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“The Smell of the Fire”

The heavy burden of the growing soul
Perplexes and offends more, day by day;
Week by week, offends and perplexes more
With the imperatives of ‘is and seems’
And may and may not, desire and control.
The pain of living and the drug of dreams
Curl up the small soul in the window seat
Behind the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
— T.S. Eliot: Animula

A full century separates the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from its relatively humble origins in 1771, when “the first edition of this venerable work was announced”.1 Successive editions grew steadily in scale and authority until, following the Encyclopaedia’s acquisition by Constable the publisher, the fourth edition, completed in 1810 under the editorship of Dr James Miller, had reached the scale of twenty volumes and had adopted the policy to be followed thenceforth of soliciting major contributions from eminent specialists. Under the new ownership of Messrs Adam and Charles Black, plans were set in foot for a ninth edition:2

Already the three sons [James Tait, Francis and Adam William] had been urging their father to set on foot a new edition, realising that the property [i.e. the encyclopaedia] would rapidly run down unless it were brought up to date, and no less that [sic] substantial profits could be made if both the editorial and business side of the undertaking were properly administered.3

Evidence relating to the embryonic stages of the new edition is scant but it appears that Thomas Spencer Baynes had been formally appointed to the post of editor by 1873 and thereafter was actively occupied in recruiting the services of potential contributors as well as soliciting help in devising coverage of the main areas of knowledge.4 However, there is reason to believe that by the time of the BA meeting at Edinburgh in August, 1871, the preliminary stages of planning were already well under way, although it is unlikely that Robertson Smith had been contemplated at that stage as a likely contributor and he does not figure at all in the first volume (A-ANA) published at the start of 1875. Nevertheless, his attendance at the 1871 BA meeting (not to mention his participation in the golfing holiday at St Andrews) must have been instrumental in affording him entrée, primarily through his friendship with Tait, to the select circle of scientists who met there – and thus to Baynes, then Professor of Logic and English at St Andrews University.5 An equally important factor, however, is likely to have been Smith’s selection as a member of the Old Testament Revision Committee from 1874, which brought him into close contact with such eminent and liberal Anglican scholars as A.P. Stanley, and T.K. Cheyne, who subsequently became life-long friends and supporters.6

The nature of an encyclopaedia

Born in 1823, Baynes came of a Nonconformist background, soon abandoned his early intention to enter the Baptist ministry and, after a period at London University, took his degree at Edinburgh University, where he is said to have been a favourite pupil of Sir William Hamilton, the most eminent Scottish philosopher of the day. A friend of G.H. Lewes, Baynes moved into journalism, first in London with the Daily News and subsequently in Edinburgh as editor of the Edinburgh Guardian, before being appointed to the St Andrews Chair in 1865.7 Seemingly a genial personality, much loved by his students, Baynes comes down to us as a relatively minor nineteenth century littérateur, despite the praise accorded him by Newth in his memoir on the publishers, Messrs A. and C. Black:

Baynes was as fine and meticulous an editor as he was a scholar, and it was largely due to his planning and the support and freedom given to him by the publishers that this ninth edition became the most famous of all editions of the Encyclopaedia, early known as the ‘scholars’ edition’ and having a profound influence on many departments of thought. The strain of keeping himself and more than eleven hundred contributors – in Britain, on the Continent and in the United States – to a rigid timetable ultimately broke his health and he died before the last volume appeared. The Britannica owed its success under Baynes to his readiness to recognise what was then regarded as the most modern lines of thought, and to encourage the newest developments in the sciences, history and philosophy.8

The anonymous reviewer in Nature was similarly eulogistic, remarking: “A glance at the first instalment of this issue warrants us in declaring that the work will lose nothing from having been entrusted to Prof. Baynes”.9 Later, however, there were to be complaints about Baynes’ “indolence”10 and Meta Bradley, who met Baynes socially at St Andrews and Edinburgh in 1881, wrote caustically to Mark Pattison:

[Baynes] has but one set of lectures, the set namely which he wrote when first elected to the professorship. This brown, yellow, fly-spotted, often illegible MS he reads perfunctorily once a year. It was never good for much and is now obsolete in its subject.11

Whatever the truth in such allegations, Baynes’ much-quoted “Prefatory Notice” to the Ninth Edition affords a succinct and precise expression of the editor’s aims and objectives. The new encyclopaedia was to follow its predecessors in offering a blend of “popular and scientific exposition”, while treating the major topics in an extended and comprehensive manner.12 That approach, wrote Baynes, had proved its worth in the past by enabling the Encyclopaedia “to secure the services of the more independent and productive minds who were engaged in advancing their own departments of scientific enquiry”.13 This principle would be followed again, so ensuring that the EB would continue to be “an instrument as well as a register of scientific progress”. It is not difficult to understand the affinity of those sentiments to Robertson Smith’s own outlook: all subjects were to be treated “scientifically” and every major article would, in itself, play a part in the advancement of knowledge.

Such expressed intentions were by no means shallow or spurious. Questions of order, selection of topics, mode of classification, allocation of space and standardisation of style had always posed problems for the compilers of an encyclopaedia.14 Baynes noted the increasing complexity of detail within the biological and physical sciences which, together with the continuous introduction of new, more precise and more highly differentiated nomenclature, required to be placed firmly and authoritatively within the public domain. Given the ever-changing processes of systematisation and classification (in the sciences at least), whatever was written would inevitably be provisional:

In these circumstances, the really important thing is, that whatever may be said on such unsettled questions should be said with the authority of the fullest knowledge and insight, and every effort has been made to secure this advantage for the New Edition of the Encyclopaedia.15

Rather cleverly, Baynes was thus able to credit the new EB with having the best, most authoritative contributors, while simultaneously implying that the accolade of becoming a contributor ipso facto vested that individual with the status of leadership in modern thinking. Physics was cited by Baynes as an example par excellence of very rapid advance in knowledge and indeed constituted for him the paradigm for all “modern” scientific thinking and research:

In advancing from the older dynamic to the newer potential and kinetic conceptions of power, this branch of science [physics] may be said to have entered on a fresh stage, in which, instead of regarding natural phenomena as the result of forces acting between one body and the next, the energy of a material system is looked upon as determined by its configuration and motion, and the ideas of configuration, motion and force are generalised to the utmost extent warranted by their definitions. This latter point of view, combined with the far reaching doctrines of the correlation of forces and the conservation of energy, has produced extensive changes in the nomenclature and classification of the various sections of physics; while the fuller investigations into the ultimate constitution of matter, and into the phenomena and laws of light, heat, and electricity, have created virtually new sections, which must now find a place in any adequate survey of scientific progress.16

If the new findings of science could not realistically be incorporated in the Encyclopaedia merely by enlargement or revision of articles from the previous edition, then (so Baynes argued) the self-same principle applied to those many other “sections of knowledge” which, in the modern age, displayed “new tendencies, and are working towards new results”:17

Man, in his individual powers, complex relationships, associated activities, and collective progress, is dealt with alike in Literature, History and Philosophy. In this wider aspect, the rudest and most fragmentary records of savage and barbaric races, the earliest stories and traditions of every lettered people, no less than their developed literatures, mythologies, and religions, are found to have a meaning and value of their own… It may be said, indeed, that their real significance is perceived and appreciated, almost for the first time, in our own day. But under the influence of the modern spirit, they are now being dealt with in a strictly scientific manner. The available facts of human history, collected over the widest areas, are carefully co-ordinated and grouped together, in the hope of ultimately evolving the laws of progress, moral and material, which underlie them, and which, when evolved, will help to connect and interpret the whole onward movement of the race.18

Baynes’ words breathe all the rather intoxicating and hubristic optimism of the High Victorian era, yet also bear witness to the intense interest of the day in comparative philology and ethnography. In many ways prophetic of Robertson Smith’s future path, they offered a secular mandate which seemed to pose no conscious threat to that spiritual commission which WRS possessed by virtue of his evangelical faith and upbringing. The final and well-known paragraph of Baynes’ Prefatory Notice defines the terms of that mandate still more explicitly:

It may be well, perhaps, to state at the outset the position taken by the Encyclopaedia Britannica in relation to the active controversies of the time – Scientific, Religious, and Philosophical. This is the more necessary, as the prolific activity of modern science has naturally stimulated speculation, and given birth to a number of somewhat crude conjectures and hypotheses. The air is full of novel and extreme opinions, arising often from a hasty or one-sided interpretation of the newer aspects and results of modern inquiry. The higher problems of philosophy and religion, too, are being investigated afresh from opposite sides in a thoroughly earnest spirit, as well as with a directness and intellectual power, which is certainly one of the most striking signs of the times. This fresh outbreak of the inevitable conflict between the old and the new is a fruitful source of exaggerated hopes and fears, and of excited denunciation and appeal. In this conflict a work like the Encyclopaedia is not called upon to take any direct part. It has to do with knowledge rather than opinion, and to deal with all subjects from a critical and historical, rather than a dogmatic point of view. It cannot be the organ of any sect or party in Science, Religion, or Philosophy. Its main duty is to give an accurate account of the facts and an impartial summary of results in every department of inquiry and research. This duty will, I hope, be faithfully performed.19

As a manifesto, Baynes’ concluding paragraphs constituted an admirable piece of rhetoric. The Encyclopaedia would take no sides on any controversial issue, and would seek always to present the “facts” impartially to its public. Dogmatism was to be eschewed but all subjects of knowledge would be explored from a “critical and historical” perspective. As a practical specification for its contributors, it was to prove less satisfactory. Far from being eirenic, as a first reading might suggest, Baynes’ sentiments could well be understood as a direct challenge to received opinion and traditional beliefs, in whatever field of human thought. In that respect, the Prefatory Notice was thoroughly Tyndallic in tone and it may seem paradoxical at first sight that Smith should so readily have given his unconditional allegiance to these principles – yet they must have seemed to offer a valid means of reconciling that evangelical faith, which he could never consciously abandon, with an increasingly rationalistic approach to biblical criticism. Indeed, it seems fair to interpret Smith’s impetuous and aggressive outbursts towards both John Tyndall and George Eliot as an unconscious denial of his own repressed scepticism.20 When Robertson Smith wrote to George Lewes in 1874 that he believed he was “as averse as any man to the sacrificio del inteletto”,21 his instinctive and forceful repudiation of Ignatius Loyola’s cardinal precept was to be echoed no less emphatically by Tyndall six months later in the Belfast Address:

A hint of Hamlet’s … teaches us all how the troubles of common life may be ended; and it is perfectly possible for you to purchase intellectual peace at the price of intellectual death. The world is not without refuges of this description; nor is it wanting in persons who seek their shelter and try to persuade others to do the same. The unstable and the weak have yielded, and will yield to this persuasion, and they to whom repose is sweeter than the truth. But I would exhort you to refuse the offered shelter, and to scorn the base repose—to accept, if the choice be forced upon you, commotion before stagnation, the leap of the torrent before the stillness of the swamp.22

Smith’s five year long battle with his Church was to exemplify repeatedly just such a temptation for “intellectual repose” as Tyndall had described – a lure held out to him, again and again, by his ecclesiastical brethren, yet always resisted staunchly.23 And in taking up Baynes’ offer to write for the Encyclopaedia, Smith was certainly neither so naïve nor so unreflecting as to be wholly unaware of the potential for conflict. A century before, the Encyclopédie Française had incurred clerical wrath by its intentionally provocative advocacy of religious toleration, its rationalistic tone and its free expression of heterodox views. The resulting suspicion of encyclopaedias as actual or potential instruments of political and theological subversion had never been entirely dissipated.24

Volume one

Three volumes of the new Encyclopaedia Britannica were published within the first year (1875) – a commercially shrewd strategy on the part of editor and publishers alike. The opening volume, however, was by no means conspicuous for its adoption of Baynes’ principles and contained a preponderance of miscellaneous and somewhat trite articles of a kind which Smith eventually was to exclude from the later volumes. Despite the praise given by the reviewer in Nature for the deletion of “all mere ‘dictionary’ words from the ‘Britannica’ by Prof. Baynes”, a number of such entries appear in the initial volume.25 The Nature review understandably gave especial praise to Huxley’s 21-page article on “Amphibia” and alluded favourably to the extended treatment given to “Agriculture” (a virtual monograph of 125 pages divided into twenty-two chapters); praised the “disquisition” on American Literature and “Mr John Ball’s article on the Alps”; and commended the “elaborate dissertation, by Prof. Turner, on Anatomy”.26 Even this brief account serves to indicate the Encyclopaedia’s heterogeneity, in terms of content and quality: individual contributors of major articles were given the widest scope as to presentation and length; and it is noticeable that Robertson Smith was later to exercise a very much firmer editorial hand. Nevertheless, the Nature reviewer concluded enthusiastically:

Prof. Baynes has taken the only safe method of securing articles that shall embody the fullest, and highest, and most accurate knowledge; viz., by obtaining the services of those who have proved themselves to be at the summit in their particular departments. To the present and to future generations, therefore, this ninth edition of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica” must be regarded as indicating the highest tide-mark of the science, literature and art of the time; and from this point of view the successive editions of the book are peculiarly interesting as showing the progress of knowledge during the periods that have elapsed between the times of their publication.27

In The Academy, James Cotton was almost as laudatory: “[the new edition] marks a progress in conception, classification and terminology which is almost equivalent to a revolution …”28 but he pointed to evidence of “insufficient editorial supervision” which had resulted in “disproportionate allocation of space” and a good deal of superfluous matter in the form of minor entries. Cotton was severe moreover on the editor’s readiness to reproduce material from previous editions.29 The impressive array of distinguished contributors nevertheless offered “a higher guarantee of excellence than the fulsome commendation of any critic” and Cotton concluded that the public had:

… deep cause for gratitude to the publishers for having undertaken what must be nothing less than a gigantic speculation, to the editor for years of imperfectly recognised toil, and to the various contributors who worthily occupy the places of those who formerly made the reputation of the Encyclopaedia.30

Biblical topics, of the kind which WRS was to make peculiarly his own, were treated in this opening volume by T.K. Cheyne, then Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and by Samuel Davidson. Cheyne was to become a close friend and fervid supporter of Smith, initially through their joint participation in the Revision Committee, and he continued to contribute on Old Testament topics throughout EB9. Davidson’s involvement, on the other hand, ceased entirely after the fourth volume. Conceivably Baynes was influenced by Cotton’s Academy review, which particularly selected Davidson for adverse comment:

Dr Davidson [in his article “Adam”] has not escaped unscathed out of the furnace of German and Dutch criticism, for it can only be from thence that he has drawn that infelicity of language and thought which repeatedly induces him to style Adam and Eve “the two protoplasts”, and to remark of the Fall that it was “at once one of the most fortunate facts in man’s history and also one of the saddest”.31

Davidson had written two named articles for the first volume – “Abraham” and “Adam” – each superficially innocuous in terms of content and style. In both articles, however, the relatively uncontroversial findings of contemporary source-criticism in relation to the book of Genesis are taken as fully established. Abraham is regarded as a historical figure although the source documents revealed inconsistencies and contained “mythical elements intermingled with much that is traditional or legendary”. In his article “Adam”, Davidson was unambiguous in regarding the first the chapters of Genesis as aetiological myth and was dismissive of allegorical interpretations:

A mythical age stands at the head of all national histories; and that of the Hebrews seems to be no exception. The two narratives present philosophical mythi in a historical form. They represent the best ideas of the Hebrews at a certain stage of their history in explanation of the creation of man, his primeval abode and state, and the cause of his degeneracy.32

Almost half of the article is taken up with a comprehensive critical review of similar myths from other eastern religions, reflecting the emerging and widespread interest in such comparative studies, and it is hard to discern any obvious shortcomings in terms of the Encyclopaedia’s stated aims.33 When Cheyne came to produce the Encyclopaedia Biblica in 1899, he indicated that Robertson Smith, originator of the project, had worked on numerous articles before his death and he specifically noted, in respect of the Biblica’s article “Adam and Eve”: “The above article is written on the lines and sometimes in the words of WRS”.34 Smith’s treatment of the topic is more scholarly than that of Davidson’s article in the Britannica, as befitted the demands of a specialised reference work, but his general conclusions are not dissimilar to Davidson’s: though mythical, the Biblical story of Adam and Eve is superior to its many pagan parallels and “in its nascent sense of spiritual realities our Eden story stands alone”.35 Smith concludes:

It is only by applying critical methods to the story, and distinguishing the different elements of which it is composed, that we can do justice to the ideas which the later editor or editors sought to convey.36

From “Angel” to “Bible”

Volumes two and three of the Encyclopaedia Britannica came out in close succession towards the close of 1875 and were for the most part reviewed together in the periodical literature. In The Academy, J.P. Mahaffy wrote:

An adequate review of these splendid volumes would require a large council of critics, and a proportionate volume of criticism. An immense range of subjects is embraced and each has been treated by a specialist, in most cases by an acknowledged master in his own department. When Mr Swinburne treats of Beaumont and Fletcher, Mr Sayce of Babylonia, Mr Max Müller of Aryan, Mr Proctor of astronomy, it is no slight undertaking to venture a review of such men in such subjects. There are few books which show more splendidly the learning and culture of England [sic] at the present day.37

Thus Smith was implicitly elevated, by association, to the ranks of the foremost literary, philological and scientific figures of the day, even though Mahaffy felt it necessary to add: “There is no space in this review to speak of the important theological articles (especially the able and advanced paper on The Bible …)”.38 Not all the contributors, however, were either famous or destined to achieve eminence and one reviewer was to complain later that: “Prof. Baynes would have acted wiser had he oftener sought for aid in England and Ireland, and trusted less to writers nearer home”.39

Smith’s four named articles in this second volume – “Angel”, “Apostle”, “Aramaic” and “Ark of the Covenant” – all carry the characteristic stamp of his authoritative and lucidly didactic style.40 The longest (“Angel”) warrants closer study, since it was later to be scrutinised for its irreverence and heterodox tendency, and since it exemplifies how carefully its author set out to follow Baynes’ stated principles – the objective yet critically analytic presentation of the most modern thinking on the topic. From a modern perspective, the article comes across as a small masterpiece of compression and objectivity, yet in the eyes of many contemporary readers (both Established and Free Church) those same virtues were to be interpreted much more negatively as the characteristics of a “rapid and passionless statement”.41

Within the Bible, wrote Smith, the term angel embraced two quite distinct concepts: first, that of God’s messenger or spokesman – or, more properly, the perceived manifestation of God in quasi-human form to chosen individuals; and secondly, the notion of a heavenly host of superhuman beings, ministering to both God and man, and possessing a multiplicity of ranks, attributes and rôles. In the Old Testament, the “Angel of the Lord” came in times of crisis to lead, direct or admonish God’s people; but such a hypostatisation possessed no true individuality and existed solely as God’s agent. The patristic identification of this being with Christ as Logos still had (Smith noted) some defenders but “does not express the sense of the O.T. writer”.42 The Bible as a whole offered no clear statement on angels such as might form the basis for dogma: they were assumed to be “good and powerful” in anthropomorphic terms, but this did not constitute revealed doctrine. Smith acknowledged the antiquity of the “heavenly host” concept of angels but pointed to its protean fluidity as a clear indication of “conscious poetic art” – indeed: “… much must be allowed for the free play of fancy”. One line of conceptual development associated the agency of angels with the natural forces of wind, fire and pestilence; that in turn became linked to the identification of angels with the stars and gave rise ultimately to the Pauline conception of “elemental powers”. Other degraded outgrowths of the angelic notion in apocalyptic and Gnostic literature became still more subject to “elasticity of conception”, and the influence of the non-canonical Book of Enoch could be discerned, for example, in the canonical Epistle of Jude. Such material could be construed, commented Smith, “as history or as myth according as the interpreter is theosophically or critically inclined”.

New Testament angelology was, in Smith’s view, broadly a continuation of later O.T. themes and trends. Angels were, on the one hand, pictured as salvific, ministering spirits (as in Heb. 1:14); on the other, they were often regarded, especially in the Pauline literature, as maleficent cosmic enforcers of the now superseded Law. Finally, WRS briefly traced the subsequent history of “angel-worship” from Gnostic dualism, through neo-Platonic speculation, to the “misdirected subtlety” of the medieval Schoolmen, concluding with a reference to the sparing attention devoted to the subject by Protestantism and citing Schleiermacher to the effect that the reality or otherwise of angels ought not to influence the conduct of Christian believers.

It requires a considerable effort today to appreciate the degree of indignation which Smith’s maiden article for the Encyclopaedia was capable of arousing in the 1870s. Nevertheless, a careful reading of “Angel” reveals an unmistakable vein of rationalistic scepticism on the topic, tempered though the article is at every step by the most judicious choice of words and by the scrupulous avoidance of any explicit partisanship. By 1877, at the General Assembly, Dr David Brown (Principal of the Aberdeen Free College) was already deploring the absence of any references in “Angel” either to Satan or to those angelic beings who “kept not their first estate”.43 By 1880, however, Robertson Smith’s name had become sufficiently notorious to ensure that every encyclopaedia article from his pen was scrutinised for heresy or irreverence – a process which, ironically, assured their author of maximum media publicity through the ensuing barrage of newspaper correspondence and pamphleteering. The series of Scottish Tracts for the Time, edited by Walter Wood, Free Church minister at Elie, contains admirable examples of the less scurrilous and more reasoned attacks on Smith. One of the more remarkable features of Scottish Tracts is the degree of scrupulous accuracy with which they convey the content and general thrust of those early articles: one wonders if the authors appreciated the extent to which they themselves assisted the dissemination of Smith’s ideas.

The attack on “Angel” by A.M. Symington is no exception in this respect and is therefore a helpful key to understanding the sense of outrage felt by the conservative majority within the Free Churches in Scotland. The author prefaced his pamphlet with the claim that:

[Professor Smith’s writings] … have created uneasiness, and suggested questions touching cardinal matters of our belief in the minds of Christians in all churches, so that anyone is at liberty to take part in the debate, so far as it is theological, who tries to do so with the candour and courage of the truth. The writer is not one of those who would always and peremptorily exclude such fundamental and cardinal questions from the area of human polemics: living orthodoxy has nothing to gain by such exclusion, and might lose much.44

God’s revelation (Symington continued) is incomplete, yet entirely sufficient. What we possess is “perfect for its purpose” and “the want of completeness takes nothing from the certainty”.45 Accordingly, we are to accept what partial information is given us scripturally, including that relating to angels, particularly since such knowledge provides a helpful antidote to materialism. Symington accepts Smith’s analysis of the angelic concept, as found in the Bible, but he examines first the “angelic host”, who are “individuality without species” and thus comprise a higher form of created being, wholly akin to mankind in its resurrected form – spiritual but not disembodied since they “are seen and heard, touch men and seize their hands eagerly, they rejoice, they sing, they unlock doors of prisons”.46 This anthropomorphic representation of angels is, of course, strikingly similar to the prevalent Victorian belief in the earthly presence of spirits, actively entertained by so many respected luminaries of the late nineteenth century, and given quasi-scientific respectability by Tait and Balfour’s Unseen Universe.

In Symington’s eyes, Smith’s attitude towards the admittedly incomplete scriptural data is a sadly negative one, with its emphasis on the biblical writers’ “free play of fancy”, use of “poetic art” and “elasticity of conception”. We may not know as much about the subject as our “speculative inquisitiveness craves to know” but what we have been told scripturally is quite sufficient. Symington’s literalist reading finds no difficulty in reconciling the varied biblical accounts of the angelic hierarchies but he judges it reprehensible that Smith refuses to take sides on the issue of myth versus historical truth.47 As for Smith’s sceptical, three-word reference to the angelic ministrations towards Jesus in Gethsemane, Symington sternly observes: “Here we do well to be angry”, adding:

If these two verses (Luke xxii, 43,44), long associated with the deepest and tenderest feelings of the children of God, the “little ones,” must be removed from the page of Scripture, or, which is no better, must be pronounced doubtful by a learned man in an encyclopaedia, the thing need not be savagely done by a point of interrogation. Want of space can hardly be pleaded, for twenty-six columns are given to Angling against the five given to Angel.48

Turning to the “Angel of Jehovah”, Symington has much less to say but disagrees vehemently with Smith’s unwillingness to accept that being’s identification with the Logos of John’s Gospel and the Spirit of Trinitarian dogma:

And, comparing Hagar’s case with that of the woman of Samaria; Jacob’s at Peniel with that of the woman of Canaan; Joshua’s under Jericho with that of John the Baptist at Bethabara; Job xxxiii.23,24 with Matt. xx.28, need we be much at a loss to recognise the same hand and tongue and heart?49

This matching of passages from the Hebrew Bible to the New Testament gives some insight into the standard hermeneutic techniques of Smith’s day and, in particular, accounts for the high evidential value placed by Smith’s critics upon all N.T. references to the Hebrew Bible. Faced with the challenging task of framing the original “libel” against Robertson Smith between 1877 and 1878, the Aberdeen Free Church Presbytery found the article “Angel” sufficiently incriminating to warrant its forming one of the eight specific counts on which it was proposed to arraign Smith, while also judging that, like the other articles, it demonstrated a “neutrality of attitude” allied to a “rashness of statement” which together tended “to disparage the Divine authority and inspired character” of Holy Scripture:

Octavo:— … the opinion that belief in the superhuman reality of the angelic teachings of the Bible is a matter of assumption rather than of direct teaching; and that angels are endowed with special goodness and insight analogous to human qualities appears as a popular assumption, not as a doctrine of revelation …50

If “Angel” had seemed in many respects an ideal test piece for Robertson Smith’s skills, being a topic relatively distanced from sensitive doctrinal issues, the article “Bible” presented a much more formidable challenge. In 1875, Huxley was engaged in writing the article “Biology” for the same volume and, in a letter to Baynes, notes that he has a full-scale book on Biology in course of publication. He is uneasy that this will mean “going over the same ground as in the article for the Encyclopaedia” – and he continues:

You see, as I am neither dealing with Theology, nor History, nor Criticism, I can’t take a fresh departure and say something entirely different from what I have just written.51

The implication is that, in the case of a strictly scientific topic such as Biology, any comprehensive overview, whether detailed or brief, was bound to cover the whole ground comprehensively and to present clearly accepted, authoritative views, in line with the findings of modern research. Non-scientific topics could afford to follow a more subjectively chosen path and indeed might take a quite partial approach. While Smith himself would have disagreed vehemently, there is no doubt that Huxley’s perception of the matter was that held implicitly by the great majority of historians, critics and theologians at that time. In attempting therefore to present a definitive historical-critical account of the complete Bible which would meet with general approval and acceptance, Robertson Smith was embarking on a unique task – one which, in hindsight, stood little if any chance of evading controversy.52 Exceptionally moreover, in the case of “Bible”, Smith was required to deal with both Old and New Testaments, and it is very apparent that his approach to the latter is more cautious. While giving a clear account, for example, of the critical findings of the Tübingen school, he was careful to avoid aligning himself with such advanced and rationalistic views.53 It was quite otherwise with his confident approach to the Old Testament, where he made no attempt to conceal the forthright exposition of his own findings.54 Nevertheless the whole article stands unparalleled within its own era as a heroic attempt to provide, with the utmost conciseness, a unified and coherent analysis of the Bible, in terms of its origins and development. For many, however, even to assume the legitimacy of such an endeavour was to make an unpardonable intrusion upon hallowed ground:

We are made keenly alive to the danger of any Free Church professor leaving out of account the divine origin of the Bible in order to handle, with what he would call adequate freedom, the question of its historical and literary character. We doubt whether it is possible to separate the divine and human elements in Scripture so as to consider them separately… We are alarmed by the positively destructive character of the criticism in this article “Bible”. It leaves scarcely anything to us of the Bible as we have been accustomed to regard it. The Pentateuch is gone; the Psalms are nearly gone; the Prophets are split into irreconcilable fragments.55

The “sacred writings of Christendom”, began Smith, represented a compilation of independent records reflecting “the gradual development of the religion of revelation”.56 That process gave rise to a variety of critical questions which would be dealt with in general terms within the article. Viewed thus broadly, the Old Testament writings demonstrated several significant features – in particular, a historical period of high productivity, succeeded by a time of creative stagnation. The creative period had also been a time of struggle, firstly for the supremacy of monotheism over polytheism and secondly for the dominance of priestly conservatism against prophetic radicalism, the latter being the true recipients of God’s “spiritual intuitions”.

Traditional exegetical prejudices had over-emphasised the predictive rôle of the prophets, obscuring their creative influence “on the religious life of their own time”.57 They had not been rightly perceived for what they truly were –

…leaders of a great development, in which the religious ordinances as well as the religious beliefs of the Old Covenant advanced from a relatively crude and imperfect to a relatively mature and adequate form.58

Modern critical methods (themselves the result of a developmental process) demanded, amongst other matters, a reconsideration of the composition and authorship of the Pentateuch, and Smith went on to present his arguments for its composite origins and, in particular, for the non-Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy which, since the time of de Wette, had clearly been identified with the “law-book” discovered by the high priest Hilkiah at the court of Josiah:

The separation of this document may justly be called the point of departure of positive criticism of the sources of the Old Testament; and present controversy turns mainly on its relation to other parts of the Pentateuch.59

As a whole, Smith argued, the Pentateuch included a variety of legislation which could not possibly be regarded as chronologically static or homogeneous in historical or cultural terms:

From these and similar facts, it follows indisputably, that the true and spiritual religion which the prophets and like-minded priests maintained at once against heathenism and against unspiritual worship of Jehovah as a mere national deity without moral attributes was not a finished but a growing system, not finally embodied in authoritative documents but mainly by direct personal efforts.60

New legislative programmes – suited to a later time, and containing a wealth of features which could not possibly have pertained to the requirements of life in Mosaic times – had gradually been introduced to modify the older traditions, though the out-moded and more archaic elements had been retained anachronistically within the sacred text, just as the historical narrative itself was a commixture of different and sometimes discrepant accounts, stemming ultimately from oral tradition but subjected to re-editing and revision when committed to writing:

The Pentateuch and the so-called earlier prophets form together a single continuous narrative. It is plain, however, that the whole work is not the uniform production of one pen, but that in some way a variety of records of different ages and styles have been combined to form a single narrative. Accordingly, Jewish tradition bears that Moses wrote the Pentateuch, Joshua the book named after him, Samuel the book of Judges, and so forth. As all Hebrew history is anonymous,—a sure proof that people had not yet learned to lay weight on questions of authorship,—it is not probable that this tradition rests on any surer ground than conjecture …61

Encapsulated within this terse statement lay the explosive core of all the subsequent controversy: Colenso had offered much the same argument in the course of the previous decade, but at such great length as to vitiate much of its impact.62 For Free Church clergy such as Walter Woods, Smith’s propositions were nothing less than a lethal mine, primed to destroy the beliefs of the faithful in scriptural inspiration and infallibility:

Here, again, the theory of development is put forth as the principal foundation of the view of the writer. Religion was not sufficiently developed in the days of Moses to admit of such a book as Deuteronomy having been written. But surely Judaism and the Bible were not developed from beneath; they were not the outgrowth of the genius of the nation. By Noah, by Abraham, by Moses, God makes a revelation of Himself; and then follows, not development, but degradation.63

The prophetic writings, Smith contended, dated from around the time of Amos in the eighth century and were, in one sense, “the brightest efflorescence of the lay element in the religion of Israel”.64 And Amos himself was a fine example of how an untutored spirituality “flowed among the more thoughtful of the laity”.65 With the fall of Jerusalem came a period of intense crisis:

The merely political worship of Jehovah as the tutelary god of the state was now reduced to absurdity. Faith in the covenant God was impossible except on the basis of spiritual belief. Nor did the restoration by Cyrus affect this result. No political future lay before the returning exiles, and continued confidence in the destiny of the race was not separable from the religious ideas and Messianic hopes of the people. To obey the law of Jehovah and patiently to await the coming of the deliverer was the only distinctive vocation of the community that gathered in the new Jerusalem.66

The eschatological preoccupations of the nation’ remnant, and their thwarted realisation, weakened even the prophetic strain, which degenerated ultimately into mere apocalyptic extravagance.67 Smith does not directly make the link between this apocalyptic and the growing emphasis (in both the New Testament and the apocryphal writings) on the predictive aspect of prophecy, but the implication is clearly detectable in one passage from “Bible” which was to become notorious:

[Prophecy] lays hold of the ideal elements of the theocratic conception, and depicts the way in which, by God’s grace, they shall be actually realised in a Messianic age, and in a nation purified by judgment and mercy. But in all this, the prophet starts from present sin, present needs, present historical situations. There is no reason to think that a prophet ever received a revelation which was not spoken directly and pointedly to his own time.68

Smith’s articles laid him open to attack on a variety of fronts. His own critical views were not as yet completely formed – he had only just begun to read Wellhausen and, though familiar with Kuenen, did not by any means wholly subscribe to the Dutch theologian's ultra-naturalistic views. Smith’s own prejudices and critical proclivities do come across strongly, however, in all the articles: his fascination, for example, with the distinctively radical thinking of the prophets and his empathy with the raw passion of an “untutored” countryman like Amos. The firmness with which, by now, he espoused the Grafian hypothesis of Pentateuchal composition and authorship is similarly evident, although the detail is not yet worked out thoroughly. Nor has Smith fully analysed the relationship between priest and prophet – indeed, it is arguable that he never adequately addressed the political aspects of this important feature of the Hebrew theocracy.69

The counter-attack

Robertson Smith’s opponents gradually built up a sustained attack on his article “Bible”, using every kind of weapon, from vituperative abuse to scholarly, well-reasoned argument. The initial trigger, as is well-known, was an anonymous review entitled “The new Encyclopaedia Britannica on Theology” in The Edinburgh Courant of April 15, 1876,70 which attacked the article for its Continental heterodoxy and, in a memorable misquotation, accused Smith of denying any predictive powers to the prophets, and concluded tellingly:

This article which we are discussing is objectionable in itself; but our chief objection to it is that it is to be sent far and wide over English-speaking countries as an impartial account of the present state of our knowledge of the Bible. We regret that a publication which will be admitted without suspicion into many a religious household, and many a carefully guarded public library, should, upon so all-important a matter as the records of our faith, take a stand—a decided stand—on the wrong side.71

In other words, Robertson Smith was culpable in having released such dangerous knowledge into the public domain. That certain issues might legitimately and harmlessly be discussed within academic circles but ought not to be exposed to impressionable minds was a view widely held by his critics but seldom so openly expressed.72 Smith’s awareness of this attitude is quite evident, both in his references to the Roman Catholic suppression of knowledge73 and in his no doubt sincere but rather contradictory denial that he would ever wish the faith of the “simple Christian” to be undermined by his own writings.74

Robertson Smith’s bold demand to the General Assembly of 1877, that “the charges against me should be reduced to the form of a libel”,75 together with the voluntary relinquishment of his post at the Free College until the case was over, were only partially successful attempts to circumvent the loosely formulated imputations of heresy made against him and to replace them with specific charges which might be argued at length and judicially assessed. The invidious task of framing a libel fell to Smith’s own presbytery, whose lengthy and often vexed proceedings are well documented elsewhere.76 The presbytery members failed to delete the references to “a dangerous and unsettling tendency” but did succeed in enumerating eight specific grounds of offence.77 These related to WRS’s arguments for the gradual development of the priestly caste and the corresponding evolution of Pentateuchal legislation; his assertion of the non-Mosaic authorship of Deuteronomy (with all that that implied for the doctrine of “immediate inspiration” and historical tradition); his identification of textual corruption and factual errors in the historical narrative (e.g. in Chronicles); his attribution to Canticles of a wholly secular and non-allegorical meaning; his apparent disregard of New Testament authority for the accuracy and authenticity of the Hebrew scriptures; his seeming scepticism towards the matter of prophetic prediction; and, lastly, his expressed doubt as to the reality of angels as represented in the Old Testament and as developed in the New.

Smith’s response to his Presbytery’s initial Form of Libel of 1878 was immediate, confident in tone and overwhelmingly robust in its systematic rebuttal of all the charges, both “major” and “minor”.78 He accepted the competency of the first general charge – the promulgation of opinions which were held to be contrary to doctrines set out in the Scriptures or in the Confession of Faith. He denied the validity of both the second and third general charges – that of publishing opinions “which are in themselves of a dangerous and unsettling tendency” and of displaying both an “attitude of neutrality” and a “rashness of statement” in those writings.79 Those latter charges, Smith argued, being “vague and indeterminate”, could not be construed as contravention of any actual law, doctrine or principle, and would not be upheld in “a popular court”:

No Church which does not pretend to infallibility could venture to embarrass the administration of its judicial function by admitting a charge which in principal nullifies every legal precaution against the miscarriage of justice, and makes it possible for a majority to inflict judicial censure on any fresh movement of Christian life in the Church.80

Real difficulties in belief, Smith continued, could not simply be denied or wished away but had to be resolved by a careful process of scholarly study:

To argue that an opinion is false, because a real difficulty of belief is connected with its acceptance, is only possible to a rationalist who goes on the assumption that supernatural revelation must contain nothing which our limited reason is unable fully to comprehend. This is the assumption which rationalism has invariably used to undermine the system of positive Christian doctrine, and it seems very shortsighted on the part of the prosecution that it has not hesitated to borrow this weapon of scepticism, and place it in the hand of the Church.81

This was a clever though casuistic attempt on Smith’s part to turn the tables on his opponents. More cogently, he pointed out that the charge of “tendency” was “bad in law and dangerous to the Church” – there were innumerable historical instances whereby the Church, acting from a position of ignorance, had erroneously challenged new discoveries, whereas “[t]he first duty of every scholar is his duty to the truth” and scholarly criticism was the only true way to reconcile apparent problems of belief. As for the charges of “neutrality” and “rashness of statement”, those had no bearing on the truth or falsity of WRS’s opinions and failed to recognise the “strict limitations of space and plan” to which the contributors to an Encyclopaedia were required to adhere.82 Smith apologised if his “neutrality” gave offence but observed that he had assumed his status within the Free Church would have freed him of any suspicion of indifference towards the doctrines of Christianity, which the article “Bible” was never intended to address.83 The charge of “rashness” was similarly imprecise. If it were coded language for venturing on to forbidden ground, then the Church should “drop the periphrasis” and simply say, “We forbid the opinions because they are dangerous”.84

This first section of WRS’s “Answer to the Form of Libel” plainly shows the marks of his agitation and hurt. It is impassioned but not eloquent and suffers from a certain lack of that coherence and lucidity of reasoning which normally characterise his writings. It is a mixture of apology and attack, challenge and withdrawal, self-assertion and defensiveness. The central section (Smith’s defence of his doctrinal position) is greatly superior in its well-reasoned affirmation of Reformation principles and of his adherence to these. Here, as elsewhere in the statement, Smith astutely draws a parallel between his opponents’ attack on free expression and the repressive practices of the “Romish” church, and he returns to a favourite theme:

In articles in the Encyclopaedia Britannica … I have held myself at liberty to discuss all literary questions about the books of Scripture on the usual principles of literary evidence, and to adopt such conclusions as the evidence justifies, without practising any such “sacrifice of the intellect” as the Church of Rome demands from her theologians. These conclusions in no way conflict with the supernatural truths which Scripture presents … but they do conflict with inferences which are sometimes drawn from the Confessional doctrine of Scripture, by pressing the mere words of the Standards beyond the limits which the whole scope of the doctrine must fairly be held to prescribe.85

Smith very successfully stigmatises the intellectual poverty of those who (deliberately or otherwise) distort the sense of the Church’s Confessional standards, who take a narrowly literalist view of Divine inspiration, and who ascribe “a formal infallibility, extending to every word and letter” of the sacred text.86 For Robertson Smith, the scriptural text was only the vehicle which conveyed the Word:

It is the record of a word which still speaks with infallible truth and personal authority to us … This argument is irrefragable and a sure ground of faith to any one who keeps in mind the fundamental Reformation position that the Word of God is nothing else than the personal manifestation to us for salvation of God and His will.87

The finest and most impassioned passages from Smith’s defence are, however, those wherein he reasserts the credo of his personal faith:

If I am asked why I receive Scripture as the Word of God, and as the only perfect rule of faith and life, I answer with all the fathers of the Protestant Church, “Because the Bible is the only record of the redeeming love of God, because in the Bible alone I find God drawing near to man in Christ Jesus, and declaring to us, in Him, his will for our salvation. And this record I know to be true by the witness of His Spirit in my heart, whereby I am assured that none other than God Himself is able to speak such words to my soul”.88

Smith concludes his defence with a more detailed exposition of his views on the Pentateuch, on Prophecy and on Angels than had been possible within the confines of his articles for EB9. He affirms that he has made no “rationalistic assumptions”89 and challenges his critics to prove otherwise:

If the authors of the libel have an opposite conviction, they ought to meet me in detail, and shew that they have mastered the critical argument, and can lay their finger on its weak point.90

Throughout, Smith categorically identifies himself as a “believing critic”, in contradistinction, for example, to Kuenen, from whom his opponents had drawn the description of Deuteronomy as a “pious fraud”. He stresses moreover that his article “Bible” nowhere discounts the predictive rôle of prophecy – at least insofar as he upholds the Hebrew prophets’ capacity to possess “insight into the future purposes of God” and to predict “the things to be fulfilled in Christ”.91

The final paragraph of Smith’s “Answer” is instructive. He does not ask the Presbytery to “approve” his views, merely to extend toleration until those views are either “confirmed or rebutted” by the process of scholarly argument and continued biblical study of a scientific kind:

But if the Church by her Courts must needs give an authoritative decision on the merits of the controversy, the decision ought not to be given without full and public discussion of every problem involved, and my condemnation cannot be for the edification of the Church unless it proceed on the ground that all the arguments I can advance have been patiently heard and conclusively rebutted on the open ground of philological and historical research.92

At Presbytery level, the debate continued tortuously through 1877 into the early months of 1878, with Smith’s mood, as reflected in his letters, varying from resolution to despair. His “Additional Answer to the Libel”, published in May, 1878, strengthened and amplified the original defence of his critical stance,93 evoked praise from Smith’s widening circle of scholarly friends in England and Germany,94 and led to the Assembly calling for substantial revision of the libel. A further year of deliberation saw the production, again by the Aberdeen Presbytery, of an “Amended Libel”,95 which replaced the expression “dangerous and unsettling tendency”, in relation to Smith’s articles, by a reference to:

… their ill-considered and unguarded setting forth of speculation of a critical kind [which writings] tend to awaken doubt, especially in the case of students, of the divine truth, inspiration, and authority of books of Scripture, or one or more of them, and on the doctrines of angels and prophecy as set forth in the Scriptures themselves, and in the Confession of Faith …96

While the broad structure of the amended libel remained unchanged, the emphasis shifted to the crucial question of Deuteronomy and its authorship. Accordingly, the Assembly of 1879 resolved, by the narrowest of votes, to reduce the libel to a single charge, disturbingly reminiscent of that made against Richard Simon and alluded to by Nestlé – that Deuteronomy:

… presented, in dramatic form, instructions and laws as proceeding from the mouth of Moses, though these never were and never could have been uttered by him,—an opinion which contradicts or is opposed to the doctrine of the immediate inspiration, infallible truth, and Divine authority of the Holy Scripture as set forth in the Scriptures themselves and in the Confession of faith, as aforesaid.97

Thus the controversy finally resolved itself into a single issue, hinging upon the Mosaic authorship, in part or otherwise, of the Pentateuch – an outworn debate which was as old as the earliest stirrings of modern biblical criticism, yet which (as Black and Chrystal observed) “revealed a deep and dangerous division in the Church”.98 It was at this juncture that Robertson Smith wrote to J.F. McLennan, his closest friend outwith Church circles:

I mean to fight them for another year. It is hard to make up one’s mind to do so; but were I to give in the adversary would score & many friends – notably James Candlish who freely publishes the fact that he has now satisfied himself that all the laws in Deuteronomy are not Mosaic w^d be left in an evil case. Even if we gain, my position will not be enviable; & then I may have to think of a change. But this is not the time to do so.99

In fact, offers of alternative posts, both at home and abroad, were now being made to WRS – some tentative, some more definite;100 and he was also being lured by the more popular journals of the day. George Grove, editor of Macmillan’s Magazine, was particularly pressing that Smith should write for him. That offer was not taken up; in any case, Smith was not only continuing to produce articles for the Encyclopaedia but had begun to assist actively in the editorial work, no doubt through the good offices of his friend, J.S. Black.101 T.K. Cheyne again wrote to him, commenting acidly that the “smell of the fire has passed upon you”, observing (with a clear grasp of the fundamental issue) that Smith was bound to find it irksome to have to “select forms of expression which cannot fairly be laid hold of as committing you to anti-supernaturalistic doctrine”, and offering to tackle on his behalf “any particularly dangerous subject”.102 Cheyne added, “I suppose we may expect Deuteronomy from your pen in the Encyclopaedia”, but the seventh volume duly appeared in 1877 with the terse cross-reference: “DEUTERONOMY. See pentateuch”.103 In the event, Smith was to commission the article from Julius Wellhausen but the Encyclopaedia’s readers had to wait a further eight years for what was to be a definitive statement on the Hexateuch, under the title “Pentateuch and Joshua”.104

Meantime, the Established Church looked on with a certain schadenfreude at the very public discomfiture of its sister body. John Tulloch’s perspicacious and at times entertaining commentary on the Scottish theological scene in 1877 spoke of “signs that the old and hard crust which so long enclosed the religious thought and life of Scotland is rapidly breaking up”.105 The collective influence of Carlyle, Coleridge, F.D. Maurice and Erskine had worked gradually towards a “determinate change” in theological opinion, finally invading “the very citadel of the Free Church itself”, whose rigid dogmatism, however, had forced its most brilliant young men to turn to biblical and historical criticism:

It was a mere matter of course that men so competent should be invited to the theological department of the new edition of the “Encyclopaedia Britannica”. And accordingly Professor Robertson Smith, of the Free Church College in Aberdeen, prepared a careful paper, marked by eminent analytical ability, on the Bible, for the third volume of this great work.106

Certainly, wrote Tulloch, WRS’s views were far in advance of any hitherto put forward by any British churchman – the stir caused in 1860 by Essays and Reviews was insignificant by comparison – and undoubtedly Smith’s style was as yet “too coldly analytical – the tone of a student who has mastered his ‘hand-books’ well, rather than that of a thinker”;107 nevertheless, the publication of such an article by a member of the Free Church was in itself an event of “momentous significance” which was likely to bring about “an entire change in the attitude of the Scotch mind towards the Bible”.108

Robertson Smith, however, was angered rather than pleased by this intrusion on his behalf. Not only was he irked by the patronising tone of Tulloch’s article,109 but he perceived it, with some justice, as an attempt to stir up old wounds and to divide his own Church. He took the opportunity, therefore, to repudiate Tulloch’s article in terms which were (as Black and Chrystal observe) so orthodox as to suggest a complete volte-face in his view of the Bible.110 The occasion was that of the closing lecture to his students of the 1876-77 College session and, as his biographers indicate, it was to prove his final appearance in the capacity of Free Church professor.