Then there is a sermon on _The Great Exhibition_, preached by a much abler man, 4 May 1851. He also speaks of “our blessing of blessings, the opened Bible,” but is not so sure of its effects. “There is too much reason to apprehend that a vast increase of vice, and Sabbath-breaking, and profaneness, may be added to the iniquity already abounding in our demoralized metropolis ... and foreign visitors may leave our shores worse than when they arrived.” Writing from Exeter, 23 October 1838, my father says, “I went to hear the Mayor preach on Sunday evening: he had an immense audience, and spoke for about an hour and a half. He holds up the Bible alone as the sole necessary book, condemns every creed and article framed by men, calls every system of religion in the world a money-getting system, etc., etc.” My father kept a copy of some verses on the Mayor, which were very popular in Exeter just then, especially the lines, “on Saturday sells gin to all, | preaches Sunday, | and on Monday, | sitting in judgment in the Hall, | inflicts the fine for fight or fray | caused by the gin of Saturday.” I can still recall a conversation between my father and an old-fashioned country doctor at a place where we were staying in 1866. I had been reading _Tom Brown’s Schooldays_, and I began to listen attentively, when I heard the doctor denouncing Rugby and speaking of Arnold’s “presumption” in undertaking to bring up other men’s sons when he could not bring up his own: every one of them had turned out badly. My father looked surprised, and mentioned Matthew Arnold. The answer came with several slaps upon the table--“Matthew, indeed! A free thinker, sir, a Free Thinker.” And then the doctor went on to talk of the “impiety” of bishop Colenso in remarking that the Book of Numbers had arranged the Hebrew camp in such a way that the Levites’ quarters would be more than a sabbath-day’s journey from the lavatories. Colenso had begun his criticisms of the Pentateuch in 1862, and had enraged the partisans of Verbal Inspiration. They could not deny that his conclusions were arithmetically right, and they did just what the Jesuits did in the days of Pascal and his _Provinciales_. In 1653 the Pope condemned some doctrines in a book, but mentioned the wrong book--the doctrines were not there. It was really no more than a slip of the pen; but, being in a Papal Bull, it could not be corrected. So the Jesuits cried “témérité” when anybody mentioned it, just as people like this doctor cried “impiety.” These people vindicated Moses as strenuously as Strabo vindicated Homer. They had no suspicion of misreadings in the Hebrew or the Greek, or mistranslations in the English version: they just adopted Burgon’s view, “every book, every chapter, every verse, every word, every syllable, every letter, was the direct utterance of the Most High.” In other words, the Most High would not merely send a message off, but would see that it got through.