448 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



shown amply those qualities which afterward made him Presi- 

 dent of Harvard, Secretary of State of the United States, and a 

 United States Senator. His character and attainments were of 

 the highest, and, as he was then occupying the foremost place in 

 the diplomatic service of his country, he was invited to receive an 

 appropriate honorary degree at Oxford. But on his presentation 

 for it in the Sheldonian Theater there came a revelation to the 

 people he represented, and indeed to all Christendom: a riot 

 having been carefully prepared beforehand by sundry zealots, 

 he was most grossly and ingeniously insulted by the mob of un- 

 dergraduates and bachelors of arts in the galleries and masters 

 of arts on the floor ; and the reason for this was that, though by 

 no means radical in his religious opinions, he was thought to 

 have been in his early life, and to be possibly at that time, below 

 what was then the Oxford fashion in belief, or rather feeling, 

 regarding the mystery of the Trinity. 



At the center of biblical teaching at Oxford sat Pusey, Regius 

 Professor of Hebrew, a scholar who had himself remained for a 

 time at a German university, and who early in life had embodied 

 so much of the German spirit as to expose himself to suspicion 

 and even to attack. One charge against him at that time shows 

 curiously what was then expected of a man perfectly sound in the 

 older Anglican theology. He had ventured to defend Holy Writ 

 with the argument that there were fishes actually existing which 

 could have swallowed the prophet Jonah. The argument proved 

 unfortunate. He was attacked on the scriptural ground that the 

 fish which swallowed Jonah was created for that express purpose. 

 He, like others, fell back under the charm of the old system: 

 his ideas gave force to the reaction : in the quiet of his study, 

 which, especially after the death of his son, became a hermitage, 

 he relapsed into patristic and mediaeval conceptions of Christian- 

 ity, enforcing them from the pulpit and in his published works. 

 He now virtually accepted the famous dictum of St. Hilary of 

 Poictiers that one is first to find what is to be believed, and then 

 to search the Scriptures for proofs of it. His devotion to the 

 main features of the older interpretation was seen at its strongest 

 in his utterances regarding the book of Daniel. Just as Cardinal 

 Bellarmine had insisted that the doctrine of the Incarnation de- 

 pends upon the retention of the Ptolemaic astronomy ; just as 

 Wesley had insisted that the truth of the Bible depends on the 

 reality of witchcraft ; just as Peter Martyr had made everything 

 sacred depend on the literal acceptance of Genesis ; just as Bishop 

 Warburton had insisted that Christianity absolutely depends 

 upon a right interpretation of the prophecies regarding Anti- 

 christ so did Pusey now virtually insist that the whole claim of 

 Christianity upon the world depends upon the early date of the 



