ray, of Cape Town, solemnly 'excommunicated' Bishop
Colenso, of Natal, and enjoined the faithful to 'treat him as a heathen
man and a publican,' for exposing the unhistorical character of portions
of the Pentateuch, he became a hero with the whole High Church party,
and even the more liberal among the bishops were cowed by the tempest of
feeling which the case aroused. In the same period, many Oxford men can
remember Bishop Wilberforce's attack upon Darwinism, and, somewhat
later, Dean Burgon's University sermon which ended with the stirring
peroration: Leave me my ancestors in Paradise, and I leave you yours in
the Zoological Gardens!' From the same pulpit Liddon, a little before
his death, uttered a pathetic remonstrance against the course which his
younger disciples were taking about inspiration and tradition.

Reverence for tradition was a very prominent feature in the theology of
the older generation. They spent an immense amount of time, learning,
and ingenuity in establishing a _catena_ of patristic and orthodox
authority for their principles, reaching back to the earliest times, and
handed down in this country by a series of Anglo-Catholic divines. This
unbroken tradition was conceived of as purely static, a 'mechanical
unpacking,' as Father Tyrrell puts it, of the doctrine once delivered to
the Apostles. The Church, according to their theory, was supernaturally
guided by the Holy Ghost, and its decisions were consequently
infallible, as long as the Church remained undivided. Thus the earlier
General Councils, before the schism between East and West, may not be
appealed against, and the Creeds drawn up by them can never be revised.
Since the great schism, the infallible inspiration of the Church has
been in abeyance, like an old English peerage when a peer leaves two or
more daughters and no sons. This fantastic theory condemns all later
developments, and leaves the Church under the weight of the dead hand.
On the question of the Establishment the party was divided, some of its
members attaching great value to the union of Church and State, while
others made claims for the Church, in the matter of self-government,
which were hardly compatible with Establishment. Their bond of union was
their conviction of 'the necessity of impressing on people that the
Church was more than a merely human institution; that it had privileges,
sacraments, a ministry, ordained by Christ Himself; that it was a matter
of highest obliga