Essays and Reviews
This book was published in London by John William Parker and Son in March 1860.
Octavo. Purple cloth blocked in blind to spine and boards, brown coated endpapers, gilt titles to spine.
It is a volume of seven essays on Christianity by these Church of England theologians
Frederick Temple,
Rowland Williams,
Baden Powell,
Henry Bristow Wilson,
Charles Wycliffe Goodwin,
Mark Pattison and
Benjamin Jowett.
The topics covered
the biblical research of the German critics,
the evidence for Christianity,
religious thought in England, and
the cosmology of Genesis.
"Essays and Reviews" was a popular book title in the 19th century: there are many similar books available, but none made the same impact as this enlightening(?) anthology by world-renowned theologians, historians and researchers. This book exposed and challenged misrepresentations and age-old beliefs
This was a groundbreaking collection of theological essays, the first assault on Biblical literalism from within the ranks of British theologians. The importance of this book may be judged by the fact that it is still in print, and is on the curriculum of the Open University.
The edifice of literalism had been crumbling for several decades, under assault from the science of Lyell and Darwin and the new Biblical criticism of Ferdinand Baur and David Strauss at the University of Tübingen.
"But all these were outside the Church of England, and it was thus with a double force that Essays and Reviews, when it generally became known, struck clergy and laity. Not only did the book subscribe to the modern non-literal concept of the Bible text, but, far worse, the authors were with one exception beneficed clergy, and the majority came from the sanctuary of Oxford".
"Printing and the Mind of Man" p.348.
Two of the contributors, Rowland Williams and Henry Bristow Wilson, were found guilty by the Court of Arches, though the verdict was overturned by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in the long-term the Church came to accept much of what the essayists advocated.
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