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of 1869. The change may be traced in the altered language of his assailants. To take only a single specimen :-When Milman called Abram "an independent Sheik or Emir" (i. 8), the critic of 1830 retorted, "that is, if the latter word is strictly and properly interpreted, he wore a green turban, and was one of the descendants of Fatimah, the daughter of Mahomet. We really wonder he did not at once call him a turbaned Turk. It would have been much more intelligible, and not at all less irreverent, nor at all more inconsistent with chronology" (B. C., vol. vii. p. 337). We believe that the Ecclesiastic in 1859 held a position not unlike that of the British Critic in 1830; and thus it accepts as probable what its predecessor had rejected as irreverent and absurd :

"We think that it cannot fairly be denied that there is a certain amount of truth in the representation there set before us of Jewish history. In other words, we admit that Jewish history has an earthly no less than a divine aspect. Abraham probably, in Dr. Milman's words, was like a modern Sheik or Emir, and the Israelites in the desert like the Bedouins." -(Reprinted by its author, the Rev. W. Houghton, in Rationalism in the Church of England, p. 35.) *

It

University Sermon of 1865 on Hebrew
Prophecy, re-state his position, and defend
his opposite frontier against those who have
gone far beyond him. Thus of the Tübin-
gen school, and their speculations on a later
part of Scripture, he says, that "their criti
cism will rarely bear criticism (Pref. to H.
C. p. vi.); of the modern German schools
in general, that his "difficulty is more often
with their dogmatism than with their dar
ing criticism" (Pref. to H. J. p. xxiii.); of
Ewald, that he "seems to have attempted
an utter impossibility," and that he "ebould
like an Ewald to criticise Ewald, (ib. pp.
xxiii.-iv.) In another place he says,
"Ewald's assignment of Deuteronomy to the
reign of Manasseh seems to me more utter-
ly wild and arbitrary, and its Egyptian
origin wilder still" (ib. i. p. 136, note). Of
Bunsen, whom he mentions "with friendly
affection," he says that "he seems to labour
under the passion for making history with
out historical materials; " and adds, "I
confess that I have not much sympathy for
this, not making bricks without straw, but
making bricks entirely of straw, and offer
cf. p. 132, note). With regard to Dr. Da-
ing them as solid materials" (ib. p. xxiv.-v.
vidson, he might have wished that this
author with German learning had not taken
to German lengthiness, and to some Ger
man obscurity (ib. xxvii.) "A recent
view" which assigns the Pentateuch to the
age of Samuel" is dismissed as "by no
means a happy conjecture" (ib. note), and
he maintains at length the early date for Deu-
teronomy (pp. 208, 215, notes). Of Strauss
he writes, that" Christianity will survive the
criticism of Dr. Strauss" (H. C. i. 110);
of Renan and Strauss together, thus-

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But the real question lies far deeper. is briefly this-whether a frank recognition of the local, national, and personal colouring of the different books of Holy Scripture is compatible with a profound conviction of their inspiration, and of that Divine authorship which made use of very different instruments to express an unchanging purpose through their varying tones. It can scarcely be denied, we think, that when Dean Milman wrote the History of the Jews this problem had not presented itself to his own mind with suffi- "I cannot apprehend more lasting effect cient fulness and distinctuess; that his forms from the light, quick, and bright-flashing artilof speech are often open to serious objec- ponderous and steadily-aimed culverins of the lery of the Frenchman than from the more tions; that he does not always allow its German" (H. C. Pref. p. v.) "To some it proper weight to the miraculous element in may seem a formidable, a distressing, a disthe history; and that in many cases he per- couraging sight-a German Professor, with all mits the alleged defects of the human ele- his boundless learning, his honest industry, un ment to corrode the substance of the narra- dermining what many of us have thought the tive. He never, so far as we know, formally very foundations of our faith; a distinguished renewed the controversy, though the pre-of his world-wide language, sentimentalizing French man of letters, with all the brilliancy faces and notes to his new editions, and his the Saviour (not without homage to His moral greatness) to the central figure of a Galileau

* Dr. Newman's intermediate treatment of the Idyll. Still, I believe firmly we are on the adpoint in 1841 is an instance of unintentional injustice. He says that Milman "evidently considers Vance; each of these is less anti-Christian than that it is an advance in knowledge to disguise Scrip-ition, dooming to the fire a holocaust of vica Spanish bishop, on the tribunal of the Inquis ture facts and persons under secular names. He thinks that it is so much gain if he can call Abraham an Emir or a Sheik " (British Critic, vol. xxix. p. 86). To attempt to bring out sacred facts more vividly by placing them under a broader daylight may become a great mistake if it is done irreverently, but can scarcely be said to "disguise" them.

tims, perhaps of the meekest and holiest lives. Christianity has survived the one, Christianity will survive the other" (Hebrew Proph. p. 38).

On the general subject of the controversy we find fresh interest, but scarcely fresh

light, in the notices which are scattered | intention, then, to exclude theology as much through his Annals of St. Paul's, especially as possible, and rather to deal with the in connexion with the names of Dean Colet temporal, social, and political" aspects of (p. 112), Bishop Francis Hare (pp. 459-62), Christianity than to regard it "in a strictly and Bishop Lowth, whose "Lectures on He- religious light." The result is naturalbrew Poetry make an epoch unperceived, per- that this external view is too often allowed haps, and unsuspected by (their) author". to fill nearly the whole canvas, while comparatively little room is left for the more essential topics of the internal and spiritual. With such an issue before him, the critic seems justified in discussing, and deciding in the negative, such questions as the following

man.

"This appears to me what I will venture to call the great religious problem. We have had a Hooker who has shown what truths we receive from revelation, what truths from that earlier unwritten revelation in the reason of We want a second Hooker, with the same profound piety, the same calm judgment, to show (if possible to frame) a test by which we may discern what are the eternal and irrepealable truths of the Bible, what the imaginative vesture, the framework in which these truths are set in the Hebrew and even in the Christian Scriptures" (p. 467).

But it is not probable that the opponents of Dean Milman's opinions would acquiesce in this proposal to regard them as a natural sequel of Bishop Lowth's teaching.

2. His history of Christianity under the earlier empire received the formidable compliment of a review from Dr. Newman, on whom, as we learn from the Apologia, it made a deep and disturbing impression, as a sort of carnest" of the approaching con

flict with Rationalism. The review is writ

Is it possible to write the history of Christianity in its external aspects only, without treason to its supernatural claims? Can we state the facts as dissevered from the doctrines, and yet escape the danger of seeming to deny altogether what we only wished to dismiss from our thoughts for our immediate purpose? Is it allowable, for instance, for a Christian believer to set forth Christ's humanity, His crucifixion, and the moral improvement introduced by Christianity, without connecting those facts emphatically with the religious truths of His of sins through supernatural grace? divinity, His atonement, and the forgiveness of sins through supernatural grace?

No one can doubt that in the case of a tions related solely to the book, not its auman so religious as Dean Milman such questhor; to his method, not his motives; to his literary performance, not his personal

ten with great courtesy, but with the distinguished author's usual force and earnest- belief. Under this limitation, it can scarceness, as well as with his usual uusparingly be denied that a large part of the accusalogic. The argument is twofold, criticising tion was established against him. The sofirst the writer's plan, and then his execucial aspects seem, in his work, to overshadow tion; and showing that the errors committed in the execution only realized the dangers the more strictly religious; the natural makes inroads on the claims of the superwhich might have been expected from the natural; the doctrinal tends to wither away plan. from the side of the historical. Not to at

In drawing this out, Dr. Newman makes great use of the original Preface, in which Milman stated that he meant to write "rather as an historian than as a religious instructor," and "as if in total ignorance of the existence of some "discussions then

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under debate in our Church, and having their roots in Church history (Newman, PP: 73, 87, 90). He thus makes it his object "entirely to discard all polemic views," and to confine himself as closely as he can to the task of exhibiting "the reciprocal influence of civilisation on Christianity, of Christianity on civilisation" (H. C. i. 46, ed. 1863); in short, as Dr Newman says (p. 78), of viewing "the history of the Church on the side of the world." It is his declared

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tempt, at this distance of time, to enter on
details, it may be enough to refer to the
way in which he treats such topics as angelic
appearances (i. 86, 123-4, etc.), or the three
voices from heaven (ib. 143-4, 240, 284), or
moniacal possession (ib. 217, note).
the temptation of Christ (ib. 145), or de-
points of this kind, the tone usual among
Christians may be lowered for the supposed
benefit of either believers or doubters; in
the one case, to bring home the history more
vividly by connecting the mysterious with
ordinary and recognised realities; in the

other

proaching more nearly to his own position. case, to propitiate the doubter by apof these designs has met with much success. It has not been found in practice that either It is scarcely possible to avoid some shock to Christian reverence, if Christianity is treated on the bare level of any other hisordinary effect, that of being accepted meretory; and concession has only produced its

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It is not to be supposed that Milman would assent to the justice of these representations, though we are not aware that he made any direct reply to his distinguished critic. In his new Preface (1863) he mere ly says that he has "not found much, after a period of above twenty years, which" he "should wish to retract or to modify." As a devout believer, he condemns in words already quoted the Lives of Christ by Strauss and Renan; and of the later he adds, in terms which may have been chosen to repudiate what he had felt to be a misconstruction of his own History:

"I cannot think that eventually the book will add to the high fame of M. Renan. To those who see in Christianity no more than a social revolution, a natural step in human progress, the beautiful passages on the transcendant humanity of Jesus (unhappily not unleavened) may give satisfaction and delight; to those to whom Christianity is a religion, Jesus the author and giver of eternal life, it will fall dead, or be a grief and an offence" (p. v.)

We may suppose that to his own mind, his design took the shape of a wish to show that the external relations of Christianity were an essential and important part of its history; and to extend the faith on which his own hopes rested by doing what he could to keep it abreast of each successive living movement. In his eyes, Christianity was no unbending formula, doomed by its very definition to maintain an unalterable opposition to the spirit of the age. Rather recalling the greatest of the images under which its birth was described, he would regard it as like the fresh breeze, the flowing stream, the penetrating fire; everything that contrasts most strongly with the dead rigour of an iron rule, fixed once for all in relation to conditions which have long since departed. It might be taken as a natural consequence of this faith in its vitality, to consider it as meant to adjust itself to all the fresh relations which the energy of mind has generated, and which the constant movement of history imposes. Milman might thus have sought his defence from principles which are common to himself and his opponents; the truths that leaven must mix with the

mass it has to modify; that salt must be mingled with what it has to season; that the world, as well as the Church, is the workman. ship of God; and that the office of a revealed religious system is to reclaim, not to destroy. But if all this were conceded, the original question of the degree in which the internal history may be lawfully modified to meet the demands of the external would continue to give rise to great differences of opinion.

3. At this point the subject connects it self with that distaste for pure dogma which is traceable throughout his Histories. His strong feeling on this question led to one of his rare appearances as a controver sial speaker, when he addressed the Royal Commission on Clerical Subscription in 1864, to recommend that, on condition of conformity to the Prayer-book, subscrip tion to the Thirty-nine Articles should be dropped.* The chief reasons which he alleged were these: that the Articles "are throughout controversial, and speak the controversial language of their day" (p. 270); that "the doctrines of the English Church" are taught "more simply, more fully, and assuredly more winningly" in the Prayer. book (ib.), where they appear as "the effu. sion of the pious heart, not the cold, abstract theorems of the understanding" (p. 276); and that the Articles fail to fulfil their pur pose because they are out of date, in conse quence of the changeableness to which all but "the simplest and most elementary truths of our religion" are exposed (p. 271). The answer is obvious: that the Prayer-book is no more free from the traces of contro versy, or confined to "the simplest and most elementary truths" than the Articles. It contains, as he admits and urges, all the three creeds, which are marked in every line by the vestiges of conflict, and bear witness all the great ancient struggles of religious speculation, in its efforts to adjust the forms of the human intellect to the analogy of faith. The devotional beauty of the Prayer-book is the very reason why we should be unwilling to deprive it of its more dogmatic compan ion, and expose it to bear the chief brunt of inevitable controversies. Thus it would be no advantage for the sacramental offices to be called in at every turn as the sole appeal on the most difficult and sacred questions. Rather it is a clear gain to religious feeling that our possession of the Articles makes it less necessary to disturb the calm of the sanctuary by seeking our polemical weapons from the language of devotion.

Magazine for March 1865. Sir J. Napier's answer *The speech is printed as a paper in Fraser's was published as a pamphlet.

*

The Dean found, we believe, no supporter in this curious application of Pope Coelestine's principle, that "the law of our prayer constitutes the law of our faith." The proposal had in fact no seconder, and was not pressed. The Dean's argument was ably answered by Mr. (now Sir Joseph) Napier; and the two great formularies of the English Church, both prized, but on very different grounds, and with widely dissimilar degrees of estimation, retain their stand on the same level in the Act to amend the law of clerical subscription. But the paper remains as an interesting record of that preference for the devotional over the controversial which seemed the final result of Milman's historical inquiries. In the closing paragraph of his latest History, he clearly shows that he should think it no drawback if the Church of the future allowed some portion of "the ancient dogmatic system" "silently to fall into disuse, as at least superfluous, and as beyond the proper range of human thought and human language" (H. L. C. ix. 357). We did not need the assurance of this paper to convince us of his deep affection for the English Prayer-book

"The best model of pure, fervent, simple devotion, as it were, and concentration of all

Milman's undisguised distaste for the more hard and exclusive side of his profession may have led some to think that, in his own case, he allowed the literary to overshadow the clerical character. There might be some colour of truth in such a suspicion, as we have remarked before. He was, as he said himself, "more of a writer than a public speaker" (Speech in Fraser, as above, p. 269); and he showed a decided aversion to what may be called the platform side of public life. He possessed in a high degree that scholarly polish which is one of the chief ornaments of a lettered clergy. He was familiar with the literature of many nations, and displayed a keen appreciation for the works of art in all its forms. Scholars will long prize his Horace as a charming book of luxury, and value the volume of translations, in which he connected his youth and age together, as a graceful relic of his early culture. But it would be most unjust to make such facts as these the basis for a charge of indifference towards his order, or carelessness for the religious truth which he was pledged to teach. The devoutness of his early hymns must never be forgotten. His deepest thoughts for nearly fifty years seem to have been occupied on questions closely connected with his profession, and on the mode in which the history and faith of Christianity could be presented most" winningly " in the eyes of the world. To his love for crowded and effective services we owe the restoration of the nave of his cathedral to the use which

the orisons which have been uttered in the name of Christ since the first days of the Gospel; that liturgy which is the great example of pure vernacular English, familiar, yet always unvulgar, of which but few words and phrases have become obsolete; which has an indwelling music which enthrals and never palls upon the ear, the architect originally contemplated (p. 441, with the full living expression of every great Christian truth, yet rarely hardening into stern note). He set himself, not unsuccessfully, dogmatism; satisfying every need, and awak- to blot out the disgrace of Hanoverian days, ening and answering every Christian emotion; when "the terrible religious tempest, which entering into the heart, and as it were welling for nearly two centuries had raged throughforth again from the heart; the full and gene-out Western Christendom, had cleared off ral voice of the congregation, yet the peculiar utterance of each single worshipper" (Annals of St. Paul's, p. 228).†

*28 and 29 Vict. chap. 122.

Compare the companion picture of the English Bible in the Dublin Review, which is commonly ascribed to Dr. Newman:-"It lives on the ear like

music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of the church-bell which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the gifts and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that

there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever out of the English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and con troversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one

spark of righteousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."

into a cold serenity" (p. 450); when St. Paul's "had subsided into a state of dignified repose, which perhaps at a later time stagnated almost into lethargy" (p. 454); and when, in the stead of the fiery old Paul's Cross sermons, "unimpassioned preachers gave good advice to unimpassioned hearers " (p. 455). Yet we trace a reflection of his own calm ideal in the temperate eulogy which he pronounces upon Tillotson, whose "character" he venerates as "nearly blameless; who was profoundly religious, unimpeachable as to his belief in all the great truths of Christianity, but looking to the fruits rather than the dogmas of the gospel," and "dwelling, if not exclusively, at least chiefly, on the Christian life, the sober unexcited Christian life" (p. 419-20).

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Among all his varied services, Dean Milman's career has left no more characteristic lesson than this, that clerical freedom of

thought is developed most completely, as well as most safely, from within the ranks of the clergy themselves. Of churches, as of individuals, it holds true that the new life springs best out of the ashes of the old; that the soundest reformation ever comes from within

"That men may rise on stepping-stones

Of their dead selves to higher things." The opposite opinion has been widely fostered by the hatred for innovations which is naturally cherished by the more conservative part of such body as the clergy, leading in darker days to fierce persecution, and often expressed in gentler times with hot and unceremonious harshness. But whatever may have been the force of the resistance to the current, the very writers who show the strongest bias against the clergy are often forced to bless them against their will, by proving the strength of the steady onward stream which is traceable within their borders, bearing witness to their vitality and mental energy in almost every period. Mr. G. H. Lewes, for example, declares that throughout the middle ages, "the Church, both by instinct and by precept, was opposed to science and literature," and that "during the nine centuries of her undisputed dominion, not a single classic writer, not a single discoverer whose genius enlarged the intellectual horizon, not a single leader of modern thought, arose to dignify her reign." Such is the preface to a chapter in which the quickening line of intellectual activity is traced from one ecclesiastic to another; through Erigena, Berengarius, Roscellinus, Abelard, even St. Anselm; "Anselm, the saintly archbishop, helped the good cause in an indirect way; he consecrated the privileges of Reason by showing the harmony between Reason and Faith.' Turn over a few pages and we come to Friar Bacon, connected with "a group of independent thinkers," who were his "teachers and friends; towering above them all is Robert Grossetete, Bishop of Lincoln." The very Pope had "scientific yearnings." William of Occam, our brilliant and rebellious countryman," the "politician" of the schoolmen (H. L. C. ix. 121), was a leading Franciscan. "The Inquisition was vigilant and cruel, but among its very members there were sceptics." As liberty moved on, "in the vanguard of its army we see Telesio, Campanella, and Bruno," ecclesiastics to a man. Look where we will, we find the same phenomenon; old and new struggling within the fold of the

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History of Philosophy, ed. 1867; ii. 4, 5, 12, 76,

78, 86, 94.

Church for the ascendency which, under Providence, was to guide the course of intellectual freedom. Let us revert once more, and for the last time, to the Anna's of St. Paul's. Erasmus and Colet were the "two great reformers before the Reformation" (p. 112), and both were in orders. The great preachers of the liberty of prophesying in England, Hales, Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, all were clergymen, and all three were on terms of personal friendship with Laud, and enjoyed his constant and effi cient protection. If there is any man whom Milman names with a special energy of dislike, it is Archbishop Laud (pp. 331-2); yet Laud, as he mentions with just praise, was Jeremy Taylor's earliest patron (p. 344). Hales, as Heylin tells us, was once summoned to Lambeth for a long private debate with the Archbishop on his speculative difficulties, was made Laud's chaplain at his own request, and was "promoted not long after, by the Archbishop's com mendation, to be prebend of Windsor, and to hold the same by special dispensation with his place in Eton.** Laud was the godfather of Chillingworth, and befriended him cordially, as long as his own power lasted, at every stage of his chequered course. Tillotson, "almost the father of true religious toleration " (p, 419), was an exemplary Archbishop. And so we might go on, alleging proofs to the same tenor from the history of liberal thought in every period. Surely our own days formed no exception. If some men fancied, many years ago, that the golden gate of preferment would be closed against the author of the History of the Jews, they have been suffi ciently refuted by Milman's prosperous and honoured career. He would have been the last man to resent the opposition which he met with and which he confronted most effectually by the simple expedient of overlooking its impetuosity and living it down. He had no right to complain, and we are not aware that he did complain, that there are barriers, inevitable barriers, beyond which the members of his sacred profession cannot pass. The English Church cannot be thought to have lost its large compre hensiveness in times which, to mention only the departed, have seen the liberal side of thought represented by Whately and Hamp den, by Arnold and Milman. A writer affords no example of the ingratitude of contemporaries who secured the universal recognition which rewarded Dean Milman for the services which he rendered, both by works and life, to his Church and to his age.

* Heylin's Cyprianus Anglicus, p. 362,

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