the face of the commands to"watch and pray" and to " pray without ceasing," we are unable to guess. At all times, however, she must have had a very vague conception of the meaning and spirit of Christian prayer, which she seems to have identified with the Pharisaic prayers reprobated

by the Saviour! We need not be surprised that, after such a discovery, she changed her method.

"Not knowing what was good for me, and being sure that every external thing would come to pass just the same, whether I liked it or not, I ceased to desire, and therefore to pray for, anything external-whether 'daily bread' [which Christ Himself has taught us to pray for], or health, or life for myself or others, or anything whatever but spiritual good. There I for a long time drew the line. Many years after I had outgrown the childishness of wishing for I knew not what-of praying for what might either be good or evil-I continued to pray for spiritual benefits. I can hardly say for spiritual aid; for I took the necessarian view of even the higher form of prayer,—that it brought about, or might bring about, its own accomplishment by the spiritual dispositions which it excited and cherished. This view is so far from simple, and so irreconcilable with the view of a revelation of a scheme of salvation, that it is clear that the one or the other view must soon give way."

Unhappily, in Harriet Martineau's case both views gave way, owing, I fear, to the arrogance of spirit in which she approached religious subjects. It was not with the humility of childhood that she knelt before her Lord,not as one conscious of sin and imploring forgiveness; but rather with all the pride of a sceptical intellect, and as one who refused to believe whatever that intellect dismissed as unworthy of belief. There is, I confess,