776 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



identify and recognize it as a fact. That article is not a mere 

 attack upon certain narratives and traditions of the Old Testa- 

 ment, on the ground that they have been incautiously admitted 

 as integral parts of Christian belief, while in reality they need not 

 and ought not to occupy any such position. On the contrary, this 

 contention is repudiated expressly, and with scorn. Prof. Huxley 

 patronizes the school which insists on the barest literalism in the 

 interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures. He refers to Canon 

 Rawlinson's Bampton Lectures (1859) as asserting that " the nar- 

 ratives contained in the canonical Scriptures are free from any 

 admixture of error." * He praises the justice and candor of the 

 lecturer when he asserts as distinctive of Christianity among the 

 religions of the world, that it claims "to be historical." \ He rep- 

 resents him as insisting that Christianity is surely founded " upon 

 events which have happened exactly as they are declared to have 

 happened in its sacred books." \ He further ascribes to the lect- 

 urer the argument that the " New Testament presupposes the his- 

 torical exactness of the Old," and that the demonstration of the 

 " falsity " of the Hebrew records, especially in regard to those nar- 

 ratives which are assumed to be true in the New Testament, would 

 be fatal to " Christian theology."* Having thus nailed the colors 

 of Christianity to the bare poles of the very barest and narrowest 

 literalism, the professor jumps and leaps upon this teaching as 

 giving him an easy fulcrum for tearing those colors down. He is 

 enchanted by the reasoning of the Canon. He adopts it with effu- 

 sion. " My utmost ingenuity," he says, " does not enable me to 

 discover a flaw in the argument thus briefly summarized." Nor 

 does he conceal the full sweep of the destructive work which he 

 desires it to accomplish. Not only the whole story of Creation, 

 the whole story of the Fall, the whole story of the Flood, the 

 whole story of Abraham and of any special mission to the Hebrew 

 people, but even the glorious idea and hope of a Messiah the 

 whole Messianic doctrine which binds the Jewish and Christian 

 Churches all are relegated to the same category as the Greek 

 myths about Theseus or the Latin stories of the regal period of 

 Rome. And, as the writers of the New Testament have believed 

 those stories and dwelt upon them, the authority of those writers 

 is denounced as that of a body of men who " have not only ac- 

 cepted flimsy fictions for solid truths, but have built the very 

 foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary quicksands." A 



This language with plenty more of it is unmistakable. Its 

 tone is that of the whole article. It must be accepted, therefore, 

 as a pronounced attack upon Christianity all along the line. 



I do not stop to inquire whether the doctrines of biblical inter- 



* Page 7. f Ibid. + Ibid. Ibid. J Page 8. A Ibid. 



