Untitled - Electric Scotland

28o I. IKK OK ARCHBISHOP TAIT [CH. MI.
volume, and entreating that some action might be taken
against its authors, who were regarded and sometimes
described as traitors to their sacred calling traitors,
too, whose position to quote the words of some of the
memorialists gave them
"
opportunities favourable in
no ordinary degree for the diffusion of error." This
it was which mainly excited the public mind. As in
the case of Bishop Colenso, a few years later, it was
not so much the what as the who says it, which
aroused general attention.
"If other men, wrote Bishop Wilberforce, "had put forth
the suggestions contained in this volume it would not, with
one or two marked exceptions, have been found to possess
cither the depth, or the originality, or the power, or the liveliness
which could have prevented its falling still-born from the press.
It has been read, because to all it is new and startling to
some delightful and to others shocking that men holding such
posts should advocate such doctrines : that the clerical head
of one of our great schools . . . two Professors in our famous
University of Oxford, . . . the Vice-Principal of the College at
Lampeter for training the clergy of the principality, and a
country clergyman famed in his day for special efforts on behalf
of orthodoxy that such men as these should be the putters
forth of doctrines which seem at least to be altogether incom
patible with the Bible and the Christian Faith as the Church of
England has hitherto received it this has been a paradox so
rare and so startling as to wake up for the time the English
mind to the distasteful subject of a set of sceptical metaphysical
speculations regarding many long-received fundamental truths.
. . . We hold that the attempt of the essayists to combine their
advocacy of such doctrines with the retention of the status and
emolument of Church of England clergymen is simply moral
l
dishonesty."
While the excitement was growing to its height both
Dr. Temple and Mr. Jowett visited Bishop Tait at Fulham.
1
Quarterly Review, Jan. 1861, pp. 250-274.