1 Stephen (1873) pp.77f.
2 D646. Cf. B&C, pp.200f., where part of the letter is quoted and reference made to Smeaton’s “hysterically” toned plea that Smith should “shun the broad road leading to destruction”.
3 Ib.
4 Ib.
5 Cf. Macleod (1943) p.288, writing with deep disapproval of A.B. Davidson’s influence on Smith and others: “… Davidson’s teaching, and even more than his positive teaching, his hints and suggestions, became the source of an alien infusion in Old Testament studies in Scotland. Robertson Smith caught the infection and spread the plague”. Of Smeaton himself, Macleod wrote (p.289): “A man can take his word in regard to any theme that he handles as soon as that of any writer on theological subjects”.
6 “Universities: actual and ideal”: in Science and Culture and Other Essays (Huxley 1881) p.43. Huxley had been elected Rector in 1872 but illness prevented him giving the Rectorial address until early 1874, when he stayed in Aberdeen with Alexander Bain (cf. Bain, p.322). There is no record of Smith having attended but there is no doubt that he would have read the newspaper reports of Huxley’s speech, which is full of far-sighted but not unprejudiced comments, of which the following (pp.26f.) are typical: “Change is in the air. It is whirling feather-heads into all sorts of eccentric orbits, and filling the steadiest with a sense of insecurity… Consummate scholars question the value of learning; priests contemn dogma; and women turn their backs upon man’s ideal of perfect womanhood, and seek satisfaction in apocalyptic visions of some, as yet unrealised, epicene reality”.
7 C64. Cf. B&C, pp.80f. where part of Smith’s letter to his father on the same subject is quoted: “of course the doctrine of the correlation of physical forces forms a great feature in [Spencer’s] argument. I think, however, that I can show the doctrine is not understood by the development school, and that the dissipation of energy directly disproves the theory of evolution”.
8 CUL Add. Mss 7476 (M12). Dr W.S. Bruce was Free Church minister at Banff.
9 Cf. the paper, “Charles Lyell and the Noachian Deluge” by James R. Moore in The Evangelical Quarterly, vol. xlv (1973) pp.141-160. For a more detailed account, Gillespie’s book, Genesis and Geology (1951), remains invaluable.
10 In The Footprints of the Creator (1861), first published in 1849 to refute the Vestiges of Creation, Miller related the Genesis 1 account of Creation to successive geological periods but he interpreted the fossil evidence as proof of cumulative “dynasties” – “in slow and solemn majesty has period succeeded period, each in succession ushering a higher and yet higher scene of existence,—that fish, reptiles , mammiferous quadrupeds, have reigned in turn,—that responsible man, ‘made in the image of God,’ and with dominion over all creatures, ultimately entered into a world ripened for his reception …” (Miller, 1861, p.290).
11 Cf. Miller (1861) pp.288f.: “There is not in all Revelation a single doctrine which we find oftener or more clearly enforced than that there shall continue to exist throughout the endless cycles of the future, a race of degraded men and of degraded angels”. Gillespie (1951) p.175 appears to overlook the deep theological significance of “degradation” for Miller, for whom “[t]he special lesson which the Adorable Saviour, during his ministry on earth, oftenest enforced … was the lesson of a final separation of mankind into two great divisions,—a division of God-like men … and a division of men finally lost, and doomed to unutterable misery and hopeless degradation” (ib., p.288).
12 The Vestiges was first published in 1844 and enjoyed an immense succès d’estime. Despite justified criticism (notably by Adam Sedgwick and Huxley) of its superficial scientific scholarship, it paved the way for Darwin’s Origin of Species, thirteen years later. The author’s identity was revealed only in 1884, long after his death in 1871: cf. the Introduction, by Gavin de Beer, to the 1969 reprint in The Victorian Library. Huxley (EB9, vol. viii, 1879, p.750) described Vestiges as “that particularly unsatisfactory book”; on the other hand, Darwin (1985, p.58) remarked, “In my opinion it [Vestiges] has done excellent service in this country in calling attention to the subject, in removing prejudice, and in thus preparing the ground for the reception of analogous views.” Both were of course right.
13 Chambers (1969) pp.153f. The various circumlocutory references to God throughout Vestiges are typical of scientific discourse up to the later years of the nineteenth century: they represent a form of contemporary “political correctness”, designed to guard against accusations of blasphemy which, at the least, could be prejudicial to publication. It is only with the advent of writers such as Leslie Stephen, Huxley and Clifford that the practice changes markedly.
14 Ib., p.154. This the crux of the dispute between Miller and Chambers.
15 Miller (1861) p.273 (his emphases). Miller fully accepted (ib., p.255) that the Mosaic record had been misinterpreted in previous generations but felt that there was now a bias in the opposite direction. The quotation is, of course, a coded statement acknowledging geological evolution but denying species mutation.
16 Ib., p.206. Miller believed he had fossil evidence (e.g. in the “Asterolepis of Stromness”) of fully-formed, non-primitive creatures having emerged without any process of development.
17 This is a theme which echoes throughout The Footprints of the Creator – e.g. p.264: “His [Chambers’] hypothesis, unless supported by scientific evidence, is a mere dream,—a fiction as baseless and wild as any in the ‘Fairy Tales’ or the ‘Arabian Nights’ ”.
18 Ib., p.277.
19 In 1837, Babbage had published his self-styled, entirely unofficial and fragmentary Ninth Bridgewater Treatise (Babbage, 1989), ostensibly to refute the view expressed in William Whewell’s Third Bridgewater Treatise that mathematicians had nothing to offer in the task of proving “the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God”. In reality, his treatise was a defiantly deterministic and secular piece of work, presented in deistic guise. In his essay, “Mr Darwin’s Critics” (ContempRev, vol. xviii ,Nov. 1871, p.463) T.H. Huxley commented prophetically: “… and if a machine produces the effects of reason, I see no more ground for denying it the reasoning power, because it is unconscious, than I see for refusing to Mr Babbage’s engine the title of a calculating machine on the same grounds”.
20 Cf. Chambers (1969) p.211: “During the whole time which we call the historical era, the limits of species have been, to ordinary observation, rigidly adhered to. But the historical era is, we know, only a small part of the entire age of our globe… Mr Babbage’s illustration powerfully suggests that this ordinary procedure [of nature] may be subordinate to a higher law which only permits it for a time, and in proper season interrupts and changes it”.
21 Both views assumed the lapse of vast ages, in contradistinction to the arguments of those nineteenth century physicists, led by Sir William Thomson, who erroneously calculated a decidedly restricted age for the earth. See Burchfield (1975) for a comprehensive account of the debate.
22 The story of Hugh Miller’s death is discussed fully, though somewhat inconclusively, in the compilation of essays, Hugh Miller and the Controversies of Victorian Science, edited by Shortland (1996). Miller’s suicide was an embarrassment to the Free Church but relationships had long been strained between the editor of The Witness and many of the leaders of the Church. Shortland (ib., p.4) rightly observes that Miller found himself ensnared between “the impious anti-creationists and the pious anti-geologists”. Cf. Rosie (1981) for a less scholarly but more sympathetic account of Miller’s life and death.
23 Miller (1861) p.13 (his emphases). The unmitigated horror with which Hugh Miller consciously viewed the implications of the evolutionary theory offers some indication of the nightmare visions which he increasingly experienced prior to his death.
24 C63: to his friend Archibald McDonald, 10.12.1866. In 1867, Smith was writing to McDonald in the same vein: “I believe I shall never recover from the dislike that Dun’s (sic) lectures have inspired me with. I make it a point of honour never to listen to the lectures and to absent myself from the class pretty often. The man is always stupid and superficial & generally talks nonsense and is occasionally profane” (C64).
25 In his memoir, W.S. Bruce lyrically conveys his awe at William Pirie Smith’s ability to communicate an understanding of the local geology to his pupils: “Dr Smith wd. stop at a point on the hill where the huge rocks abutted on the path and wd. give us a very graphic description of rock-formation & of the chemical activity of percolating water within stone. We were shown how the Aberdeen granite was clearly of igneous origin & how big Benachie across the Don had been cooled & consolidated with the cooling of the earth’s crust & then shot upwards into its long camel’s back & various “taps”, which had become more sharp by subsequent denudation. The wonders of Geology burst upon our vision like some fairy scene in the Arabian Nights. We could scarcely believe all that was said to us & barely knew that we were learning modern Science …” (CUL Add Mss 7476 M12).
26 CUL Add. Mss 7476 M3: neither the Homily nor the original letter appears now to be extant. Spencer’s “book” was almost certainly First Principles (1862). Spencer never spoke of the “materiality of the soul”, only of the neural processes which accompanied consciousness. The young Smith’s use of the second law of thermodynamics (“the dissipation of energy”) in disproof of the theory of evolution relates to Sir William Thomson’s efforts (staunchly supported as ever by P.G. Tait) to prove that the limited age of the earth afforded insufficient time for the evolutionary process: cf. Burchfield (1975) pp.108ff. Smith’s recourse to this argument is an interesting indication of his awareness of Thomson and Tait’s work prior to his employment in the physics laboratory at Edinburgh from late 1868.
27 Both papers were reprinted in Spencer’s Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative (1868) to which subsequent references are made. “The Developmental Hypothesis” first appeared in Lewes’ Leader in March, 1852, and “Progress: its Law and Cause” in the Westminster Review for April, 1857.
28 Such themes were developed, for example, in Spencer’s essays, “Manners and Fashion” (1854), “The Origin and Function of Music” (1857) and “The Social Organism” (1860). Spencer was always reluctant to acknowledge his debt to Comte: cf. his Autobiography (1904) pp.445f., where he concedes only his adoption of the Comtean neologisms “altruism” and “sociology”. Quite bafflingly, A.N. Wilson, in God’s Funeral, devotes a whole chapter to the gratuitous “rubbishing” of “funny old Herbert Spencer” (Wilson, 1999, pp.155-173).
29 Spencer (1868) p.378. Hugh Miller is representative of those proponents of special creation being assailed here. Spencer’s view of Miller is succinctly given in his essay, “Illogical Geology” (ib., pp.352-5): “He might aptly be described as a theologian studying geology… His ruling aim was to disprove the Developmental Hypothesis, the assumed implications of which were repugnant to him; and in proportion to the strength of his feeling, was the one-sidedness of his reasoning”.
30 Ib., p.379 (Spencer’s emphases). Darwin was to employ the same argument, in much greater detail, from observed man-induced variation in domesticated plants and animals.
31 Ib., p.383.
32 In 1852, George Eliot, aware that her love for Spencer was not being reciprocated, wrote to him in humorous but typically self-deprecating fashion: “You see I am sinking fast towards ‘homogeneity’, and my brain will soon be a mere pulp unless you come to arrest the downward process” (GEL, vol. viii, p.51).
33 Ib., p.12. Spencer’s views on racial differences, especially insofar as they exemplified (and could be used as a gauge of) relative ethnic superiority or inferiority, offered dangerous ammunition to later generations and helped to bring his work into some disrepute. His emphasis on the irreducible difference between the sexes, and the implication of this for gender rôles, annoyed even George Eliot, by no means an ardent feminist.
34 Ib., pp.30f. Deliberately or otherwise, Spencer is here aping the standard disclaimer of the religiously orthodox scientist. His actual words are: “That we can fathom such cause, noumenally considered, is not to be supposed. To do this would be to solve the ultimate mystery which must ever transcend human intelligence”.
35 Ib., p.32. The notions of causal interaction and multi-determination, though they seem almost self-evident today, were radically new and were to have profound consequences – not least in the field of behavioural science.
36 Ib., p.55. Spencer’s welcoming attitude towards the railway (he had worked as a civil engineer on the early railways) contrasts with Ruskin’s intense dislike of the steam engine and Hugh Miller’s apocalyptic fears for the future in an age of railways:– “Now, prophecy everywhere represents the ultimate struggle between the powers of good and evil as short and sharp; and we are mistaken if there may not be seen in this still accelerating motion of the wheel a predisposition in the nature of things to such a result. Alas, that there should be so little progress in the spread of those vital truths which alone can steady its movements, and prevent it from scattering around, as its sole gifts to the country, fruitless revolution, inconsistency, and indifference”: Miller, “The Locomotive Age” (1843) in Rosie (1982) p.203.
37 Cf. James Sully in EB9, vol. viii (1879) pp.751f. (s.v. Evolution): “Evolution is thus almost synonymous with progress, although the latter term is usually confined to processes of development in the moral as distinguished from the physical world”. The EB article “Evolution” was a joint one, with Huxley writing on biological evolution and Sully, an up-and-coming psychologist, providing a lengthy but eloquent section on “Evolution in Philosophy”.
38 Cf. Spencer (1868) p.45: “We are still in the dark respecting those mysterious properties in virtue of which the germ, when subject to fit influences, undergoes the special changes that begin the series of transformations”. In his Autobiography (pp.390f.) Spencer describes how close he came to finding the key to evolution. Having written an essay on Malthusian laws as related to the human “struggle for existence”, he had nevertheless, “completely overlooked this obvious corollary—was blind to the fact that here was a universally-operative factor in the development of species”. He attributes the oversight partly to his adherence to Lamarckian principles – “the belief that the inheritance of functionally-produced modifications suffices to explain the facts”.
39 Ib., pp.58f.
40 BFER, vol. xxv (1876) pp. 471-493. The journal’s opening footnote identifies the article as, “Lecture delivered in the Free Church College, Aberdeen, at the close of Session 1875-76”. Surprisingly, it was not reprinted by Black and Chrystal in L&E.
41 Smith refers to Pusey’s remarks in the “Introductory Statement” to The Minor Prophets (1886) pp. iii-iv: “If, in the main, I have adhered to the English Version, it has been from the conviction, that our [AV] translators were in the right”.
42 BFER, vol. xxv 91876) p.472. Cf. Pusey (p. iii): “But the comparison of the cognate dialects opened for a time an unlimited licence of innovation. Every principle of interpretation, every rule of language, was violated. The Bible was misinterpreted with a wild recklessness, to which no other book was ever subjected”.
43 Pusey’s actual words were: “But interpretations as arbitrary as any which have perished still hold their sway, or from time to time emerge, and any revisal of the authorized Version of the O.T., until the precarious use of the dialects should be far more settled, would give us chaff for wheat, introducing an indefinite amount of error into the Word of God”.
44 The Puseyite encouragement of ritualism within the Anglican High Church had provoked Queen Victoria’s anger and resulted in the Public Worship Regulation Act of 1874 , designed to curb the worst of those alarming liturgical practices which had grown out of the Oxford Movement. Cf. Marsh (1969): The Victorian Church in Decline, esp. ch.7, for an account of this stormy political episode.
45 Ib. Cf. Spencer’s reference, quoted above (n.37) to “the timid sectarian, alarmed at the progress of knowledge”. Smith (BFER, 1876, p.475) is entirely open: “I have used Dr Pusey as a typical specimen of the habit of mind which underlies the widespread disinclination to believe that our knowledge of the Bible can be progressive in any large sense of the word”. Should it appear that WRS is unduly harsh on Pusey, a brief reading of (for example) the latter’s introduction to Habakkuk (Pusey, 1886, pp.397ff.) will illustrate the way in which Pusey parades his knowledge of Hebrew while simultaneously exposing either the impotence or the mendacity of his own logic.
46 Ib., p.473. Smith’s comment would have been much appreciated by his students, especially when he added ironically that, in such a case, the time would have been “more profitably spent … in studying some standard old commentary on the Authorised Version, or the conservative pages of Dr Pusey himself”.
47 Ib.
48 Ib., pp.474f. The profusion of double negatives in these two convoluted sentences perhaps indicates Smith’s awareness of treading here on extremely dangerous ground. While his argument is a powerful plea for objectivity, and also reveals his wholehearted commitment to the Spencerian-Huxleyan principle of “gradual development”, there is nevertheless a stout denial that he is thereby a “rationalist”.
49 Ib., p.475. Smith might well have quoted John Donne’s famous lines from Satyre iii: “On a huge hill, / Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will / Reach her, about must, and about must go”.
50 Ib., p.477: “It is plain that the knowledge of Hebrew handed down in this way was necessarily imperfect, and was constantly exposed to new corruptions”.
51 Ib., p.478. Smith pays tribute to the Massoretic scholars and to their medieval Christian counterparts, who began to develop the grammatical study of Hebrew. But, he argues, the study of grammar and syntax remained “ancillary” and “there was no attempt to reach the organic principles of the language”. Language as a living, developing organism has now become a central metaphor in Smith’s thinking.
52 Ib., p.480. This is, of course, an application to the study of Hebrew linguistics of the general principle for textual criticism enunciated by Jowett and A.B. Davidson. It is also a startlingly candid assumption by Smith of evolutionary principles, with its quasi-biological references to “structure” and to “growth and decay”.
53 Ib., p.481. The signed article in EB9 (vol. xxi,1886, pp.140f.) on de Sacy (1758-1838) “the greatest of French Orientalists and the founder of the modern school of Arabic scholarship" is a personal tribute by WRS to the French scholar’s work which, Smith adds, “has become the starting-place for all subsequent ascents of the Arabian Parnassus”. As a royalist, de Sacy abandoned his post in the French civil service at the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789 but went on to become a leading figure in the flowering of French Asiatic and Semitic studies under Napoleon.
54 Ib., p.480. Smith goes on to note the long battle waged over the question of whether the Massoretic pointing was divinely inspired: “… it is now agreed among all competent judges that the points simply represent a very ancient exegetical traditions, not the direct mind of the author himself”(p.483).
55 Ib., p.485. Smith’s phraseology leaves little doubt that he has now absorbed the ascendant doctrines of Spencer, Huxley and Darwin, and has unhesitatingly applied these in the cause of theological progress. The manner of exposition is, however, characteristically his own.
56 Smith is alluding here in particular to the aims and achievements of the Palestine Exploration Fund, set up in June, 1865, by a group of eminent personages, chief amongst whom were George Grove and A.P. Stanley. Most of the topographical work was carried out by Captain (initially Lieutenant) Claude Conder, whose over-confident identification of biblical sites was to incur Smith’s severe disapprobation in the 1880s. The work of the P.E.F. had underlying political and intelligence-gathering objectives of a complex nature and offers material for a detailed study in its own right. Smith was repeatedly accused of ignoring or down-playing the significance of archaeological discoveries and the increasing estrangement between himself and the philologist A.H. Sayce (referred to obliquely in B&C, p.168) is only one example of the rather bitter rivalry between Biblical archaeologists and the higher critics. Cf. Sayce (1894) esp. pp.1-30, for a flavour of the latter’s very partisan attack on the “arrogance” of the higher critics.
57 By modern standards, the academic session in the nineteenth century was short, extending from the beginning to November to the end of March. Since his closing lecture must therefore have been delivered before the Scotsman review (of April 15, 1876) denouncing his article “Bible”, it is necessary either to credit Smith with prophetic foresight or, possibly, to assume that his original lecture was later expanded to include this defence, before being sent to Candlish for publication.
58 BFER, vol. xxv (1876) p.485.
59 Ib., pp.485f. In Purity and Danger, Mary Douglas (writing of Smith’s inaugural address at the Aberdeen Free College in 1870) argued that WRS’s attack on the “magical” element in religious ritual was “an emotional and prejudiced approach [which] has led anthropology down one of its barrenest perspectives—a narrow preoccupation with belief in the efficacy of rites” (Douglas, 1984, p.19). While that is a legitimate argument in relation to his anthropological studies, it seems to take insufficient account of the scientific and rationalistic basis of Smith’s animus against the pervasive and corrosive magical thinking which in his eyes distorted modern Victorian religion as much as “primitive” religion.
60 Ib., pp.486f.
61 Ib., p.487.
62 Ib.: “If this law [of causal sequence] were anywhere broken, if at any point of the Old Testament dispensation God communicated abstract doctrine about himself which had to be taken on trust intellectually, instead of embodying the new knowledge of his will in a form that could draw forth personal faith, then edification and spiritual growth would cease, and in place we should have a mere intellectual puzzle valueless for the nourishment of spiritual life”.
63 In the course of 1875, Smith doubtless read also the EB article, “Association of Ideas, or Mental Association” by George Croom Robertson (EB9, vol. ii, 1875, pp.730-734) which provides a detailed history of the development of Associationism at the hands (principally) of the Scottish philosophers, David Hartley, Sir William Hamilton, Dugald Stewart, the Mills (father and son), Bain and Herbert Spencer. The influence of this article on Smith’s thinking may be seen in the following representative quotation (p.734): “The laws of association express undoubted relations holding among particular mental states, that are the real or actual facts with which the psychologist has to deal, and it becomes a strictly scientific task to inquire how far the whole complexity of the internal life may receive an explanation therefrom. Understood in this sense, Hume’s likening of the laws of mental association to the principle of gravitation is perfectly justifiable”.
64 BFER, vol. xxv (1876) p.487: “The action of God’s spirit on the believer or on the Church, the development of a right knowledge of God, the education of the Church to follow the will of God—all this takes place under the laws of human nature, in a genuine historical process in which each link is naturally connected with what precedes and with what follows”.
65 Ib., p.489. It is interesting and instructive to compare Robertson Smith’s confident usage of the term “evolution” in its modern sense with Pusey’s possibly intentional employment of the verb “evolve” in its original sense (of “open out” or “unfold”) within the opening sentence of his book, The Minor Prophets (1886) p.iii: “The object of the following pages is to evolve some portion of the meaning of the Word of God”.
66 BFER, vol.xxv (1876) pp.489f.: “The life of the whole Old Testament history is the actual presence of God to man for the realisation of his gracious purpose. The critic who shuts his eye to this never gets beyond what I may call the anatomy of the dead body”. Smith’s view of the divine developmental process could readily accommodate Darwinian evolution.
67 The phrase “doctrine of continuity” was semantically equivalent to the “developmental theory”. It is used, for example in a well-balanced review article entitled “The scientific doctrine of continuity”, by J.R. Leebody in the October, 1876, number of BFER (vol. xxv, 1876, pp.742-774), discussing, amongst other recent books, Tait and Balfour Stewart’s The Unseen Universe.
68 This point is made, for example, by Cameron (1987) p.381 n.3, who notes that historians have often neglected the emotional element in the controversy between Victorian science and religion.
69 BFER, vol. xxix (1880) pp. 220-247.
70 Ib., p.220.
71 Ib., p.221. Cf. Smith’s down-playing of the successive O.T. covenantal relationships in his 1876 article: e.g., “… the federal theology failed to do justice to the historical development of revelation. The scheme of successive covenants did not go deep enough …” (BFER, vol. xxv, 1876, p.488).
72 Ib., p.225. It is plain that, while Watts is familiar with the attribution of Deuteronomy to the time of Josiah, he has failed to grasp the finer points of Smith’s argument; he proceeds (p.226) to state that “. . there was nothing done [in Deuteronomy] that was not fully authorised in other parts of the Pentateuch, and there is no need for the assumption that Deuteronomy is anything other than what its name implies—a reiteration of the Law”.
73 Ib., p.230.
74 Ib., p.231.
75 Ib., p.233. The Zeitgeist takes on a Satanic quality here. Watts utterly and unconditionally condemns the Jowett/ A.B. Davidson application of secular criticism to Scripture: “Christian criticism can admit of no theory which classes the sacred writers of any period with profane writers of the same period, and treats their compositions as if they were the products of mere uninspired genius, determined, as to form and style and phrase, not by the indwelling Spirit, but by the use and wont of the age”.
76 Ib., p.239. Any Biblical book, argues Watts, might on this basis take any position in the sequence.
77 EB9, vol. iii (1875) p.638.
78 BFER, vol. xxix (1880) p.245.
79 Ib., p.247.
80 Vol. xi of EB9 (GOU-HIP) came out in, June, 1880, a few weeks subsequent to the conclusion of the trial. In addition to “Hebrew Language and Literature”, this volume contained two other contributions from Smith, “Haggai” and “ Epistle to the Hebrews”, together with articles by Sir William Thomson (“Heat”), P.G. Tait (“Sir William Rowan Hamilton”), Clerk Maxwell (“Harmonic Analysis”), Mark Pattison (“Grotius”), T.M. Lindsay (“Greek Church”), J.S. Black (“Mme Guyon”) and John Addington Symonds (“Guicciardini”). In addition to those familiar names, the volume contained contributions from a number of younger figures destined to achieve eminence – James Sully and James Ward (both psychologists), Henry Sweet (Anglo-Saxon philologist and lexicographer) and Richard Garnett (already a prolific contributor). Interestingly, in view of Smith’s later life, there are also articles by Prof. E.H. Palmer (“Háfiz”) whose post at Cambridge WRS was to occupy following Palmer’s murder in Arabia; and by Dr John Chiene (“Hernia”), one of the surgeons who was eventually to operate unavailingly on Smith.
81 Conversely, B&C (pp.370f.) describe the article, “Hebrew Language and Literature” as “an unambitious and highly condensed summary of facts”. However, not only was Smith by now a thorough protagonist of Julius Wellhausen’s writings, but he was, as B&C delicately puts it, finding it “less possible to give prominence to the supra-naturalistic point of view”.
82 BFER, vol.xxix (1880) p.596. Evidently Cave was not yet familiar with Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels, vol.i, reviewed by Smith in The Academy of May 17, 1879..
83 Ib., p. 597. Smith was sensitive to any imputation of sectarianism, as the letter to his father from Germany (C118) in July 1869 makes clear. A long – and, one suspects, personally crucial – talk with Ritschl at Göttingen had reassured the young Scot that “Sects” were to be distinguished from the “Church” by their insistence on “empirical conversion” (cf. B&C, pp.110f.).
84 Ib., pp.597-99. Cave insists that WRS has failed to give both sides of the argument – in particular, there was no reference “ to the Messianic elements, to the unusual prophetic phenomena, to miracles, to the exceptional morality, to the concatenated development of doctrine, so manifestly supernatural …”.
85 Ib., p.600. Willis Glover, in his Evangelical Nonconformists and Higher Criticism in the Nineteenth Century (1954) describes Cave (pp.128f.) as “the strongest exponent of conservative criticism the nonconformists were able to produce … but his arguments in reply [to Smith] fall far short of the mark”. This seems to under-estimate Cave’s strengths.
86 BFER, vol.xxix (1880) p.602.
87 Ib., p.603. Cave’s specific rebuttals of Smith’s arguments are, as Glover pointed out, decidedly weak, being based largely on the assertions that (p.604) the later Scripture references “absolutely demand the pre-existence of the law of Moses” and that “[t]the Mosaic System of laws bears unmistakable traces of having been given ‘at one casting’ as the Germans say”. What remains of interest is his perception of the essential ambiguity in Smith’s personal position.
88 Ib., p.621 (Cave’s emphases).
89 One of Spencer’s seminal remarks in First Principles, which the young Smith must have bridled at, yet which became eventually a guiding principle in his maturity, is the following (p.15): “Two suppositions only are open to us: the one that the feeling which responds to religious ideas resulted, along with all other human faculties, from an act of special creation; the other that it, in common with the rest, arose by a process of evolution”.
90 Cf. Spencer (1870) p.10: “My aim has been to exhibit the more general truth, which we are apt to overlook, that between the most opposite views there is usually something in common,—something taken for granted by each; and that this something, if not to be set down as an unquestionable verity, may be considered to have the highest degree of probability”.
91 Cf. ib., p.102: “Religion ignores its immense debt to Science; and Science is scarcely at all conscious how much Religion owes it. Yet it is demonstrable that every step by which Religion has progressed from its first low conception to the comparatively high one it has now reached, Science has helped it, or rather forced it to take; and that even now, Science is urging further steps in the same direction”. Smith would not have disagreed with these propositions.
92 Ib., p.21
93 For a detailed analysis of the rhetorical devices and dialectical strategies employed by the writers of the eight “official” Bridgewater Treatises, see John M. Robson’s paper, “The fiat and finger of God: the Bridgewater Treatises”, in Helmstadter and Lightman, eds. (1990) pp.71-125.