504 



TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTELY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



consider it further, and for that purpose to resort 

 yet once again to to a classical illustration. The 

 Kymaeans being commanded by an oracle to de- 

 liver up a suppliant, one of their citizens, Aristo- 

 dikus, suspected that the divine words had been 

 tampered with, 1 and consulted the oracle himself. 

 The god, however, gave the same answer as be- 

 fore. Thereupon Aristodikus bethought him of a 

 device : he robbed the nests of the sacred birds 

 that were in the precincts of the temple. Pres- 

 ently he heard a voice from the sanctuary, saying, 

 " Wretch, how dare you strip the temple of my 

 suppliants ? " "0 king ! " replied he, nothing 

 abashed, "you, indeed, protect your suppliants; 

 and do you bid the Kymasans deliver up theirs ? " 2 

 " Yea, verily," said the god, " that for such im- 

 piety ye may perish speedily; and may never 

 again ask the oracle ahout giving up suppliants." 

 Thus, then, was Aristodikus rewarded for disre- 

 garding an injunction strikingly analogous to Je- 

 hovah's " statutes that were not good." His bear- 

 ing in face of such an injunction differed from 

 that of Abraham and Hosea, 3 just as Hellenism 

 differed from Hebraism. It is, therefore, impor- 

 tant that his precise moral attitude should be 

 noted. He first cherished the hope that the wick- 

 ed command was not from God ; and, afterward, 

 when convinced that it was from God, he still held 

 that God was less dishonored by its breach than 

 by its observance ; for it seemed less incredible 

 that, for some inscrutable reason, God should have 

 deceived his worshipers, than that he should have 

 sanctioned what was unjust and cruel. 



Aristodikus, in so judging, was a model of 

 pious discrimination. He deserves our respect, 

 both for regarding the divine untruthfulness as 

 one of the solutions of the problem that lay be- 

 fore him, and also for regarding it as an unsatis- 



1 &OKe<i>v roils 0eo7rpdi7ovs ou Ac'yeiv a\i)6etot. Herod- 

 otus, i., 158. 



5 These words are closely parallel to passages in the 

 Gospel : Matthew vi. 14, 15 ; xviii. 33. Observe that 

 in all such passages the identity of the divine and the 

 human morrlity is assumed. 



3 Genesis xxii.; Hosea i. 2. 



factory solution— a solution not to be adopted till 

 a happier one had failed. And, in thus express- 

 ing our concurrence with his estimate of divine 

 deceptions, we have shown what we think of Mr. 

 Oxenham's estimate. It is in a certain sense true 

 that the belief in such deceptions is "little short 

 of blasphemous." But this is a one-sided truth, 

 unless supplemented by the more obvious and 

 momentous truth that the belief in hell is, in the 

 words of the first of living bishops, " blasphemous 

 and revolting." Orthodoxy, therefore, is in a 

 strait between two blasphemies; and of those 

 blasphemies she should choose the less. 



Briefly, then, we concede to Suarez and Prof. 

 Huxley that " incredibile est, Deum illis verbis ad 

 populum fuisse locutum quibus deciperetur." But 

 we guard this concession by adding, " Incredibi- 

 lius est, Deum illis pamis in populum esse usurum 

 quibus crucietur." We should hate, not the be- 

 lief in divine untruthfulness less, but the belief in 

 divine cruelty more. Only, in holding our brief 

 for Neochristianity, we assumed that it was be- 

 tween these two beliefs that the alternative lay. 

 And, starting with this assumption, we maintained 

 that those who hang the belief in hell on the divine 

 veracity represent the chain of evidence for hell 

 as stronger than its weakest link ; or, to employ 

 a yet bolder metaphor, they make the burning 

 lake rise above its own level. To prove this has 

 been the design of our article. We have been en- 

 deavoring to show the universal application of a 

 plain rule of human jurisprudence, by establishing 

 a proposition which may be called a counterpart, 

 if not a corollary, of Hume's famous proposition 

 about miracles. Our proposition is: That no per- 

 son (whether in heaven or on earth) should stand 

 convicted, on his own testimony, of an immoral 

 or unlikely act, unless it be less antecedently un- 

 likely that he should do the act than that his tes- 

 timony should be false; "and" (to apply Hume's 

 very words) " even in that case there is a mutual 

 destruction of arguments, and the superior only 

 gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of 

 force which remains after deducting the inferior." 

 — Fortnightly Review. 



