In 1825 when a young Edward Pusey was sent from Oxford University to find out what these German critics were doing, the Englishman realised the import of the work at once. Late in his life he recalled to his biographer the impact that his discoveries in Germany had on him. ‘I can remember the room in Göttingen in which I was sitting when the real condition of religious thought in Germany flashed upon me. I said to myself, “This will all come upon us in England; and how utterly unprepared for it we are!”’3 Pusey was struck by Eichhorn’s ‘total insensibility’ to what Pusey saw as ‘the real religious import of the narrative’. In time that wave of insensibility, or sensibility, extended to the New Testament as well, not least through David Friedrich Strauss and his The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835). It finally did reach England just as it reached everywhere else. As surely as the Islamic clerics today fight to keep any element of criticism away from the foundations of their faith, in the knowledge of what it will do to the whole, so the Christian clergy across Europe tried to keep the results of such criticism away from their flock. But they could not – just as surely as the clerics today cannot wholly stem the tide of criticism coming towards them. It washed across the continent as surely as Pusey saw it would.

It was not just that the investigations of the German scholars had discovered fresh routes of scholarship. Trying to keep the Bible watertight from criticism failed not because the questions raised in the heads of the German higher critics were unique to them, but because they were questions that had occurred to many people. Now they had been voiced and the Bible was henceforth up for critical inquiry and analysis like any other text. Pulled apart by historical comparison, questions of authorship and questions of fallibility, the generation of believers after Strauss would have to find a new accommodation with these discoveries. Some pretended that these changes had not occurred, were not relevant, or had all been answered before. But much of the clergy began to realise that a fundamental shift had occurred and that they must shift too.