gh his life-work was over. At the heart of
Maurice's theology lies the contention to which he gave the name of
universal redemption. Christ's work is for every man. Every man is
indeed in Christ. Man's unhappiness lies only in the fact that he will
not own this fact and live accordingly. Man as man is the child of God.
He cannot undo that fact or alter that relation if he would. He does not
need to become a child of God, as the phrase has been. He needs only to
recognise that he already is such a child. He can never cease to bear
this relationship. He can only refuse to fulfil it. With other words
Erskine and Coleridge and Schleiermacher had said this same thing.

For the rest, one may speak briefly of Maurice. He was animated by the
strongest desire for Church unity, but at the back of his mind lay a
conception of the Church and an insistence upon uniformity which made
unity impossible. In the light of his own inheritance his ecclesiastical
positivism seems strange. Perhaps it was the course of his experience
which made this irrational positivism natural. Few men in his generation
suffered greater persecutions under the unwarranted supposition on the
part of contemporaries that he had a liberal mind. In reality, few men
in his generation had less of a quality which, had he possessed it,
would have given him peace and joy even in the midst of his
persecutions. The casual remark above made concerning Campbell is true
in enhanced degree of Maurice. A large part of the industry of a very
industrious life was devoted to the effort to convince others and
himself that those few really wonderful glimpses of spiritual truth
which he had, had no disastrous consequences for an inherited system of
thought in which they certainly did not take their rise. His name was
connected with the social enthusiasm that inaugurated a new movement in
England which will claim attention in another paragraph.

CHANNING

Allusion has been made to a revision of traditional theology which took
place in America also, upon the same general lines which we have seen in
Schleiermacher and in Campbell. The typical figure here, the protagonist
of the movement, is William Ellery Channing. It may be doubted whether
there has ever been a civilisation more completely controlled by its
Church and ministers, or a culture more entirely dominated by theology,
than were those of New England until the middle of the eighteenth
century. There had been indeed a ma