he was to avoid attacking anything established, alluded with deep regret to "the devotion of the English people to the law in matters of this sort."
Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence of the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England and America, was stirred to the depths against the heretic, and various dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains were taken to root out his reputation; it was declared that he had merely stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by wholesale, and then peddled them out in England at retail; the fact being that, while he used all the sources of information at his command, and was large-minded enough to put himself into relations with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was singularly independent in his judgment, and his own investigations were of lasting value in modifying Continental thought. Kuenen, the most distinguished of all his contemporaries in this field, modified, as he himself declared, one of his own leading theories after reading Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English scholar for original suggestions.[1]
But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He was socially ostracized; more completely even than Lyell had been after the publication of his Principles of Geology thirty years before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had been defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who turned against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a true ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and people, of all books in the world, Spinoza's Tractatus! A large part of the English populace was led to regard him as an "infidel," a "traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean being"; servants left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart were let loose upon him"; and one of the favorite
- ↑ For interesting details of tbe Colenso persecution, see Davidson's Life of Tait, chaps, xiii and xiv; also the Lives of Bishops Wilberforce and Gray. For full accounts of the struggle, see Cox, Life of Bishop Colenso, London, 1888, especially vol. i, chap. v. For the dramatic performance at Colenso's cathedral, see vol. ii, pp. 14-25. For a very impartial and appreciative statement regarding Colenso's work, see Cheyne, Founders of Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix. For testimony to the originality and value of Colenso's contributions, see Kuenen, Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, introduction, p. xx, as follows: "Colenso directed my attention to difficulties which I had hitherto failed to observe or adequately to reckon with, and, as to the opinion of his labors curient in Germany, I need only say that, inasmuch as Ewald, Bunsen, Bleek, and Knabel were every one of them logically forced to revise their theories hi the light of the English bishop's researches, there was small reason in the cry that his methods were antiquated and his objections stale."
