Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading ed. by Victor Shea, William Whitla (review)

HUMANITIES 265 as one study. Colonial historians and genealogists will find much to pique and sustain their interest. And the general reader looking for stories of the past will be delighted. (E. JANE ERRINGTON) Victor Shea and William Whitla, editors. Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Reading University Press of Virginia. xxiv, 1060. US $90.00 Essays and Reviews, a collection of seven articles by six clergymen and one layman (a lawyer) of the Church of England, appeared in the autumn of 1860, a year after Charles Darwin=s On the Origin of Species. Like Darwin=s work, it became both the trigger and the target of a rolling controversy which did much to define the landscape of Victorian culture. For Essays and Reviews marked the moment when Liberal Protestantism stood forth as an identifiable ethos with a British presence. This ethos consciously took modernity as its benchmark and, prizing >free inquiry,= sought to apply the critical faculties of disinterested intelligence to the whole of Christian theology and its sources. Hitherto, the leaders and gate-keepers of Victorian opinion had associated such Liberalism almost exclusively with German academics, and thus as something >foreign.= It was just this prejudice that made Essays and Reviews such a shock to the reflexively conservative temperament of the Anglican establishment (and, at one remove, to that of Presbyterians and Nonconformist Protestants). Here was consciously >modern= critical theology, practised not by isolated mavericks but by seven bona fide members of the Establishment itself B Frederick Temple, headmaster of Rugby (later bishop of Exeter and then archbishop of Canterbury); Baden Powell, Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford; Mark Pattison, fellow (and soon to be rector) of Lincoln College, Oxford; Benjamin Jowett, Regius Professor of Greek and fellow (later master) of Balliol College, Oxford; Rowland Williams, vice-principal of St David=s College, Lampeter; H.B. Wilson, a Huntingdonshire vicar and active journalist; and Charles Goodwin, barrister, philologist, and Egyptologist. With such an array of essayists, Liberal theology could no longer be considered a foreign phenomenon; it was within the gates, and in force. The angry reaction of >High Churchmen= to Essays and Reviews was predictable. More surprising, not least to the essayists themselves, was the hostility of bishops and clergy whose centrist opposition to the Anglo-Catholic movement had given them a reputation for liberal sympathies. The bishops of the Church issued a condemnatory manifesto; Wilson and Williams were tried in ecclesiastical court for teaching >false and erroneous doctrine,= though the judgment against them was reversed on appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; and the Lower House of the Convocation of Canterbury proceeded to pass a formal motion of condemnation. 266 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 Nevertheless, the essayists in the end achieved at least a portion of their aim: if the Church of England still worried about the bounds (or even the legitimacy) of free critical inquiry, it had started to come to grips with diversity as a fact of its own B and the nation=s B institutional life. Essays and Reviews, therefore, would seem to be a seminal cultural document. So it is curious that the present edition is the first since 1874, and the first critical edition ever. Or perhaps not. One age=s modernity is the next age=s antique. The terms of critical discussion in the theological enterprise, as in other disciplines, have shifted and even developed significantly since 1860; and of the seven essays, only Pattison=s >Tendencies of Religious Thought in England, 1688B1750= continues to be consulted and taken seriously to this day. Essays and Reviews, in other words, may now be simply a historical document. And yet intellectual life, if it is to retain its energy, must engage in constant re-engagement with its sources, not in order to pass judgment on those sources but because those sources may (as Karl Rahner once wrote) >say something to us which we in our time have not considered at all or not closely enough, about reality itself.= By enabling us once again to read Essays and Reviews, masterfully edited and superbly annotated, Victor Shea and William Whitla have performed something far more than intellectual archaeology. They...