centuries, and should keep them in happy ignorance of the reforming spirit of the sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the nineteenth 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 mediæval ecclesiology. As if to strike the keynote of the thought to be fostered in the new institution, one of the most beautiful of pseudo-mediæval pictures was given the place of honor in its hall, and the college, lofty and gaudy, loomed high above the neighboring modest abode of Oxford science. Kuenen might rage 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 favor 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, and 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?"[1]
In the sister university the same tendency was seen. Robertson Smith, who had been driven out of his high position in the
- ↑ 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's Life and Letters. For the views referred to in Lux Mundi, see pages 345-357; also, on the general subject, Bishop Ellicott's Christus Comprobator.
