Transcribed , email ccx074@coventry.ac.uk
My Dear Stanley,
I dedicate these Sermons to you, not that I may make you responsiblefor any doctrine or statement contained in them, but as the simplestmethod of telling you how much they owe to your book on the Jewish Church,and of expressing my deep gratitude to you for publishing that bookat such a time as this.
It has given to me (and I doubt not to many other clergymen) a freshconfidence and energy in preaching to my people the Gospel of the OldTestament as the same with that of the New; and without it, many ofthese Sermons would have been very different from, and I am certainvery inferior to, what they are now, by the help of your admirable book.
Brought up, like all Cambridge men of the last generation, upon Paley’sEvidences, I had accepted as a matter of course, and as the authoritativeteaching of my University, Paley’s opinions as to the limits ofBiblical criticism, {0a}quoted at large in Dean Milman’s noble preface to his last editionof the History of the Jews; and especially that great dictumof his, ‘that it is an unwarrantable, as well as unsafe rule tolay down concerning the Jewish history, that which was never laid downconcerning any other, that either every particular of it must be true,or the whole false.’
I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubtnot, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shallread these lines who has not read Paley’s Evidences, hemay be stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so becomeacquainted with a great book and a great mind.
A reverent and rational liberty in criticism (within the limits oforthodoxy) is, I have always supposed, the right of every Cambridgeman; and I was therefore the more shocked, for the sake of free thoughtin my University, at the appearance of a book which claimed and exerciseda licence in such questions, which I must (after careful study of it)call anything but rational and reverent. Of the orthodoxy of thebook it is not, of course, a private clergyman’s place to judge. That book seemed dangerous to the University of Cambridge itself, becauseit was likely to stir up from without attempts to abridge her ancientliberty of thought; but it seemed still more dangerous to the hundredsof thousands without the University, who, being no scholars, must takeon trust the historic truth of the Bible.
For I found that book, if not always read, yet still talked and thoughtof on every side, among persons whom I should have fancied carelessof its subject, and even ignorant of its existence, but to whom I waspersonally bound to give some answer as to the book and its worth. It was making many unsettled and unhappy; it was (even worse) panderingto the cynicism and frivolity of many who were already too cynical andfrivolous; and, much as I shrank from descending into the arena of religiouscontroversy, I felt bound to say a few plain words on it, at least tomy own parishioners.
But how to do so, without putting into their heads thoughts whichneed be in no man’s head, and perhaps shaking the very faith whichI was trying to build up, was difficult to me, and I think would havebeen impossible to me, but for the opportune appearance of your admirablebook.
I could not but see that the book to which I have alluded, like mostother modern books on Biblical criticism, was altogether ne