remarked: "Your bishops are making themselves the laughingstock of Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus is really the hare; . . . every zoölogist knows that it does not chew the cud."[1]
On Colenso's return to Natal, where many of the clergy and laity who felt grateful for his years of devotion to them received him with signs of affection, an attempt was made to ruin these clergymen by depriving them of their little stipends, and to terrify the simple-minded laity by threatening them with the same "greater excommunication" which had been inflicted upon their bishop. To make the meaning of this more evident, the vicargeneral of the Bishop of Cape Town met Colenso at the door of his own cathedral, and solemnly bade him "depart from the house of God as one who has been handed over to the Evil One" The sentence of excommunication was read before the assembled faithful, and they were enjoined to treat their bishop as "a heathen man and a publican." But these and a long series of other persecutions created a reaction in his favor.
There remained to Colenso one bulwark which his enemies found stronger than they had imagined—the British courts of justice. The greatest efforts were now made to gain the day before these courts, to humiliate Colenso, and to reduce to beggary the clergy who remained faithful to him, and it is worthy of note that one of the leaders in preparing the legal plea of the committee against the accused was Mr. Gladstone.
But this bulwark proved impregnable; both the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's favor. Not only were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him of his salary, but their excommunication of him was made null and void; it became, indeed, a subject of ridicule, and even a man so enwrapped in religious thought as John Keble confessed and lamented that the English people no longer believed in excommunication. The bitterness of the defeated found vent in the utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had excommunicated Colenso—Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town"—who denounced the judgment as "awful and profane" and the Privy Council as "a masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the English Church." Even Wilberforce, careful as
- ↑ For the passages referred to as provoking especial wrath, see Colenso, Lectures on the Pentateuch and the Moabite Stone, 1876, p. 217. For the episode regarding the hare chewing the cud, see Cox, Life of Colenso, i, p. 240. The following epigram went the rounds:
"The bishops all have sworn to shed their blood
To prove 'tis true the hare doth chew the cud.
bishops, doctors, and divines, beware—
Weak is the faith that hangs upon a hair!"
