e men, often many
of the most distinguished _literati_ of the day--such as Dickens and
Forster--and who was actually to sit in Parliament as M.P. for Oldham,
where, old as he was--and Mr. Gladstone says, 'People who wish to succeed
in Parliament should enter it young'--he occupied a most respectable
position, all the more creditable when you remember that Parliament, even
at that recent date, was a far more select and aristocratic assembly than
any Parliament of our day, or of the future, can possibly be. Mr. Fox
had been educated at Homerton Academy--as such places were then termed
(college is the word we use now)--under the good and venerable Dr.
Pye-Smith, whose 'Scripture Testimony to the Messiah' was supposed to
have given Unitarianism a deadly blow, but whom I chiefly remember as a
very deaf old man, and one of the first to recognise the fact that the
Bible and geology were not necessarily opposed to each other, and to
welcome and proclaim the truth--at that time received with fear and
trembling, if received at all--that the God of Nature and the God of
Revelation were the same. There was a good deal of free inquiry at
Homerton Academy, which, however, Mr. Fox assured me, gradually subsided
into the right amount of orthodoxy as the time came for the student to
exchange his sure and safe retreat for the fiery ordeal of the deacon and
the pew. My father and Johnson Fox had been fellow-students, and for
some time corresponded together. The correspondence in due time,
however, naturally ceased, as it was chiefly controversial, and nothing
can be more irksome than for two people who have made up their minds, and
whom nothing can change, to be arguing continually, and the friendship
between them in some sense ceased as the one remained firm to, and the
other wandered farther and farther from, the modified Calvinism of the
Wrentham Church and pulpit, where, as in all orthodox pulpits at that
time, it was taught that men were villains by necessity, and fools, as it
were, by a Divine thrusting on; that for some a Saviour had been
crucified, that there might be a way of escape from the wrath of an angry
and unforgiving God; whilst for the vast mass--to whom the name of Christ
had never been made known, to whom the Bible had never been sent--there
was an impending doom, the awful horror of which no tongue could tell, no
imagination conceive. But to the last Mr. Fox--especially if you met him
with his old-fashioned hat on