power to believe what he list.' So More the philosopher, says the Bishop; and now hear More the Chancellor, addressing himself to the confutation of Tyndale, and declaring, 'It appertaineth to my part and duty to follow the example of his noble Grace; and after my poor wit and learning with opening to his people the malice and poison of those pernicious books, to help as much as in me is, that his people abandoning the contagion of all such pestilent writing, may be far from all infection, and thereby from all such punishment as following thereupon, doth oftentimes rather serve to make other beware that are yet clear, than to cure and heal well those that are already infected so hard is that carbuncle, catching once a core, to be well and surely cured. Howbeit, God so worketh: and sometimes it is. Toward the help whereof, or if it haply be incurable, then to the clean cutting out that part for infection of the remnant, am I, by mine office, in virtue of my oath, right especially bounden.' More is to Bishop Creighton 'a type of that pseudo-liberalism which obscures and confuses every question which it touches.' He is one of those who asserted liberty of thought as a speculative right, [but] showed little capacity for acting on their principles. He deceived himself with the belief that he was saving society by putting his principles aside . . . following the example of the King's noble grace till the King was ready to apply to him the same measure of justice as himself had applied to others.' Surely the sufficient answer to the Bishop of Peterborough is, that More's lot was cast, not in Utopia, where a philosophical Deism prevailed, but in sixteenth-century England, where the Catholic religion was the very foundation of civil society, where theological unity was the very keystone of the public order. The polity in which More held the highest judicial office, was of the kind described by Jeremy Taylor: The commonwealth is made a Church the law of the nation made a part of the religion: Christ is made King, and the temporal power is His substitute. But if we say, like the people in the Gospel, “Nolumus hunc regnare," then God has armed the temporal power with a sword to cut us off.' When More wrote the Utopia' in 1516, Luther had not begun his innovations, but was still protesting -and undoubtedly in good faith-his loyalty to the Catholic Church and the Supreme Pontiff. When More wrote his confutation of Tyndale in 1532, the very framework of civil society in half Germany had been well-nigh wrecked by religious revolutionists, seeking to force their new opinions upon the rest of the community. How was it possible for More, the the statesman, to advocate toleration of sectaries, who sought violently to subvert the existing religion with which the civil order was so strictly united? Or for More, the magistrate, to ignore the provisions of the laws he had sworn to administer, for the maintenance of that religion? The Bishop of Peterborough's remark that More followed the example of the King's noble grace till the King was ready to apply to him the same measure of justice as himself had applied to others,' is doubtless a rhetorically effective conclusion of a paragraph. But we must take leave to say that it is singularly unworthy of the learned and large-minded prelate who has indited it. More, in dealing with cases of heresy as Chancellor, was most scrupulous not only to keep within the law, but in all possible ways to mitigate its severity.* His judicial murder has been described by a high legal authority-Lord Campbell-as the blackest crime that ever has been perpetrated in England under the forms of law.' How can it be seriously maintained that the same measure of justice' was applied to More, as himself had applied to others'? Commending that question to the careful consideration of the Bishop of Peterborough, we return for a moment to the 'Utopia.' Nisard has described it, accurately enough, as 'the jeu d'esprit of a scholar rather than the declaration of principles of a reformer.' But More had a serious purpose in writing the Utopia,' although he chose, characteristically enough, to mask that purpose under a veil of humour. The book is, indeed, no declaration of principles; but it is an indictment of the state of society in which More found himself, and an aspiration after a fairer and juster ordering of the commonwealth. Nay, surely, we can trace in it, as we generally may in the works of genius, something vaticinatory; some forecast of the prophetic soul of the great world, dreaming on things to come.' Rudhart finds it underlain by three great truths: that toleration should prevail in matters of religious belief; that all political power should not be vested in a single hand; that the well-being of the body politic depends upon the ethical and religious fitness (Tüchtigkeit) of its members. The first two of these truths we may reckon it must be hoped-among the secure conquests of the modern mind. The third, perhaps, is, as yet, by no means Erasmus (Ep. 1810) speaks of More's 'singular clemency' in dealing with heretics. But the testimony of More himself, in the thirty-sixth chapter of his 'Apology,' is conclusive: Of al that ever came in my hand for heresye, as helpe me God, save as I said, the sure keeping of them, had never any of them any stripe or stroke given them, so much as a fylyppe on the forehead.' (English Works, p. 901.) More, if any man, may be believed on his bare word. generally generally apprehended. Nay, is there not a tendency, and more than a tendency, in this age, to ignore those spiritual and moral forces which are the true factors of virility and the real sources of national greatness?—to seek that necessity which determines the course of national history, not in national character, but in merely external causes, in mechanical force, in occult destiny? Is it not very generally forgotten or denied, that education, properly considered, is not the mere sharpening of the wits, nor the acquisition of saleable knowledge,' but a high, stern, ethical discipline; its primary function, in the august words of Milton, 'to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, sobriety, modesty, justice '-the only way in which, as he justly discerned, it is possible to make the people the fittest to choose and the chosen fittest to govern'? Such are some of the thoughts which are suggested to us as we turn over the pages of the Utopia,'' that charming and faithful reflection of More's mind in the years when it was most free, most impartial, most open to ideas of every kind, even to such as harmonize least with the religious exaltation of his first youth, and the dogmatic bitterness of the closing years of his life.' But, however acted on by the circumstances of the age, from first to last, as Rudhart has well observed, More's character is all of a piece. 'Because right is right, to follow right was, from first to last, the principle which ruled his life. The all-encroaching, all-absorbing despotism of Henry VIII. corrupted not only the King himself, but his ministers, his courtiers, his Parliaments, the nation at large.' 'He turned the theory of kingship into action: "the King can do no wrong"; therefore men shall call right all that he does.' "What is truth?" said jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer.' What has truth to do with it? was the thought, expressed or not, of the men who cowered before Henry VIII., when the royal will was declared. The King's volition was their one rule of faith and action. But More would not make his reason blind.'__ To him may be applied, in fullest measure, the eulogy of the Roman poet : Sub principe duro, * It was no ordinary daring. It was no ordinary manifestation of the triumph of those ideal forces, which we spoke of earlier in this article, over material forces; of right over might, of * Stubbs, Lectures on Medieval and Modern History,' p. 246. Vol. 184.-No. 368. 2 c justice justice over fact. It was no ordinary vindication of the freedom of the rational will to follow its transcendental law. Nor is it easy to overestimate the value of one single life like More's. Duty, self-devotion, sacrifice, the things written upon every page of it, what is the explanation of them? They are inexplicable apart from the supersensuous, the ideal, the divine and eternal. The great heroes of conscience of all heroes the greatest are indeed, in Cicero's words, lumina quædam probitatis et veritatis': 'the light of the world,' as a greater than Cicero has said, putting visibly before the multitude excellences which else had 'Seemed like a dream of the heart, Seemed but a cry of desire.' These are they who are ordained, in God's providence, to be the salt of the earth; to continue, in their turn, the succession of His witnesses, though death sweep away each successive generation of them to their rest and their reward. These communicate their light to a number of lesser luminaries, by whom, in its turn, it is distributed through the world. . And thus, the self-same fire, once kindled on Moriah, though seeming at intervals to fail, has at length reached us in safety, and will in like manner, as we trust, be carried forward, even to the end.'* *J. H. Newman's Oxford University Sermons,' pp. 95-7. ART. ART. III.-1. The Earldom of Mar in Sunshine and Shade during 500 Years. By the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres. Edinburgh, 1882. 2. Spalding Club Publications. 1840-1870. Edinburgh and Aberdeen, 3. New Spalding Club Publications. Aberdeen, 1887-1894. 4. Aberdeen: its Traditions and History. By William Robbie. Aberdeen, 1893. 5. The New Book of Bon-Accord. By William Cadenhead. Aberdeen, 1879. 6. A Description of the Chanonry, Cathedral, and King's College of Old Aberdeen. By William Orem. Aberdeen, 1791. HE north-eastern district of Scotland has a distinctive THE northeast colouring of its own, due to natural features, to climate, to the special development of local history in the past, and to the bent and genius of its inhabitants. Its boundaries are clearly marked out by ocean, mountain range, and river; and while it comprises every variety of scenery, and a civic and intellectual centre second to none in its blending of ancient tradition with industrial activity, the whole region retains a complexion of its own which distinguishes it alike from the rest of the eastern lowlands and from the territories that adjoin it on the north and west. 'From the North Water to Spey' was in old days a section of the Scottish realm that for many purposes stood by itself. To the traveller the change is more marked as he passes from the greyer colouring of Banffshire into the rich fields of the 'Laigh o' Moray,' than it is when he crosses the North Esk. Still Kincardineshire, even in the Howe o' the Mearns,' is not the same as Forfarshire, and its northern parishes and fisher-towns' are ejusdem generis with those of Buchan, Boyne, and Enzie. Within this wide region there is a central portion, the limits of which are marked off in the same manner by rivercourses, which combines most of the natural features that give variety to its scenery, and contains nearly all the great centres of civil power and social activity recorded in history as guiding its development. This is the territory forming the ancient Mormaership and later Earldom of Mar, embracing the districts between the Don and the Dee, and extending from the inmost recesses and loftiest heights of the Highland hills where these take their rise, to the point where there nestles between their lower reaches and behind the sandhills that stay the breakers of the German Ocean the twin city of New and Old Aberdeen. |