Abstract
If Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species (1859) swept across England like a cataclysmic flood, as Charles Kingsley presciently observed, then the pseudonymous Essays and Reviews (1860) was the storm.1 From this blast “troubling the stagnant waters of orthodoxy,” English orthodoxy became “convulsed with indignation and panic.” Constituting “a landmark in the history of English theology,” Essays and Reviews was even “more alarming— a conspiracy of clergymen to blow up the Church from within.”2 This was precisely what the architects of the Oxford Movement of 1833 had dreaded and wanted to preempt: the theological and biblical skepticism of German higher criticism. With its “guerilla warfare of essays,” where “hundreds of points are touched, none completed,” Essays and Reviews was viewed as an act of what we now call bio-terrorism, “the scattering of poison in the wells of a city,” a metaphor based on the familiar nineteenth-century practice of dumping raw, untreated sewage into the streets, which then contaminated the water supplies.3 In a related metaphor, the most recent editors of Essays and Reviews likened its effect to an illness and an epidemic: “the rising temperature of the established church as fears of heretical fever … gripped the nation” (E&R, 30). In the language of another favorite metaphor, Essays and Reviews virtually “set a torch to what proved to be dry timber.”24
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