The hideously named "Pan-Anglican Synod," which assembled at Lambeth
in September, 1867, and terminated its proceedings in the following
December, was a real movement in the direction of Life and Liberty
for the Church of England. The impulse came from the Colonies,
which, themselves enjoying the privilege of spiritual independence,
were generously anxious to coalesce at a time of trial with the
fettered Church at home. The immediate occasion of the movement
was the eccentricity of Bishop Colenso--"the arithmetical Bishop
who could not forgive Moses for having written a Book of Numbers."
The faith of some was seriously perturbed when they heard of a
Bishop who, as Matthew Arnold said, "had learnt among the Zulus
that only a certain number of people can stand in a doorway at
once, and that no man can eat eighty-eight pigeons a day; and who
tells us, as a consequence, that the Pentateuch is all fiction,
which, however, the author may very likely have composed without
meaning to do wrong, and as a work of poetry, like Homer's."
Certainly the tremors of a faith so lightly overset were justly
obnoxious to Arnold's ridicule; but Colenso's negations went deeper
than the doorway and the pigeons; and the faithful of his diocese,
being untrammelled by the State, politely dismissed him from his
charge.
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