often bitter enemy. In spite of the dominant teaching
identified with the name of Mr. Simeon, Frederic Maurice,
with John Sterling and other members of the Apostles’
Club, was feeling for something truer and nobler than
the conventionalities of the religious world.[12] In
Oxford, mostly in a different way, more dry, more
dialectical, and, perhaps it may be said, more sober,
definite, and ambitious of clearness, the same spirit
was at work. There was a certain drift towards
Dissent among the warmer spirits. Under the leading
of Whately, questions were asked about what was supposed
to be beyond dispute with both Churchmen and Evangelicals.
Current phrases, the keynotes of many a sermon, were
fearlessly taken to pieces. Men were challenged
to examine the meaning of their words. They were
cautioned or ridiculed as the case might be, on the
score of “confusion of thought” and “inaccuracy
of mind”; they were convicted of great logical
sins,
ignoratio elenchi, or
undistributed
middle terms; and bold theories began to make their
appearance about religious principles and teaching,
which did not easily accommodate themselves to popular
conceptions. In very different ways and degrees,
Davison, Copleston, Whately, Hawkins, Milman, and not
least, a brilliant naturalised Spaniard who sowed the
seeds of doubt around him, Blanco White, had broken
through a number of accepted opinions, and had presented
some startling ideas to men who had thought that all
religious questions lay between the orthodoxy of Lambeth
and the orthodoxy of Clapham and Islington. And
thus the foundation was laid, at least, at Oxford
of what was then called the Liberal School of Theology.
Its theories and paradoxes, then commonly associated
with the “
Noetic” character of
one college, Oriel, were thought startling and venturesome
when discussed in steady-going common-rooms and country
parsonages; but they were still cautious and old-fashioned
compared with what was to come after them. The
distance is indeed great between those early disturbers
of lecture-rooms and University pulpits, and their
successors.
While this was going on within the Church, there was
a great movement of thought going on in the country.
It was the time when Bentham’s utilitarianism
had at length made its way into prominence and importance.
It had gained a hold on a number of powerful minds
in society and political life. It was threatening
to become the dominant and popular philosophy.
It began, in some ways beneficially, to affect and
even control legislation. It made desperate attempts
to take possession of the whole province of morals.
It forced those who saw through its mischief, who
hated and feared it, to seek a reason, and a solid
and strong one, for the faith which was in them as
to the reality of conscience and the mysterious distinction
between right and wrong. And it entered into
a close alliance with science, which was beginning
to assert its claims, since then risen so high, to