Bishop of Natal, was born at St. Austell, January 24, 1814, and graduating in 1836 from St. John’s College, Cambridge, as second wrangler, was elected a fellow. In 1838 he became an assistant-master at Harrow, in 1842 a tutor at Cambridge, and in 1846 rector of Forncett St. Mary in Norfolk. He published “Miscellaneous Examples in Algebra” in 1848, “Plane Trigonometry” in 1851, and “Village Sermons” in 1853, in which same year he was appointed first Bishop of Natal. He soon mastered the Zulu language, prepared a grammar and dictionary, and translated the Prayer-book and part of the Bible. In a Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1861) he objected to the doctrine of eternal punishment. He became convinced of the improbability of many statements of facts and numbers in the Bible; and “The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua Critically Examined” (seven parts, 1862–79) brought down upon its writer an avalanche of criticism, and was condemned in both Houses of Convocation. In 1864 he was deposed from his see by his Metropolitan, Bishop Gray of Capetown; but on appeal the Privy-council declared the deposition “null and void” (1865); and in 1866 the Court of Chancery ordered the payment of his income, with arrears. Bishop Gray next publicly excommunicated him, and consecrated a new bishop with nearly the same diocese. In 1874 Colenso visited England, conferred with the Archbishop of Canterbury, and pleaded the cause of Langalibalele, a dispossessed Zulu chief. He was author of “Ten Weeks in Natal” (1855); “The New Bible Commentary Literally Examined” (1871–74); “Lectures on the Pentateuch and the Moabite Stone” (1873); and a volume of “Sermons” (1873). His works in algebra and arithmetic are still standard school-books. He died at Durban, Natal, June 20, 1883. See “Life” by Sir G. W. Cox (2 vols. 1888).

Personal

  Oh, my dear Mr. Froude, I surely couldn’t have looked so bored as that. I couldn’t because I wasn’t. I own to feeling rather antipathetic to that anomalous bishop. A man arrived at the years of discretion wearing an absurd little black silk apron, disturbs my artistic feelings to begin with. Then consider whom I am descended from, the woman who when King James offered to make her husband a bishop if she would persuade him to return to this country and be a peaceable subject, held up her apron and answered, “I would rather keep his head in there.” Add to all this that I strongly believe with a German friend of mine, that it is the mixing up of things which is the Great Bad! and that this particular bishop mixes up a black silk apron with arithmetical confutation of the Bible, and you will allow that I have better reason than a woman usually has for first impressions, why I should not take to Colenso.

  Five years after his first departure, Dr. Colenso, with his wife and family, came home to England; and, as soon as possible, put through the press the first volume of his “Pentateuch and Book of Joshua critically examined.”… It was at this time the writer first saw him, at the table of a distinguished man of science. The first impression he gave was that of a most courteous and high-bred gentleman; the second that of a man powerful physically and by strength of will; the third, that of extreme sincerity, simplicity, and sweetness of character. A tall, strong man, some six feet one or two inches in height, with gray eyes, iron-gray hair, regular features, and a jaw, not coarse, but so strong and firm as to suggest to every beholder the idea of indomitable resolution; a man who could wrestle with a marauding Caffre, or contend with an Archbishop of Canterbury, equally readily at any time.

  Among the figures who acted in his drama, he will not pass, as Gray or Wilberforce may do, into the legends of the saints, but he will have a niche in history beside Thirlwall and Stanley. It will be remembered that his dignity and temper in controversy never failed, though the most abusive language was poured out on him; that he loved the truth, and was willing to trust to it; and that his heart burnt with the fire of humanity and justice. One who experienced his kindness must also place on record how he could devote time and thought to the service of a friend. We shall not easily see his like.

  I knew Colenso; we met him [1864] in one of our walks. He joined us, and talked of what he had done with some slight elation. “Poor fellow!” said Carlyle, as he went away; “he mistakes it for fame. He does not see that it is only an extended pillory that he is standing on.” I thought and think this judgment a harsh one. No one had been once more anxious than Carlyle for the “Exodus.” No one had done more to bring it about than Colenso, or more bravely faced the storm which he had raised, or, I may add, more nobly vindicated, in later life, his general courage and honesty when he stood out to defend the Zulus in South Africa. Stanley spoke more truly, or more to his own and Colenso’s honour, when he told the infuriated Convocation to its face, that the Bishop of Natal was the only English prelate whose name would be remembered in the next century.

  He had done a great work, and he had done it with singular sweetness and serenity of temper. Those who knew him will remember the charm and dignity of his manner, and for those who never saw him, his writings will attest at the least his unswerving and incorruptible veracity.

  He faced this tornado of abuse, and these hurricanes of universal anathema, with the calmest dignity. He never once lost his temper; he never returned so much as one angry word to men who had heaped on him every species of abuse and contempt, and of whom many were incomparably his inferiors, not only in learning, but in every grace…. Future times will remember Bishop Colenso with honor and gratitude, when the names of nineteen-twentieths of his accusers have been buried in merciful oblivion. They will remember how, almost alone among colonial bishops, he not only devoted nearly the whole of his years to the duties of his see until his death, but also “with intense, indefatigable labor,” mastered the Zulu language; produced a Zulu grammar and dictionary; translated into Zulu much of the Bible (correcting inconceivably frightful errors in some small previous attempts); and, in the cause of the oppressed, braving all hostile combinations, came home only to plead the wrongs of Langalibalele, and did his best to obtain justice for King Cetshwayo.

General

  Have you heard of that wonderful Bishop Colenso? Such a talk about him too. And he isn’t worth talking about for five minutes, except for the absurdity of a man making arithmetical onslaughts on the Pentateuch, with a bishop’s little black silk apron on!

  I think it a pity that he commits himself in his books to so much speculative and precarious criticism. His analysis of the Psalms and argument from them struck me as forced and weak; and I find Russell is painfully impressed with its untenable character, though in most respects satisfied with his volumes.

  We have not seen that, among the half-hundred books and half-thousand pamphlets which it has called out, any new views as to the Pentateuch or the Book of Joshua have been elicited, which we need present at any length to our readers, or with any great care discuss. What is new in Bishop Colenso’s own suggestions of detail is perhaps curious, but it seems to us certainly trivial. The greater part of his suggestions are not new, as he himself says. They are household words to every intelligent Christian in America, in France, or in Germany. We believe we might add, they are the familiar speculations of all the enlightened men not bound by the strictest ties of the Church in Spain, in Italy, and in Russia. England is the only country in Christendom where at this moment, the promulgation of these views could be welcomed with such a howl of indignation and surprise…. The handful of illustrations which Bishop Colenso presents, where he might have presented thousands, are painfully and sedulously discussed, as if the whole case were wrapped up in them. Everything in the controversy shows to us, that to the great majority of the English clergy, of the higher orders as well as of the lower, the discovery that the Pentateuch is self-contradictory, or that any statement in it is untenable, is not simply painful, but a surprise.

  If the Bishop desired a sudden immortality, he has secured his wish. If he sought to put his thoughts in such a form that those for whom he wrote might thoughtlessly receive his opinion as law with regard to the gravest questions that have ever commanded the attention of man, he has been successful. There is a baldness and a boldness in the style of his book, a lowness and, if we may use the term, a filthiness of mind, as if gorging himself with details bordering upon obscenity, which caters to a class of readers who are ever too eager to catch at anything which may foster and strengthen their prejudices against the stern and pure spirit of revelation. Sometimes, as we have read page after page, it seemed as if we could see in the eye of the consecrated Bishop the leer of the Arch-deceiver himself, as looking up at us he said, “Yea! hath God said this?”… It was begotten like a house-plant. It will die like a mushroom.

  Literary criticism, however, must not blame the Bishop of Natal because his personal position is false, nor praise Spinoza because his personal position is sound. But, as it must deny to the Bishop’s book the right of existing, when it can justify its existence neither by edifying the many nor informing the few, it must concede that right to Spinoza’s for the sake of its unquestionably philosophic scope…. There are alleged contradictions in Scripture; and the question which the general culture of Europe, informed of this, asks with real interest is, as I have said,—What then? To this question Spinoza returns an answer, and the Bishop of Natal returns none. The Bishop of Natal keeps going round forever within the barren sphere of these contradictions themselves; he treats them as if they were supremely interesting in themselves, as if we had never heard of them before, and could never hear enough of them now. Spinoza touches these verbal matters with all possible brevity, and presses on to the more important. It is enough for him to give us what is indispensably necessary of them…. He, too, like the Bishop of Natal, touches on the family of Judah; but he devotes one page to this topic, and the Bishop of Natal devotes thirteen. To the sums in Ezra—with which the Bishop of Natal, “should God, in His providence, call him to continue the work,” will assuredly fill folios—Spinoza devotes barely a page. He is anxious to escape from the region of these verbal matters, which to the Bishop of Natal are a sort of intellectual land of Beulah.

  So sincere is my dislike to all personal attack and controversy, that I abstain from reprinting, at this distance of time from the occasion which called them forth, the essays in which I criticised the Bishop of Natal’s book; I feel bound, however, after all that has passed, to make here a final declaration of my sincere impenitence for having published them. The Bishop of Natal’s subsequent volumes are in great measure free from the crying fault of his first; he has at length succeeded in more clearly separating, in his own thoughts, the idea of science from the idea of religion; his mind appears to be opening as he goes along, and he may perhaps end by becoming a useful biblical critic, though never, I think, of the first order. Still, in here taking leave of him at the moment when he is publishing, for popular use, a cheap edition of his work, I cannot forbear repeating yet once more, for his benefit and that of his readers, this sentence from my original remarks upon him: There is truth of science and truth of religion; truth of science does not become truth of religion till it is made religious. And I will add: Let us have all the science there is from the men of science; from the men of religion let us have religion.

  There are two Bishops, and two only, among all the Bishops of the Colonial Churches, who won for themselves the glory of having endeavored to translate the truths of the Scriptures into the uncouth tongues of the people whose pastors they have become. The one is Bishop Patteson of Melanesia, and the other is Bishop Colenso of Natal. If, in pursuance of this investigation, he was led to take too minute care of the words and letters of the Sacred Volume, as I fully think he was, still one would have thought that the sacredness and the value of the labour in which he was employed ought to have procured for him something different from the vast vocabulary of abuse which, as a general rule, is the only response his labours have met with in this country.

  He has recently published a volume of the sermons he has preached since his return to his bishopric,—sermons in which many of the theological questions of the day are dealt with in an able and thoroughly original manner. But the peculiar merit of these discourses is one above their learning and originality. It consists in that warm and simple piety, that strong, clear faith in the LIVING GOD, which has been from first to last the characteristic of the man whom his enemies proclaim as the most dangerous infidel of the day. Well will it be for England, if, fifty years or a century hence, her clergy, with all their cowardly tampering with truth, have left in the hearts of the masses of her people such real manly faith, faith in God and duty and immortality, as breathes through every word and deed of the heretic Bishop of Natal.

  I return the Bishop’s paper. If I formed my opinion of Colenso from such statements alone, I should have but a low estimate of his knowledge and powers of reasoning. They are, in my judgment, puerile, hardly ingenius, hardly ingenuous. He does not seem to me to understand the bearing and importance of the subject. But I do not judge Colenso on such grounds. I honour him as a bold, honest, single-minded man, with a deep and sincere love of truth. He is a man, too, of remarkably acute intellect and indefatigable industry. But he entered on these enquiries late in life, struck boldly into one track, in which he marches with fearless intrepidity, looking neither to the right nor to the left. Moreover, he wants wide and general knowledge. He rides his hobby with consummate skill, but he rides it to death. Everything must give way before his Jehovistic and Elohistic theory. Now, I fully believe that to a certain limit, but not in its application to all the writings of the Old Testament (as we have them); for I am a worse sceptic than Colenso, doubting whether we have them in unaltered, unimpeachable integrity. I believe the whole of Colenso’s theory about the development of the Jewish religion to be all pure conjecture and from (to me) most unsatisfactory premises. As history, much of the German criticism, as well as his, is purely arbitrary: doubtful conclusions from more doubtful facts. None of this, however, in the least lowers my respect for Colenso, and my sense of his ill usage by persons to whom his knowledge is comparatively the widest, his ignorance much more trustworthy than their knowledge. As for his piety, I have read some, and intend to read more of his sermons. None of his adversaries, of course, read them. If they did, it might put even them to shame, especially as contrasted with their cold, dry dogmatism.

  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 its resemblance to the prophecies of Jeremiah. Now the historical books showed that the so-called Mosaic law was never carried out before the Babylonish captivity. The popular religion down to the time of the great prophets was a debased idolatry, according to the writing of the prophets themselves. But in the time of Josiah occurred the discovery of the Book of the Law in the Temple. This book, whatever it was, had been utterly forgotten. He inferred that the book discovered was the book of Deuteronomy, and this book is identical in feelings, style, purpose, and language with the book of the prophecies of Jeremiah. The conclusion followed that it was written by Jeremiah and placed in the Temple in order that its discovery should lead to a resolution on the part of the king to put down the abominations which were eating out the spiritual life of his people. This conclusion, the bishop insisted, threw light on many difficulties, and proved the books of Chronicles to be a narrative deliberately falsified with the set purpose of exalting the priests and Levites.

  It would be unjust to pass over this brave man, who in the teeth of opposition made himself a genuine critic, and who won his battle more completely for others than for himself…. Though by no means a negative critic, he was not qualified to do thoroughly sound constructive work either in historical criticism or in theoretic theology. Let us be thankful for all that he did in breaking up the hard soil, and not quarrel with him for his limitations.

  Colenso’s avowed object was to destroy what he called the idol of Bibliolatry. The letter of the Bible he compared to the law as understood by St. Paul, which was to be put aside as a thing dead and of the past, while the spirit lives and could never die. The accuracy of the Pentateuch may go, but the Sermon on the Mount abideth ever.

  In 1862 the excitement was renewed by the publication of Colenso’s book on the Pentateuch. It seems arid, now, for there is nothing attractive in the application of arithmetical formulas to Noah’s Ark; but it was just the kind of argument needed at the time and for the audience addressed.