means.

dull and undisciplined. We can hardly for a brief moment strive to realise what this Historic Gospel Yet even so in the still silence it makes itself felt. Then we confess that nothing beautiful, or true, or good, which lies within the range of human powers, can be outside its hallowing influence; that it calls for an expression in doctrine, and in conduct, and in worship, which exercises the utmost gifts of reason, and will, and feeling; that it restores to man the Divine fellowship which has been interrupted by sin; that it discloses the importance of the present through which the interpretation of the eternal comes to us; that it confirms the value of the individual by revealing his relation to a whole of limitless majesty; that it offers a sovereign motive for seeking the help of unfailing might; that it asks, guides, sustains the ministry of all life, and the ministry of every life; and, therefore, that it is a complete satisfaction of the religious needs of men.

BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE1.

THERE can, I think, be no better omen for the

future of our lecture-room than that we should first hear in it words of a former Provost through whom some of the noblest thoughts of Cambridge found shape and expression in an age of unparalleled distress and anxiety, BENJAMIN WHICHCOTE.

Whichcote was one of those men whose work is their life. Such benefactors are naturally forgotten, though their work lives on, if they do not find a sympathetic biographer, and the only memorials of Whichcote's life which we have are the funeral sermon of Abp. Tillotson, transcribed with a few additions and paraphrases by Allen, and the short but careful notice prefixed by Dr Salter to Whichcote's correspondence with Tuckney. But these scholars witness to Whichcote's power, and a well-known passage of Burnet has preserved a clear if brief judgment of the labours of our Provost.

1 A Lecture given at the opening of the new Lecture Room, King's College, Oct. 13, 1885.

When describing the effects of the Restoration upon the English clergy Burnet writes: "with this great accession of wealth [from the fines raised on the Church estates] there broke in upon the Church a great deal of luxury and high living on the pretence of hospitality; while others made purchases and left great estates, most of which we have seen melt away. And with this overset of wealth and pomp, that came on men in the decline of their parts and age, they who were now growing into old age became lazy and negligent in all the true concerns of the Church: they left preaching and writing to others, while they gave themselves up to ease and sloth. In all which sad representation some few exceptions are to be made; but so few that if a new set of men had not appeared of another stamp the Church had quite lost her esteem over the nation. These were generally of Cambridge, formed under some divines, the chief of whom were Drs Whitchcot, Cudworth, Wilkins, More, and Worthington. Whitchcot was a man of rare temper, very mild and obliging. He had great credit with some that had been eminent in the late times; but made all the use he could of it to protect good men of all persuasions. He was much for liberty of conscience; and being disgusted with the dry systematical way of those times, he studied to raise those who conversed with him to a nobler set of thoughts, and to consider religion as a seed of a deiform nature, to use one of his own phrases. In order to this he set young students much on reading the ancient

Philosophers, chiefly Plato, Tully, and Plotin, and on considering the Christian religion as a doctrine sent from GOD, both to elevate and sweeten human nature, in which he was a great example, as well as a wise and kind instructor1.”

Every detail of Whichcote's life which has been recorded serves to confirm this estimate of his character and influence and line of thought. The period through which he lived made his work in every way specially important. It was fitted to try to the uttermost the power of calm and comprehensive moderation. The vigour of his manhood was passed in a time of revolution, in which every opinion and institution which had been held sacred in the past was questioned or overthrown. He saw the rise of a new philosophy, of a new civil constitution, of a new ecclesiastical organization; and in part he saw the old restored. As an undergraduate at Emmanuel he might have met Milton at Christ's and Jeremy Taylor at Caius. As a Fellow he was the tutor of Wallis, Culverwel, John Smith, Worthington and Cradock: the friend of Cudworth and More. The date of his ordination by Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, coincided with that of the imposition of the ship-money (1636). He was appointed Provost in the year when Descartes published his Principles of Philosophy (1644). He was created D.D. with those friends who had taken a leading part in the Westminster Assembly. His controversy with Tuckney took place in the year of the 1 History of his own Time, i. 186 f., Orig. edit.

battle of Worcester and the publication of Hobbes' Leviathan (1656): his death in the year of the execution of Lord W. Russell and the Oxford declaration in favour of passive obedience (1683).

Through these stirring crises of thought and action Whichcote held on his way, unchanged except by silent and continuous growth.

Trained, as it seems, in a Puritan family and entered at Cambridge on the Puritan foundation of Emmanuel College, he extended his sympathies from the first beyond the narrow limits of the opinions of those about him. "From your first coming to Cambridge," his Emmanuel tutor Tuckney writes, "I loved you, as finding you then studious and pious, and very loving and observant of me." However, he goes on to say, "I remember I then thought you somewhat cloudy and obscure in your expressions; but I then left you. Since I have heard, that when you came to be lecturer in the College you in a great measure for the year laid aside other studies and betook yourself to Philosophy and Metaphysics'."

And Whichcote himself does not dissemble the differences by which he was separated from his early teachers, while he acknowledges his debt to them. with singular tenderness. "I have borne you reverence," he writes to Tuckney, "beyond what you do or can imagine, having in me a living and quick sense of my first relation to you; and of all men alive, I have least affected to differ from you; or to call in 1 Correspondence, p. 36.