Pusey, persisted in withholding from him an extra
salary, without which the endowment of the Greek Chair was worth
L40. This scandal was not removed till 1864, after he had been
excluded from the university pulpit. He continued working hard at
his translation of the whole of Plato; he had already published
notes on the Republic and analyses of the dialogue. This took up
all his time till 1878, when he became Master of Balliol.
The worst of the Essays and Reviews controversy was that it did an
injustice to Jowett's reputation. For years people thought that he
was a great heresiarch presiding over a college of infidels and
heretics. His impeached article on The Interpretation of Scripture
might to-day be published by any clergyman. His crime lay in
saying that the Bible should be criticised like other books.
In his introduction to the Republic of Plato he expresses the same
thought:
A Greek in the age of Plato attached no importance to the question
whether his religion was an historical fact. ...Men only began to
suspect that the narratives of Homer and Hesiod were fictions when
they recognised them to be immoral. And so in all religions: the
consideration of their morality comes first, afterwards the truth
of the documents in which they are recorded, or of the events,
natural or supernatural, which are told of them. But in modern
times, and in Protestant countries perhaps more than Catholic, we
have been too much inclined to identify the historical with the
moral; and some have refused to believe in religion at all, unless
a superhuman accuracy was discerned in every part of the record.
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