OUR AUTHORIZED BIBLE VINDICATED
It is interesting at this juncture to take a glance at Doctors Westcott and Hort, the dominating mentalities of the scheme of Revision, principally in that period of their lives before they sat on the Revision Committee. They were working together twenty years before Revision began, and swept the Revision Committee along with them after work commenced. Mainly from their own letters, partly from the comments of their respective sons, who collected and published their lives and letters, we shall here state the principles which affected their deeper lives.1
1 The influence of Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort is clearly demonstrated in W. R. Glover Jr.’s book, Evangelical Nonconformity and the Higher Criticism (London, Independent Press, 1954). “Leaning heavily on the Cambridge trio as defenders of the faith, the English churches were led imperceptibly into a mildly critical view that prevented any serious shock from New Testament criticism ever developing” (p. 64). “In the early decades of higher criticism in England the nonconformists followed the intellectual leadership of the Anglicans-Westcott, Lightfoot and Hort” (p. 257). “In accepting the Cambridge defence against Strauss and Baier, the evangelicals accepted Higher Criticism in principle without being fully aware of what they had done” (p. 284).
Westcott writes to his fiancée, Advent Sunday, 1847:
“All stigmatize him [Dr. Hampden] as a ‘heretic’. ... If he be condemned, what will become of me! . . . The battle of the Inspiration of Scripture has yet to be fought, and how earnestly I could pray that I might aid the truth in that. ”2
2 Westcott, Life of Westcott, Vol. I, pp. 94, 95.
Westcott’s son comments, 1903: “My father... believed that the charges of being ‘unsafe’ and of ‘Germanizing’ brought against him were unjust.” 3
3 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 218.
Hort writes to Rev. Rowland Williams, October 21, 1858: “Further I agree with them [authors of Essays and Reviews} in condemning many leading specific doctrines of the popular theology. . . . Evangelicals seem to me perverted rather than untrue. There are, I fear, still more serious differences between us on the subject of authority, and especially the authority of the Bible.”4
4 Hort, Life of Hort, Vol. I, p. 400.
Hort writes to Rev. John Ellerton, April 3, 1860: “But the book which has most engaged me is Darwin. Whatever may be thought of it, it is a book that one is proud to be contemporary with. . . . My feeling is strong that the theory is unanswerable. If so, it opens up a new period.”5
5 Ibid., Vol. I,p. 416.
Westcott writes from France to his fiancée, 1847: “After leaving the monastery, we shaped our course to a little oratory which we discovered on the summit of a neighboring hill. . . . Fortunately we found the door open. It is very small, with one kneeling-place; and behind a screen was a ‘Pieta’ the size of life [i.e. a Virgin and dead Christ].... Had I been alone I could have knelt there for hours.”6
6 Westcott, Life of Westcott, Vol. I, p. 81.
Westcott writes to Archbishop Benson, November 17, 1865: “I wish I could see to what forgotten truth Mariolatry bears witness.”7
7 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 50.
Hort writes to Westcott: “I am very far from pretending to understand completely the oft-renewed vitality of Mariolatry.”8
8 Hort, Life of Hort, Vol. II, p. 49.
Hort writes to Westcott, October 17, 1865: “I have been persuaded for many years that Mary-worship and ‘Jesus’־worship have very much in common in their causes and their results.”9
9 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 50.
Hort writes to Westcott: “But this last error can hardly be expelled till Protestants unlearn the crazy horror of the idea of priesthood.”10
10 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 51.
Hort writes to Dr. Lightfoot, October 26, 1867: “But you know I am a staunch sacerdotalist.”11
11 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 86.
Westcott wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury: “It does not seem to me that the Vaudois claim an ecclesiastical recognition. The position of the small Protestant bodies on the Continent, is, no doubt, one of great difficulty. But our church can, I think, only deal with churches growing to fuller life. ”12
12 Westcott, Life of Westcott, Vol. II, p. 53.
Hort writes to Westcott, September 23, 1864: “I believe Coleridge was quite right in saying that Christianity without a substantial church is vanity and disillusion; and I remember shocking you and Lightfoot not so long ago by expressing a belief that ‘Protestantism’ is only parenthetical and temporary.”12 “Perfect Catholicity has been nowhere since the Reformation.”13
12 Hort, Life of Hort, Vol. II, p. 30.
13 Ibid., Vol. II, p. 32.
Westcott writes to the Archbishop of Canterbury on Old Testament criticism, March 4, 1890: “No one now, I suppose, holds that the first three chapters of Genesis, for example, give a literal history — I could never understand how any one reading them with open eyes could think they did.”14
14 Westcott, Life of Westcott, Vol. II, p. 69.
Hort writes to Mr. John Ellerton: “I am inclined to think that no such state as ‘Eden’ (I mean the popular notion) ever existed, and that Adam’s fall in no degree differed from the fall of each of his descendants, as Coleridge justly argues.”15
15 Hort, Life of Hort, Vol. I, p. 78.
We have already noticed Westcott’s associated work with Archbishop Benson in protecting ritualism and giving the most striking blow which discouraged Protestantism.
Hort writes to Mr. John Ellerton, July 6, 1848: “The pure Romish view seems to me nearer, and more likely to lead to, the truth than the Evangelical. ... We should bear in mind that that hard and unspiritual medieval crust which enveloped the doctrine of the sacraments in stormy times, though in measure it may have made it unprofitable to many men at that time, yet in God’s providence preserved it inviolate and unscattered for future generations. . . . We dare not forsake the sacraments or God will forsake us.”16
Westcott writes to his wife, Good Friday, 1865: “This morning I went to hear the Hulsean Lecturer. He preached on the Atonement. . . . All he said was very good, but then he did not enter into the great difficulties of the notion of sacrifice and vicarious punishment. To me it is always most satisfactory to regard the Christian as in Christ — absolutely one with Him, and he does what Christ has done: Christ’s actions become his, and Christ’s life and death in some sense his life and death.”17
17 Westcott, Life of Westcott, Vol. I, p. 231.
Westcott believed that the death of Christ was of His human nature, not of His Divine nature, otherwise man could not do what Christ did in death. Dr. Hort agrees in the following letter to Westcott. Both rejected the atonement of the substitution of Christ for the sinner, or vicarious atonement; both denied that the death of Christ counted for anything as an atoning factor. They emphasized atonement through the Incarnation. This is the Catholic doctrine. It helps defend the Mass.
Hort writes to Westcott, October 15, 1860: “Today’s post brought also your letter. ... I entirely agree — correcting one word — with what you there say on the Atonement, having for many years believed that ‘the absolute union of the Christian (or rather, of man) with Christ Himself’ is the spiritual truth of which the popular doctrine of substitution is an immoral and material counterfeit. . . . Certainly nothing could be more unscriptural than the modern limiting of Christ’s bearing our sins and sufferings to his death; but indeed that is only one aspect of an almost universal heresy.”18
18 Hort, Life of Hort, Vol. I, p. 430.
Their Collusion Previous to Revision
Westcott writes to Hort, May 28, 1870: “Your note came with one from Ellicott this morning. . . . Though I think that Convocation is not competent to initiate such a measure, yet I feel that as ‘we three’ are together it would be wrong not to ‘make the best of it’ as Lightfoot says. . . . There is some hope that alternative readings might find a place in the margin. ”19
19 Westcott, Life of Westcott, Vol. I, p. 390.
Westcott writes to Lightfoot, June 4, 1870: “Ought we not to have a conference before the first meeting for Revision? There are many points on which it is important that we should be agreed.”21
21 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 391.
Westcott writes to Hort, July 1, 1870: “The Revision on the whole surprised me by prospects of hope. I suggested to Ellicott a plan of tabulating and circulating emendations before our meeting which may in the end prove valuable. ”22
22 Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 392, 393.
Hort writes to Lightfoot: “It is, I think, difficult to measure the weight of acceptance won beforehand for the Revision by the single fact of our welcoming an Unitarian.”23
23 Hort, Life of Hort, Vol. II, p. 140.
Hort writes to Williams: “The errors and prejudices, which we agree in wishing to remove, can surely be more wholesomely and also more effectually reached by individual efforts of an indirect kind than by combined open assault. At present very many orthodox but rational men are being unawares acted on by influences which will assuredly bear good fruit in due time, if the process is allowed to go on quietly; and I cannot help fearing that a premature crisis would frighten back many into the merest traditionalism. ”24
24 Ibid., Vol. I, p. 400.
Although these last words of Dr. Hort were written in 1858, nevertheless they reveal the method carried out by Westcott and himself as he said later, “I am rather in favor of indirect dealing.” We have now before us the sentiments and purposes of the two men who entered the English New Testament Revision Committee and dominated it during the ten years of its strange work. We will now be obliged to take up the work of that Committee, to behold its battles and its methods, as well as to learn the crisis that was precipitated in the bosom of Protestantism.