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private correspondence, and her private journals. As for Lord John's children, they brought him all their childish troubles, and confided to him all their childish thoughts. He was never, in his busiest days, so busy that he had not time to devote to them. In 1846, when he was charged with the formation of a Ministry, he stopped at Wimbledon on his way from Osborne to London, and had a game of ball with his boy. And in the spring of 1865, when most men thought that the Foreign Minister was engrossed with the affairs of his office, his youngest daughter, who was laid up with illness, had more pressing work for him, sending him from her bed the following note :—

I am very sorry to say that the canary you gave me is dead. Mammy said I [had] better write to tell you. I should like very much if you would come up to talk about it.

Lord John's intense love for wife and children may be said to have occasionally interfered with his efficiency as a public man. When domestic trouble was heavy on him, he was always disposed to look with despondency on public affairs; and it was not perhaps an altogether accidental circumstance that crises in the Cabinet had a tendency to synchronise with anxiety at home. Writing to his wife from Windsor in April 1847, he said—

Baron Stockmar came in and asked me what had made me so low yesterday evening. I was obliged to say that it was your not being so well. He could not imagine so simple a cause, and thought that there must be something wrong in the state of Europe.

While, in the following year, writing from Balmoral, he said to Lady John

I do not envy the Queen anything she has, except the rosy cheeks of Prince Alfred. Our poor boy is so different, and gets so depressed and unstrung.

When trouble came upon him he was frequently prostrated by the blow. 'Jesus wept,' so ran his consolatory note to his son-in-law Mr. Villiers after the Bishop of Durham's death

Jesus wept; and these natural sorrows must be indulged before they can be checked..

In periods of sorrow and in joy he sought in religion consolation and encouragement. His views on the highest subjects with which man's mind can occupy itself were not perhaps thought out with the accuracy of a metaphysician. He probably was not sorry to leave a great deal unsettled and vague. He never seriously addressed himself to the questions which have agitated Christianity in our own times. He accepted Jesus Christ as the Divine Founder of a religion of love; he regarded the Bible as the word of God. To the last hour of his life he looked back with satisfaction to the share which he had himself had in terminating the monopoly of printing it in Scotland. A visitor at Pembroke Lodge noticed that the only book on his library table was an old Bible Society's Bible bound in sheepskin. He could not understand the complicated dogmas of other Christians. He detested the doctrines of Rome, and the pretensions of the High Church party in the English Church. He frequently spoke of them in language which could not fail to give offence.

There is, there is, one primitive and sure

Religion pure:

Unchanged in spirit though its forms and codes

Wear myriad modes,

Contains all creeds within its mighty span,

The love of God, displayed in love of man.

Such were the lines which he quoted with approval in the third letter to Mr. Chichester Fortescue.

Lady Russell wrote

His religion was as simple and true as everything else about him. He deplored the earthly and sectarian trappings by which man has disfigured Christianity-the multiplication of creeds, dogmas, ceremonies in the Church of England; her assumption: of sanctity as the special depositary of truth; the narrowness of spirit which has made her through all history the enemy of free thought and progress. He was very severe on the wearisome and irreverent repetitions in her services . . . he disliked the reading

of the Commandments, one of which-the fourth-not one of those who prayed to obey it meant to obey. . . . There was, I need hardly say, much that he heartily loved and admired in the liturgy. The thanksgiving prayer was especially dear to him. . . Baptism he, of course, considered merely as an outward sign. He had himself never been confirmed, but did not trouble his mind about the petty superstition which would have made this an obstacle to his joining in the Lord's Supper. This rite was to him nothing but a simple remembrance of Christ's last supper and death.1 He thought the English Catechism wholly unfit for children, and vehemently disliked the dogmatic parts of it. His thoughts and opinions were not to be bounded or cramped by the regulations of any one sect built up by man. He looked forward to a day when there would be no priests, or rather when every man would be a priest, and all superstitious notions—such as is implied in the notion that only a clergyman ought to perform certain offices of religion -should be cast aside by Christian men for ever.

In practice, however, Lord John showed a greater tolerance than might be inferred from some of his opinions or writings.. When he was in London he usually attended the services at St. Paul's, Knightsbridge, or at Belgrave Chapel. It would have been difficult to select two churches, within a reasonable distance of Chesham Place, representing more opposite poles of thought. But he did not confine himself to places of worship within the pale of the Church. Lady John and he went sometimes to hear the great Nonconformist preachers; while occasionally, like most men of deep religious feeling, he recognised that public worship does not constitute the highest form of devotion. Sitting one Sunday among his trees and his flowers, with his daughter and his grandchildren around him, he said to Lady Russell, 'It conduces much to piety not to go to church sometimes.'

Such is a rough sketch of Lord Russell's religious views.

1 Writing to Lady Victoria Villiers in 1866, Lord Russell said, 'About his and your views on the Eucharist, every one must judge for himself how far he believes in the spiritual presence of Christ in the Holy Communion. Without questioning your belief, I am inclined to think that every act of kindness and love and charity to our fellow-creatures obtains the special blessing of God and Christ-that the merciful shall obtain mercy; and those who forgive trespasses of others may hope forgiveness of their own.'

But his opinions on the highest subjects were modified by his political judgment. Few Tories-who had resisted the emancipation of the Roman Catholics which he had done so much to secure-had so genuine a dread of the political consequences of the spread of Roman Catholicism. Through the greater part of his life he hoped to find an adequate barrier to Rome in the Church; and for this reason, even if it had stood alone, he would have desired to maintain the Establishment. But he was also throughout his early and middle life impressed with the notion that the clergy of an endowed Church were more likely to profess liberal views than the ministers of voluntary sects, who were dependent for their livelihood on the subscriptions of their congregations. The experience of a long life perhaps convinced him that a Stateendowed clergy would not extricate itself from the trammels of Creeds and Articles; and so, as years rolled on, he became less earnest in defence of the cause, and would often laugh as he brought out the well-known arguments. Writing early in 1870, the year of Mr. Forster's Education Act, to Mr. Forster from San Remo, he said—

The prospect of obtaining a national unsectarian education, founded on the exclusion of all catechisms and formularies, is, in the present temper of the nation, so fair a one that I think the country may well wait a year for the accomplishment of so great a blessing.

My wish and hope is [so he wrote a year afterwards], the rising generation may be taught to adopt, not the Church of Rome, or the Church of England, but the Church of Christ.

These few remarks may possibly help the reader to supply the lights and shadows of an imperfect portrait, and to gather some idea of the nature and character of the man whom the author has endeavoured, however vainly, to draw. It is a pleasure to recollect that his long life was, on the whole, a very happy one. His childhood was, indeed, clouded by the death of his mother, his middle years by the loss of his first wife, his old age by the deaths of his eldest son, his daughter

in-law, and their child; as well as by the afflicting illness of another son.

Yet, in the children who were still left to him, in the children's children who were brought to his home, in the memory of the part which he had played in the past, in the interest which he was taking in the present, in the hope which he felt for the future, in the consciousness of his own integrity, in the respect of his fellow-countrymen, in faith in his God, Lord Russell may have found some consolation for his trials, and have reflected that, if his old age was clouded with sorrow, his grey hairs were descending with honour to the grave.

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