THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND OF SCIENCE. 635 



relapse, he bids thera remember "Lot's wife."* When he would point out how 

 worldly engagements may blind the soul to a coming judgment, he reminds them 

 how men ate, and drank, and married, and were given in marriage, until the day 

 that Noah entered into the ark, and the flood came and destroy ed them all.f If 

 he would put his finger on a fact in past Jewish history which, by its admitted 

 reality, would warrant belief in his own coming resurrection, he points to Jonah's 

 being three days and three nights in the whale's belly (p. 23). $ 



The preacher proceeds to brush aside the common— I had 

 almost said vulgar — apologetic pretext that Jesus was using ad 

 hominem arguments, or " accommodating " his better knowledge 

 to popular ignorance, as well as to point out the inadmissibility 

 of the other alternative, that he shared the popular ignorance. 

 And to those who hold the latter view sarcasm is dealt out with 

 no niggard hand : 



But they will find it difficult to persuade mankind that, if he could be mis- 

 taken on a matter of such strictly religious importance as the value of the sacred 

 literature of his countrymen, he can be safely trusted about anything else. The 

 trustworthiness of the Old Testament is, in fact, inseparable from the trustwor- 

 thiness of our Lord Jesus Christ ; and if we believe that he is the true Light of 

 the world, we shall close our ears against suggestions impairing the credit of those 

 Jewish Scriptures which have received the stamp of his divine authority (p. 25). 



Moreover, I learn from the public journals that a brilliant and 

 sharply-cut view of orthodoxy, of like hue and pattern, was only 

 the other day exhibited in that great theological kaleidoscope, the 

 pulpit of St. Mary's, recalling the time so long passed by, when a 

 Bampton lecturer, in the same place, performed the unusual feat 

 of leaving the faith of old-fashioned Christians undisturbed. 



Yet many things have happened in the intervening thirty-one 

 years. The Bampton lecturer of 1859 had to grapple only with 

 the infant Hercules of historical criticism ; and he is now a full- 

 grown athlete, bearing on his shoulders the spoils of all the lions 

 that have stood in his path. Surely a martyr's courage, as well as 

 a martyr's faith, is needed by any one who, at this time, is pre- 

 pared to stand by the following plea for the veracity of the 

 Pentateuch : 



Adam, according to the Hebrew original, was for two hundred and forty-three 

 years contemporary with Methuselah, who conversed for a hundred years with 

 Shem. Shem was for fifty years contemporary with Jacob, who probably saw 

 Jochebed, Moses's mother. Thus Moses might, by oral tradition, have obtained 

 the history of Abraham, and even of the deluge, at third hand ; and that of the 

 temptation and the fall at fifth hand. . . . 



If it be granted — as it seems to be — that the great and stirring events in a 

 nation's life will, under ordinary circumstances, be remembered (apart from all 

 written memorials) for the space of one hundred and fifty years, being handed 

 down through five generations, it must be allowed (even on mere human grounds) 



St. Luke, xvii, 32. \ Ibid., 27. \ St. Matt, xii, 40. 



