Recollections of James Martineau; With Some Letters from Him and an Essay on His Religion (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOME RECOLLECTIONS OF JAMES MARTINEAU James Martineau was born in Norwich in April 1805, and died in London in January 1900. His father was a merchant of French descent. The earliest known Martineau is said to have married a German Lutheran, and through this connection the family become Protestants. At the time of the revocation of the edict of Nantes, in October 1685, Gaston Martineau, a surgeon of Dieppe, removed to Norwich. The intellectual greatness of James Martineau is sufficiently proved by the fact?mentioned by Mr. Knowles in an article on Lord Tennyson in the Nineteenth Century ? that the author of " In Memoriam " considered him far the greatest member of the famous Metaphysical Society, which included in its ranks such celebrated men as Ruskin, Gladstone, Dr. Ward, ProfessorsTyndall, Huxley, and Henry Sidgwick, Mr. R. H. Hutton (editor of the Spectator), and Connop Thirlwall (Bishop of St. David's), as well as Tennyson himself and other men of conspicuous ability. Long before I made acquaintance with Dr. Martineau, I had been a devoted admirer of his writings, though not agreeing with his Unitarian opinions. I remember that I first read his " Endeavours after the Christian Life " at the time when I was also reading the sermons of Robertson of Brighton; and I was very much struck by the great superiority of the former as compared with the latter in depth and condensation of thought as well as in power of expression. It appeared to me that one discourse of the Unitarian philosopher contained matter enough to make at least a dozen sermons of the eloquent Anglican preacher. In fact Martineau's addresses are too full of ideas to be adequately comprehended when delivered from the pulpit; they need to be carefully thought over, in order that their power and beauty may ...