Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence of the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England and America, was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and various dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains were taken to root out his reputation: it was declared that he had merely stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by wholesale, and peddled them out in England at retail; the fact being that, while he used all the sources of information at his command, and was large-minded enough to put himself into relations with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was singularly independent in his judgment, and that his investigations were of lasting value in modifying Continental thought. Kuenen, the most distinguished of all his contemporaries in this field, modified, as he himself declared, one of his own leading theories after reading Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English scholar for original suggestions.(483)
(483) For interesting details of the Colenso persecution, see Davidson's
Life of Tait, chaps. xii and xiv; also the Lives of Bishops Wilberforce
and Gray. For full accounts of the struggle, see Cox, Life of Bishop
Colenso, London, 1888, especially vol. i, chap. v. For the dramatic
performance at Colenso's cathedral, see vol. ii, pp. 14-25. For a very
impartial and appreciative statement regarding Colenso's work, see
Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix. For
testimony to the originality and value of Colenso's contributions, see
Kuenen, Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, Introduction, pp. xx,
as follows: "Colenso directed my attention to difficulties which I had
hitherto failed to observe or adequately to reckon with; and as to
the opinion of his labours current in Germany, I need only say that,
inasmuch as Ewald, Bunsen, Bleek, and Knabel were every one of them
logically forced to revise their theories in the light of the English
bishop's research, there was small reason in the cry that his methods
were antiquated and his objections stale." For a very brief but
effective tribute to Colenso as an independent thinker whose merits are
now acknowledged by Continental scholars, see Pfleiderer, Development of
Theory, as above.
But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He was socially ostracized—more completely even than Lyell had been after the publication of his Principles of Geology thirty years before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had been defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who turned against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a true ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and people, of all books in the world, Spinoza's Tractatus. A large part of the English populace was led to regard him as an "infidel," a "traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean being"; servants left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart were let loose upon him"; and one of the favourite amusements of the period among men of petty wit and no convictions was the devising of light ribaldry against him.(484)
(484) One of the nonsense verses in vogue at the time summed up the
controversy as follows:
"A bishop there was of Natal,
Who had a Zulu for his pal;
Said the Zulu, 'My dear,
Don't you think Genesis queer?'
Which coverted my lord of Natal."
But verses quite as good appeared on the other side, one of them being
as follows:
"Is this, then, the great Colenso,
Who all the bishops offends so?
Said Sam of the Soap,
Bring fagots and rope,
For oh! he's got no friends, oh!"
For Matthew Arnold's attack on Colenso, see Macmillan's Magazine, January, 1863. For Maurice, see the references already given.
In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of whom has connected his name with it permanently.
First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of Oxford. The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been honoured throughout the world for his efforts in the suppression of the slave trade, he had been rapidly advanced in the English Church, and was at this time a prelate of wide influence. He was eloquent and diplomatic, witty and amiable, always sure to be with his fellow-churchmen and polite society against uncomfortable changes. Whether the struggle was against the slave power in the United States, or the squirearchy in Great Britain, or the evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views promulgated by the Essayists and Reviewers, he was always the suave spokesman of those who opposed every innovator and "besought him to depart out of their coasts." Mingling in curious proportions a truly religious feeling with care for his own advancement, his remarkable power in the pulpit gave him great strength to carry out his purposes, and his charming facility in being all things to all men, as well as his skill in evading the consequences of his many mistakes, gained him the sobriquet of "Soapy Sam." If such brethren of his in the episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn and Tait might claim to be in the apostolic succession, Wilberforce was no less surely in the succession from the most gifted and eminently respectable Sadducees who held high preferment under Pontius Pilate.
By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached the sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and one passage in it may be cited as showing the preacher's gift of prophecy both hortatory and predictive. Wilberforce then said to Colenso: "You need boldness to risk all for God—to stand by the truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the devil's wrath;... you need a patient meekness to bear the galling calumnies 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, misrepresent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your powers of service."(485)
(485) For the social ostracism of Colenso, see works already cited; also
Cox's Life of Colenso. For the passage from Wilberforce's sermon at the
consecration of Colenso, see 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.