Pusey, as we have seen, had proved
to the controlling parties in the English Church that Christianity
must stand or fall with the traditional view of this book; and now,
within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in his own
university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had so
often insisted upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the older
view, this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of divinity,
showing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that the
critical view had won the day; that the name of Daniel is only
assumed; that the book is in no sense predictive, but was written,
mainly at least, after the events it describes; that "its author
lived at the time of the Maccabean struggle"; that it is very
inaccurate even in the simple facts which it cites; and hence that
all the vast fabric erected upon its predictive character is baseless.
But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even
more striking.
To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even every
germ that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a special
movement was begun, of which the most important part was the
establishment, at the University of Oxford, of a college which
should bring the old opinion with crushing force against the new
thought, and should train up a body of young men by feeding them
upon the utterances of the fathers, of the medieval doctors, and of
the apologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and
should keep them in happy ignorance of the reforming spirit of the
sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century.
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