Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

258 FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM.
Up to a time then very recent, the early authorship and predictive
character of the book of Daniel were things which
no one was allowed for a moment to dispute. Pusey, as we
have seen, had proved to the controlling parties in the English
Church that Christianity must stand or fall with the
traditional view of this book ; and now, within a few years
of Pusey's death, there came, in his own university, speaking
from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had so often insisted
upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the older view,
this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of divinity, show-
ing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that the crit-
ical view had won the day ; that the name of Daniel is only
assumed ; that the book is in no sense predictive, but was
written, mainly at least, after the events it describes ; that
" its author lived at the time of the Maccabean struggle " ;
that it is very inaccurate even in the simple facts which it
cites ; and hence that all the vast fabric erected upon its predictive
character is baseless.
But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch
was even more striking.
To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy
even every germ that had been planted by Colenso and men
like him, a special movement was begun, of which the most
important part was the establishment, at the University of
Oxford, of a college which should bring the old opinion with
crushing force against the new thought, and should train up
a body of young men by feeding them upon the utterances
of the fathers, of the mediaeval doctors, and of the apologists
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and should keep
them in happy ignorance of the reforming spirit of the sixteenth
and the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century.
The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet
large endow-
most widely beloved among high churchmen ;
ments flowed in upon it ; a showy chapel was erected in accordance
throughout with the strictest rules of mediaeval
ecclesiology. As if to strike the keynote of the thought to
be fostered in the new institution, one of the most beautiful
of pseudo-mediasval pictures was given the place of honour
in its hall ; and the college, lofty and gaudy, loomed high
above the neighbouring modest abode of Oxford science.