Dr. Temple has decided that his essay iu " Essays
and Reviews" shall not be republished in any future edition of that work, and his resolve was made known in the Lower House of Convocation on Wednesday. We had written frankly enough on this subject, and on Dr. Temple's probable view of it, before we saw his speech delivered yesterday in the Upper House of Convocation, which indicates that we had in general interpreted pretty correctly his view. But while condemning, as we do, the angry censure of some of our contemporaries, which sounds to us like disgust that any man whose line had been sketched out for him by the Press should venture to deviate from it, we cannot help persisting in our view that Dr. Temple has adopted an unsatisfactory mode of declaring his real divergence from the other writers with whom he was classed. He did not intend, it seems, to leave the declaration to be made by another, and so far good. But surely Bishops are apt to consider scandals likely to be caused to weaker brethren till there are no weaker brethren than themselves to consider. St. Paul might abstain from meat offered to idols to avoid scandal, but we doubt if he would ever have dreamt of any scandal in writing down his honest views even on the same papyrus with a so-called proof that Diana of the Ephesians came down from Jupiter. The weaker brethren are not only " weaker " themselves, but too often the cause of still weaker weakness in others.
Previous page
