iven the lecturer not only out of the
Church but out of any decent position in society; for Prof. Sanday
not only gave up a vast mass of other ideas which the great body
of churchmen had regarded as fundamental, but accepted a number of
conclusions established by the newer criticism. He declared that Kuenen
and Wellhausen had mapped out, on the whole rightly, the main stages of
development in the history of Hebrew literature; he incorporated with
approval the work of other eminent heretics; he acknowledged that very
many statements in the Pentateuch show "the naive ideas and usages of
a primitive age." But, most important of all, he gave up the whole
question in regard to the book of Daniel. Up to a time then very recent,
the early authorship and predictive character of the book of Daniel were
things which no one was allowed for a moment to dispute. Pusey, as we
have seen, had proved to the controlling parties in the English Church
that Christianity must stand or fall with the traditional view of this
book; and now, within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in his
own university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had
so often insisted upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the older
view, this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of divinity,
showing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that the critical
view had won the day; that the name of Daniel is only assumed; that the
book is in no sense predictive, but was written, mainly at least, after
the events it describes; that "its author lived at the time of the
Maccabean struggle"; that it is very inaccurate even in the simple facts
which it cites; and hence that all the vast fabric erected upon its
predictive character is baseless.

But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even more
striking.

To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even every germ
that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a special movement
was begun, of which the most important part was the establishment,
at the University of Oxford, of a college which should bring the old
opinion with crushing force against the new thought, and should train up
a body of young men by feeding them upon the utterances of the fathers,
of the medieval doctors, and of the apologists of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries; and should keep them in happy ignorance of the
reforming spirit of the sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the
nine