for having written a Book of Numbers."
The faith of some was seriously perturbed when they heard of a
Bishop who, as Matthew Arnold said, "had learnt among the Zulus
that only a certain number of people can stand in a doorway at
once, and that no man can eat eighty-eight pigeons a day; and who
tells us, as a consequence, that the Pentateuch is all fiction,
which, however, the author may very likely have composed without
meaning to do wrong, and as a work of poetry, like Homer's."

Certainly the tremors of a faith so lightly overset were justly
obnoxious to Arnold's ridicule; but Colenso's negations went deeper
than the doorway and the pigeons; and the faithful of his diocese,
being untrammelled by the State, politely dismissed him from his
charge. In England steady-going Christians had been not less perturbed
by that queer collection of rather musty discourses which was called
_Essays and Reviews_; and the Church of England had made an attempt
to rid itself, by synodical action, of all complicity in the dubious
doctrine. But the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had justified
the essayists, and had done its best to uphold Colenso. By so doing, it
had, of course, delighted all Erastians; but Churchmen, whether at home
or abroad, who believed in the English Church as a spiritual society,
with a life of its own apart from all legal establishment, felt that
the time had come when this belief should be publicly proclaimed. In
February, 1866, the Anglican Bishops of Canada addressed a Memorial
to Dr. Longley, then Archbishop of Canterbury, requesting him to
summon a conference of all the Bishops of the Anglican Communion;
and, after some characteristic hesitation, this was done. A Letter of
Invitation was issued in February, 1867. The more dogged Erastians
held aloof; but those who conceived of the Church as a spiritual
society obeyed the summons; the "Conference of Bishops" assembled,
and the priceless word "Pan-Anglicanism" was added to the resources
of the language.

What did these good men do when they were come together? Not, it
must be admitted, very much. They prayed and they preached, and
debated and divided, and, in the matter of Colenso, quarrelled.
They issued a Pastoral Letter which, as Bishop Tait said, was "the
expression of essential agreement and a repudiation of Infidelity
and Romanism." If this had been the sole result of the Conference,
it would have been meagre enough; but under this official
ine