ABSTRACT
Even if those problems could be resolved, others remained. There was no simple way to verify Christian dogma independently. In the area of first principles tradition and evidence were so intertwined that it was hard to separate them; and any deeply held personal conviction was both absolutely and relatively inexpressible. All that could be done was to offer ‘a tentative exhibition’ of some of the leading lines of such a position. This was why he used the language of inquiry, believing that the presentation of a controversy in the form of a problem was most likely to lead to truth; and to speak in any other way would misrepresent the way in which the subject appeared to him. ‘Beliefs worth calling beliefs must be purchased with the sweat of the brow’, he wrote; and Hort was not prepared to supply ‘ready nourishment to the credulity which is truly said to be a dangerous disease of the time’.2 Anything less likely from Hort is difficult to imagine! But would Newman or Pusey have been so cautious in tackling such a theme? It is absolutely typical that the first point which Hort makes in the first lecture is that Jesus’ words in John 14:5-6 ‘belong more to dialogue than to discourse’ – thus
1 F.J.A. Hort, Introduction to The Way, the Truth and the Life (London, 1893),
he includes Thomas’s question as well as Jesus’ response, ‘I am the Way and the Truth and the Life: no one cometh unto the Father save through me’.3
