But how widely different,--rather, how utterly dissimilar,--is the phenomenon before us! Here is a singularly confused and shallow thinker oppressed with the vastness of his discovery, that the Bible--_has nothing in it!_ Here is a Clergyman of the Church of England, and a Lecturer in Divinity, whose difficulty is how he shall convince the world that the Bible is--_like any other book!_ Here is the sceptical fellow of a College, conspiring with six others, to produce a volume of which Germany itself, (having changed its mind,) would already be ashamed!... Mr. Jowett is enthusiastic for _a negation!_ Without belief himself, he cannot rest because Christendom has, on the whole, a good deal of belief remaining! If he may but _unsettle somebody's mind_,--his Essay will have achieved its purpose, and its author will not have lived in vain!... Sublime privilege for "the only man in the University of Oxford who" is said to "exercise a moral and spiritual influence at all corresponding to that which was once wielded by John Henry Newman[232]!"
I shall be thought a very profane person, I dare say, by the friends and apologists of Mr. Jowett, if I avow that the passage with which he concludes his Essay, instead of sounding in my ears like the plaintive death-song of departing Genius, sounds to me like nothing so much as the piteous whine of a schoolboy who knows that he _deserves_ chastisement, and perceives that he is about to experience his deserts. System, or Theory, the Reverend Gentleman has none to propose. Views, except negative ones, Mr. Jowett is altogether guiltless of. Can anybody in his senses suppose that a man "has, by a Divine help (!), been enabled to plant his foot _somewhere beyond the waves of Time_," (p. 433,) who doubts everything, and believes nothing? Can any one of sane mind dream that posterity will come to the rescue of a man who, when he is asked for his story, rejoins, (with a well-known needy mechanic,) that he has "none to tell, Sir?" _What_ then is posterity to vindicate? _What_ has the Regius Professor of Greek written so many weak pages to prove? Just nothing! If Mr. Jowett's Essay could enforce the message it carries, the result would simply be that the world would become _dis_believers in the Inspiration of the Bible: they would _dis_believe that Scripture has any sense but that which lies on the surface: they would therefore _dis_believe the Prophets and Evangelists and Apostles of CHRIST: they would _dis_believe the words of our LORD JESUS CHRIST Himself!... Has Mr. Jowett, then, grown grey under the laborious process of arriving at this series of negations? When he anticipates "departing hence before the natural term," does he mean that he is "_worn out with the intellectual toil_" of propounding _nothing!_ and that he expects the sympathy and gratitude of posterity for what he has propounded?