Untitled - Electric Scotland

1860-64] AN AGITATION IJKdINS 279
the rude flippancy of Dr. Williams with respect to the
Divine claims of the Old Testament. 1
The author of the fourth essay, the Rev. H. B. Wilson,
had in 1841 been one of the four tutors who, with Tait as
their leader, protested against Tract XC. ; and his views
as to the meaning of honest subscription
to the articles
had evidently undergone a startling change in the twenty
years that had elapsed, for he was now able to argue in
favour of the very mode of interpretation which he had
then denounced, and some pages of his essay upon the
National Church gave more pain perhaps to devout minds
than any
others in the volume. 2
But if the essayists had, to say the least, blindly com
mitted themselves to rash and ill-considered statements
in one direction,
it cannot be denied that those who
stood forth to answer or impugn them used language
on the other side which would nowadays be generally
regarded as scarcely less open to objection. In the judg
ment of Bishop Tait, and of others who felt with him, the
strain of denunciation in which the champions of ortho
doxy indulged, and their dogmatic
assertions as to what
is essential to the faith, contributed not a little to the
harmfulness of the whole controversy. 3 An agitation of
the wildest sort immediately began. Addresses to the
Archbishops came up from Rural Deaneries on every side,
calling attention to the mischievous tendency
of the
Even Arthur Stanley in his tiery article in the Edinburgh Review in
defence of the essayists condemns Dr. Williams s *
flippant and contemp
tuous tone and the unbecoming character of his remarks. Edin. Rev.,
April 1861, p. 479.
:
See Essays and Reviews, pp. 180-183, 186, etc.
; Even Bishop Wilberforce, for example, who was by no means the hottest
of the controversialists, described men as in danger of being "robbed
unawares of the very foundations of the Faith," if they should be persuaded
to
"
accept allegorically, or as parable, or poetry, or legend, the story of a
serpent tempter, of an ass speaking with man s voice, of an arresting of the
earth s motion, or of a reversal of its motion." Charge of 1860, pp. 69, 70.