My dear Martineau,

        Perhaps you are already pulling up your peg-tents; rather a heart-breaking work, especially to those who so love beauty and have surrounded themselves within doors with so much. You need, dear friend, a broad and fruitful field in London to recompense you for the great, the very great sacrifices you must make in parting from all that you have loved in Liverpool. I have felt this so deeply, that I have never known exactly how to wish that you might come to London: and indeed this place, so emphatically dissipated (that is, mente dissipata, distracta), does not prize its great minds so much as smaller placed would. I have lately heard of Mr. Tagart's retirement, and cannot help auguring that this will shortly lead to new demands upon your energies.

        Beloved friend, you know that great expectations are formed of you. It is hard, most hard, not to let this draw you into great intellectual effort, from which I fear much. For your literary lecturing of course I have no word of dissuasion. But let me assure you that in your preaching there is superfluous intellectual effort. It would be spiritually more effective if there were far less perfection of literary beauty and less condensation of refined thought and imaginative metaphor. I hear again and again from intellectual persons the complaint, that the effort to follow your meaning is too great, and impairs both the pleasure and profit of listening to you. I myself am conscious that wonder and admiration of your talent is apt to absorb and stifle the properly spiritual influence: and when I read your sermons, I often pause so long on single sentences, as to be fully aware that I could have got little good from hearing them. I know that no two men's nature is the same, and habit is second nature. Do not imagine that I wish you not to be yourself. (There is no danger of that). But I am sure that by cultivating more of what the French call "abandon"—by preparing with less intellectual effort for each separate sermon—though of course not with less devotional purpose—and by letting your immediate impulse have a large play, in comparison with your previous study, there will be less danger of overworking your mind, and fuller effect on those who are to benefit.

        I hear strange reports, which move me alternately with contempt and mysterious fear, that you are closely approximating to Maurice, both as to the Divinity of Christ and as to the Atonement. The persons who say it, agree on the whole nearer with me than with any one else I can name to you. This makes me say: how obscure Martineau must be, if such persons can so mistake! Of one thing I am certain, that your heart and soul are so given to God, and so enlightened as to what is true goodness, that (whatever theories most commend themselves to you) nothing will make me trust and love you less, nothing will make you cease to bear tenderly and kindly with my scepticisms. But I confess, I am made anxious as to the results on the minds of others which all confusion of thought produces; and I think there must be somewhere great confusion, when you are thought to be preparing pupils for a renewed Trinitarianism and Atonement. . . .

        I want to cultivate, if I knew how, rather more free spiritual communication with those who supremely love God as the Good One, and who will bear with me. I much need this, if I could get it. But however shut up I may seem, believe that a fire of love for you burns in my heart. With warm regards to Mrs. Martineau,

Your affectionate Friend,    
F. W. Newman