EARLY REMINISCENCES Although the decision affected only a country vicar, it was seen that it offered immunity to every Bishop, Dean, Prebendary Head of a College or Hall, and Theological Professor, should he deny any doctrine traditionally held by the Church, or so dilute it as to deprive it of colour, taste and strength ; and that, moreover, notwithstanding that he had sworn to hold and to teach the Faith of undivided Christendom. It is reasonable and justifiable that Jews, German Evangelicals, Dutch Calvinists and American Nondescripts should question and discredit doctrines held by the Catholic Church in all ages, because they are not bound by oath, nor required in honour to uphold them ; but it is another matter when those occupying positions of authority as teachers within the Church, and who occupy these positions in virtue of their having subscribed to the creeds and doctrines of the Church Universal, misuse their situations in order to disseminate doubt. Indubitably questions have arisen in recent years that demand close examination and a correction of convictions previously entertained. At the time concerning which I am now writing, questions were broached relative to the Infallibility of Scripture. It had been popularly taught and believed that the text was absolutely inerrant in its statements relative to history and the cosmogony of the Universe. This, which was a superstition bred mainly at the Reformation, was attacked. The Broad Church School consisted of Dean Stanley, Chevalier Bunsen, Baden-Powell, Professor Jowett and the writers of Essays and Reviews. The Christology of most of these men was of the vaguest, and was little other than a veiled Socinianism. The Old Testament was the principal object of assault.1 That which perplexed men brought up in the view of Holy Scripture as the infallible Oracle of God, inspired in all its statements, historical, geographical, ethnological, chronological, physical, was the knowledge that the facts of the motions of the heavenly bodies as established by the modern science of astronomy, and which are the most certain and undeniable, and, perhaps we may add, the most intelligible in the physical world, were definitely contradicted by the letter of Scripture. It was the same in regard to Geology, which refutes altogether the assertions of Moses or 1 The assault was initiated by S. T. Coleridge's Letters on Inspiration.
