MARTIN, WILLIAM(1767-1810), English naturalist, the son of a hosier, was born at Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, in 1767. He studied drawing at an early age from James Bolton at Halifax, and gained from him a taste for the study of natural history. In 1805 he was appointed drawing master in the grammar school at Macclesfield. Meanwhile he cultivated his taste for natural history, and was in 1796 elected a fellow of the Linnaean Society. He is best known for his early works on British fossils, entitledPetrifacta derbiensia or Figures and Descriptions of Petrifactions collected in Derbyshire(1809); andOutlines of an Attempt to establish a Knowledge of Extraneous Fossils on Scientific Principles(1809). He died at Macclesfield on the 31st of May 1810.
MARTIN, SIR WILLIAM FANSHAWE(1801-1895), British admiral, son of Admiral of the Fleet Sir Thomas Byam Martin, comptroller of the navy, and grandson, on the mother’s side, of Captain Robert Fanshawe, who commanded the “Namur” 90 in Rodney’s victory of the 12th of April 1782, was born on the 5th of December 1801. Entering the navy at the age of twelve, his father’s interest secured his rapid promotion: he was made a lieutenant on the 15th of December 1820; on the 8th of February 1823 he was promoted to be commander of the “Fly” sloop, his good service in which in support of the interests of British merchants at Callao secured his promotion as captain on the 5th of June 1824. He afterwards served in the Mediterranean and on the home station. In 1849-1852 he was commodore commanding the Channel squadron, and gave evidence of a remarkable aptitude for command. He was made rear-admiral in May 1853, and for the next four years was superintendent of Portsmouth dockyard. He was made vice-admiral in February 1858, and after a year as a lord of the admiralty, was appointed commander-in-chief in the Mediterranean. The discipline of the navy was then bad. It was a tradition sprung from the wholesale shipment of gaol-birds during the old war, that the men were to be treated without consideration; moreover the ships had been largely filled up with “bounty men” bought into the service with a £10 note without training. Out of this unpromising material Martin formed the fleet which was at that time the ideal of excellence. He had no war service, and, beyond the Italian disturbance of 1860-61, no opportunity for showing diplomatic ability. But his memory lives as that of the reformer of discipline and the originator of a comprehensive system of steam manœuvres. He became an admiral in November 1863, and on the 4th of December succeeded to the baronetcy which had been conferred on his grandfather. His last appointment was the command at Plymouth, 1866-1869, and in 1870 he was put on the retired list. In 1873 the G.C.B. was conferred on him, and in 1878 he was made rear-admiral. He died at Upton Grey, near Winchfield, on the 24th of March 1895. He was twice married, and left, besides daughters, one son, who succeeded to the baronetcy.
MARTIN OF TROPPAU,orMartin the Pole(d. 1278), chronicler, was born at Troppau, and entered the order of St Dominic at Prague. Afterwards he went to Rome and became papal chaplain under Clement IV. and other popes. In 1278 Pope Nicholas III. appointed him archbishop of Gnesen, but he died at Bologna whilst proceeding to Poland to take up his new duties. Martin wrote some sermons and some commentaries on the canon law; but more important is hisChronicon pontificum et imperatorum, a history of the popes and emperors to 1277. Written at the request of Clement IV. theChroniconis jejune and untrustworthy, and was mainly responsible for the currency of the legend of Pope Joan, and the one about the institution of seven electors by the pope. Nevertheless it enjoyed an extraordinary popularity and found many continuators; but its value to students arises solely from the fact that it was used by numerous chroniclers during the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries. In the 15th century it was translated into French, and as part of theChronique martinianewas often quoted by controversialists. It has also been translated into German, Italian and Bohemian.
The Latin text is printed, with introduction by L. Weiland, in Band XXII. of theMonumenta Germaniae historica(Hanover and Berlin, 1826 seq.). See G. Waitz, H. Brosien and others in theNeues Archiv der Geseltschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde(Hanover, 1876 seq.); W. Wattenbach,Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, Band II. (Berlin, 1894); and A. Molinier,Les Sources de l’histoire de France, Tome III. (Paris, 1903).
The Latin text is printed, with introduction by L. Weiland, in Band XXII. of theMonumenta Germaniae historica(Hanover and Berlin, 1826 seq.). See G. Waitz, H. Brosien and others in theNeues Archiv der Geseltschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde(Hanover, 1876 seq.); W. Wattenbach,Deutschlands Geschichtsquellen, Band II. (Berlin, 1894); and A. Molinier,Les Sources de l’histoire de France, Tome III. (Paris, 1903).
MARTIN1(Fr.Martinet), theHirundo urbicaof Linnaeus andChelidon urbicaof modern ornithologists, a bird well known throughout Europe, including even Lapland, where it is abundant, retiring in winter to the south of Africa. It also inhabits the western part of Asia, and appears from time to time in large flocks in India. The martin (or house-martin, as it is often called, to distinguish it from the sand-martin) commonly reaches its summer quarters a few days later than the Swallow (q.v.), with which it is often confused in spite of the differences between them, the martin’s white rump and lower parts being conspicuous as it flies or clings to its nest attached to houses. This nest, made of the same material as the swallow’s, is, however, a more difficult structure to rear, and a week or more is often occupied in laying its foundations—the builders clinging to the wall while depositing the mud of which it is composed. The base once fixed, the superstructure is often quickly added, till the whole takes the shape of the half or quarter of a hemisphere, and is finished with a lining of feathers mixed with a few bents or straws. The martin builds soon after its return, and a nest that has outlasted the winter is almost at once reoccupied. The bird usually in the course of the summer raises a second, or rarely a third, brood of offspring—though the latest broods often die in the nest, apparently through failure of food. What seem to be adults are observed in England every year so late as November, and sometimes within a few days of the winter solstice, but these late birds are almost certainly strangers.
The sand-martin,Hirundo ripariaof Linnaeus andCotile ripariaof modern writers, differs much in appearance and habits from the former. Its smaller size, mouse-coloured upper surface and jerking flight distinguish it from the other BritishHirundinidae; but it is seldom discriminated, and, being the first of the family to return to its northern home, the so-called “early swallow” is nearly always of this species. Instead of the clay-built nest of the house-martin, this bird bores horizontal galleries in an escarpment. When beginning its excavation, it clings to the face of the bank, and with its bill loosens the earth, working from the centre outwards, and often hanging head downwards. The tunnel may extend to 4, 6, or even 9 ft. The gallery seems intended to be straight, but inequalities of the ground, and especially the meeting with stones, often causes it to take a sinuous course. At the end is formed a nest lined with a few grass-stalks and feathers. The sand-martin has several broods in the year, and is more regular than otherHirundinidaein its departure for the south. The kind of soil needed for its nesting habits makes it somewhat local, but no species of the orderPassereshas a geographical range that can compare with this. In Europe it is found nearly to the North Cape, and thence to the Sea of Okhotsk. In winter it visits many parts of India and South Africa to the Transvaal. In America its range extends (having due regard to the season) from Melville Island to Caiçara in Brazil, and from Newfoundland to Alaska.
The purple martin of America,Progne purpurea, is a favourite in Canada and the United States. Naturally breeding in hollow trees, it readily adapts itself to the nest-boxes which are commonly set up for it; but its numbers are in some years and places diminished in a manner unexplained. The limits of its range in winter are not determined, chiefly owing to the differences of opinion as to the validity of certain supposed kindred species found in South America; but according to some authorities it reaches the border of Patagonia, while in summer it is known to inhabit lands within the Arctic Circle. The male is almost wholly of a glossy steel-blue, while the female is duller in colour above, and beneath of a brownish-grey.
Birds that may be called martins occur almost all over the world except in New Zealand, which is not regularly inhabited by any member of the family. The ordinary martin of Australia is thePetrochelidon nigricansof most ornithologists, and another and more beautiful form is the ariel or fairy-martin of the same country,Petrochelidon ariel. This last builds a bottle-shaped nest of mud, as does also the rock-martin of Europe,Cotile rupestris. The eggs of martins are from four to seven in number, and generally white, while those of swallows usually have brown, grey or lilac markings.
(A. N.)
1The older English form, martlet (French,Martelet), is, except in heralds’ language, almost obsolete, and when used is now applied in some places to the Swift (q.v.). The bird called martin by French colonists in the Old World is a mynah (Acridotheres). (SeeGrackle.)
1The older English form, martlet (French,Martelet), is, except in heralds’ language, almost obsolete, and when used is now applied in some places to the Swift (q.v.). The bird called martin by French colonists in the Old World is a mynah (Acridotheres). (SeeGrackle.)
MARTINEAU, HARRIET(1802-1876), English writer, was born at Norwich, where her father was a manufacturer, on the 12th of June 1802. The family was of Huguenot extraction (seeMartineau, James) and professed Unitarian views. The atmosphere of her home was industrious, intellectual and austere; she herself was clever, but weakly and unhappy; she had no sense of taste or smell, and moreover early grew deaf. At the age of fifteen the state of her health and nerves led to a prolonged visit to her father’s sister, Mrs Kentish, who kept a school at Bristol. Here, in the companionship of amiable and talented people, her life became happier. Here, also, she fell under the influence of the Unitarian minister, Dr Lant Carpenter, from whose instructions, she says, she derived “an abominable spiritual rigidity and a truly respectable force of conscience strangely mingled together.” From 1819 to 1830 she again resided chiefly at Norwich. About her twentieth year her deafness became confirmed. In 1821 she began to write anonymously for theMonthly Repository, a Unitarian periodical, and in 1823 she publishedDevotional Exercises and Addresses, Prayers and Hymns.
In 1826 her father died, leaving a bare maintenance to his wife and daughters. His death had been preceded by that of his eldest son, and was shortly followed by that of a man to whom Harriet was engaged. Mrs Martineau and her daughters soon after lost all their means by the failure of the house where their money was placed. Harriet had to earn her living, and, being precluded by deafness from teaching, took up authorship in earnest. Besides reviewing for theRepositoryshe wrote stories (afterwards collected asTraditions of Palestine), gained in one year (1830) three essay-prizes of the Unitarian Association, and eked out her income by needlework. In 1831 she was seeking a publisher for a series of tales designed asIllustrations of Political Economy. After many failures she accepted disadvantageous terms from Charles Fox, to whom she was introduced by his brother, the editor of theRepository. The sale of the first of the series was immediate and enormous, the demand increased with each new number, and from that time her literary success was secured. In 1832 she moved to London, where she numbered among her acquaintance Hallam, Milman, Malthus, Monckton Milnes, Sydney Smith, Bulwer, and later Carlyle. Till 1834 she continued to be occupied with her political economy series and with a supplemental series ofIllustrations of Taxation. Four stories dealing with the poor-law came out about the same time. These tales, direct, lucid, written without any appearance of effort, and yet practically effective, display the characteristics of their author’s style. In 1834, when the series was complete, Miss Martineau paid a long visit to America. Here her open adhesion to the Abolitionist party, then small and very unpopular, gave great offence, which was deepened by the publication, soon after her return, ofSociety in America(1837) and aRetrospect of Western Travel(1838). An article in theWestminster Review, “The Martyr Age of the United States,” introduced English readers to the struggles of the Abolitionists. The American books were followed by a novel,Deerbrook(1839)—a story of middle-class country life. To the same period belong a few little handbooks, forming parts of aGuide to Service. The veracity of herMaid of All Workled to a widespread belief, which she regarded with some complacency, that she had once been a maid of all work herself.
In 1839, during a visit to the Continent, Miss Martineau’s health broke down. She retired to solitary lodgings in Tynemouth,and remained an invalid till 1844. Besides a novel,The Hour and the Man(1840),Life in the Sickroom(1844), and thePlayfellow(1841), she published a series of tales for children containing some of her most popular work:Settlers at Home,The Peasant and the Prince,Feats on the Fiord, &c. During this illness she for a second time declined a pension on the civil list, fearing to compromise her political independence. Her letter on the subject was published, and some of her friends raised a small annuity for her soon after.
In 1844 Miss Martineau underwent a course of mesmerism, and in a few months was restored to health. She eventually published an account of her case, which had caused much discussion, in sixteenLetters on Mesmerism. On her recovery she removed to Ambleside, where she built herself “The Knoll,” the house in which the greater part of her after life was spent. In 1845 she published three volumes ofForest and Game Law Tales. In 1846 she made a tour with some friends in Egypt, Palestine and Syria, and on her return publishedEastern Life, Present and Past(1848). This work showed that as humanity passed through one after another of the world’s historic religions, the conception of the Deity and of Divine government became at each step more and more abstract and indefinite. The ultimate goal Miss Martineau believed to be philosophic atheism, but this belief she did not expressly declare. She published about this timeHousehold Education, expounding the theory that freedom and rationality, rather than command and obedience, are the most effectual instruments of education. Her interest in schemes of instruction led her to start a series of lectures, addressed at first to the school children of Ambleside, but afterwards extended, at their own desire, to their elders. The subjects were sanitary principles and practice, the histories of England and North America, and the scenes of her Eastern travels. At the request of Charles Knight she wrote, in 1849,The History of the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1816-1846—an excellent popular history written from the point of view of a “philosophical Radical,” completed in twelve months.
In 1851 Miss Martineau edited a volume ofLetters on the Laws of Man’s Nature and Development. Its form is that of a correspondence between herself and H. G. Atkinson, and it expounds that doctrine of philosophical atheism to which Miss Martineau inEastern Lifehad depicted the course of human belief as tending. The existence of a first cause is not denied, but is declared unknowable, and the authors, while regarded by others as denying it, certainly considered themselves to be affirming the doctrine of man’s moral obligation. Atkinson was a zealous exponent of mesmerism, and the prominence given to the topics of mesmerism and clairvoyance heightened the general disapprobation of the book, which caused a lasting division between Miss Martineau and some of her friends.
She published a condensed English version of thePhilosophie Positive(1853). To theDaily Newsshe contributed regularly from 1852 to 1866. HerLetters from Ireland, written during a visit to that country in the summer of 1852, appeared in that paper. She was for many years a contributor to theWestminster Review, and was one of the little band of supporters whose pecuniary assistance in 1854 prevented its extinction or forced sale. In the early part of 1855 Miss Martineau found herself suffering from heart disease. She now began to write her autobiography, but her life, which she supposed to be so near its close, was prolonged for twenty years. She died at “The Knoll” on the 27th of June 1876.
She cultivated a tiny farm at Ambleside with success, and her poorer neighbours owed much to her. Her busy life bears the consistent impress of two leading characteristics—industry and sincerity. The verdict which she records on herself in the autobiographical sketch left to be published by theDaily Newshas been endorsed by posterity. She says—“Her original power was nothing more than was due to earnestness and intellectual clearness within a certain range. With small imaginative and suggestive powers, and therefore nothing approaching to genius, she could see clearly what she did see, and give a clear expression to what she had to say. In short, she could popularize while she could neither discover nor invent.” Her judgment on large questions was clear and sound, and was always the judgment of a mind naturally progressive and Protestant.
See herAutobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman(1877) and Mrs. Fenwick Miller,Harriet Martineau(1884, “Eminent Women Series”).
See herAutobiography, with Memorials by Maria Weston Chapman(1877) and Mrs. Fenwick Miller,Harriet Martineau(1884, “Eminent Women Series”).
MARTINEAU, JAMES(1805-1900), English philosopher and divine, was born at Norwich on the 21st of April 1805, the seventh child of Thomas Martineau and Elizabeth Rankin, the sixth, his senior by almost three years, being his sister Harriet (see above). He was descended from Gaston Martineau, a Huguenot surgeon and refugee, who married in 1693 Marie Pierre, and settled soon afterwards in Norwich. His son and grandson—respectively the great-grandfather and grandfather of James Martineau—were surgeons in the same city, while his father was a manufacturer and merchant. James was educated at Norwich Grammar School under Edward Valpy, as good a scholar as his better-known brother Richard. But the boy proving too sensitive for the life of a public day school, was sent to Bristol to the private academy of Dr Lant Carpenter, under whom he studied for two years. On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer at Derby, where he acquired “a store of exclusively scientific conceptions,”1but also experienced the hunger of mind which forced him to look to religion for satisfaction. Hence came his “conversion,” and the sense of vocation for the ministry which impelled him in 1822 to enter Manchester College, then lodged at York. Here he “woke up to the interest of moral and metaphysical speculations.” Of his teachers, one, the Rev. Charles Wellbeloved, was, Martineau said, “a master of the true Lardner type, candid and catholic, simple and thorough, humanly fond indeed of the counsels of peace, but piously serving every bidding of sacred truth.” “He never justified a prejudice; he never misdirected our admiration; he never hurt an innocent feeling or overbore a serious judgment; and he set up within us a standard of Christian scholarship to which it must ever exalt us to aspire.”2The other, the Rev. John Kenrick, he described as a man so learned as to be placed by Dean Stanley “in the same line with Blomfield and Thirlwall,”3and as “so far above the level of either vanity or dogmatism, that cynicism itself could not think of them in his presence.”4
On leaving the college in 1827 Martineau returned to Bristol to teach in the school of Lant Carpenter; but in the following year he was ordained for a Unitarian church in Dublin, whose senior minister was a relative of his own. But his career there was in 1832 suddenly cut short by difficulties growing out of the “regium donum,” which had on the death of the senior minister fallen to him. He conceived it as “a religious monopoly” to which “the nation at large contributes,” while “Presbyterians alone receive,” and which placed him in “a relation to the state” so “seriously objectionable” as to be “impossible to hold.”5The invidious distinction it drew between Presbyterians on the one hand, and Catholics, Friends, free-thinking Christians, unbelievers and Jews on the other, who were compelled to support a ministry they “conscientiously disapproved,” offended his always delicate conscience; while possibly the intellectual and ecclesiastical atmosphere of the city proved uncongenial to his liberal magnanimity. From Dublin he was called to Liverpool, and there for a quarter of a century he exercised extraordinary influence as a preacher, and achieved a high reputation as a writer in religious philosophy. In 1840 he was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy and political economy in Manchester New College, the 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 forty-five years. In 1853 the college removed to London, and four years later he followed it thither. In 1858 he was called tooccupy the pulpit of Little Portland Street chapel in London, which he did at first for two years in conjunction with the Rev. J. J. Tayler, who was also his colleague in the college, and then for twelve years alone. In 1866 the chair of the philosophy of mind and logic in University College, London, fell vacant, and Martineau became a candidate. But potent opposition was offered to the appointment of a minister of religion, and the chair went to George Croom 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 long served and adorned. Martineau, who was in his youth denied the benefit of a university education, yet in his age found famous universities eager to confer upon him their highest distinctions. He was made LL.D. of Harvard in 1872, S.T.D. of Leiden in 1874, D.D. of Edinburgh in 1884, D.C.L. of Oxford in 1888 and D.Litt. of Dublin in 1891. He died in London on the 11th of 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 history. He was a man happy in his ancestry; he inherited the dignity, the reserve, the keen and vivid intellect, and the picturesque imagination of the 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 face of exclusion from academic privileges. He had the sweet and patient 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 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 innuendo under a 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 root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial change in his philosophy, being the feeling for 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 maxims and postulates of physical knowledge,” and had moved within the narrow lines drawn by the philosophical instructions of the class-room “interpreting human phenomena by the analogy of 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”;6and how in a period of “second education” at Berlin, “mainly under the admirable guidance of Professor Trendelenburg,” he experienced “a new intellectual birth” which “was essentially the 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 available throughout the history of philosophy, and lifted the darkness from the pages of Kant and even Hegel.”7But 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 theism was, so was his religion and his philosophy. Certainly it was true of him, in a far higher degree than of John Henry Newman, that the being of God and himself were to his mind two absolutely self-luminous truths—though both his God and his self were almost infinitely remote from Newman’s. And as these truths were self-evident, so the religion he deduced from them was sufficient, not only for his own moral and intellectual nature, but also for man as he conceived him, for history as he knew it, and for society as he saw it.
We may, alternatively, describe Martineau’s religion as his applied philosophy or his philosophy as his explicated religion, and both as the expression of his singularly fine ethical and reverent nature. But to understand these in their mutual and explanatory relations it will be necessary to exhibit the conditions under which his thought grew into consistency and system. His main function made him in his early life a preacher even more emphatically than a teacher. In all he said and all he thought he had the preacher’s end in view. He was, indeed, no mere orator or 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 felt the 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 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 character and ways of God interpreted into a law for the government of conscience and the regulation of life. And so he became a positive religious teacher by virtue of the very ideas that made the words of the Hebrew prophets so potent and sublime. But he did more than interpret to his age the significance of man’s ultimate theistic beliefs, he gave them vitality by reading them through the consciousness of Jesus Christ. His religion was what he conceived the personal religion of Jesus to have been; and He was to him more a 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 vision of God; time was an 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 manifest in humanity; its saints and heroes became, in spite of innumerable frailties, after a sort divine; man underwent an apotheosis, and all life was touched with the dignity and the grace which it owed to its source. The 19th century had no more reverent thinker than Martineau; the 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 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 series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847;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 theHome Prayersin 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 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 press. The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the idea of the church, the historical 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 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 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 term, he explained, was used not as “a name of praise,” but simply as “a designation of belief.”8He censured the German rationalists “for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other.”9The 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 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 dialectic. Nor did the sound of the ancient controversy ever cease to be audible to him. In 1839 he sprangto the defence of Unitarian doctrine, which had been assailed by certain Liverpool clergymen, of whom Fielding Ould was the most active and Hugh McNeill the most famous. As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed “the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection,” “the Deity of Christ,” “Vicarious Redemption,” “Evil,” and “Christianity without Priest and without Ritual.”10He 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 quick and susceptible mind—enlarged, deepened and developed it. Within his own fold new light was breaking. To W. E. Channing (q.v.), whom Martineau had called “the inspirer of his youth,” Theodore Parker had succeeded, introducing more radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic criticism of sacred history. Blanco White, “the rationalist A’Kempis,” who had dared to appear as “a religious sceptic in God’s presence,” had found a biographer and interpreter in Martineau’s friend and colleague, John Hamilton Thom. Within the English Church men with whom he had both personal and religious sympathy rose—Whately, of whom he said, “We know no living writer who has proved so little and disproved so much”;11and Thomas Arnold, “a man who could be a hero without romance”;12F. D. Maurice, whose character, marked by “religious realism,” sought in the past “the witness to eternal truths, the manifestation by time-samples of infinite realities and unchanging relations”;13and Charles Kingsley, “a great teacher,” though one “certain to go astray the moment he becomes didactic.”14Beside these may be placed men like E. B. Pusey and J. H. Newman, whose mind Martineau said was “critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision,” and whose faith is “an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives thevetonot of his reason but of his will,”15as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy. The philosophic principles and religious deductions of Dean Mansel he disliked as much as those of Newman, but he respected his arguments more. Apart from the Churches, men like Carlyle and Matthew Arnold—with whom he had much in common—influenced him; while Herbert Spencer in England and Comte in France afforded the antithesis needful to the dialectical development of his own views. He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of Renan and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of 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 world and His 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 part. At first his literary activity was limited to sectional publications, and he addressed his public, now as editor and now as leading contributor, in theMonthly Repository, theChristian Reformer, theProspective, the Westminster and theNational Review. Later, especially when scientific 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 miscellaneous essays and papers written during a period of sixty years, he expressed the hope that, though “they could 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.”16And though it is a proud as well as a modest hope, no one could call it unjustified. For his essays are fine examples of permanent literature appearing in an ephemeral medium, and represent work which has solid worth for later thought as well as for the speculation of their own time. There is hardly a name or a movement in the religious history of the century which he did not touch and illuminate. It was in this 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 independent, and, though one of the most affectionate and most sensitive of men, yet it was his 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 theTypes of Ethical TheoryandThe Study of Religion, and, in some measure, ofThe Seat of Authority in Religion.”17These 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 1890, 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 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 scale and to be built into an organic whole. In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his division of ethical theories into the “unpsychological,” “idiopsychological,” and the “hetero-psychological,” is incapable of historical 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 order and perspective. In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he “used the word in the sense which it invariably bore 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 late, for they were concerned with problems which agitated the 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 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 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 microcosm was the epitome of the macrocosm; the reason which reigned in man interpreted the law that was revealed in conscience and the power which governed human destiny, while the freedom which man realized was the direct negation both of 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 deal with inThe 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 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 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 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.
We may, alternatively, describe Martineau’s religion as his applied philosophy or his philosophy as his explicated religion, and both as the expression of his singularly fine ethical and reverent nature. But to understand these in their mutual and explanatory relations it will be necessary to exhibit the conditions under which his thought grew into consistency and system. His main function made him in his early life a preacher even more emphatically than a teacher. In all he said and all he thought he had the preacher’s end in view. He was, indeed, no mere orator or 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 felt the 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 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 character and ways of God interpreted into a law for the government of conscience and the regulation of life. And so he became a positive religious teacher by virtue of the very ideas that made the words of the Hebrew prophets so potent and sublime. But he did more than interpret to his age the significance of man’s ultimate theistic beliefs, he gave them vitality by reading them through the consciousness of Jesus Christ. His religion was what he conceived the personal religion of Jesus to have been; and He was to him more a 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 vision of God; time was an 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 manifest in humanity; its saints and heroes became, in spite of innumerable frailties, after a sort divine; man underwent an apotheosis, and all life was touched with the dignity and the grace which it owed to its source. The 19th century had no more reverent thinker than Martineau; the 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 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 series, 1843; 2nd series, 1847;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 theHome Prayersin 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 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 press. The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the idea of the church, the historical 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 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 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 term, he explained, was used not as “a name of praise,” but simply as “a designation of belief.”8He censured the German rationalists “for having preferred, by convulsive efforts of interpretation, to compress the memoirs of Christ and His apostles into the dimensions of ordinary life, rather than admit the operation of miracle on the one hand, or proclaim their abandonment of Christianity on the other.”9The 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 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 dialectic. Nor did the sound of the ancient controversy ever cease to be audible to him. In 1839 he sprangto the defence of Unitarian doctrine, which had been assailed by certain Liverpool clergymen, of whom Fielding Ould was the most active and Hugh McNeill the most famous. As his share in the controversy, Martineau published five discourses, in which he discussed “the Bible as the great autobiography of human nature from its infancy to its perfection,” “the Deity of Christ,” “Vicarious Redemption,” “Evil,” and “Christianity without Priest and without Ritual.”10He 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 quick and susceptible mind—enlarged, deepened and developed it. Within his own fold new light was breaking. To W. E. Channing (q.v.), whom Martineau had called “the inspirer of his youth,” Theodore Parker had succeeded, introducing more radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic criticism of sacred history. Blanco White, “the rationalist A’Kempis,” who had dared to appear as “a religious sceptic in God’s presence,” had found a biographer and interpreter in Martineau’s friend and colleague, John Hamilton Thom. Within the English Church men with whom he had both personal and religious sympathy rose—Whately, of whom he said, “We know no living writer who has proved so little and disproved so much”;11and Thomas Arnold, “a man who could be a hero without romance”;12F. D. Maurice, whose character, marked by “religious realism,” sought in the past “the witness to eternal truths, the manifestation by time-samples of infinite realities and unchanging relations”;13and Charles Kingsley, “a great teacher,” though one “certain to go astray the moment he becomes didactic.”14Beside these may be placed men like E. B. Pusey and J. H. Newman, whose mind Martineau said was “critical, not prophetic, since without immediateness of religious vision,” and whose faith is “an escape from an alternative scepticism, which receives thevetonot of his reason but of his will,”15as men for whose teachings and methods he had a potent and stimulating antipathy. The philosophic principles and religious deductions of Dean Mansel he disliked as much as those of Newman, but he respected his arguments more. Apart from the Churches, men like Carlyle and Matthew Arnold—with whom he had much in common—influenced him; while Herbert Spencer in England and Comte in France afforded the antithesis needful to the dialectical development of his own views. He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of Renan and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of 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 world and His 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 part. At first his literary activity was limited to sectional publications, and he addressed his public, now as editor and now as leading contributor, in theMonthly Repository, theChristian Reformer, theProspective, the Westminster and theNational Review. Later, especially when scientific 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 miscellaneous essays and papers written during a period of sixty years, he expressed the hope that, though “they could 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.”16And though it is a proud as well as a modest hope, no one could call it unjustified. For his essays are fine examples of permanent literature appearing in an ephemeral medium, and represent work which has solid worth for later thought as well as for the speculation of their own time. There is hardly a name or a movement in the religious history of the century which he did not touch and illuminate. It was in this 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 independent, and, though one of the most affectionate and most sensitive of men, yet it was his 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 theTypes of Ethical TheoryandThe Study of Religion, and, in some measure, ofThe Seat of Authority in Religion.”17These 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 1890, 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 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 scale and to be built into an organic whole. In the first of these books his nomenclature is unfortunate; his division of ethical theories into the “unpsychological,” “idiopsychological,” and the “hetero-psychological,” is incapable of historical 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 order and perspective. In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he “used the word in the sense which it invariably bore 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 late, for they were concerned with problems which agitated the 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 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 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 microcosm was the epitome of the macrocosm; the reason which reigned in man interpreted the law that was revealed in conscience and the power which governed human destiny, while the freedom which man realized was the direct negation both of 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 deal with inThe 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 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 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 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 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 clergy stood in an apostolic 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 trust as he would not trust ecclesiastics. And so he even propounded a scheme, which fell still-born, that would haverepealed 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; but he would have had it to recognize historical achievement, religious character and capacity, and endow out of its ample resources those societies which had vindicated their right to be regarded as making for religion. His ideal may have been academic, but it was the dream of a mind that thought nobly both of religion and of the state.
SeeLife and Lettersby J. Drummond and C. B. Upton (2 vols., 1901); J. E. Carpenter,James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher(1905); J. Crawford,Recollectionsof James Martineau (1903); A. W. Jackson,James Martineau, a Biography and a Study(Boston, 1900); H. Sidgwick,Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau(1902); and J. Hunt,Religious Thought in England in the 19th Century.
SeeLife and Lettersby J. Drummond and C. B. Upton (2 vols., 1901); J. E. Carpenter,James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher(1905); J. Crawford,Recollectionsof James Martineau (1903); A. W. Jackson,James Martineau, a Biography and a Study(Boston, 1900); H. Sidgwick,Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau(1902); and J. Hunt,Religious Thought in England in the 19th Century.
(A. M. F.)
1Types of Ethical Theory, i. 8.2Essays, Reviews and Addresses, iv. 54.3Ibid. i. 397.4Essays, Reviews and Addresses, i. 419.5Martineau’s “Letter to the Dissenting Congregation of Eustace Street” (Dublin).6Types of Ethical Theory, i. pp. vii.-ix.7Ibid. p. xiii.8Rationale, 2nd ed., pref., p. vii.9Ibid. p. 133.10They stand as Lectures ii., v., vi., xi., xii. in the volumeUnitarianism Defended, 1839.11Essays,Reviews and Addresses, ii. 10.12Ibid. i. 46.13Ibid. i. 258, 262.14Ibid. ii. 285.15Ibid. i. 233.16Essays, Reviews and Addresses, i., iii.17Ibid, iii., pref., p. vi.
1Types of Ethical Theory, i. 8.
2Essays, Reviews and Addresses, iv. 54.
3Ibid. i. 397.
4Essays, Reviews and Addresses, i. 419.
5Martineau’s “Letter to the Dissenting Congregation of Eustace Street” (Dublin).
6Types of Ethical Theory, i. pp. vii.-ix.
7Ibid. p. xiii.
8Rationale, 2nd ed., pref., p. vii.
9Ibid. p. 133.
10They stand as Lectures ii., v., vi., xi., xii. in the volumeUnitarianism Defended, 1839.
11Essays,Reviews and Addresses, ii. 10.
12Ibid. i. 46.
13Ibid. i. 258, 262.
14Ibid. ii. 285.
15Ibid. i. 233.
16Essays, Reviews and Addresses, i., iii.
17Ibid, iii., pref., p. vi.