Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 150.djvu/292

Genesis, or believe that the authenticity of the Gospel is established solely by miracles. In this way the work of the pioneers of the new criticism has been chiefly of effect in elevating our conceptions of religious faith, and showing how much nobler and higher is the ground upon which it is founded.

The first idea, however, suggested both to the authorities of the Church and the general reader by this book, was that, in the words of Bishop Wilberforce, its writers “could not with moral honesty maintain their posts as clergymen of the Church of England.” It was exactly the same question which had been put with so much vehemence in respect to Newman and those connected with him. A superficial, perhaps, but at the same time a very simple and practically unanswerable question. How could men who professed views of her ordinances and beliefs which she had herself expressly denied continue in her bosom? How could men who questioned the Scriptures read in her daily services and the doctrines preached in her pulpits, continue to teach and interpret these? It is a fatal thing for a Church to repress the action of the mind and use the knife upon every eccentric growth, but still there is no logical answer to that demand. Scotland, always absolute, and more bound by rigid reason than the broader and more tolerant practical mind of her partner in national life, cut and hacked freely, cutting off for much smaller divergences of opinion some of the best and most devoted of her sons, and was all the worse for it both in temper and judgment. The action of the rulers of the English Church, and of Tait, then Bishop of London, in particular, was exactly the reverse. After the first strong disapproval of the volume to which he, along with his brother bishops, gave utterance, all his exertions were devoted to calming the storm, and leaving the offenders to their own better and cooler judgment of the mistake they had made. Prosecution, of course, was the first thing thought of by the majority of the Church—very naturally and most logically, as we have said. BUt this was profoundly against Bishop Tait's views. “We have had,” he says in his private diary, ‘“a great duty to express our disapproval; a great duty, also, I think, to guard the accused from ill usage; a great duty to the Church to guard its doctrine; and also to watch for its children likely to be led astray by any appearances of persecution.” A more ideal mind for a bishop could scarcely be.

There was, however, a secondary and personal question involved in this which gave him great distress, and which affords what would be rather a humorous, if it were not so serious, a view of the manner in which his friends were disposed to try this long-suffering and gentle-souled man. Dr Temple and Mr Jowett were both contributors to the volume in question, and their respective essays were blameless, as well as that of the Rector of Lincoln College—the well-known Mark Pattison. It was the express proviso of the publication that each writer was responsible only for his own production—a proviso which no doubt satisfied every man’s conscience, but which was practically useless so far as the public, not given to any very close perception of the nuances, was concerned. To give to the book in general the disapproval it deserved, and to make continual exception in favour of the innocent or partially innocent