Essays and Reviews

The topics covered the biblical research of the German critics, the evidence for Christianity, religious thought in England, and the cosmology of Genesis.

Despite lacking originality,[2] the book was popular due to its high-profile authors, and "caused a furore among English Christians by its readiness to adopt (in a very moderate way) the methods of biblical criticism".

The layman was Charles Wycliffe Goodwin, former fellow of St Catharine's College, Cambridge, Egyptologist, barrister and, later, Assistant Judge of the British Supreme Court for China and Japan.

[6] The implications of Jowett's essay and his other writings that revelation was ongoing and that scripture was always subject to reinterpretation as each generation encountered them were the target of his traditionalist foes.

Jowett felt he was being slandered for his honesty concerning his beliefs, but he suffered no actual penalty other than an infamously low salary at Christ Church, Oxford.

[7] Wilson wrote:The Roman Church has imagined a limbus infantium; we must rather entertain a hope that there shall be found, after the great adjudication, receptacles suitable for those who shall be infants, not as to years of terrestrial life, but as to spiritual development—nurseries as it were and seed-grounds, where the undeveloped may grow up under new conditions—the stunted may become strong, and the perverted be restored.

[8]Wilson's views on hell were challenged by the church courts as being incompatible with the plain sense of the Athanasian Creed, to which all Anglican clergy were bound to subscribe.

[9] The court, speaking through Lord Chancellor Westbury, declared:We are not required, or at liberty, to express any opinion upon the mysterious question of the eternity of final punishment, further than to say that we do not find in the formularies, to which this article refers, any such distinct declaration of our Church upon the Subject as to require us to condemn as penal the expression of hope by a clergyman, that even the ultimate pardon of the wicked, who are condemned in the day of judgment, may be consistent with the will of Almighty God.

[10] It "caused a firestorm of protest, especially from Evangelicals and Anglo-Catholics",[7] but "Dean Stanley regarded it as a charter of intellectual freedom within the walls of the establishment.

Darwin quoted a proverb: "A bench of bishops is the devil's flower garden", and joined others including the eminent geologist Charles Lyell, and the mathematician and Queen's printer William Spottiswoode, in signing a counter-letter supporting Essays and Reviews for trying to "establish religious teachings on a firmer and broader foundation".

"[20] But Essays and Reviews was nevertheless influential; S.C. Carpenter estimated that "four-fifths of the actual contents of the book has since been digested into the system of the Church",[4] and C. John Collins has stated that "Jowett's hermeneutic has, in many ways, won the day in how biblical scholars read the Bible.