21 SEPTEMBER 1867, Page 2

At Salisbury the other day, Dr. Gray, Bishop of Capetown,

after exuding preliminary saccharine matter about his love for his brother of Natal, brought his charge against him :—" What was it that he [Dr. Gray] had left behind him in his own distant province? One who went forth to preach Christ crucified to the heathen, but who had ceased to preach Christ, and was now destroying that faith which he once upheld, and was now proclaiming—and proclaiming avowedly with the authority and in the name of the Church of England, and upheld in his position in the Courts of law as a bishop of the Church of England—preaching that Christ our Lord was ignorant ; that his knowledge did not exceed that of an enlightened Jew of his own day ; that He was liable to error ; that the sacrifice which He offered up on the Cross for the sins of the world was not a true expiation for those sins ; that our blessed Lord, whom, when the Father sent Him into the world, He declared that the angels of God should worship Rim, ought not to be adored ; and that Satan had no existence. . . . He confessed that that was a great grievance to his own conscience and a great oppression to his own soul ; and he felt here, in this his native laud, notwithstanding the warmth and kindness with which his friends were pleased to receive what he said, a great oppression and a great depression of spirit." We may remark that as to the human limita- tion of our Lord's knowledge in His earthly life,J.le himself affirmed it, and not the Bishop of Natal. Dr. Thirlwall, Bishop of St David's, in one of his finest Charges, has shown how impossible it is to condemn this as theological error, judging it even by the strictest standard of orthodoxy. The statement that Dr. Colenso objects to the worship of the Son of God is, we believe sincerely, not true, whatever be the ultimate drift of his present course of thought. We fell into that error ourselves and were corrected. Dr. Colenso preferred, in selecting hymns, to keep to what he thought the constant habit of the early Church, not to address them to Jesus. But he holds to the litany, in which worship is offered to " God the Son, Redeemer of the World." Dr. Gray adds, that he would feel cheered in his depression if the Anglican Church would formally excommunicate Dr. Colenso before he returns. It will be very painful to his brother prelates to refuse him this amiable and simple gratification, but their caution will prevail.