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defence of their wealth and privileges worthy of honour, but hold up to scorn those who try to get the poor man's wages raised from 10s. or 12s. to 158. a week, because there being nothing else to say against themthey are paid agitators ?"

With educational progress Mr. Davies has in many ways registered his sympathies. He took an active part in the affairs of the Working Men's College. He has been chairman of the committee for the Cambridge Local Examinations for London. He is Principal of Queen's College, Harley-street, that excellent institution where ladies are educated, instead of being merely "finished" without education. He was one of the principals for a year before Dr. Plumptre's accession to office, and now, on the latter's resignation, has resumed the responsibility, which is no nominal and honorary post, but claims his attendance at least one day a week. His connection with Queen's College leads us to note that he has specially interested himself in what are called women's movements, both educational and medical, and in connection with the Suffrage and the School Board. At the Church Congress at Brighton his subject was the Higher Education of Women. Mrs. Garrett Anderson's Hospital is in his district, and he is on terms of personal intimacy with that lady, her sister, and others now connected both with Queen's College and medical education. His own sister, Miss Emily Davies, many will remember as a member of the London School Board, and one of the founders of Girton College, now so successful.

Liberal Church Reform is another field to which Mr. Davies has devoted much labour and attention. He is a prominent member of the Church Reform Union, the original objects of which were the admission of the laity to a defined share of power in Church matters, the removal of impolitic restraints, so as to allow opportunities of variation according to the interests of different localities, the promotion of practical improvements, the removal of any legal hindrances by which those who have received holy orders are excluded from civil employments, discontinuance of the use in Church services of the Athanasian Creed, sub-division of over-large dioceses, revision of the translation of the Bible, &c. A Bill which issued directly from the Union, was a provision to authorise men not in orders to preach or lecture in any church belonging to the Church of England, on the application of the incumbent, and with permission of the Bishop. Prof. Max Müller, since the date of this Bill, it may be remembered, has preached in Westminster Abbey.

Mr. Davies is well-known for the active part he takes in Poor Law administration and improvement. He has attended conferences on the subject, reading papers in London and Leicester. He contributed to Macmillan's Magazine a paper on "Charity and the Poor Laws," and to Good Words a paper on Pauperism." To name these by no means represents the work he has done, as they are but isolated evidences.

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Mr. Davies treats large and general questions, politically, socially, and religiously of concern to the whole community. But his Liberal politics, his charity reforms, his religious energies, all converge as regards their active outcome to Marylebone, and find their focus there. He is the chairman of a ward section of the Liberal Four Hundred for Marylebone; he has had a leading hand in a great deal done to ameliorate the district by pulling down condemnable houses, widening streets, and other improvements carried out by the vestry, having been himself chairman of committee and personal promoter of these objects. There has fallen to him, also, a good deal of work of a general kind in connection with the vestry.

Mr. Davies was a member of the School Board for Marylebone for a short time, and has ever since continued to do School Board work. He has besides other local work in superintending the schools, visitors, &c. He is a member of the Board of Guardians and chairman of the Out Relief Committee.

This world does not afford the smoothest existence conceivable for one bent on carrying ideal radicalism into practice. A man's patience must have to record more difficulties and trials than can ever be gathered in his biography. We may turn from such serious matters to a story of an amusing opposition which Mr. Davies had to encounter for no more cause than being simply as nature made him. Dr. Maurice Davies, in his "Orthodox London," writes as follows: "I remember the time when Mr. Davies was thought 'dreadful,' the epithet Mesdames Partington and Grundy always attach to advanced opinions of any kind. I am amused to remember why it was those venerable ladies were so scandalised in Mr. Davies's particular case. In those ancient days before Essays and Reviews were born, or Bishop Colenso thought of, it was deemed worldly to wear a beard, and Mr. Davies ventured to assume to himself that hirsute adornment of manhood. Thereat the said ladies waxed wroth, and spread abroad-as their sex is so capable of doing what I have no doubt was an egregious canard in reference to a former Bishop of London and Mr. Davies's beard. It was proposed to hold a confirmation at Christ Church, but his lordship declined to officiate unless the rector shaved! I beg it to be distinctly understood that I only give this anecdote on the authority of my friend Mrs. Grundy. But, just as they say of the Apocryphal Gospels—even if they are not canonical, they are interesting as showing something of the opinions held at an early age of Church history; so Mrs. Grundy's legend about Mr. Davies's beard is interesting under the same aspect, viz., as showing what monstrous opinions could be entertained in an incipient era of Broad Churchmanship." Custom is a strong tyrant when upheld by common consent, a nullity when fashion removes its crown.

It is now rather clerical than otherwise to wear a beard, but

some that now rejoice in nature's ornament would be clean shaven if they had to face the odium incurred by the first claimants for a covered chin but a short memory ago.

Mr. Davies is one of the Honorary Chaplains to Her Majesty, and has twice been Select Preacher to the University of Cambridge. He was chosen to read the service at Maurice's funeral. He is a sufficiently muscular Christian to have travelled a little, having visited Algeria, and made many a visit to Switzerland. He is one of the original members of the Alpine Club, which was founded by a group of Cambridge men. He has achieved some first ascents, one being of the third mountain in height of the Alps, the Dom, one of the Mischabel-Hörner. The account thereof is to be found in "Peaks, Passes and Glaciers," London, 1859. Mr. Davies's most important published works are as follows:

The Work of Christ: Sermons, with Preface on the Atonement Controversy, 1860.

The Signs of the Kingdom of Heaven; The Spirit giveth Life; The Death of Christ; in Tracts for Priests and People, 1861 and 1862. This series of Tracts was got up by Tom Hughes and Llewellyn Davies, as a counter-blast to " Essays and Reviews."

Sermons on the Manifestation of the Son of God, 1864.

On Ephesians, Colossians and Philemon; with Notes, 1866.

Morality according to the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper, Three Dis courses, 1867.

The Gospel and Modern Life: Sermons on some of the Difficulties of the Day, 1869; 2nd Edn. 1875. This volume includes a republication of the last-mentioned work.

The Voluntary Principle, in Essays on Church Policy, 1868. This work was edited by the Rev. W. L. Clay, sometime curate to Mr. Davies. The Church of England and the Church of Rome, 1870.

Theology and Morality; Essays on Questions [of Belief and Practice, 1873. This was reprinted in New York the same year, with an introduction by H. C. Potter, D.D.

Warnings against Superstition: four Sermons, 1874.

The Christian Callings: Sermons, 1875.

Smith's Bible Dictionary. Article, St. Paul.

Dictionary of Christian Biography. Article, St. Ambrose. A volume

in the press contains other smaller articles.

The Things above in Relation to Education and Science, 1877.
Religious Aspects of the Eastern Question, 1877.

Mr. Davies makes noble efforts to enable the Church to expand to true comprehensiveness, and so reach a real life far transcending the pseudovitality of a mere self-satisfied orthodoxy. He says with truth: “The whole world, it is conceivable, might be completely orthodox, every whisper of heretical opinion being silenced, and yet the souls of men

might remain unquickened, unenlightened, unreconciled." To the same thought he gave utterance last September in other words: "It is certain that we might have absolute unruffled orthodoxy in conjunction with an utter absence of belief."

Theology, according to Mr. Davies, ought not to be doctrinally final and argumentative, but expansive: "The better way is to confess at once that modern ethics are truer than the so-called forensic system of theological tradition. Modern theology should humble itself and go to school, to get its errors corrected by ethical science. It will learn nothing but good from its most subtle and refined appreciations." He has since stated in a more striking form the truth that the highest thoughts have a life higher than logical definitions of them, or argumentative treasuries, can enshrine: "Verbal limits rounding off spiritual facts, are comparatively things of the surface. . . . . The great objects of faith firm as they are at the core, have no sharpness of outline. Think earnestly of God, and you will feel no impulse to define him." Of the relation of God to the universe, he says: "It would have been wise of Christians not to tie themselves down to anything more technical and precise on this subject than the broad Pantheism of St. Paul." This, too, is broad enough for any philosophic thinker: "The Word of God, interpreted by history and life, is a grander object of faith than even the Bible. Theology ceases to be the mere exegesis of documents, and becomes an attempt to explain and commend to the human intelligence the spiritual realities with which men have to do."

Why we are drawn to contemplate the existence of such mysteries as spiritual realities at all, is readily answered when it is found that even Huxley, taking no interest, as he says, in spiritualism, cannot confine himself within simple physics.

"Why trouble ourselves' he (Mr. Huxley) asks, with anything beyond natural phenomena? We live in a world which is full of misery and ignorance, and the plain duty of each and all of us is to try to make the little corner he can influence somewhat less miserable and somewhat less ignorant than it was before he entered it.' The plain duty of each and all of us! Where in the world, we are inclined to ask, does Mr. Huxley find a place for plain duty amongst his molecular changes?"

The following is a warning against a too hasty cry for severance of Church and State-better improve both than replace one by a narrow powerful sect: "Our nationality is at this moment an important safeguard of high spiritual quality in the Church of England. If we were given over to ecclesiastical government, it is hardly to be hoped that devotion to spiritual truth would be as effectual in shielding liberty of thought and practice as the instincts of citizenship and social rights now are."

A transition time of opinion is a very trying one; even Mr. Davies places himself in danger of dilemma sometimes. In one book (“ Signs of the Kingdom of Heaven") he says of the resurrection of Jesus: "After He had died upon the Cross, He returned within three days alive to His disciples, having taken up his dead body from the grave, and transfigured it into a form which at His will He made visible and palpable to men still in the flesh." A beckoning hand is ever being held out to science, but here, where it would be most serviceable to have information on such a point as the transfiguration of a body once dead and discarded, no record of the occurrence of such a kind of phenomenon is referred to for confirmation. Mr. Davies refers to M. Renan's theory of "the hallucinations of the disciples as to the appearances of Jesus in Galilee," rather as an offence against taste than against verified fact. If there were the transfigured apparition at all, there is no need to resort to any hypothesis of hallucination. And, in spite of this assertion of the return of the spirit to the body after the three days' period, when, according to the Talmudic mystics, the spirit leaves its crumbling tenement absolutely, it would seem that the subject of the following quotation from Mr. Davies's treatise, "The Spirit giveth Life,” should have been a little more fully studied by him.

"The beliefs and practices, which are combined under the vulgar name of Spiritualism, form another and a very direct protest, though to the common English mind a disagreeable one, in favour of special spiritual influences descending out of the unseen world upon the souls of men. . . . Far deeper and fresher thoughts have been evoked by this Spiritualist movement than by the more common-place Revival; thoughts which harmonise well, as I believe, with the true orthodox faith, but which often put to shame the ordinary level of our orthodox sentiments. Whatever be the right explanation of the marvels of spiritual intercourse, which are said to have been so abundant, it can hardly be denied by those who know anything of the religion of Spiritualism, that it raises visions of a life governed from another world, and actuated by one spirit of love and joy, at which both the records of Apostolic times and the secret hopes of our own hearts forbid us to mock."

But on subjects of this kind, which above all others the divine ought to have studied well, we find the trumpet giving forth an uncertain sound. The passage last quoted supports an objective theory of spiritual influences, that, however immaterial, they are positive, actual, and so far outside man, that he can be said to have 'intercourse' with them. The following passage, on the other hand, seems to favour a more subjective theory:

"There was unquestionably an exaltation of spirit prevailing amongst the followers of Jesus, such as we commonly make no attempt to realize. Some of the phenomena we read of in the Acts and the

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