MARTINEAU, JAMES (1805-190o), English philosopher and divine, was born at Norwich, of Huguenot ancestry, on April 2 I, 1805, the seventh child of Thomas Martineau and Rankin, the sixth, his senior by almost three years, being his sister Harriet (see above). James was educated at Norwich Grammar school and at the private academy of Dr. Lant Carpenter at Bris tol. On leaving he was apprenticed to a civil engineer at Derby, but in 1822 entered Manchester college, then lodged at York with a view to entering the Unitarian ministry.
On leaving the college in 1827 Martineau taught for a time in his old school at Bristol. From 1828 to 1832 he was junior min ister of a Presbyterian church in Dublin, but resigned on a matter of conscience. He was then called to Liverpool, and there for a quarter of a century he exercised extraordinary influence as a preacher. In 1840 he was appointed professor of mental and moral philosophy and political economy in Manchester New college, now removed to Manchester. This position he held for 45 years (until 1885). In 1853 the college removed to London, and four years later Martineau followed. In 1858 he became minister of Little Portland street chapel in London. Martineau received many academic honours. He died in London on Jan. 1s, 1900.
Martineau's most characteristic and stimulating works are his sermons, published as Endeavours after the Christian Life (1st series, 1843 ; and series, ; Hours of Thought (1st series, 1876; and series, 1879) ; the various hymn-books he issued at Dublin in 1831, at Liverpool in 1840, in London in 1873; and the Home Prayers in 1891. Martineau just escaped the active period of the old Unitarian controversy. But its presence is felt in his The Rationale of Religious Enquiry (1836), and later in his Types of Ethical Theory (1885) and The Study of Religion (1888) and, in some measure, in The Seat of Authority in Religion (1890).
Martineau's theory of the religious society or church was that of an idealist rather than of a statesman or practical politician. He stood equally remote from the old Voluntary principle, that "the State had nothing to do with religion," and from the sacer dotal position that the clergy stood in an apostolic succession, and either constituted the Church or were the persons into whose hands its guidance had been committed. He hated two things in tensely, a sacrosanct priesthood and an enforced uniformity. He may be said to have believed in the sanity and sanctity of the state rather than of the Church. Statesmen he could trust as he would not trust ecclesiastics. And so he even propounded a scheme, which fell still-born, that would have repealed uniformity, taken the church out of the hands of a clerical order, and allowed the coordination of sects or churches under the state. Not that he would have allowed the state to touch doctrine, to determine polity or discipline; but he would have had it to recognize his torical achievement, religious character and capacity, and endow out of its ample resources those societies which had vindicated their right to be regarded as making for religion. His ideal may have been academic, but it was the dream of a mind that thought nobly both of religion and of the state.
See Life and Letters by J. Drummond and C. B. Upton (2 vols., 19o1) ; J. E. Carpenter, James Martineau, Theologian and Teacher (1905) ; J. Crawford, Recollections of James Martineau (1903) ; A. W. Jackson, James Martineau!, a Biography and a Study (Boston, 190o) ; H. Sidgwick, Lectures on the Ethics of Green, Spencer and Martineau (1902) ; and J. Hunt, Religious Thought in England in the zgth Century.