istrict, and gave a lecture
to a Limehouse audience. He attended a coffee-house discussion upon the
existence of God, and exposed the inconclusiveness of the atheistic
conclusions. On another occasion he went with 'Tom,' now Judge Hughes,
to support Mr. Davies, who addressed a crowd in Leman Street one Sunday
night. Hughes endeavoured to suppress a boy who was disposed for
mischief. The boy threw himself on the ground, with Hughes holding him
down. Fitzjames, raising a huge stick, plunged into the thick of the
crowd. No one, however, stood forth as a champion of disorder; and Mr.
Davies, guarded by his stalwart supporters, was able to speak to a quiet
audience. Fitzjames, says Mr. Davies, was always ready for an argument
in those days. He did not seek for a mere dialectical triumph; but he
was resolved to let no assumption pass unchallenged, and, above all, to
disperse sentiment and to insist upon what was actual and practical. He
wrote to Mr. Davies in reference to some newspaper controversies: 'As to
playing single-stick without being ever hit myself, I have no sort of
taste for it; the harder you hit the better. I always hit my hardest.'
'Some people profess,' he once said to the same friend, 'that the sermon
on the Mount is the only part of Christianity which they can accept. It
is to me the hardest part to accept.' In fact, he did not often turn the
second cheek. He said in the same vein that he should prefer the whole
of the Church service to be made 'colder and less personal, and to
revive the days of Paley and Sydney Smith.' (The Church of the
eighteenth century, only without the disturbing influence of Wesley,
was, as he once remarked long afterwards, his ideal.) 'After quoting
these words,' says Mr. Davies in conclusion, 'I may be permitted to add
those with which he closed the note written to me before he went to
India (November 4, 1869), "God bless you. It's not a mere phrase, nor
yet an unmeaning or insincere one in my mouth--affectionately yours."'

I shall venture to quote in this connection a letter from my father,
which needs a word of preface. Among his experiments in journalism,
Fitzjames had taken to writing for the 'Christian Observer,' an ancient,
and, I imagine, at the time, an almost moribund representative of the
evangelical party. Henry Venn had suggested, it seems, that Fitzjames
might become editor. Fitzjames appears to have urged that his theology
was not of the desired type. He consulted my