[1] The 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_). (See
GRACKLE.)
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 (see MARTINEAU, 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 the _Monthly Repository_, a Unitarian periodical, and in 1823 she
published _Devotional 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 the _Repository_ she wrote
stories (afterwards collected as _Traditions 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 as _Illustrations of Political Economy_.
After many failures she accepted disadvantageous terms from Charles Fox,
to whom she was introduced by his brother, the editor of the
_Repository_. 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 of _Illustrations 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, of _Society in America_ (1837) and a _Retrospect
of Western Travel_ (1838). An article in the _Westminster 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 a _Guide to
Service_. The veracity of her _Maid of All Work_ led 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 the _Playfellow_ (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 sixteen _Letters 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 of _Forest and Game
Law Tales_. In 1846 she made a tour with some friends in Egypt,
Palestine and Syria, and on her return published _Eastern 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 time _Household 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 of _Letters 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 in _Eastern Life_ had
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 the _Philosophie Positive_
(1853). To the _Daily News_ she contributed regularly from 1852 to 1866.
Her _Letters 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 the _Westminster 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 the _Daily News_ has 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 her _Autobiography, 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,"[1] but 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."[2] The
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,"[3] and 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."[5] The 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 to occupy 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";[6] and 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."[7] 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 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 the _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 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."[8] He 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."[9] 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 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 sprang
to 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."[10] 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 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";[11] and Thomas Arnold, "a
man who could be a hero without romance";[12] F. 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";[13] and Charles
Kingsley, "a great teacher," though one "certain to go astray the
moment he becomes didactic."[14] Beside 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 the _veto_ not of his reason but of his will,"[15] as 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
the _Monthly Repository_, the _Christian Reformer_, the _Prospective_,
the Westminster and the _National 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."[16] And
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 the _Types of Ethical_
_Theory_ and _The Study of Religion_, and, in some measure, of _The
Seat of Authority in Religion_."[17] 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 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 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 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 have 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; 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.
See _Life and Letters_ by J. Drummond and C. B. Upton (2 vols., 1901);
J. E. Carpenter, _James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher_ (1905); J.
Crawford, _Recollections_ of 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.)