Other sources of Information that mention the book's authors or the proceedings.
- A Brief Summary of Inspiration and Interpretation by Dean John William Burgon (1813-1888) - at the The Dean Burgon Society - In Defense of Traditional Bible Texts
-
http://www.deanburgonsociety.org/DeanBurgon/dbs2925d.htm
- "Dean Burgon has devoted 228 pages to answer the apostasy contained in Essays and Reviews"
- Who Was Dean John William Burgon? (1813-1888):
http://www.deanburgonsociety.org/DeanBurgon/whowasdb.htm
- Anglican Timeline: 1833-1890: The Victorian era -
-
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/timeline/12victoria.html
- "Essays
and Reviews", favorable to science
and modernism, published. Rev. Frederick Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury,
discusses the valuable contributions of non-Christian thinkers.
Rev. H.B. Wilson pleads for tolerance and common sense in doctrinal matters, instead
of "godless orthodoxy", so that the church can retain credibility.
Rev. Rowland Williams reviews the new field of Biblical archaeology.
Rev. Benjamin Jowett
popularizes historical and literary criticism of the Bible.
Rev. Mark Pattison reviews church history in the last century pointing out "irrational"
elements.
Rev. Baden Powell popularizes new understandings about the earth's real history.
C.W. Goodwin (the only layman) argues for a figurative interpretation of the Biblical
creation stories.
Both high and low churchmen are appalled. The authors are called "the
Seven Against Christ". Dr. Pusey collects 11,000 signatures from outraged
clergymen who still believe in scriptural inerrancy and eternal damnation for the
wicked. Temple writes to the bishop of London, "Many years ago you urged us
from the University pulpit to undertake the critical study of the Bible. You said
that it was a dangerous study, but indispensable.... To tell a man to study, yet
bid him, under heavy penalties, come to the same conclusions with those who have
not studied, is to mock him."
Conservatives are shocked when a secular court allows the clerical contributors to
retain their positions. The court finds that a priest who doubts eternal damnation
is not a threat to public morality.
- Prof. Benjamin Jowett -
http://preteristarchive.com/StudyArchive/j/jowett-benjamin.html
- Science and Religion: Baden-Powell and the Anglican Debate, 1800-1860 -
http://books.cambridge.org/0521242452.htm
- Baden-Powell Family History -
http://www.pinetreeweb.com/bp-family-index.htm
- Stuart Jones - Senior Lecturer in History
-
http://www.people.man.ac.uk/~mfssthsj/
- Mark Pattison: An Intellectual Biography
"My other current project is an intellectual biography of Mark Pattison,
the nineteenth-century scholar and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He is
best known as a contributor to Essays and Reviews, as a highly distinctive
contributor to the mid-Victorian debate on the purpose of universities,
and as the author of a famous posthumous volume of Memoirs. But I want
to explore his general intellectual significance, which no-one has hitherto
investigated. I am currently seeking British Academy funding for this."
- Anglican Timeline - 1833-1890: The Victorian era -
http://justus.anglican.org/resources/timeline/12victoria.html
- The Correspondence of Charles Darwin: Introduction to Volume 8: 1860 (Cambridge University Press 1993) -
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/Departments/Darwin/intros/vol8.html
- "The rise and main characteristics of the Anglican Evangelical movement in
England and America" by The Very Reverend Alexander Clinton Zabriskie, S. T. D., D. D., :
http://www.episcopalian.org/gambierevangelicals/Background/AnglicanEvangelicalismB1.htm
- "Victorian Britain 1837-1901 - a simply chronology:
http://www.dur.ac.uk/alan.heesom/chronology.htm
- "Chapter 5: The Discourses of Journalism: "Arnold and Pater" Again and Wilde :
http://www.uncg.edu/eng/elt/pater/chap5.html
- INTERPRETATION (reference to Jowett and Essays and Reviews) -
http://www.open.org/~mrdsnts/d00500.htm
- The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907-21) - Volume XII. The Romantic Revival. - XIII. The Growth of Liberal Theology. - 14. Essays and Reviews. : -
- http://www.bartleby.com/222/1314.html
- The publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860 made the broad churchmen a storm-centre as
much as Tract XC had done for the high churchmen. It was not intended, but was generally
taken to be, the manifesto of a party. The volume was, in fact, the concluding number of a
series of Oxford and Cambridge essays, issued annually. The editor, Henry Bristow Wilson,
was a country clergyman whose Bampton lectures entitled The Communion of Saints (1851)
had already caused him to become suspect. The seven writers consisted of six clergymen, and
one layman, Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, an Egyptologist who had resigned his Cambridge
fellowship on finding himself unable to take holy orders. They were soon, by an outraged
religious public, dubbed Septem contra Christum. Replies, in the shape of books and
pamphlets and articles, continued for many months to be issued. Two of the essayists,
Rowland Williams and the editor, were tried and condemned for heresy in the court of arches;
their acquittal, on appeal to the judicial committee of the privy council, afforded a valuable
protection to liberty of thought within the church of England. But it is not hard to account for
the opposition to the essayists. Though many of the essays were blameless and unaggressive,
the general effect was negative, and some of the essays were provocative. Maurice
complained of the absence of theology in the volume, and especially of the neglect of "the full
revelation of God in Christ" which he believed to be all that was worth preaching. Stanley,
who must have symbolised closely with some of the contributors, found fault with its negative
character: "No book which treats of religious questions can hope to make its way to the heart
of the English nation unless it gives, at the same time that it takes away." The editor gave just
offence in his essay, "The National Church," by betraying a greater anxiety to see the church
national than Christian. Baden Powell, Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford from 1827,
was a survivor from the early Oriel school, and died directly after the issue of Essays and
Reviews. He had already written much on the relations of the theology and science, and in his
essay he pressed the uniformity of nature against the argument for miracle. But for his
opportune death, he could hardly have escaped prosecution. His generation would never have
tolerated his attempt to free Christian theism from a dependence on miracles. Mark Pattison’s
essay, "The Tendencies of Religious Thought, 1688–1750," was, for the most part, a purely
historical survey, and would have avoided criticism if it had not appeared in the incriminating
volume. Jowett urged, "Interpret the Scripture like any other book," and yet maintained that it
would remain unlike any other book.
Scripture has an inner life or soul; it has also an outward body or form. That form is language,
which imperfectly expresses our common notions, much more those higher truths which
religion teaches.
His essay, like Frederick Temple’s, "The Education of the World," was pious and conciliatory,
though both included (what, indeed, gives unity to the whole collection of essays) a strong plea
for free criticism. "He is guilty of high treason against the faith," wrote Temple, "who fears the
result of any investigation, whether philosophical, or scientific, or historical." Yet, the future
archbishop may have had some qualms when he read Rowland Williams’s essay on Bunsen’s
Biblical Researches. The shock was not mediated by the English writer, but rendered liable to
cause the maximum of offence. Williams’s Psalms and Litanies, published by his widow in
1872, proves him to have had a true devotional feeling, and a desire to enter into communion
with the Eternal Spirit, but it also shows how he consistently reduced ancient collects to a
unitarian standard. Maurice had, indeed, touched the chief defect of Essays and Reviews, a
defect which the lapse of time has made even more apparent. The disparagement of doctrine,
and, especially, the neglect to contribute anything to the understanding of the person and nature
of Jesus Christ, render it of little service to a later age, which, like other ages before it, sees
that here is the core of essentially Christian thinking. The true claim of the essayists to grateful
remembrance is that they asserted with one voice the duty of the Christian church to welcome
new truth, and the right of her accredited sons to make it known. Not in vain is one of the
essayists commemorated on the walls of his college chapel as a scholar qui libertatem cleri
anglicani feliciter vindicavit.
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