THE LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND OF SCIENCE. 649 



For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive (1 Corinthians, 

 xv, 21, 22). 



If Adam may be held to be no more real a personage than 

 Prometheus, and if the story of the fall is merely an instructive 

 " type," comparable to the profound Promethean mythus, what 

 value has Paul's dialectic ? 



While, therefore, every right-minded man must sympathize 

 with the efforts of those theologians who have not been able 

 altogether to close their ears to the still, small voice of reason, to 

 escape from the fetters which ecclesiasticism. has forged, the 

 melancholy fact remains, that the position they have taken up is 

 hopelessly untenable. It is raked alike by the old-fashioned artil- 

 lery of the churches and by the fatal weapons of precision with 

 which the enfants perdus of the advancing forces of science are 

 armed. They must surrender, or fall back into a more sheltered 

 position. And it is possible that they may long find safety in such 

 retreat. 



It is, indeed, probable that the proportional number of those 

 who will distinctly profess their belief in the transubstantiation of 

 Lot's wife, and the anticipatory experience of submarine naviga- 

 tion by Jonah ; in water standing fathoms deep on the side of a 

 declivity without anything to hold it up ; and in devils who enter 

 swine, will not increase. But neither is there ground for much 

 hope that the proportion of those who cast aside these fictions 

 and adopt the consequence of that repudiation, are, for some gen- 

 erations, likely to constitute a majority. Our age is a day of com- 

 promises. The present and the near future seem given over to 

 those happily, if curiously, constituted people who see as little 

 difficulty in throwing aside any amount of post-Abrahamic script- 

 ural narrative, as the authors of Lux Mundi see in sacrificing the 

 pre-Abrahamic stories ; and, having distilled away every incon- 

 venient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine 

 honors to the residue. There really seems to be no reason why the 

 next generation should not listen to a Bampton lecture modeled 

 upon that addressed to the last : 



Time was — and that not very long ago — when ail the relations of biblical au- 

 thors concerning the old world were received with a ready belief ; and an un- 

 reasoning and uncritical faith accepted with equal satisfaction the narrative of the 

 captivity and the doings of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, the account of the 

 apostolic meeting in the Epistle to the Galatians, and of the fabrication of Eve. 

 We can most of us remember when, in this country, the whole story of the Exodus, 

 and even the legend of Jonah, were seriously placed before boys as history, and 

 discoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of Agincourt or the history of the 

 Norman Conquest. 



But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the growth of scien- 

 tific criticism to its full length. The whole world of history has been revolution- 



