the paralysing effects of this Oxford-delusion heresy, for such
it is I feel persuaded. And to know it a man must live here, and
he will see the promising and ardent men sinking one after another
in a deadly torpor, wrapped up in self-contemplation, dead to
their Redeemer, and useless to His Church, under the baneful
breath of this accursed upas tree. I say accursed, because I
believe that St. Paul would use the same language to Oxford as he
did to the Galatian Church, "I would they were even cut off which
trouble you"; accursed, because I believe that the curse of God
will fall on it He has denounced it on the Papal hereby, and he is
no respecter of persons, to punish the name and not the reality.
May He forgive me if I err, and lead me into all truth. But I do
not speak as one who has been in no clanger, and therefore cannot
speak very quietly. It is strange into what ramifications the
disbelief of external justification will extend; _we will_ make it
internal, whether it be by self-mortification, by works of
evangelical obedience, or by the sacraments, and that just at the
time when we suppose most that we are magnifying the work of the
Lord.

Mr. Brooke rather likes to dwell, as it seems to us, in an unreal and
disproportionate way, on Mr. Robertson's sufferings, in the latter part
of his life, from the bitter and ungenerous attacks of which he was the
object. "This is the man," he says in one place, "who was afterwards at
Brighton driven into the deepest solitariness of heart, whom God
thought fit to surround with slander and misunderstanding." He was, we
doubt not, fiercely assailed by the Evangelical party, which he had
left, and which he denounced in no gentle language; he was, as we can
well believe, "constantly attacked, by some manfully, by others in an
underhand manner, and was the victim of innuendoes and slander." We
cannot, however, help thinking that Mr. Brooke unconsciously
exaggerates the solitariness and want of sympathy which went with all
this. Mr. Robertson had, and knew that he had, his ardent and
enthusiastic admirers as well as his worrying and untiring opponents.
But what we remark is this. It was the measure which he had meted out
to others, in the fierceness of his zeal for Evangelicalism, which the
Evangelicals afterwards meted out to him. They did not more talk evil
of what they knew not and had taken no real pains to