1 Numerous other characters from the contemporary scene (e.g. T.H. Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Walter Pater and W.K. Clifford) may readily be identified but they play smaller parts.

2 Mallock (1877) p.97.

3 Ib., p.99: “Aristotle first systematised the great principle of evolution, and transformed what seemed to former thinkers as the dualism of mind and matter into a single scale of ascending existences”.

4 Ib., p.103.

5 Ib., p.104.

6 Ib., p.106. Compare the real Jowett’s words in his hard-hitting paper in Essays and Reviews (“On the interpretation of Scripture”) p.337: “. . . [in] the interpretation of Scripture . . . the same rules apply to the Old and New Testaments as to other books”.

7 Ib., p.110.

8 Ib., p.114. Jowett suffered the indignity of being required to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles twice, because of his expression of heterodox views. See Hinchliff (1987) p.63.

9 Ib., p.119.

10 Hinchliff (1987) p.84; Jowett’s thinking mainly derived from the work of J.S. Semler and F.C.Baur.

11 Cf. Essays and Reviews (1860) p.348: “The same fact cannot be true in religion when seen by the light of faith, and untrue in science when looked at through the medium of evidence or experiment . . . But . . . there is no need of elaborate reconcilements of revelation and science; they reconcile themselves the moment any scientific truth is distinctly ascertained”.

12 “If the term inspiration were to fall into disuse, no fact of nature, or history, or language, no event in the life of man, or dealings of God with him, would be in any degree altered” (ib., p.351).

13 “It is one evil of conditions or previous suppositions in the study of scripture that the assumption of them has led to an apologetic temper in the interpreters of Scripture. The tone of apology is always a tone of weakness and does injury to a good cause” (ib.).

14 “A little more or a little less of the method [i.e. of allegorical or mystical interpretation] does not make the difference between certainty and uncertainty in the interpretation of Scripture . . . it is the interpreter’s fancy . . .” (ib., p.369).

15 “But no one is willing to break through the reticence which is observed on these subjects; hence a sort of smouldering scepticism . . . The thoughts of able and highly educated young men almost always stray towards the first principles of things; it is a great injury to them, and tends to raise in their minds a sort of incurable suspicion, to find that there is one book of the fruit of the knowledge of which they are forbidden freely to taste, that is, the Bible” (ib., p.373).

16 Hinchliff (1987) p.90. This writer is by no means sympathetic towards Jowett, whom he describes as “naive” (p.88) in holding such views. Many of Smith’s critics took precisely this view of his “rashness” in exposing theological differences to the public gaze through the pages of EB⁹.

17 Though strenuous attempts were made to punish him by freezing his salary as professor of Greek. Cf. Ellis (1980) pp.182f.

18 “The Bible will be no longer appealed to as the witness of the opinions of particular sects, or of our own age; it will cease to be the battle ground of controversies. But as its true meaning is more clearly seen, its moral power will also be greater. . . Its discrepancies of fact, when we become familiar with them, will seem of little consequence in comparison with the truths it unfolds” (Essays and Reviews, p.435).

19 Ib., p.349.

20 Ib., p.384. Like all Jowett’s arguments, however, there is an essential ambiguity here which detracts from its dialectic force.

21 Ib., p.433.

22 Mallock (1878) p.343.

23 Ib., pp.349f. Mallock’s irony rests in the fact of Ruskin’s own idiosyncratic utopianism.

24 Ib., p.353.

25 Ib., p.359.

26 Along with Clifford (Mr Saunders) and Huxley (Mr Storks).

27 Ib., pp.225f.

28 Cf. Chambers (1939): “Arnold stood too near his lost faith to become a contented pagan. He feels as one adrift from his moorings. He envies the Scholar Gipsy, in his single-eyed chase, year after year, of a constant aim, Still nursing the unconquerable hope,/ Still clutching the inviolable shade”.

29 The term is first used by Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (CPWMA, vol.v, p.101). The slogan, he explains, formed the masthead of a contemporary newspaper called the Nonconformist.

30 BFER (April,1862) vol. x, p.407.

31 Ib., p.408.

32 Ibid.

33 Ib., p.425: “. . . it is, in point of literary finish, an essay of exquisite beauty; and this all the more makes us grieve at its tone”.

34 Ib., p.410.

35 Ib., p.412.

36 Ib., pp.414f. The charge of pantheism, levelled alike at scientific naturalism and at the writers of Essays and Reviews, was a common one; it underlies Tennyson’s perplexity in his poem, The Higher Pantheism: The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains – /Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns?

37 Ib., p.419.

38 Ib., pp.425f.

39 The principle had been enunciated already, as Ellis (1980, p.310) indicates, by both Lessing and Coleridge. Ellis’s exemplary study of Essays and Reviews and its repercussions provides a mine of information about contemporary politics and ecclesiastical in-fighting, though his assessment of the book as a relative failure is perhaps too severe. Ellis is right, though, to observe (ib., p.318) that “Jowett opened up a new vista in hermeneutics”. Though the book was ahead of its time, its publication in 1860 meant that, by 1875, an educated English public was ready for Robertson Smith’s “Bible” article in EB⁹. The same could not be said of Scotland.

40 The anonymous BFER reviewer of Essays and Reviews marked out the conservative and evangelical battle-line starkly (1862, vol.x, p.426): “The business of the interpreter, it is true, is merely to investigate what the sacred writer meant to narrate as fact, to establish as doctrine. That it is truth and not error, is secured by the circumstance that the book which he expounds is inspired and unerring revelation”.

41 With the possible exception of the Bishop Colenso affair, which undoubtedly generated a relatively high level of interest in Scotland.

42 Reactions to Colenso’s work (which covered more ground than its title implied) bore little relation to party boundaries within the Victorian intelligentsia. Ruskin, for example, (CW vol.xv, p.443) described him as “an entirely true and noble . . . Christian Bishop”; Matthew Arnold, who might have been expected to be sympathetic to Colenso’s motivation, was clearly irritated by the critical and literary shallowness of the writer’s treatment of the Bible (cf. Guy, 1983, pp.134f).

43 It was originally published as a series of essays in the Cornhill (cf. Shurer ed., CPWMA, vol.v. pp.408ff).

44 Arnold’s use of terms such as Philistine and Barbarian was actually borrowed, as he acknowledged, from Heinrich Heine.

45 Whilst Arnold uses these terms broadly as extended metaphors, there is also a literal aspect to his choice of labels. He truly believed that, as contrasting elements of the national character, Hellenism and Hebraism represented actual genetic or ethnic components: “Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from those of a Semitic people” (CPWMA, vol.v, p.173). It was part of the prevailing understanding of perceived racial differences that “affinities” of character nevertheless proved the essential unity of mankind.

46 Ib., p.91: this is one of Arnold’s many quotations from Bishop Thomas Wilson of Sodor and Man (1663-1755), author of Maxims of Piety and of Christianity. Arnold compared Wilson’s spirituality with that of George Herbert and his frequently ironical use of those quotations is never directed at the bishop himself. Rather, they are used to attack the failings of Puritanism. In his preface to Culture and Anarchy, Arnold teasingly chided T.H. Huxley – that “brilliant and distinguished votary of the natural sciences” – for his ignorance of the Bishop’s existence (ib., p.231; p.447).

47 Ib., pp.172f.

48 In The English Constitution (1928); cf. esp. ch.vii, “Checks and balances”.

49 CPWMA vol.v, p.175.

50     “Porro unum est necessarium” (Vulgate: Lk.10,42) is Arnold’s fifth chapter heading in Culture and Anarchy.

51 CPWMA, vol.v., pp.176f.

52 Ib., p.208.

53 Ib., p.226.

54 Cf. ib., p.237: “But we [i.e. Arnold] have got fixed in our minds that a more full and harmonious development of their humanity is what the Nonconformists most want, that narrowness, one-sidedness, and incompleteness is what they most suffer from; in a word, that in what we call provinciality they abound, but in what we may call totality they fall short”.

55 Ib., pp.239f.

56 See CPWMA, vol. viii (Essays Religious and Mixed) p.464, where R.H. Super notes this fact. In the Preface to his edition of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (ib., pp.319f.) Arnold alludes fulsomely to the article on Samuel Johnson by Macaulay in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and is generous in thanking Messrs A. & C. Black for permitting him to incorporate the Macaulay article in the new edition of Johnson’s Lives.

57 The exact date is not known but the proofs were ready early in 1872 : cf. Super, CPWMA, vol.vii (God and the Bible) p.412.

58 Arnold was captivated by the book: “I want to enable the reader to apprehend, as a whole, a literary work of the highest order. And the Book of Isaiah, as it stands in our Bibles, is this in a double way. By virtue of the original it is a monument of the Hebrew genius at its best, and by virtue of the [AV] translation it is a monument of the English language at its best” (ib., p.58, from Isaiah Xl-LXVI: Introduction). Arnold’s later, complete version of Isaiah was published in 1883 under the title, Isaiah of Jerusalem:CPWMA, vol. x (Philistinism in England and America) p.484.

59 T.K. Cheyne: Book of Isaiah Chronologically Arranged (1870). Cheyne defended himself in The Academy from Arnold’s charges of aiming for technical accuracy at the expense of the book’s poetry.

60 Ib., p.101. Arnold took WRS’s translation from Lecture vi of The Prophets of Israel (Pr.Is, p.276).

61 Originally published, like most of Arnold’s work, as separate essays – in this case in ContempRev (1874-75) – God and the Bible emerged in book form in 1875. For the text, see CPWMA, vol.vii, pp.141-398.

62 Ib., p.397.

63 CPWMA, vol. iii (Lectures and Essays in Criticism) pp. 45f.

64 Ibid. Arnold goes on to refer favourably to A.P. Stanley’s recent book, Sinai and Palestine, which addressed many of the same issues in what Arnold regarded as a more “positive” manner.

65 Ib., p.52. See Rogerson (1984) pp.220ff. for a much more positive assessment of Colenso.

66 Ib., p.54.

67 The accusation of naivety on Robertson Smith’s part was not always made stridently or uncharitably. Principal Rainy’s biographer, Patrick Carnegie Simpson, expresses it with remarkable gentleness and sympathy: “But there was in his [Smith’s] nature – it was the good side of what, on its bad side, became inconsiderateness – a remarkable intellectual simplicity. William Robertson Smith had the passion of the lover for truth. . . And he assumed that his Church shared that love” (Simpson, 1909, vol.1, pp.313f.).

68 Colenso’s mistake was to lay such emphasis at the outset on these statistical details in Genesis and Exodus when more serious anomalies might have been identified (as later parts of his work demonstrated).

69 The story of how Colenso began his Pentateuchal criticism after “William Ngidi’s searching questions about the Ark and its animals” is given in the Preface to Part I of Colenso’s book. The whole Colenso affair is recounted in detail by Guy (1983).

70 “A plea for the free discussion of theological difficulties”, published in Fraser’s Magazine, 1863. Reprinted in Essays in Literature and History by J.A. Froude (pp.195-223) in the Everyman Library, from which the present references are taken.

71 Ib., p.195.

72 Ib., p.198.

73 Ib., pp.201f.

74 Ib., p.206.

75 Ib., p.221.

76 Arnold: Sohrab and Rustum, ll.714f.

77 E.g. by Livingston (1986) p.ix, who vigorously and for the most part successfully effects a rehabilitation of Arnold’s reputation from the criticisms levelled by T.S. Eliot and others earlier in this century. However, many of Eliot’s strictures are valid: he identified the inherent ambiguity in Arnold’s motives and message; he rightly understood Arnold’s use of satire as a form of defence mechanism; and he penetrated harshly to the hidden heart of Arnold’s implicit theme: “that the Christian faith is of course impossible to the man of culture”. See Eliot’s “Arnold and Pater” in Selected Essays (1932) pp.431-441.

78 Ib., pp.126ff. Livingston here draws close parallels with the work of Rudolph Bultmann.

79 “Religion without metaphysic; or, the modern religion of experience;” in Tulloch (1884) p.313.

80 Ib., p.286.

81 Ib., p.314,

82 Ib., p.278.

83 Sohrab and Rustum, ll. 390-393. Cf. A.N. Wilson in God’s Funeral (1999) p.249: “Whatever the reasons . . . the Victorian Age produced the Victorian Father and the tension, peculiar to the time, that we find in texts as different as Sohrab and Rustum, [Samuel Butler’s] Father and Son, and [F. Anstey’s] Vice Versa”.