teenth century.

The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet most widely
beloved among high churchmen; large endowments flowed in upon it; a
showy chapel was erected in accordance throughout with the strictest
rules of medieval ecclesiology. As if to strike the keynote of the
thought to be fostered in the new institution, one of the most beautiful
of pseudo-medieval pictures was given the place of honour in its hall;
and the college, lofty and gaudy, loomed high above the neighbouring
modest abode of Oxford science. Kuenen might be victorious in Holland,
and Wellhausen in Germany, and Robertson Smith in Scotland--even
Professors Driver, Sanday, and Cheyne might succeed Dr. Pusey as
expounders of the Old Testament at Oxford--but Keble College, rejoicing
in the favour of a multitude of leaders in the Church, including Mr.
Gladstone, seemed an inexpugnable fortress of the older thought.

But in 1889 appeared the book of essays entitled Lux Mundi, among whose
leading authors were men closely connected with Keble College and
with the movement which had created it. This work gave up entirely the
tradition that the narrative in Genesis is a historical record, and
admitted that all accounts in the Hebrew Scriptures of events before the
time of Abraham are mythical and legendary; it conceded that the books
ascribed to Moses and Joshua were made up mainly of three documents
representing different periods, and one of them the late period of the
exile; that "there is a considerable idealizing element in Old Testament
history"; that "the books of Chronicles show an idealizing of history"
and "a reading back into past records of a ritual development which
is really later," and that prophecy is not necessarily
predictive--"prophetic inspiration being consistent with erroneous
anticipations." Again a shudder went through the upholders of tradition
in the Church, and here and there threats were heard; but the Essays
and Reviews fiasco and the Colenso catastrophe were still in vivid
remembrance. Good sense prevailed: Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury,
instead of prosecuting the authors, himself asked the famous question,
"May not the Holy Spirit make use of myth and legend?" and the
Government, not long afterward, promoted one of these authors to a
bishopric.(487)

(487) Of Pusey's extreme devotion to his view of the book of Daniel,
there is a curious evidence in a letter to Stanley in the second volume
of the latter'