readers of Essays and Reviews thought its authors had undermined the truth of Anglicanism from within its fold.280
The controversy was fueled in part by the prominent positions held by several essayists: Frederick Temple was Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen and Head Master of the Rugby School; Rowland Williams was Vice-Principal and Professor of Hebrew at St. David’s College, Lampeter; Baden Powell was Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford; Mark Pattison was Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford; and Benjamin Jowett was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. Six of the seven were clergymen of the Church of England. Although several bishops called to judge the work proclaimed their high regard for the book’s authors, the latter could not stand unchastised. Despite the writers’ claim that each was responsible only for his own essay,281 reviewers and bishops alike deemed the book part of an insidious cabal against Christianity’s basic tenets. By early 1862, with many thousand copies in print, more than 8500 clergy petitioned Lambeth against the book, and by 1864, 11,000 had signed the protest; the Upper and Lower Houses of the Anglican Church met to judge the work and hand down condemnations.282 The essayists, in the end, were saved by the Privy Council’s decision that there should be freedom of opinion on matters about which the Anglican Church had prescribed no rule. It was, in effect, the state that rescued the authors from the church.283
The essays were widely believed to introduce dangerous German ideas—near-atheism, Rationalism, and Hegelian Pantheism—into the bosom of English Christianity. In addition, the essayists also raised questions about the scientific and historical validity of Genesis, the doctrines of atonement and eternal punishment, and biblical infallibility more generally.284 Ieuan Ellis, historian of the controversy, argues that for many British readers, the novel aspect of the book was the centrality accorded to historical method: it was “a religious counterpart of those historically dominated studies (Buckle, Maine, etc.) which proposed to explain society and its institutions by their historical origins, an evolutionary process from lower to higher.” This historical treatment “put the traditional doctrine of revelation in a new and unflattering light.” Yet, Ellis notes, despite the essayists’ appeal to history and development, they remained curiously traditional in affirming notions of eternal, unchanging truths and a static human nature.285
Today, scholars of New Testament and early Christianity might deem the essays rather harmless and less “Germanizing.” For example, Temple claimed in his essay, “The Education of the World,” that since Christians had now reached “manhood,” they should decide for themselves the meaning and limits of biblical inspiration and the degree of authority to be ascribed to various books of the Bible. Temple also warned readers not to shy from the findings of geology, even if they implied that the opening chapters of Genesis could not be taken literally.286
The appeal to science also marked Baden Powell’s essay, “On the Study of Evidences of Christianity”—the only essayist who explicitly evoked Darwin’s Origin of Species. This author counseled Christians to divorce their understanding of truth from “physical things”: in centuries past, astronomy had jarred Christians’ understanding of the universe; more recently, geology; and now, theories of the antiquity of the human race and the development of the species. Modern Christians, Powell advised, might better abandon the scientific views of biblical writers, who did not rise above “the prepossessions and ignorance of their times.”287
A third essayist, Henry Bristow Wilson, argued that neither the Scriptures nor the earliest patristic writings contain the doctrines set forth in the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds. The Church of England, Wilson claimed, leaves its devotees free to interpret Scripture literally or allegorically, as poetry or as parable, and to decide for themselves how to understand stories in which serpents tempt or asses speak.288
Some critics deemed Benjamin Jowett’s essay, “On the Interpretation of Scripture,” the most damaging. As a noted scholar of classical Greek, Jowett could authoritatively address New Testament philology. Yet he argued that textual problems (e.g., questions of variations) were not the troubling issue; more frequently, problems stem from interpreters’ deployment of the text as a “weapon” for their party’s view, or attempt to make the Bible speak according to modern critical standards.289 As for recent scientific and historical discoveries, Jowett pointedly remarked, “the same fact cannot be true in religion when seen by the light of faith, and untrue in science when looked at through the medium of evidence or experiment.” He counseled readers to abandon “a losing battle” over the creation of the world or human origins; they imperil religion by resting it on false geological or philological views. How, he bluntly asked, can religious truths, so important to human life, depend on “the mere accident of an archaeological discovery”? “Interpret the Scripture like any other book,” he advised, and distinguish interpretation, the province of the few, from application, which even the uneducated can appropriate. He urged that study of the Scripture, just as of the classics, should be part of a liberal education. Unfortunately, ministerial students are mainly schooled to reconcile discrepancies or (in a jab at Tractarians) to adopt the “fancies and conjectures” of the Fathers—an unprofitable exercise, in Jowett’s view.290
Critics were hostile: Essays and Reviews was deemed “a radical subversion of the faith of the Church of England,” “infidelity made easy.”291 Critics veered precipitously between charging that the book’s ideas were “old” (so no cause for excitement) or “new” (thus very dangerous, especially to the young).292 Most commentators, whatever their line, accused the authors of adopting German historical and biblical criticism.
For example, the staunchly High-Anglican scholar Edward Pusey charged the authors with “random dogmatic skepticism” stemming from “foreign sources of unbelief,” namely, “German unbelievers” of thirty years ago.293 An editor (or contributor), writing in the British and Foreign Evangelical Review and signing himself “S.,” claimed that Essays and Reviews, a “manifesto,” had alarmed Anglicans more than any book since Strauss’s Life of Jesus a quarter-century earlier. The essays are not “English,” “S.” complained. Hanging “like a portentous cloud over the Anglican church, blackening her whole horizon,” the essays represent “the destructive theology of Germany, and the Hegelian philosophy on which the former rests.” They are “tainted with the school of Tübingen, which may be called the Medusa head that threatens to turn Oxford into stone.”294 The essays cannot even be called “Christian,” for the theory of development they contain lies “outside the pale of Christianity.” “S.” accused the essayists of jettisoning the truth of Scripture in favor of a (Hegelian) “ideal,” of endorsing Pantheism (the human race, not Christ alone, is deemed divine), and of implying that the doctrine of the Trinity is not biblical. These “hollow and arrogant speculations of Hegelianism,” “S.” observed, were a reaction to the Tractarian movement’s exaltation of the early church and “hoar [sic] antiquity.”295 In this latter claim, at least, “S.” appears correct.
Henry Smith reviewed the book (in its second American edition) in his American Theological Review. Although Smith treats the essayists’ arguments more fully than does “S.,” his assumptions and major criticisms are largely the same. For Smith, Christianity, whatever internal developments have shaped it,
has always aimed to be a specific, divine revelation, supernatural in its origin, announced in prophecy, attested by miracles, recorded in inspired Scriptures, centering in the person and work of the Godman, and having for its object the redemption of the world from sin. It presupposes a personal God, and anticipates a future state of reward and punishment.296
Like “S.,” Smith linked the essayists with Hegelianism, German thought, Tübingen, and Pantheism; they repay “the debt which German rationalism owed to that English deism, from which it received its impulse.” Yet while the essayists don German garb, they err in not pressing further, so as either to accept the radical conclusions of certain German authors or to discover
