and at the most critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.[1]
The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England whose names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall.
He was undoubtedly the foremost man in the Church of his time—the greatest ecclesiastical statesman, the profoundest historical scholar, the theologian of clearest vision in regard to the relations between the Church and his epoch. Alone among his brother bishops at this period, he stood "four square to all the winds that blew," as during all his life he stood against all storms of clerical or popular unreason. He had his reward. He was never advanced beyond a poor Welsh bishopric; but, though he saw men wretchedly inferior constantly promoted beyond him, he never flinched, never lost heart or hope, but bore steadily on, refusing to hold a brief for lucrative injustice, and resisting to the last all reaction and fanaticism, thus preserving not only his own self-respect but the future respect of the English nation for the Church.
A few other leading churchmen were discreetly kind to Colenso, among them Tait, who had now been made Archbishop of Canterbury; but, manly as he was, he was somewhat more cautious in this matter than those who most revere his memory could now wish.
In spite of these friends the clerical onslaught was for a time effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was discredited and virtually driven from his functions. But this enforced leisure simply gave him more time to struggle for the protection of his native flock against colonial rapacity, and to continue his great work on the Bible.
His work produced its effect. The impulse which it gave had much to do with arousing a new generation of English, Scotch, and American scholars. That a new epoch had come was now more and more evident, and out of the many proofs of this we may note two of the most striking.
For many years the Bampton Lectures at Oxford had been considered as adding steadily and strongly to the bulwarks of the old orthodoxy. If now and then orthodoxy had appeared in
- ↑ For interesting testimony to Stanley's character, from a quarter whence it would have been least expected, see a reminiscence of Lord Shaftesbury in the Life of Frances Power Cobbe, London and New York, 1894. The late Bishop of Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks, whose death was a bereavement to his country and to the Church universal, once gave the present writer a vivid description of a scene witnessed by him in the Convocation of Canterbury, when Stanley virtually withstood alone the obstinate traditionalism of the whole body in the matter of the Athanasian Creed. It is to be hoped that this account may be brought to light among the letters written by Brooks at that time. See also Dean Church's Life and Letters, p. 294, for a very important testimony.
