600 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



tament, should offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the va- 

 lidity of the will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather 

 rotatory, argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified 

 by the infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the in- 

 fallible Bible, too absurd for serious consideration, it remains per- 

 missible to ask, Where and when the Church, during the period 

 of its infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, 

 has officially decreed the " actual historical truth of all records " 

 in the Old Testament ? Was Augustine heretical when he de- 

 nied the actual historical truth of the record of the Creation ? 

 Father Suarez, standing on later Roman tradition, may have a 

 right to declare that he was ; but it does not lie in the mouth of 

 those who limit their appeal to that early " antiquity," in which 

 Augustine played so great a part, to say so. 



Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, 

 some view with delight and some with horror the recrudescence 

 of supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes 

 ranged along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, sep- 

 arates the sublime from the ridiculous from Neo-Catholicism 

 and Inner-light mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not 

 worthy of mention in the same breath, at the bottom. In my 

 poor opinion, the importance of these manifestations is often 

 greatly overestimated. The extant forms of supernaturalism have 

 deep roots in human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard ; but, 

 in these latter days, they have to cope with an enemy whose full 

 strength is only just beginning to be put out, and whose forces, 

 gathering strength year by year, are hemming them round on 

 every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of system- 

 atized natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries, 

 has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which 

 is confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which 

 the supernatural has hitherto been recognized. 



When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of 

 heroic Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables ; when the 

 unity of authorship of the Iliad was successfully assailed by 

 scientific literary criticism ; when scientific physical criticism, 

 after exploding the geocentric theory of the universe, and reduc- 

 ing the solar system itself to one of millions of groups of like 

 cosmic specks, circling, at unimaginable distances from one an- 

 other, through infinite space, showed the supernaturalistic theo- 

 ries of the duration of the earth and of life upon it to be as inade- 

 quate as those of its relative dimensions and importance had 

 been it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or later, the 

 Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in the 

 same manner ; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the 



