be recognized as such by the aid of a revelation within; a real
activity, a genuine moral choice, and a resulting character, the marks
of a truly living Soul, these are indispensable to an adequate view of
the religious life. But all this involves two significant positions,
each far asunder from those hitherto put forth--there must be Freedom,
at least in the moral world; and the Divine assurances of moral values
and of loving aid to win them are no longer confined to an outer record.
Such a record may yield invaluable service as a heightener and
interpreter of individual experience; to the last we find Martineau
attaching a profound and quite special significance to the revelation in
Jesus of the life of sonship to God, and retaining tenaciously the
Christian attitude in preference to one of simple theism. But his system
is based on the internal; all the rest, the Church, the Bible, Nature,
however august and charged with meaning, is supplementary to that.

In the American field, under the influence of Emerson and the German
philosophy, what is called 'Transcendentalism' flourished midway in the
century, and there as well as in England its extravagances were
deplored. Martineau himself, while approaching so nearly to the egoistic
centre, was safeguarded from all such vagaries by an all-pervading sense
of duty. In his volumes of sermon the _Endeavours after the Christian
Life_, and _Hours of Thought on Sacred Things_, which remain among the
choicest of their kind in our language, his austerity of moral tone is
only relieved by an elevation of poetic mysticism till then unknown in
Unitarian literature. It was, indeed, his conviction that the body would
not write poetry for a generation or two, so dry and prosaic did he find
it; but at that very time his own efforts in hymnody on one side and on
the other his lyric prose, almost too richly ornate for general wear,
were touching new springs of feeling. By and by, he issued in
conjunction with others a set of liturgical services, which did much to