580 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



he was to avoid attacking anything established, alluded with 

 deep regret to " the devotion of the English people to the law in 

 matters of this sort." 



Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence 

 of the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in Eng- 

 land and America, was stirred to the 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 then 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 rela- 

 tions with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was 

 singularly independent in his judgment, and his own investiga- 

 tions 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 the- 

 ories after reading Colenso's argument ; and other Continental 

 scholars scarcely less eminent acknowledged their great indebted- 

 ness to the English scholar for original suggestions.* 



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 favorite 



* For interesting details of tbe Colenso persecution, see Davidson's Life of Tait, chaps, 

 xiii 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 Testa- 

 ment Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix. For testimony to the originality and value of 

 Colenso's contributions, see Kuenen, Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, introduc- 

 tion, p. 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 labors curient 

 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 hi the light of the English bishop's 

 researches, there was small reason in the cry that his methods were antiquated and his 

 objections stale." 



