66 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



ence belongs the power of deciding whether there are any agen- 

 cies in the spiritual, which can produce effects upon the material, 

 world. I suppose we shall be told presently that science can 

 decide, by the microscope and the dissecting needle, whether the 

 Sadducee was right in denying either angel or spirit, and the 

 Pharisee was a fool in confessing both. Our agnostic professor 

 may well be happy in the prospect of such unbounded knowledge 

 being obtained by such simple means. 



Then we have a very lofty boast about the hopeless position of 

 Christian divines " raked by the fatal weapons of precision with 

 which the enfants perdus of the advancing forces of science are 

 armed." We are tempted to ask if Prof. Huxley himself is one 

 of these " enfants." If so, he must have laid down his arms 

 before he fired off this article. Anything less like a weapon of 

 precision than that which he has shouldered in the fight, it is im- 

 possible to conceive. " Old Brown Bess " with its clumsy bullet, 

 its devious flight, its low penetration, and its enormous windage 

 is indeed almost a weapon of precision in comparison with that 

 which Prof. Huxley here flourishes against the massive founda- 

 tions of Christian belief. But, perhaps, he means rather the small 

 arms of the modern critical school. If he does, then precision is 

 the very last characteristic which belongs to it. Its methods are 

 largely subjective. Here and there it may have a clearly ascer- 

 tained fact to rest upon. Here and there it may have arrived at 

 some tolerably secure results. But in the main its methods are 

 metaphysical, resting on nothing but individual preconceptions, 

 applying tests and private canons of interpretation which are 

 purely arbitrary. There is no credulity like that which leads the 

 agnostic to swallow with open mouth everything that issues from 

 that most copious fountain of fads and follies the inner con- 

 sciousness of a German professor. 



The assumption which inspires the tone of Prof. Huxley's lan- 

 guage on this subject that precision in research is undermining 

 the credit of the Hebrew Scriptures is an assumption almost 

 comically at variance with fact. There is, in particular, one 

 weapon of precision which has been of late working wonders in 

 precisely the opposite direction. That weapon is the spade. And 

 what has it been unearthing ? Everywhere over that narrow 

 strip of our planet on which its human interests have been most 

 impressive and profound everywhere from Tyre and Sidon 

 from Carmel and Lebanon on the west, to Babylon and Nineveh 

 and the boundary mountains of Assyria, on the east the spade 

 has been disentombing continuous and triumphant proof of the 

 genuine antiquity and historical character of the Jewish books. 

 Out of them comes the light which guides the explorer ; and out 

 of them shines the light which is reflected from his spoils. They 



