Item 171 - Letter from Julius Charles Hare

Herstmonceux, Hailsham - Thanks WW for his course of sermons [On the Foundations of Morals: Four Sermons, 1837]. JCH is deeply honoured that the volume is dedicated to him: 'a strange wonder will come over me now and then, that to me in my littleness such honours should have befallen as to have books dedicated to me by Niebuhr and you'. JCH is often reminded of 'Coleridge's saying, that we have to earn the joys of earth, before we can think of earning the joys of heaven'. JCH is with WW 'heart and mind' regarding the main object of WW's sermons but differs on one or two secondary or tertiary points: 'I can [not] think that St Paul is speaking of God's moral being in your first text...I am not sure whether you do not strain the passages from St Paul, in which the word conscience occurs, too far at the beginning of your second sermon. Sedgwick, I thought, certainly did. Your[s] rest less on them. In several of them at least conscience is nothing more than consciousness, and compatible with any view as to the origin and nature of our notions of right and wrong. The comparison between our scientific and moral knowledge is locally appropriate and very satisfactory'. Is p.44 of WW's volume directed at Thomas Carlyle: 'I have not read his book: but from some extracts in the Examiner it seemed to me almost as monstrous in doctrine as in style...What you say in p.vii about the pernicious influence of our teaching Paley on the morals of the country, I have long thought. May you prosper in substituting something better for him. There are many of the points you speak of in p.x admirably expounded in some of Chalmers's Essays in the 1st 2nd and 5th vols of his new edition. If any one wd leave out 3 sentences in 4 and turn the 4th into English, he wd be a great benefactor to philosophy: and it wd be a great thing to substitute his evidences for Paley's[.] a Christian life breathes from his, and wd pass into the hearts of many'.