Andrew Martin Fairbairn

“ The life of Martineau was so essentially the life of the thinker, and was so typical of the century in which he lived and the society within which he moved, that he can be better understood through his spoken mind than through his outward history. ”

“ He was fundamentally too much a man of strong convictions to be correctly described as open-minded, for if nature ever determined any man’s faith, it was his; the root of his whole intellectual life, which was too deep to be disturbed by any superficial change in his philosophy, being the feeling for God. ”

“ He came to know German philosophy and criticism, especially the criticism of Baur and the Tübingen school, which affected profoundly his construction of Christian history. And these were strengthened by French influences, notably those of Renan and the Strassburg theologians. The rise of evolution, and the new scientific way of looking at nature and her creative methods, compelled him to rethink and reformulate his theistic principles and conclusions, especially as to the forms under which the relation of God to the world and His action within it could be conceived. ”

“ Theodore Parker had succeeded, introducing more radical ideas as to religion and a more drastic criticism of sacred history. Blanco White, “the rationalist A’Kempis,” who had dared to appear as “a religious sceptic in God’s presence,” had found a biographer and interpreter in Martineau’s friend and colleague, John Hamilton Thom. Within the English Church men with whom he had both personal and religious sympathy rose—Whately, of whom he said, “We know no living writer who has proved so little and disproved so much”; [11] and Thomas Arnold, “a man who could be a hero without romance” ”

“ That argument may be described as a criticism of man and his world used as a basis for the construction of a reasoned idea of nature and being. Man and nature, thought and being, fitted each other. What was implicit in nature had become explicit in man; the problem of the individual was one with the problem of universal experience. The interpretation of man was therefore the interpretation of his universe. ”

“ In the second of the above books his idea of religion is somewhat of an anachronism; as he himself confessed, he “used the word in the sense which it invariably bore half a century ago,” as denoting “belief in an ever-living God, a divine mind and will ruling the universe and holding moral relations with mankind.” As thus used, it was a term which governed the problems of speculative theism rather than those connected with the historical origin, the evolution and the organization of religion. ”

“ The questions which lived in the earlier and more formative period of his life concerned mainly the idea of the church, the historical interpretation of the documents which described the persons who had created the Christian religion, especially the person and work of its founder; but those most alive in his later and maturer time chiefly related to the philosophy of religion and ethics. In one respect Martineau was singularly happy; he just escaped the active and, on the whole, belittling period of the old Unitarian controversy. ”

“ In its speculative parts the book is quite equal to those that had gone before, but in its literary and historical parts there are indications of a mind in which a long-practised logic had become a rooted habit. While a comparison of his expositions of the Pauline and Johannine Christologies with the earlier Unitarian exegesis in which he had been trained shows how wide is the interval, the work does not represent a mind that had throughout its history lived and worked in the delicate and judicial investigations he here tried to conduct. ”

“ From Dublin he was called to Liverpool, and there for a quarter of a century he exercised extraordinary influence as a preacher, and achieved a high reputation as a writer in religious philosophy. In 1840 he was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy and political economy in Manchester New College, the seminary in which he had himself been educated, and which had now removed from York to the city after which it was named. ”