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i86i-66] COMMENTARY ON ROMANS 333
oath, and no one at the time suspected that anything
informal had been done. As it afterwards turned out,
however, these whole proceedings, so far as the jurisdic
tion conferred by the new Letters Patent was concerned,
were in point of law null and void, for the following
reason : In the year 1850 a Constitutional Government
was established in the Cape of Good Hope, including a
Parliament,
"
with authority to make laws for the peace,
welfare, and good government of the settlement." And
from that moment the Crown ceased to have the power of
conferring by Letters Patent any such coercive jurisdiction,
ecclesiastical or civil, within the Colony, as the new
Letters Patent professed to give to Bishop Gray. Strange
to say, this point seems to have been simply overlooked
by the lawyers who drew the documents of 1853 ;
it discovered till nearly ten years afterwards.
nor was
For several years after Bishop Colenso s consecration he
was on terms of intimate personal friendship with his
Metropolitan, who fully recognised the remarkable effi
work in the difficult diocese of
ciency of his missionary
Natal. But his opinions, after a time, began
to cause
anxiety to his ecclesiastical friends, and matters reached
a crisis in the autumn of 1861 by the publication
of his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans,
which was immediately denounced by Bishop Gray as
"
full of the most objectionable views, and entirely sub
stituting a new scheme for the received system of
1
Christianity."
It was admitted by Bishop
Colenso s
friends at the time, and to some extent by his biographer
twenty years later, that in discussing subjects so momen
tous as the nature of our Lord s Atonement and the
Eternity of Future Punishment, the Commentary set the
popular theology altogether at defiance ; and it is in no
1
Bishop Gray s Lije, vol. ij. p. 22.