and with the most candid ignorance that this was the natural effect of what he was doing; but, says Joubert, “Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in intellectual matters, a crime of the first order."[51] I criticized Bishop Colenso’s speculative confusion.  Immediately there was a cry raised:  “What is this? here is a liberal attacking a liberal.  Do not you belong to the movement? are not you a friend of truth?  Is not Bishop Colenso in pursuit of truth? then speak with proper respect of his book.  Dr. Stanley[52] is another friend of truth, and you speak with proper respect of his book; why make these invidious differences? both books are excellent, admirable, liberal; Bishop Colenso’s perhaps the most so, because it is the boldest, and will have the best practical consequences for the liberal cause.  Do you want to encourage to the attack of a brother liberal his, and your, and our implacable enemies, the Church and State Review or the Record,—­ the High Church rhinoceros and the Evangelical hyena?  Be silent, therefore; or rather speak, speak as loud as ever you can! and go into ecstasies over the eighty and odd pigeons.”

But criticism cannot follow this coarse and indiscriminate method.  It is unfortunately possible for a man in pursuit of truth to write a book which reposes upon a false conception.  Even the practical consequences of a book are to genuine criticism no recommendation of it, if the book is, in the highest sense, blundering.  I see that a lady[53] who herself, too, is in pursuit of truth, and who writes with great ability, but a little too much, perhaps, under the influence of the practical spirit of the English liberal movement, classes Bishop Colenso’s book and M. Renan’s[54] together, in her survey of the religious state of Europe, as facts of the same order, works, both of them, of “great importance”; “great ability, power, and skill”; Bishop Colenso’s, perhaps, the most powerful; at least, Miss Cobbe gives special expression to her gratitude that to Bishop Colenso “has been given the strength to grasp, and the courage to teach, truths of such deep import.”  In the same way, more than one popular writer has compared him to Luther.  Now it is just this kind of false estimate which the critical spirit is, it seems to me, bound to resist.  It is really the strongest possible proof of the low ebb at which, in England, the critical spirit is, that while the critical hit in the religious literature of Germany is Dr. Strauss’s[55] book, in that of France M. Renan’s book, the book of Bishop Colenso is the critical hit in the religious literature of England.  Bishop Colenso’s book reposes on a total misconception of the essential elements of the religious problem, as that problem is now presented for solution.  To criticism, therefore, which seeks to have the best that is known and thought on this problem, it is, however well meant, of no importance whatever.  M. Renan’s book attempts a new synthesis of the