especially that great dictum of his, 'that it is an unwarrantable,
as well as unsafe rule to lay down concerning the Jewish history,
that which was never laid down concerning any other, that either
every particular of it must be true, or the whole false.'

I do not quote the rest of the passage; first, because you, I doubt
not, know it as well as I; and next, in order that if any one shall
read these lines who has not read Paley's Evidences, he may be
stirred up to look the passage out for himself, and so become
acquainted with a great book and a great mind.

A reverent and rational liberty in criticism (within the limits of
orthodoxy) is, I have always supposed, the right of every Cambridge
man; and I was therefore the more shocked, for the sake of free
thought in my University, at the appearance of a book which claimed
and exercised a licence in such questions, which I must (after
careful study of it) call anything but rational and reverent. Of
the orthodoxy of the book it is not, of course, a private
clergyman's place to judge. That book seemed dangerous to the
University of Cambridge itself, because it was likely to stir up
from without attempts to abridge her ancient liberty of thought; but
it seemed still more dangerous to the hundreds of thousands without
the University, who, being no scholars, must take on trust the
historic truth of the Bible.

For I found that book, if not always read, yet still talked and
thought of on every side, among persons whom I should have fancied
careless of its subject, and even ignorant of its existence, but to
whom I was personally bound to give some answer as to the book and
its worth. It was making many unsettled and unhappy; it was (even