Lionel Smithett Lewis

ST JOSEPH OF ARIMATHEA AT GLASTONBURY

A PREFACE FOR CRITICS.

THIS booklet is written afar from great libraries
with little time at the author's disposal. It is
said in the text, an attempt at a popular statement
for lovers of our Island Church, for the inhabitants
of Glastonbury, and for visitors on pilgrimage there
of some of the grounds for the world-wide belief in
the traditions that haunt this place. Even so, one
dares not hope that it may escape being torn by
critics. Critics do a considerable amount of good
erhaps even those more extreme ones who have
called themselves " higher" The course of " highe
criticismis a recognised thing. They unite in
destruction of the quarry. This is their great gift
It is when they come to construction that they fall
out, and begin to devour each other. Once destructive
criticism starts, it had better have its course. It is
like measles or scarlet-fever. For when the critics
have sufficiently eaten up each other like microbes
the patient often recovers and is better for the
attack. It was on these grounds that that great
scholar and saint, Bishop Ellicott, of Gloucester and
Bristol (R.I.P.) bade me as a young man possess m
soul in peace under the attacks of higher criticism
nd I gave him more than canonical obedience, and
have done so ever since.

Some of these folk must try and eat the heart
out of every beautiful tradition, and get into its
kernel themselves. The only thing to do is to put
them at their true value. And so I say: "Let them
tear." Let us possess our souls in patience. No
doubt to their own satisfaction they will tear most
of our authorities to pieces. But there is such
thing as eumulative evidence, and one hopes that
even to the critic, amid the havoc that he will work
on this poor booklet, there may remain jus
residuum of evidence that there is some re
authority for what every branch of the Church has
believed-that the British Church was founded by...… (mer)