MISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES FROM SOUTH AFRICA MAGAZINE - DECEMBER 12, 1896
Transcribed by Ellen Stanton

SOUTH AFRICAN MEN OF MARK

JOHN WILLIAM COLENSO, D.D., BISHOP OF NATAL, (CHURCH OF ENGLAND)

By the Hon. A. Wilmot, M.L.C.

No. 9.

One of the foremost men of mark in Southern Africa, in the middle of the nineteenth century, was a Protestant of Protestants, who held that the great charter of the Church of England was freedom of opinion in matters of faith, and the consequent right of privately interpreting the Scriptures. Dr. Colenso became a martyr to these views, as his income was taken from him by the S.P.G., and he was further subjected to a sentence of excommunication, delivered by Bishop Gray in Cape Town. To show his standpoint, and to indicate the sincerity of his convictions, let us hear him upon the main question. He says: "You need boldness to seek God, to stand by the truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the Devil's wrath ... You need a patient meekness to bear the galling calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under semblance of a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your powers of service."

John William Colenso was born at St. Austell, in Cornwall, on January 24, 1814, and in 1836 became Second Wrangler and Second Smith's Prizeman. He was then elected a Fellow of St. John's College. A contemporary who knew him well says, "I never knew a young man of greater promise, or one more deserving the attention of his friends." He received the appointment of "Bishop of Natal" under Royal Letters Patent in 1853, and arrived in that Colony on January 30, 1854. His early impressions were given to the world in a very readable book entitled, "Ten Weeks in Natal." The subject of native marriages was the first crucial one to attract Colenso's attention, and he boldly declared that a Polygamist desiring to be a Christian might be told to retain all the wives he had already married, but not to add to the number. To use his own words: "I must confess that I feel very strongly on this point, that the usual practice of enforcing the separation of wives from their husbands upon their conversion to Christianity is quite unwarrantable, and opposed to the plain teaching of our Lord." Of course this doctrine is diametrically opposed to that of the Catholic Church, and Bishop Gray thundered out against it. The writer of the life, or rather the usual panegyric, of Bishop Colenso,* says that the notion that he even looked upon polygamy with favour is ludicrous, but tells us in the same page that for a native to put away all his wives but one was, quoting Dr. Colenso's words, "unwarranted by the Scriptures, unsanctioned by Apostolic example or authority, condemned by common reason and sense of right, and altogether unjustifiable." So far as quotations from the Bible are concerned, anyone who reads Bishop Gray's panegyric record, and then that of Bishop Colenso, will be inclined to think that there is a good deal of truth in the saying "that you can prove anything by means of statistics or the Scriptures." In 1859 the latter Prelate tells us: "The great drawback here (Natal) is that the country is already saturated with a corruption of character of God and of the Gospel as keeps them back from desiring to have a much closer acquaintance with it. This they have obtained partly from the example they have constantly before them in the lives of unfaithful Christians, partly from the mistaken teaching of the missionaries." Certainly his own subsequent instruction was not on very orthodox lines.

"The Commentary on the Romans" was published in 1861, and in the following year Dr. Colenso visited England, where he had, of course, to encounter a "deep resentment for the rude upsetting of convictions held to be beyond reach of all hostile argument." Dr. Gray styled it "a revolt against the faith of Christendom," but Colenso, in reply to all attacks, assumed his right under the great charter of Protestantism to interpret the Scriptures as he deemed fit, saying: "I trust that I duly reverence both the Church and the Bible, but the Truth is above both." Legal proceedings were threatened, but Colenso saw clearly from the first that these could never succeed. He had the courage of his opinions, and boldly published his "Pentateuch and Book of Joshua." Writing about this work in 1863, he says: "The contrast between the reception I met with from really learned Hebrew and Biblical scholars at Leyden, and that which has been my lot in England from an unlearned and prejudiced clergy, is very striking, and not a little humiliating to an Englishman. I saw most of the notabilities of Leyden-among the rest Professor Schotten, Professor Van Hengel, Professor Rauwenhof, etc." The biographer of Colenso tells us that the effect of the earlier part of the "Pentateuch" was to open wide the flood-gates of theological strife and animosity. In almost every quarter in which his criticisms were rejected, they were opposed with a vehemence which showed that the feeling of resentment had been deeply stirred. "In many quarters they were denounced with a bitterness and ferocity which revealed how far the iron had entered into their soul."

While all this furious controversy was going on, the person responsible for it was neglecting his diocese and residing in Europe. On July 23, 1863, he exultingly says: "Indeed, not a word is now said of my leaving the Church. It is felt that if I am to go, then Dean Milman, Canon Stanley, and a host of our most distinguished men must go also." By a decree of deposition, issued by Bishop Gray, Dr. Colenso ceased to be Bishop of Natal on April 16, 1864, but we find him smiling at the judgment and triumphantly sitting as "Bishop of Natal" at a banquet given by Her Majesty's Ministers on May 24 in the same year. At last, on March 20, 1865, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council decided "that the proceedings taken by the Bishop of Cape Town and the judgment and sentence pronounced by him against the Bishop of Natal are null and void in law."

After an absence of three years Dr. Colenso returned to South Africa and received a hearty greeting. Then commenced what might be styled inter-tribal warfare. Churchwarden rose against churchwarden, and the house of the Church of England in Natal became seriously divided. In January, 1866, Colenso writes: "We are still surviving, thank God, and in very good spirits, though now I expect comes the tug of war." Subsequently he says: "We are going on very well. In fact, our cause would be triumphant but for the S.P.G." It would take a volume to detail all the numerous conflicts. "The United Church of England and Ireland" stood on one side and "The Church of South Africa," with its Bishop of Maritzburg, on the other. The life of the subject of our sketch was one of perpetual warfare, in the midst of which he managed to write his three volumes of "Natal Sermons," and to take up the cudgels for Langalebalele, and subsequently for all rebel chiefs and the Zulu nation generally. The keen intellect of the eminent mathematician was shown constantly in analysis which amounted sometimes to hair splitting. After having, in his own opinion, torn the Pentateuch to pieces, he descended, full of anger, upon the Government of Natal, and thence proceeded to pour vials of wrath upon the head of Sir Bartle Frere. He says in 1874: "I have pushed on a most unwilling Government to allow me to visit Langalebalele in gaol ... and to employ counsel to support the appeal." Afterwards he became the intimate friend and adviser of the Zulu Monarch, and published a book styled "Cetywayo's Dutchmen," in which, using the form of the journal of a white trader in Zululand, he warmly championed the cause of that potentate. The last visit of Colenso to England took place in 1874-5, and then he was busy with the Pentateuch and the persecuted Zulus. He was looked upon as a "dangerous heretic" by English Churchmen, and as a wrong-headed political firebrand by the people of Natal. At all times in doubt, eminently a man of war, he nevertheless led a pure Christian life. A friend who knew him intimately (Mr. de la Touche) says: "Amid all the vituperation of which he was the subject, not one word that I heard was uttered against him of personal disrespect-not an attempt to throw any aspersion on his motives. The truth is, the whole life he led and all its surroundings, could not fail to impress even his bitterest enemies with respect, if not veneration. It was a life of self-denial and devotion."

A letter dated January 24, 1879, refers to the terrible news of the slaughter of the 24th Regiment by the Zulus at Isandhlwana. In the previous month he had said: "Do not forget that all this disturbance in our relations with Zululand, as well as with Sikukuni, is the direct consequence of that unfortunate annexation of the Transvaal, which would have fallen into our hands like a ripe fruit if we had not take possession of the country like a party of filibusters, partly by trickery, partly by bullying." There never were truer words than these. So far, however, as subsequent events are concerned, Colenso seems strangely unfair to Sir Bartle Frere, whose policy of "The British flag to the Zambezi" preceded that of Mr. Rhodes, but failed in consequence of unlooked-for disasters and the belief that the Transvaal was a valueless country not worth fighting for. The history of the Zulu War* is well worth study, and the philosophies of Frere and Colenso-extremely opposed as they were-hinged very much upon the nature and character of Cetywayo and the Zulu people. It is, of course, impossible to treat the subject here.

The evening of Dr. Colenso's life was spent calmly at Bishopstowe, some miles from Maritzburg, where he was in touch with the natives and could carry on his correspondence and literary works in calmness and leisure. Dean Williams, of Grahamstown, engaged in keen ecclesiastical strife with his Bishop, wrote to Dr. Colenso as to a kindred spirit, but the latter, on March 19, 1883, says: "I must repeat what I said before, that you must really dismiss all idea of my going, if elected, to Grahamstown. I am too old (in my seventieth year), and I begin to feel the infirmities of age." Up to the last he wrote to the Aborigines Protection Society against the Natal Government, and in favour of the Zulus. During the early days of Jun, 1883, he was too unwell to write, and sent for the doctor. "He got weaker and weaker, but still took an eager interest in his work, dictating notes to be inserted in the printed sheets, and asking for the news from the daily papers, though on the Tuesday he said he did not care to hear the leaders in the Times and Mercury, full of abuse." Almost his last words are "I should be so glad of a little rest." Very touching and very significant. His restless, troubled, and militant life ended on June 20, 1883, in the seventieth year of his age.

*"The Life of John William Colenso, Bishop of Natal," by the Rev. Sir George W. Cox, Bart., M.A., Rector of Scrayingham. London: W. Ridgway, 1888. This work, in two volumes, can be consulted by those who wish a full laudatory account of Dr. Colenso's life.

*See Miss Colenso's works on Zululand and the War on one side, and Wilmot's History of the Zulu War on the other.