CLAIMS OF THE BIBLE AND OF SCIENCE. March 9th, 1863. MY DEAR MAURICE, I do indeed wish you to speak in plain language about the Bible to English Laymen at the present time. I will tell you why, and I should be glad, as one of your oldest friends, though much severed from you through life, to tell others why. For more than a quarter of a century you have been helping Englishmen to see through the theories and systems which have been invented to prop up, restore, develope, or narrow the ancient edifice of their National Church; and amidst ceaseless contumely and misrepresentation levelled against yourself, you have striven to teach, as Alexander Knox and S. T. Coleridge B taught before you, that the Bible and the Church of England, in all their comprehensiveness, can best bear witness for their own truth, and for God's providence, against infidelity and Pantheism. Now that many are shocked by Bishop Colenso's theories, or alarmed lest his criticism should put the faith of England in danger, I think you, who have been familiar with such questions all your life, can tell us how little there is to fear from a searching inquiry into facts. The only ground for alarm is lest a false and untenable position be taken up. It is now thirty-five years and more since you migrated from Cambridge by way of London to Oxford. There are many now in high posts of responsibility who will remember that, bringing with you the inquiring and loving spirit of Julius Hare, and more experience of life than we had, you roused us to long for something deeper than logic, and helped us to look beyond that thin nominalism by which Whately and others were upsetting old notions without putting anything solid in their place. How Hampden's appeal from dogmas to facts was denounced as the Foundation of the Faith assailed in Oxford, and |