England and America,
was stirred to its 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 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 relations with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he
was singularly independent in his judgment, and that his investigations
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 theories after reading
Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less
eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English scholar for
original suggestions.(483)

(483) For interesting details of the Colenso persecution, see Davidson's
Life of Tait, chaps. xii 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 Testament Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix. For
testimony to the originality and value of Colenso's contributions, see
Kuenen, Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, Introduction, pp. 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 labours current 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 in the light of the English
bishop's research, there was small reason in the cry that his methods
were antiquated and his objections stale." For a very brief but
effective tribute to Colenso as an independent thinker whose merits are
now acknowledged by Continental scholars, see Pfleiderer, Development of
Theory, as above.

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 f