BISHOP COLENSO AND VERBAL INSPIRATION.*

Hawke's Bay Times, Volume II, Issue 122, 8 June 1863, Page 3

BISHOP COLENSO AND VERBAL INSPIRATION.*

fErom the (London) Daily Telegraph ,j There are seeming defeats which are substantial triumphs, and the Church of England hardly ever gained a more material victhan when Dr. Lushington pronounced his careful judgment against her indiscreet champion. The Bishop of Salisbury precipitated the question, which could not long have remained deferred. It was none other than to decide whether the Established Church might or might not continue to exist as the Church of England—allying to itself the spirit of modern inquiry, or hazard its corporate existence in a struggle of which none could foresee the issue. Happily for religion, for truth, and for the country, the hand of the legist flung down, between those who should never have been combatants, the warder of conciliation, The ruling of the Court of Arches, in the cases of Dr. Williams and the Rev. H. B. Wilson amounted to the declaration that there was nothing in the codes of the Church which forbade the free and unbiassed application of the principles of right reason to the text of the sacred volume. The full purport of this decision was not at first grasped. Like an Englishman in the one respect that he did not know when he was beaten, the militant prelate withdrew the shattered squadrons of his “ Articles,” with the full intention of marshalling them for another onset. He entertains, and is carrying out, that intention now. But twenty such polemical passages will not alter the fortune of the field, or turn the happy discomfiture of the bishop into a sad success. Dr. Lushington construed the English law aright. The fine spirit of its founders has been raised by him, as from the dust, to confute its ministerpreters, much as the corpse of the Cid was unshrouded and armed, to lead the Christians once again to victory. When Luther broke away from Rome, he never meant to bind the reformed faith to a harder Egypt and more subtle tyranny. His thought, and that of his followers, was to give England and Christendom the Bible pure, perfect, single, and simple, with the Holy Spirit for its illumination, and the conscientious judgment for its exponent. A Laudian reaction fettered the freed thought with articles and canons, or rather with interpretations of them, conceived in the interest of a hierarchy, and leavened with the leaven of the old lump. From this, by many ages of convention, intolerance, and indifference, has arisen the monstreus postulate, that what Rome, had been to the Churches, a certain interpretation of the Thirty-nine Articles—settled at a period of much exaltation and energy, but certainly not one of final judgment—was to be to the conscience. This admitted, the Reformation would have effected nothing, except to place one spiritual tyrant in the seat of another—a Caligula on the empty throne of Tiberius. The question was thus of the Bible, and the issue was justly joined upon its interpretation. The judge ruled that the ordination oath, “ I do unfeignedly believe in all the canonical Scriptures,” could not be construed otherwise than into an expression of hand fide belief that “ the Holy Scriptures contain everything necessary to salvation, and to that extent have the sanction of the Almighty.” The ground has thus been left as free for the enlightened as for the simple mind. Sciences [no longer rudely warned off the very premises where she has the highest business to perform ; and that doubtful pledge, which sate formerly like an incubus on the consciences of those who had entered the ministry, or’growled like a Cerberus upon those who stood at its portals, is reduced to just and re-assuring dimensions. The Church of England saved herself, in fact, by forcing the proof that she had mistaken herself ; she had claimed to be infallible, and found herself to be something better, namely, expansible; her Balaam of Salisbury, who went forth to curse neology, has returned home —that is to say, if he be really a seer — to bless English law. We have noticed in these columns the appearance of the Bishop of Natal, as one who by dignity of character, purity of life, and faithfulness in the Ministry, had a singular title to respectful attention for any use which

he might make of the new immunities. It is only due, however, to the courage and candor of this eminent prelate to observe that the present work, containing his mature decisions upon the historical accuracy of the books of Moses, was compilnd before the judgment of the Court of Arches had been delivered. Had that judgment gone otherwise, Bishop Colenso declares that he should still have felt it his duty to make public the results of his conscientious study. As it is, whatever their critical effect, the solemn judgment of an English court must first be reversed beforeeager anxiety of authority to punish opinion with persecution can be safely indulged. Under this new c’narter'for the freedom of discussion Dr. Colenso puts forward hir estimate of the Pentateuch, the indirect fruit of long labour in translating the Holy Scriptures into the tongue of his black converts: I am not conscious [he says] of having written anything to contravene I)r. Lushington’s decision. Should it be otherwise, and should the strange phenomenon be witnessed of a bishop of the Protestant Church of England, more especially one who has been expressly occupied in translating the Scriptures into a foreign tongue, being precluded by the law of that Church from entering upon a close, critical examination of them, and from bringing befors the great body of the Church (not the clergy only, but the clergy and laity) the plain honest results of such criticism, I must, of course, bear the consequences of ray act. But meanwhile, I cannot but believe that our Church, representing, as it is supposed to do, the religious feeling of a free Protestant nation, requires us now, as in the days of the reformation, to protest against all perversion of the truth, and all suppression of it for the sake of peace, or by mere authority. As a bishop of that Church, I dissent entirely from the principle laid down by some, that such a question as that which is hoi'o discussed is not even an open question for an English clergyman—that we are bound by solemn obligations to maintain certain views on the points here involved, to our lives’ end, or at least to resign our sacred office in the Church as soon as ever we feel it impossible any longer to hold them.

With this quotation we may pass to the volume itself, which is nothing more nor less than a fasciculus of such criticisms as Niebuhr has applied to the early history of Rome, or Fronde to the times of our Henry VIII. There are, it is true, many estimable persons who will be shocked in limine at the employment of so mundane a method; yet we believe that the best-informed of these, especially if they pretend to anything liltc bibliology, are familiar with a volume called Blunt's Coincidences. In that not unskilful compilation (much lauded, let it he remarked, by the orthodox) the Margaret Professor of Divinity at Cambridge applied the method of an Old Bailey barrister to elicit confirmations of the credibility of the Old Testament by cross-examination. Occasionally he succeeds ; in more than one instance he breaks down. But with the example of so excellent and practical an effort on one side of the Court, no tenable objection can be advanced to its imitation on the other. It must he observed, too, that in the discussion which Dr. Colenso proposed to himself, the little lacuna of phrase, or word, or letter, which embarass the Hebrew texts ascribed to Moses, were not to be included. Perplexing as they must be to pretensions which, like Mr. Burgon’s, of Oxford, and his school, claim absolute inspiration for every blunder of every transcriber and every printer's devil, a humbler mind, with less assertion regarding them, may possess more faith. Nor has the bishop addressed the enquiries forced upon him to the stupendous character of the miracles recorded by Moses—such as the Creation; the Deluge; the arrestation of the sun and moon at the word of a victorious soldier; the waters of the running Jordan heaped up in a wall; the ass speaking with a human voice ; the wands of the Egyptian magi transformed to serpents, and swallowed by, that of Aaron. These lay beside his purpose; which was, viewing the “ Five Books” as an historical narrative, to measure its credibility and consistency as such. Of course, the dogma that every word and line of Old and New Testament alike bears Heaven’s own imprimatur —the dogma, in a word, of absolute inspiration—is largely involved in such an enquiry. History is neither morals, nor religion, nor religious teaching, except indirectly; yet the supporters of a literal inspiration should be prepared to prove that their text does not contradict itself on matters of fact. Bishop Colenso believes himself to have proved the converse, being, indeed, far from the first, either as prelate or as critic, who has reached that result in the same investigation. I have arrived at the conviction (he writes] as painful to myself at first as it may be to my reader, though painful now no longer under the clear shining of the light of truth—that the Pentateuch, as a whole, cannot possibly have been written by Moses, or by anyone acquainted personally with the facts which it professes to describe; and, further, that the (so-called) Mosaic narrative, by whomsoever written, and though imparting to us, as I fully believe it does, revelations of the Di-

vine will and character, cannot be regarded as historically true. [To he Continued !].