Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the traditionally orthodox
side of English scholarship, while it had not been able to maintain
any effective quarantine against Continental criticism of classical
literature, had been able to keep up barriers fairly strong against
Continental discussions of sacred literature. But in the second half of
the nineteenth century these barriers were broken at many points, and,
the stream of German thought being united with the current of devotion
to truth in England, there appeared early in 1860 a modest volume
entitled Essays and Reviews. This work discussed sundry of the older
theological positions which had been rendered untenable by modern
research, and brought to bear upon them the views of the newer school
of biblical interpretation. The authors were, as a rule, scholars in
the prime of life, holding influential positions in the universities and
public schools. They were seven--the first being Dr. Temple, a successor
of Arnold at Rugby; and the others, the Rev. Dr. Rowland Williams, Prof.
Baden Powell, the Rev. H. 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 moderate,
served most effectually as entering wedges into the old tradition.

At first no great attention was paid to 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 Review 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 explosive 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 exception
of the essay by Dr. Temple, their writings w