596 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



has been discovered " not to be worthy of unquestioning belief/' 

 faith " in the supernatural itself " is, so far, undermined. And I 

 may congratulate myself upon such weighty confirmation of an 

 opinion in which I have had the fortune to anticipate them. But 

 whether it is more to the credit of the courage, than to the intel- 

 ligence, of the thirty-eight that they should go on to proclaim 

 that the canonical Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments 

 " declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all rec- 

 ords, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to 

 be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to the coming generation 

 to decide. 



The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I 

 think, be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but 

 upon that of which it is a sign. It is an open secret that the 

 memorial is put forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of 

 opinion of a contrary character, on the part of certain members 

 of the same ecclesiastical body, who therefore have, as I sup- 

 pose, an equal right to declare themselves "stewards of the 

 Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the stream 

 of tendency toward naturalism, the course of which I have 

 briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even 

 the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, 

 to swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican 

 establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, 

 there are as many thorough-going defenders of "plenary in- 

 spiration" as there were timid questioners of that doctrine 

 half a century ago. Commentaries, sanctioned by the highest 

 authority, give up the " actual historical truth " of the cosmogoni- 

 cal and diluvial narratives. University professors of deservedly 

 high repute accept the critical decision that the Hexateuch is a 

 compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as author or as 

 editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might be ; highly 

 placed divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture narra- 

 tives may be ignored ; that the book of Daniel may be regarded 

 as a patriotic romance of the second century B. c. ; that the words 

 of the writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distin- 

 guished from those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus. 

 Conservative but conscientious revisers decide that whole pas- 

 sages, some of dogmatic and some of ethical importance, are inter- 

 polations. An uneasy sense of the weakness of the dogma of 

 Biblical infallibility seems to be at the bottom of a prevailing 

 tendency once more to substitute the authority of the " Church " 

 for that of the Bible. In my old age it has happened to me 

 to be taken to task for regarding Christianity as a " religion of a 

 book" as gravely as, in my youth, I should have been repre- 

 hended for doubting that proposition. It is a no less interesting 



