KFLCC / New Age Bible Versions - Gail Riplinger

Hort Haunts Today's Pulpits

If Hort were applying for the position of pastor in your church, he might reply as he did in 1871, when asked by the Bishop of Ely’s to be a chaplain. (This was the very year he joined the New Testament Revision Committee.)

I doubt greatly whether I possess some of the qualifications.. .in views, and still more in sympathies. I do not sufficiently conform to any of the recognized standards. . .on what might be called the details of even these matters of faith, I am not sure that my views so far as they are fixed would be generally accepted.. .[T]o give an instance, there are certain parts of the Old Testament. [Mr. Maurice's books] have led me to doubt whether the Christian faith is adequately or purely represented in all respects in the accepted doctrines of any living school.. I have. . .a keen interest in philosophy, a conviction that their vigorous and independent progress is to be desired for the sake of mankind, even when for the time they seem to be acting to the injury of the faith. . .[A] fundamental difference in the subject of the Atonement, if it existed, would place me in a false position as your examining chaplain.. .1 have friends of various creeds and creedless, from whom I believe I should do wrong to dissociate myself. It is quite possible that I might wish to write papers or books in which some of these facts would unavoidably come to light. 10

Webb wrote of the dismal state of the Church of England at this time; it is evidenced in the fact that, in spite of Hort's admission of 'heresy', he was hired as chaplain! His son writes:

[F]or the next six years [he] lectured to the theological students at Emmanuel College. The subjects were Origen. . .Clement. . .etc. . .[h]is lecturing which exercised a kind of spell over the more thoughtful listener. . .[T]here has grown up. . .a kind of cult around him. There is something mysterious about those lectures .11 And those bibles.