Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 11.djvu/297

, a volume of sermons, which showed at the least that he could not rest contented with some notions generally associated with the theological school in which he had been trained. His sermons were violently attacked by the 'Record' newspaper; but he vindicated himself ably in a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury. The turning-point of his life had now come. Up to this time his moral and spiritual instincts lacked free play; but the questions of the 'intelligent Zulu' became for him questions like those which led Luther to nail his paper of theses on the church door at Wittenberg.

Sailing from Plymouth on 15 Dec. 1853, he made a visitation of his diocese, of which his small volume, 'Ten Weeks in Natal,' is a pleasant record. But he could not break ground in the field allotted to him without running counter to the prejudices of certain sections of his countrymen. This opposition was roused in the first instance by his remarks on Kafir polygamy. Holding most firmly that polygamy was debasing and demoralising in every way. he yet saw that the divorcing of wives on the conversion or baptism of the husband only made bad worse. He protested strongly against the injustice so caused to the women and to the children; and to his surprise he found that the whole body of the American missionaries in Burmah had reached the same conclusions with himself.

Returning to obtain help for his mission work, he remained in England for some months, and then took his family to Natal, where he landed on 20 May 1855. The work done during his first seven years is astonishing. The list of books written, and for the most part printed under his direction by natives, contains a grammar of the Zulu language (1859), a Zulu-English dictionary (1861), selections and reading-books in Zulu, manuals of instruction for the natives in the English language in geography, history, astronomy, and other subjects, with translations of Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, and of the whole of the New Testament (1876). In the printing of these books great part of the work was done by a Zulu lad whom he took as a young savage from his kraal, with some others who were given up to him by their fathers for education during a period of five years only. To these poor lads the bishop was emphatically Sobantu, the 'father of the people;' but as he was their teacher and guide, so in turn he was stimulated by their questions to the most momentous inquiries. Early in 1861 he published his 'Commentary on St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans,' a work which, according to Bishop Gray of Capetown, bristled from beginning to end with heresies. There can be no question that it struck at the roots of what is commonly called the sacramental system. The Epistle to the Romans, in his opinion, dealt the death-blow to all notions of covenant and privilege. It asserted that the benefits received from and through Christ were received for all the world, and that the divine work was a work for the extinction of sin, not merely for its punishment. He allowed that on this point his eyes had been opened to see that all theories of partial satisfaction implied, not the conquest of evil, but a compromise with it; and having been | brought to this conviction, he expressed it with absolute fearlessness.

He was now translating the book of Genesis for human beings with the docility of a child, but with the reasoning powers of mature age, and he was met at every step by the point-blank question, 'Is all that true?' 'My heart,' he says, 'answered, in the words of the Prophet, Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord? I dared not do so.' These questions had set him free. Critics in England found satisfaction in relating how ' the newly appointed bishop went to convert and was converted himself.' The bishop went on with his scrutiny of the Pentateuch, and came to the conclusion that with some historical matter these books contained a large amount which was not historical at all, and that the extremely minute and highly wrought ecclesiastical legislation of the books of Numbers and Leviticus was the work of an age later by many centuries than that to which it professedly belonged. This was the substance of the first three volumes of his critical examination of the Pentateuch, published in the latter part of 1862 and in the following year. From all sides came the indignant summons to give up his office as bishop, and retire from all work as a Christian teacher. Shaken at first, but only for a moment, the bishop soon came to see that he would be basely deserting his post and doing an irreparable wrong to the coming generations if he should foreclose the debate by declaring that such conclusions as these might not lawfully be maintained by a clergyman of the church of England.

The publication of these was to cost him one most valued friendship. Almost from the first they shocked Maurice, who broke off all intercourse with his old friend. The examination of the Pentateuch soon resolved itself into an examination of all the Hebrew scriptures. The book of Deuteronomy contained many passages which could not have been written until long after the settlement of the Jews in Canaan. He was struck by