Beside Dr. Martineau, I had the privilege of friendship with three eminent Unitarian Ministers, now alas! all departed—Rev. Charles Beard, of Liverpool, for a long time editor of the Theological Review; the venerable and beloved John James Tayler; and Rev. William Henry Channing, to whom I was gratefully attached, both on account of religious sympathies, and of his ardent adoption of our Anti-vivisection cause, which he told me he had at first regarded as somewhat of a “fad” of mine, but came to recognise as a moral crusade of deep significance. Among living friends of the same body, I am happy to number Rev. Philip Wicksteed, the successor of Dr. Martineau in Portland Street and the exceedingly able President of University Hall, Gordon Square,—an institution, in the foundation of which I gladly took part on the invitation of Mrs. Humphry Ward.
A man in whose books I had felt great interest in my old studies at Newbridge, and whose intercourse was a real pleasure to me in London, was Mr. W. R. Greg. I intensely respected the courage which moved him, in those early days of the Fifties, to publish such a book as the Creed of Christendom. He was then a young man, entering public life with the natural ambitions which his great abilities justified, and the avowal of such exorbitant heresies (nothing short of pure Theism) as the book contained, was enough at that date to spoil any man’s career. He was a layman, too, and man of the world, “Que Diable allait il faire, writing on theology at all?” That book remains to this day a most valuable manual of arguments and evidences against the Creed of Christendom; set forth in a grave and reverent spirit and in a clear and manly style. His Enigmas of Life had, I believe, a larger literary success. The world had moved much nearer to his standpoint; and the Enigmas concern the most interesting subjects. We had a little friendly controversy over one passage in the essay, Elsewhere. Mr. Greg had laid it down that, hereafter, Love must retreat from the discovery of the sinfulness of the beloved; and that both saint and sinner will accept as inevitable an eternal separation (Enigmas, 1st Edit., p. 263). To this I demurred strenuously in my Hopes of the Human Race (p. 132–6). I said, “The poor self-condemned soul whom Mr. Greg images as turning away in an agony of shame and hopelessness from the virtuous friend he loved on earth, and loves still at an immeasurable distance,—such a soul is not outside the pale of love, divine or human. Nay, is he not,—even assuming his guilt to be black as night,—only in a similar relation to the purest of created souls, which that purest soul holds to the All-holy One above? If God can love us, is it not the acme of moral presumption to think of a human soul being too pure to love any sinner, so long as in him there remains any vestige of affection? The whole problem is unreal and impossible. In the first place, there is a potential moral equality between all souls capable of equal love, and the one can never reach a height whence it may justly despise the other. And, in the second place, the higher the virtuous soul may have risen in the spiritual world, the more it must have acquired the god-like Insight which beholds the good under the evil, and not less the god-like Love which embraces the repentant Prodigal.
In the next edition of his Enigmas (the 7th), after the issue of my book, Mr. Greg wrote a most generous recantation of his former view. He said:—
“The force of these objections to my delineation cannot be gainsaid, and ought not to have been overlooked. No doubt a soul that can so love and so feel its separation from the objects of its love, cannot be wholly lost. It must still retain elements of recovery and redemption, and qualities to win and to merit answering affection. The lovingness of a nature—its capacity for strong and deep attachment—must constitute, there as here, the most hopeful characteristic out of which to elicit and foster all other good. No doubt, again, if the sinful continue to love in spite of their sinfulness, the blessed will not cease to love in consequence of their blessedness.”
Later on he asks:—
“How can the blessed enjoy anything to be called Happiness if the bad are writhing in hopeless anguish?” “Obviously only in one way. By ceasing to love, that is, by renouncing the best and purest part of their nature.... Or, to put it in still bolder language, ‘How,—given a hell of torment and despair for millions of his friends and fellow men—can the good enjoy Heaven except by becoming bad, and without being miraculously changed for the worse?’”
The following flattering letters are unluckily all which I have kept of Mr. Greg’s writing:—
“Park Lodge, Wimbledon Common, S.W.,
“February 19th.
“My Dear Miss Cobbe,