The life and letters of Benjamin Jowett, M. A., master of Balliol college, Oxford.

348

Lzfe of Benjamin Jowett

[CHAP. XI

who are attacked by it, though not, perhaps, the better for
the Church of England. I made up my mind at the commencement of the clamour that the best course was also
the easiest-to do nothing. With my College and University
work I have not had time hitherto to write answers, hardly
to write letters, if I had had the inclination.
I am sorry that the Clergy are so determinedly set against
all the intellectual tendencies of the age. They are trying
to pledge the Church of England to the same course in which
the Church of Rome has already failed. The real facts and
truths of Christianity are quite a sufficient basis for a national
Church, but they want to maintain a conventional Christianity
into which no one is to inquire, which is always being patched
and plastered with evidences and apologies. I wish I could
persuade you that it was right to alter the Church of England
from within, for I think that it will never be altered from
without, unless it is destroyed.
I had not forgotten your words to me at Bristol about
freethinkers entering the ministry. But unless you admit
some freedom of thought, men of ability will be absolutely
excluded, and the Church of England will become more and
more the instrument of bigotry and intolerance. Moreover
I cannot see that freethinkers about Scripture, &c., who were
not contemplated by the Articles, are more nearly touched
by them than the High Churchmen who were, or than the
Evangelicals are by the Baptismal Service. Though I dislike
'Subscription,' I am inclined to think that if we are all dishonest together that proves us to be all honest together.
Do you think of writing anything on the present position
of the Church of England-'A letter to Convocation from
the Prolocutor of the Lower House '? There will hardly occur
such an opportunity again of saying useful truths with equal
effect. And yet, perhaps, by the time the letter was ready
the tempest may have lulled; and it seems a kind of profanaAn application of W. G. scribing to them (the Articles) we
Ward's saying as recorded by were not all dishonest together,
Jowett in W. G. Ward and the but all honest together.' Cf. the
Oxford Movement, p. 438, ' At one letter to B. C. Brodie of February,
time he used to say that in sub- I845 (p. 94).