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MARTINEAU, JAMES (1805-1900)
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See also:MARTINEAU, See also: From Dublin he was called to See also:Liverpool, and there for a See also:quarter of a See also:century he exercised extraordinary See also:influence as a preacher, and achieved a high reputation as a writer in religious See also:philosophy. In 184o he was appointed See also:professor of See also:mental and moral philosophy and See also:political See also:economy in Manchester New College, the See also:seminary in which he had himself been educated, and which had now removed from York to the city after which it was named. This position he held for See also:forty-five years. In 1853 the college removed to See also:London, and four years later he followed it thither. In 1858 he was called to 1 Types of Ethical Theory, i. 8. 2 Essays, Reviews and Addresses, iv. 54. 3 Ibid. i. 397. ' Essays, Reviews and Addresses, i. 419. 6 Martineau's " See also:Letter to the Dissenting See also:Congregation of Eustace See also:Street " (Dublin). occupy the See also:pulpit of Little See also:Portland Street See also:chapel in London, which he did at first for two years in See also:conjunction with the Rev. J. J. Tayler, who was also his colleague in the college, and then for twelve years alone. In 1866 the See also:chair of the philosophy of mind and See also:logic in University College, London, See also:fell vacant, and Martineau became a See also:candidate. But potent opposition was offered to the See also:appointment of a minister of religion, and the chair went to See also:George Croom See also:Robertson—then an untried man--between whom and Martineau a cordial friendship came to exist. In 1885 he retired, full of years and honours, from the principalship of the college he had so See also:long served and adorned. Martineau, who was in his youth denied the benefit of a university See also:education, yet in his See also:age found famous See also:universities eager to confer upon him their highest distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Harvard in 1872, S.T.D. of See also:Leiden in 1874, D.D. of See also:Edinburgh in 1884, D.C.L. of See also:Oxford in 1888 and D.Litt. of Dublin in 1891. He died in London on the 11th of See also:January 1900. The life of Martineau was so essentially the life of the thinker, and was so typical of the century in which he lived and the society within which he moved, that he can be better understood through his spoken mind than through his outward See also:history. He was a man happy in his ancestry; he inherited the dignity, the reserve, the keen and vivid See also:intellect, and the picturesque See also:imagination of the See also:French Huguenot, though they came to him chastened and purified by generations of Puritan discipline exercised under the gravest ecclesiastical disabilities, and of culture maintained in the See also:face of exclusion from See also:academic privileges. He had the sweet and patient See also:temper which knew how to live, unrepining and unsoured, in the midst of the most watchful persecution, public and private; and it is wonderful how rarely he used his splendid See also:rhetoric for the purposes of invective against the spirit and policy from which he must have suffered deeply, while, it may be added, he never hid an See also:innuendo under a See also:metaphor or a trope. He was fundamentally too much a man of strong convictions to be correctly described as open-minded, for if nature ever determined any man's faith, it was his; the See also:root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial See also:change in his philosophy, being the feeling for See also:God. He has, indeed, described in graphic terms the greatest of the more superficial changes he underwent; how he had " carried into logical and ethical problems the See also:maxims and postulates of See also:physical knowledge," and had moved within the narrow lines See also:drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-See also:room " interpreting human phenomena by the See also:analogy of See also:external nature "; how he served in willing captivity " the ` empirical ' and ` necessarian ' mode of thought," even though " shocked " by the dogmatism and acrid humours " of certain distinguished representatives ";1 and how in a See also:period of " second education " at See also:Berlin, " mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor See also:Trendelenburg," he experienced " a new intellectual See also:birth" which " was essentially the See also:gift of fresh conceptions, the unsealing of hidden openings of self-consciousness, with unmeasured corridors and sacred halls behind; and, once gained, was more or less avail-able throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of See also:Kant and even See also:Hegel."2 But though this momentous change of view illuminated his old beliefs and helped him to re-interpret and re-articulate them, yet it made him no more of a theist than he had been before. And as his See also:theism was, so was his religion and his philosophy. Certainly it was true of him, in a far higher degree than of John See also: He was, indeed, no See also:mere orator or See also:speaker to multitudes. He addressed a comparatively small and select circle, a congregation of thoughtful and devout men, who cultivated reverence and loved religion all the more that their own beliefs were limited to the simplest and sublimest truths. He See also:felt the See also:majesty of these truths to be the greater that they so represented to him not only the most fundamental of human beliefs, but also all that man could be reasonably expected to believe, though to believe with his whole See also:reason. Hence the beliefs he preached were never to him mere speculative ideas, but rather the ultimate realities of being and thought, the final truths as to the See also:character and ways of God interpreted into a See also:law for the See also:government of conscience and the regulation of life. And so he became a See also:positive religious teacher by virtue of the very ideas that made the words of the See also:Hebrew prophets so potent and See also:sublime. But he did more than interpret to his age the significance of man's ultimate theistic beliefs, he gave them vitality by See also:reading them through the consciousness of Jesus See also:Christ. His religion was what he conceived the See also:personal religion of Jesus to have been; and He was to him more a See also:person to be imitated than an authority to be obeyed, rather an ideal to be revered than a being to be worshipped. Martineau's mental qualities fitted him to fulfil these high interpretative functions. He had the imagination that invested with personal being and ethical qualities the most abstruse notions. To him space became a mode of divine activity, alive with the presence and illuminated by the See also:vision of God; See also:time was an See also:arena where the divine hand guided and the divine will reigned. And though he did not believe in the Incarnation, yet he held deity to be in a sense See also:manifest in humanity; its See also:saints and heroes became, in spite of innumerable frailties, after a sort divine; man underwent an See also:apotheosis, and all life was touched with the dignity and the See also:grace which it owed to its source. The 19th century had no more reverent thinker than Martineau; the See also:awe of the Eternal was the very atmosphere that he breathed, and he looked at man with the compassion of one whose thoughts were full of God. To his function as a preacher we owe some of his most characteristic and stimulating See also:works, especially the discourses by which it may be said he won his way to wide and influential recognition—Endeavours after the Christian Life, 1st See also:series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847; See also:Hours of Thought, 1st series, 1876; 2nd series, 1879; the various hymn-books he issued at Dublin in 1831, at Liverpool in 1840, in London in 1873; and the See also:Home Prayers in 1891. But besides the vocation he had freely selected and assiduously laboured to fulfil, two more external influences helped to shape Martineau's mind and define his problem and his See also:work; the awakening of English thought to the problems which underlie both philosophy and religion, and the new and higher opportunities offered for their discussion in the periodical See also:press. The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the See also:idea of the church, the See also:historical See also:interpretation of the documents which described the persons who had created the Christian religion, especially the person and work of its founder; but those most alive in his later and maturer time chiefly related to the philosophy of religion and See also:ethics. In one respect Martineau was singularly happy; he just escaped the active and, on the whole, belittling period of the old Unitarian controversy. When his ministry began its fires were slowly dying down, though the embers still glowed. We feel its presence in his earliest notable work, The Rationale of Religious Enquiry, 1836; and may there see the rigour with which it applied audacious logic to narrow premisses, the tenacity with which it clung to a limited literal supernaturalism which it had no philosophy to justify, and so could not believe without historical and verbal authority. This traditional conservatism survived in the statement, which, while it caused vehement discussion when the See also:book appeared, was yet not so much characteristic of the man as of the school in which he had been trained, that " in no intelligible sense can any one who denies the supernatural origin of the religion of Christ be termed a Christian," which See also:term, he explained, was used not as " a name of praise," but simply as " a designation of belief." 3 He censured the See also:German rationalists " for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the See also:memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of See also:ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of See also:miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their See also:abandonment of See also:Christianity on the other." 4 The echoes of the dying controversy are thus distinct and not very distant in this book, though it also offers in its larger outlook, in the author's evident uneasiness under the See also:burden of inherited beliefs, and his inability to reconcile them with his new standpoint and accepted principles, a curious forecast of his later development, while in its positive premisses it presents a still more instructive contrast to the conclusions of his later See also:dialectic. Nor did the See also:sound of the See also:ancient controversy ever cease to be audible to him. In 1839 he sprang 3 Rationale, and ed., pref., p. vii. 4 Ibid. p. 133. to the See also:defence of Unitarian See also:doctrine, which had been assailed by certain Liverpool clergymen, of whom See also:Fielding Ould was the most active and See also:Hugh McNeill the most famous. As his See also:share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed " the See also:Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its See also:infancy to its perfection," " the Deity of Christ," " Vicarious Redemption," " Evil," and " Christianity without See also:Priest and without See also:Ritual."' He remained to the end a keen and vigilant apologist of the school in which he had been nursed. But the questions proper to the new day came swiftly upon his See also:quick and susceptible mind—enlarged, deepened and See also:developed it. Within his own See also:fold new See also:light was breaking. To W. E. See also:Channing (q.v.), whom Martineau had called " the inspirer of his youth," See also:Theodore See also:Parker had succeeded, introducing more See also:radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic See also:criticism of sacred history. Blanco See also: H. Newman, whose mind Martineau said was " See also:critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision," and whose faith is " an See also:escape from an alternative See also:scepticism, which receives the See also:veto not of his reason but of his will,"6 as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy. The philosophic principles and religious deductions of Dean See also:Mansel he disliked as much as those of Newman, but he respected his arguments more. Apart from the Churches, men like See also:Carlyle and See also:Matthew Arnold—with whom he had much in See also:common—influenced him; while See also:Herbert See also:Spencer in See also:England and See also:Comte in See also:France afforded the See also:antithesis needful to the dialectical development of his own views. He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of See also:Baur and the See also:Tubingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of See also:Renan and the See also:Strassburg theologians. The rise of See also:evolution, and the new scientific way of looking at nature and her creative methods, compelled him to rethink and reformulate his theistic principles and conclusions, especially as to the forms under which the relation of God to the See also:world and His See also:action within it could be conceived. Under the impulses which came from these various sides Martineau's mind lived and moved, and as they successively rose he promptly, by appreciation or criticism, responded to the dialectical issues which they raised. In the discussion of these questions the periodical press supplied him with the opportunity of taking an effective See also:part. At first his See also:literary activity was limited to sectional publications, and he ad-dressed his public, now as editor and now as leading contributor, in the Monthly Repository, the Christian Reformer, the Prospective, the See also:Westminster and the See also:National See also:Review. Later, especially when scientific See also:speculation had made the theistic problem urgent, he was a frequent contributor to the literary monthlies. And when in 1890 he began to gather together the See also:miscellaneous essays and papers written during a period of sixty years, he expressed the See also:hope that, though " they could See also:lay no claim to logical consistency," they might yet show " beneath the varying complexion of their thought some intelligible moral continuity," " leading in the end to a view of life more coherent and less defective than was presented at the beginning."' And though it is a proud as well as a modest hope; no one could See also:call it unjustified. For his essays are fine examples of permanent literature appearing in an ephemeral See also:medium, and represent work which has solid See also:worth for later thought as well as for the speculation of their own time. There is hardly a name or a See also:movement in the religious history of the century which he did not See also:touch and illuminate. It was in this See also:form that he criticized the " atheistic mesmerism " to which his sister Harriet had committed herself, and she never forgave his criticism. But his course was always singularly See also:independent, and, though one of the most affectionate and most sensitive of men, yet it was his See also:fortune to be so fastidious in thought and so conscientious in judgment as often to give offence or create alarm in those he deeply respected or tenderly loved. The theological and philosophical discussions which thus appeared he later described as " the tentatives which gradually prepared the way for the more systematic expositions of the Types of Ethical ' They stand as Lectures ii., v., vi., xi., xii. in the See also:volume See also:Unitarianism Defended, 1839. 2 Essays, Reviews and Addresses, ii. to. 6 Ibid. i. 46. 4 Ibid. i. 258, 262. 6 Ibid. ii. 285. 6Ibid. i. 233. 7 Essays, Reviews and Addresses, i.,Theory and The Study of Religion, and, in some measure, of The Seat of Authority in Religion."' These books expressed his mature thought, and may be said to contain, in what he conceived as a final form, the speculative achievements of his life. They appeared respectively in' 1885, 1888 and 189o, and were without doubt remarkable feats to be performed by a man who had passed his eightieth year. Their literary and speculative qualities are indeed exceptionally brilliant; they are splendid in diction, elaborate in See also:argument, cogent yet reverent, keen while fearless in criticism. But they have also most obvious defects: they are unquestionably the books of an old man who had thought much as well as spoken and written often on the themes he discusses, yet who had finally put his material together in haste at a time when his mind had lost, if not its dialectic vigour, yet its freshness and its sense of proportion; and who had been so accustomed to amplify the single stages of his argument that he had forgotten how much they needed to be reduced to See also:scale and to be built into an organic whole. In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his See also:division of ethical theories into the " unpsychological," idiopsychological," and the " hetero-psychological," is incapable of historical See also:justification; his exposition of single ethical systems is, though always interesting and suggestive, often arbitrary and inadequate, being governed by dialectical exigencies rather than historical See also:order and See also:perspective. In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an See also:anachronism; as he himself confessed, he " used the word in the sense which it invariably See also:bore See also:half a century ago," as denoting " belief in an ever-living God, a divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind." As thus used, it was a term which governed the problems of speculative theism rather than those connected with the historical origin, the evolution and the organization of religion. And these are the questions which are now to the front. These criticisms mean that his most elaborate discussions came forty years too See also:late, for they were concerned with problems which agitated the See also:middle rather than the end of the 19th century. But if we pass from this criticism of form to the actual contents of the two books, we are See also:bound to confess that they constitute a wonderfully cogent and persuasive theistic argument. That argument may be described as a criticism of man and his world used as a basis for the construction of a reasoned idea of nature and being. Man and nature, thought and being, fitted each other. What was implicit in nature had become explicit in man; the problem of the individual was one with the problem of universal experience. The interpretation of man was therefore the interpretation of his universe. Emphasis was made to fall on the reason, the conscience and the will of the finite See also:personality; and just as these were found to be native in him they were held to be immanent in the cause of his universe. What lived in time belonged to eternity; the See also:microcosm was the See also:epitome of the macrocosm;. the reason which reigned in man interpreted the law that was revealed in conscience and the See also:power which governed human destiny, while the freedom which man realized was the See also:direct negation both of See also:necessity and of the operation of any fortuitous cause in the cosmos. It was not possible, however, that the theistic idea could be discussed in relation to nature only. It was necessary that it should be applied to history and to the forces and personalities active within it. And of these the greatest was of course the Person that had created the Christian religion. What did Jesus signify? What authority belonged to Him and to the books that contain His history and interpret His person? This was the problem which Martineau attempted to See also:deal with in The Seat of Authority in Religion. The workmanship of the book is unequal: historical and literary criticism had never been Martineau's strongest point, although he had almost continuously maintained an amount of New Testament study, as his See also:note-books show. In its speculative parts the book is quite equal to those that had gone before, but in its literary and historical parts there are indications of a mind in which a long-practised logic had become a rooted See also:habit. While a comparison of his expositions of the Pauline and Johannine Christologies with the earlier Unitarian exegesis in which he had been trained shows how wide is the See also:interval, the work does not represent a mind that had throughout its history lived and worked in the delicate and judicial investigations he here tried to conduct. Martineau's theory of the religious society or church was that of an idealist rather than of a statesman or See also:practical politician. He stood equally remote from the old Voluntary principle, that " the State had nothing to do with religion," and from the sacerdotal position that the See also:clergy stood in an apostolic See also:succession, and either constituted the Church or were the persons into whose hands its guidance had been committed. He hated two things intensely, a sacrosanct priesthood and an enforced uniformity. He may be said to have believed in the sanity and sanctity of the state rather than of the Church. Statesmen he could See also:trust as he would not trust ecclesiastics. And so he even propounded a See also:scheme, which fell still-born, that would haw.. 6 Ibid. iii.. pref., p. vi. repealed uniformity, taken the church out of the hands of a clerical order, and allowed the coordination of sects or churches under the state. Not that he would have allowed the state to touch doctrine, to determine polity or discipline; btt he would have had it to recognize historical achievement, religious character and capacity, grid endow out of its ample resources those See also:societies which had vindicated their right to be regarded as making for religion. His ideal may have been academic, but it was the See also:dream of a mind that thought nobly both of religion and of the state. See Life and Letters by J. See also:Drummond and C. B. Upton (2 vols., 1901); J. E. Carpenter, James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher (1905); J. See also:Crawford, Recollections of James Martineau (1903); A. W. See also:Jackson, James Martineau, a See also:Biography and a Study (See also:Boston, 1900) ; H. See also:Sidgwick, Lectures on the Ethics of See also:Green, Spencer and Martineau (1902) ; and J. See also:Hunt, Religious Thought in England in the rgth Century. (A. M. 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