Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort, Volume 1 (1896)

Arthur Fenton Hort, Life and Letters of Fenton John Anthony Hort, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1896).

This volume is indispensable because it preserves Hort's own early language about the received text, the Ghostly Guild, exclusive societies, and even debates in which science and Scripture are set against one another. Those lines are not reconstructed from enemies or Internet summaries; they survive in the memoir published by his son.

This is one of the central documentary pages in the entire debate. It joins manuscript preference and psychical investigation in a single preserved letter.

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I had no idea till the last few weeks of the importance of texts, having read so little Greek Testament, and dragged on with the villainous Textus Receptus... Think of that vile Textus Receptus leaning entirely on late MSS.; it is a blessing there are such early ones... We have started a society for the investigation of ghosts... our own temporary name is the 'Ghostly Guild.'

This continuation matters because it shows that the Ghostly Guild language was not a single stray jest detached from other activity. The page speaks of "750 copies" of printed “ghostly papers,” promised private stories, and an “admirably authenticated communication,” presumably by a ghost. In context, that last phrase most naturally points not to ordinary club logistics but to a communication treated as evidential within the Guild's inquiry into supernatural phenomena.

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I send you two ‘ghostly’ papers … We are promised a large number of well-authenticated private stories … Our most active members are, however, absent from Cambridge; to wit, Westcott at Harrow … During the vacation I distributed some eight or ten ‘ghostly’ papers … I had a note from Gordon the other day, and he tells me that he has an admirably authenticated communication.

The Apostles passage matters because the fuller wording is stronger than the shortened version often quoted. Hort does not merely mention the society in passing. He records that Maurice acknowledged evil attached to every exclusive society, and then he treats that very warning as part of the recommendation on the basis of which he joined.

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I had been asked to join the ‘Apostles’; I, however, begged time to consider. Meanwhile I wrote to Maurice for impartial counsel … He said he ‘could not advise me impartially.’ His ‘connection with them had moulded his character and determined the whole course of his life’ … believed there must be evil attaching to every exclusive society; the counter-acting good in this he had found very great.’ Could there be a more beautiful or delicate recommendation? So I joined …

This page cluster is central because it joins the Apostles, an oath-bound secrecy, and the emergence of the Ghostly Guild / Bogie Club material in one place. It is one of the clearest places where the record stops looking merely eccentric and begins to look structurally secretive.

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He remained always a grateful and loyal member of the secret Club … an oath which binds the members to a conspiracy of silence … the object of which was to collect and classify authenticated instances of what are now called psychical phenomena.

This page is important because it preserves the Union anecdote in which Hort preferred the discoveries of science to the text of Scripture on the formation of the earth and added that he “does not believe in matter.” That is not ordinary conservative Protestant language, and readers should not be asked to pretend that it is.

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One of —’s are ludicrous enough; e.g. on the question whether we ought to follow the text of Scripture or the discoveries of science as to the formation of the earth, etc. He votes the latter … as he ‘does not believe in matter’.

This early page is worth preserving because it shows that recorded interest in apparitions, ghosts, sleep-walking, and animal magnetism belonged to Hort’s world very early. It does not by itself prove later organized occult involvement, but it does show that the subject matter was already treated as intellectually interesting, not merely distasteful.

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Lecture 2d Theory of sleep dreaming singular prophetic dreams. Fallacy of the senses. Apparitions,—Ghosts. Lecture 3d Sleep walking,—sleep talking, Animal magnetism …