NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 453 



B. Wilson, Mr. C. W. Goodwin, the Rev. Mark Pattison, and the 

 Rev. Prof. Jowett the only one of the seven not in holy orders 

 being Goodwin. All the articles were important, though the first, 

 by Temple, on The Education of the World, and the last, by 

 Jowett, on The Interpretation of Scripture, being the most mod- 

 erate, served most effectually as entering wedges into the old 

 tradition. 



At first no great attention was paid the book, the only notice 

 being the usual attempts in sundry clerical newspapers to pooh- 

 pooh it. But in October, 1860, appeared in the Westminster Re- 

 view an article exulting in the work as an evidence that the new 

 critical method had at last penetrated the Church of England. 

 The opportunity for defending the Church was at once seized by 

 no less a personage than Bishop Wilberforce, of Oxford, the same 

 who a few months before had secured a fame more lasting than 

 enviable by his attacks on Darwin and the evolutionary theory. 

 His first onslaught was made in a charge to his clergy. This he 

 followed up with an article, in the Quarterly Review, very ex- 

 plosive in its rhetoric, much like that which he had devoted in 

 the same periodical to Darwin. The bishop declared that the 

 work tended " toward infidelity, if not to atheism " ; that the 

 writers had been "guilty of criminal levity"; that, with the ex- 

 ception of the essay by Dr. Temple, their writings were " full of 

 sophistries and skepticisms/' He was especially bitter against 

 Prof. Jowett's dictum, " Interpret the Scripture like any other 

 book " ; he insisted that Mr. Goodwin's treatment of the Mosaic 

 account of the Origin of Man " sweeps away the whole basis of 

 inspiration and leaves no place for the Incarnation " ; and through 

 the article were scattered such rhetorical adornments as the words 

 " infidel," " atheistic," " false," " wanton," and the like. It at once 

 attracted wide attention, but its most immediate effect was to 

 make the fortune of Essays and Reviews, which was straightway 

 demanded on every hand, went through edition after edition, and 

 became a power in the land. At this a panic began, and with the 

 usual results of panic much folly and some cruelty. Addresses 

 from clergy and laity, many of them frantic with rage and fear, 

 poured in upon the bishops, begging them to save Christianity 

 and the Church ; a storm of abuse arose ; the seven essayists were 

 stigmatized as " the seven extinguishers of the seven lamps of the 

 Apocalypse," " the seven champions not of Christendom." As a 

 result of all this pressure, Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury, 

 one of the last of the old, kindly, bewigged pluralists of the Geor- 

 gian period, headed a declaration, which was signed by the Arch- 

 bishop of York and a long list of bishops, expressing pain at the 

 appearance of the book, but doubts as to the possibility of any 

 effective dealing with it. This letter only made matters worse. 



