Transcribed by David Price, email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
The Gospel of the Pentateuch: A set of Parish Sermons
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION OF THE GOSPEL OF THE PENTATEUCH
TO THE REV. CANON STANLEY.
My Dear Stanley,
I dedicate these Sermons to you, not that I may make you responsible for any doctrine or statement contained in them, but as the simplest method of telling you how much they owe to your book on the Jewish Church, and of expressing my deep gratitude to you for publishing that book at such a time as this.
It has given to me (and I doubt not to many other clergymen) a fresh confidence and energy in preaching to my people the Gospel of the Old Testament as the same with that of the New; and without it, many of these Sermons would have been very different from, and I am certain very inferior to, what they are now, by the help of your admirable book.
Brought up, like all Cambridge men of the last generation, upon Paley’s Evidences, I had accepted as a matter of course, and as the authoritative teaching of my University, Paley’s opinions as to the limits of Biblical criticism, [{0a}] quoted at large in Dean Milman’s noble preface to his last edition of the History of the Jews; and especially that great dictum of his, ‘that it is an unwarrantable, as well as unsafe rule to lay down concerning the Jewish history, that which was never laid down concerning any other, that either every particular of it must be true, or the whole false.’
I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubt not, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shall read these lines who has not read Paley’s Evidences, he may be stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so become acquainted with a great book and a great mind.
A reverent and rational liberty in criticism (within the limits of orthodoxy) is, I have always supposed, the right of every Cambridge man; and I was therefore the more shocked, for the sake of free thought in my University, at the appearance of a book which claimed and exercised a licence in such questions, which I must (after careful study of it) call anything but rational and reverent. Of the orthodoxy of the book it is not, of course, a private clergyman’s place to judge. That book seemed dangerous to the University of Cambridge itself, because it was likely to stir up from without attempts to abridge her ancient liberty of thought; but it seemed still more dangerous to the hundreds of thousands without the University, who, being no scholars, must take on trust the historic truth of the Bible.