the English writer, but rendered liable to cause the maximum of offence. Williams's Psalms and Litanies, published by his widow in 1872, proves him to have had a true devotional feeling, and a desire to enter into communion with the Eternal Spirit, but it also shows how he consistently reduced ancient collects to a unitarian standard. Maurice had, indeed, touched the chief defect of Essays and Reviews, a defect which the lapse of time has made even more apparent. The disparagement of doctrine, and, especially, the neglect to contribute anything to the understanding of the person and nature of Jesus Christ, render it of little service to a later age, which, like other ages before it, sees that here is the core of essentially Christian thinking. The true claim of the essayists to grateful remembrance is that they asserted with one voice the duty of the Christian church to welcome new truth, and the right of her accredited sons to make it known. Not in vain is one of the essayists commemorated on the walls of his college chapel as a scholar qui libertatem cleri anglicani feliciter vindicavit.

Public opinion was so far in favour of wider theological liberty that the acquittal of the essayists in 1864 was followed next year by the Clerical Subscription act, substituting a general assent to the XXXIX Articles of religion for the ex animo subscription 'to all things therein contained,' which had been required for two centuries. There were similar struggles for freedom in other churches. Scottish theology, which had been eminently conservative, became less provincial as it grew bolder and more critical. In the Free church of Scotland, the biblical contributions of William Robertson Smith to the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica excited a growing hostility from 1875 till 1881, when he was removed from his professorial chair at Aberdeen. But there was a larger public ready to form its judgment when he published his popular lectures, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882). Freed from ecclesiastical ties, he pursued at Cambridge, till his death in 1894, his original researches into the primitive religions of the Semitic peoples.

Prosecutions for heresy and indictments of heterodox publications brought theological questions into general discussion throughout the 'sixties. The magazines, and especially the new Fortnightly Review, often provided the arena. The excitement over Essays and Reviews was not allayed before a new quarry was started by bishop Colenso's free handling of the Pentateuch,

which found few whole-hearted defenders in the Christian camp, partly owing to the author's provocative and unfortunate manner. It was more difficult for the contemporary orthodox mind to decide whether the anonymous author of Ecce Homo (1865) was friend or foe. Like Matthew Arnold's essays and many other books of the period, Ecce Homo represents the attempt to save religion in the shipwreck of orthodoxy, and, above all, to save Christian ethics. Its author, who was soon discovered to be John Robert Seeley, at that time professor of Latin in University college, London, intentionally avoided controversial theology. When he was reproached for 'concealing' his theological opinions, he replied that he concealed them 'only in the sense in which the vast majority of the community have concealed them; that is, he has not published them.' Seeley took for granted, as orthodox and heterodox writers commonly did in his generation, that 'almost all men' could agree upon the Christian ethical standard. With an engaging fervour and literary grace, he set before his readers Christ's 'enthusiasm for humanity,' and found in it a motive which could still be for Christians a stronger passion than any other.

Christ raised the feeling of humanity from being a feeble restraining power to be an inspiring passion. The Christian moral reformation may indeed be summed up in this-humanity changed from a restraint to a motive.

Seeley regarded Christianity as natural fellow-feeling or humanity raised to the point of enthusiasm. He did not think that the world could 'do without Christ and his Church.' Indeed, he reckoned the person of Christ to be of more account than anything which he said or did: 'Christ's discovery is himself.' The moral teaching of the New Testament, for instance, the law of forgiveness, Christ's most striking innovation in morality,' was commended by Seeley to his generation with greater freshness and charm than by any other writer. No one could miss his meaning or ever forget his fine tribute to the distinctive note of Christian morality.

There was much to discourage the Christian advocate in the 'seventies. Neither science nor culture was inclined to be docile. Huxley made merry in the monthly reviews, and Matthew Arnold subjected the defenders of traditional theology to successive volleys of Gallic raillery. Confidence was restored to the orthodox ranks, less by the concessions of broad churchmen or the defence of orthodox apologists, than by the rise of a school of historical criticism. If the appeal was to be to scholarship,

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even the general reader would soon see that sound learning and candour were not all on one side. A notable part in the creation of an improved theological scholarship was played by three Cambridge contemporaries and friends, Brooke Foss Westcott, Fenton John Anthony Hort, and Joseph Barber Lightfoot. The tractarian scholars had been chiefly interested in the age of the councils; the Cambridge scholars devoted themselves to the study of Christian origins. Westcott and Hort's main work was the recension of the Greek text of the New Testament; Lightfoot was concerned with the Pauline epistles and the apostolic Fathers. Their work was timely and valuable, but they would have been the last to regard it as final. They shared the characteristic belief of the liberal theologians in the progressive apprehension of Christian truth. 'Let us all thank God,' said bishop Westcott to his clergy, at the close of his long life of teaching, 'that He has called us to unfold a growing message, and not to rehearse a stereotyped tradition.' 'Christianity,' wrote Hort, 'is not an uniform and monotonous tradition, but to be learned only by successive steps of life.' Hort's passion for meticulous accuracy and his extreme caution caused him to publish little, and his shyness stood in the way of his influence as an oral teacher. Yet his posthumous Hulsean lectures, The Way the Truth the Life, revealed him as a master of pregnant phrase. Centuries of speculation on the doctrine of atonement are arraigned by the terse judgment: 'Theologies which have sundered God's righteousness from His love have done equal wrong to both.'

While Christian scholarship was thus holding its own, there was also a welcome escape from the determinist and utilitarian fashions in philosophy. At Oxford, Thomas Henry Green, tutor of Balliol, exercised a strong spiritual influence over those whom criticism was compelling to discard 'the fair humanities of old religion.' James Martineau, of an older generation than Green, did not publish any of his more important books till his eightieth year. In earlier life, Martineau had adopted the determinist and utilitarian theories of morals, but he proved their effective critic in his octogenarian volume, Types of Ethical Theory (1885). Three years later, he vindicated theistic belief in A Study of Religion.

The critical principles for which liberal theologians had had to do battle were by this time no longer the badges of their tribe, but were accepted by most educated Christians. For instance, high churchmen had travelled more than half way from

the tractarian to the liberal position, when, in 1889, a group of Oxford friends combined, in Lux Mundi, to make a re-statement of Christian faith; 'it needs disencumbering, re-interpreting, explaining.' 'It is the test of the Church's legitimate tenure that she can encourage free inquiry into her title-deeds.'

Cross-currents of theological opinion have become in recent years increasingly noticeable. If high churchmen have adopted a freer biblical criticism, broad churchmen and free churchmen have ceased to belittle the idea of the church. Theology becomes more and more cosmopolitan, and oversteps denominational boundaries. Even that church which rates highest the principle of authority has had its disciplinary difficulties with those sons who seek to create a catholic atmosphere in which the modern mind may breathe more freely. The modernist movement is yet too near and unexhausted to find historical treatment, were it not that its most brilliant English representative, George Tyrrell, has already written his last word. The title of one of his earlier books, Nova et Vetera, is a fit symbol of his lifelong attempt to adjust new and old. His mind was delicately sensitive to every modern pressure, yet he loved the past and would lose none of its heritage: 'The new must be made out of the old, must retain and transcend all its values.' The very word catholic, said the Abbé Brémond at his graveside, was music to his ears; he was more securely catholic than Christian. Now he would be wondering whether the Christianity of the future would consist of mysticism and charity, and possibly the Eucharist in its primitive form as the outward bond'; now he would look longingly back to the church of his baptism; and yet again give a last loyalty to the church of his adoption. He was still probing this way and that for sure foothold when death interrupted his pilgrimage. ‘Had I been Moses I don't think I should have felt not entering the Land of Promise one bit, so long as I knew that Israel would do so one day.'

It is inevitable that Tyrrell's career should be compared with Newman's; he made the comparison himself in one of the latest of his essays.

'Be my soul with the Saints!' says Newman, looking away from Anglicanism towards the altars of Rome. But is there not a wider Communion of Saints, whereof the canonised are but a fraction, and whose claims are founded, not in miracles or prodigies, but in that sincerity to truth and righteousness, without which even orthodoxy were nothing worth? Be my soul with such saints, whatever their creed and communion!

CHAPTER XIV

HISTORIANS

WRITERS ON ANCIENT AND EARLY ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY

WITH the eighteenth century, or, more precisely, in its concluding decade, the last two of its three great British historians had passed away; and it was as if, beneath the shadow of the imposing names of Hume, Robertson and Gibbon, no growth of rival dignity and splendour could venture to rear its head. During the ensuing years of long-sustained national effort, few minds cared to concentrate themselves upon a close study of past public life. Yet, when this period came to an end with the Napoleonic, that had grown out of the revolutionary, wars, it was not, in the first instance, a patriotic impulse which turned attention back to historical studies. Nor, although in our literature the efforts of the romantic school were then at their height, and although, both here and in other countries, the influence of Scott, more powerfully than that of any other poet or prose writer, changed alike the spirit and the form of historical composition, were the revival of the study of history and the reassertion of the claim of historians to a place of honour among English writers due, primarily at all events, to an intellectual reaction. The motive force which, first and foremost, inspired the new progress of English historical literature in the nineteenth century is to be sought in what has been aptly called the second revival of classical learning in Europe, but what may be more exactly described as the beginnings of later critical scholarship. In the field of history, the search for materials and the examination of them now first became an integral part of the historian's task, without pretending to supersede composition, or, in other words, the literary or artistic side of his labours. F. A. Wolf had led the way on which, in Greek historical studies, Otfried Müller