Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

THE CLOSING STRUGGLE.
nies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that
same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your
body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and
tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance
of a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, mis-
represent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate
your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to
destroy your powers of service."
*
Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice his adviser
became the most untiring of his persecutors. While
leaving to men like the Metropolitan of Cape Town and
Archdeacon Denison the noisy part of the onslaught, Wil-
berforce was among those who were most zealous in devising
more effective measures.
But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance
between the two prelates. Colenso is seen more and more
of all men as a righteous leader in a noble effort to cut the
Church loose from fatal entanglements with an outworn system
of interpretation ; Wilberforce, as the remembrance of
his eloquence and of his personal charm dies away, and as
the revelations of his indiscreet biographers lay bare his
modes of procedure, is seen to have left, on the whole, the
most disappointing record made by any Anglican prelate
during the nineteenth century.
But there was a far brighter page in the history of the
Church of England ; for the second of the three who linked
their names with that of Colenso in the struggle was Arthur
Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster. His action during
this whole persecution was an honour not only to the Anglican
Church but to humanity. For his own manhood and
the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he had cheer-
in the Church which had
full}^ given up the high preferment
* For the social ostracism of Colenso, see works already cited ;
also Cox's of
Life
Colenso. For the Colenso, see
passage from Wilberforce's sermon at the consecration of
Rev. Sir G. W. Cox, The Church of England and the Teaching of
Bishop Colenso. For Wilberforce's relations to the Colenso case in general, see
his Life, by his son, vol. iii, especially pp. 113-126, 229-231. For Keble's avowal
that no Englishman believes in excommunication, ibid., p. 128. For a guarded
statement of Dean Stanley's opinion regarding Wilberforce and Newman, see a
letter from Dean Church to the Warden of Keble, in Life and Letters of Dean
Church, p. 293.
355