VI PREFACE 



But, if this dogma of Rabbinical invention is 

 well founded ; if, for example, every word in our 

 Bible has been dictated by the Deity ; * or even, if 

 it be held to be the Divine purpose that every 

 proposition should be understood by the hearer or 

 reader in the plain sense of the words employed 

 (and it seems impossible to reconcile the Divine 

 attribute of truthfulness with any other intention), 

 a serious strain upon faith must arise. More- 

 over, experience has proved that the severity of 

 this strain tends to increase, and in an even 

 more rapid ratio, with the growth in intelligence 

 of mankind and with the enlargement of the 

 sphere of assured knowledge among them. 



It is becoming, if it has not become, impossible 

 for men of clear intellect and adequate instruction 

 to believe, and it has ceased, or is ceasing, to be 

 possible for such men honestly to say they believe, 

 that the universe came into being in the fashion 

 described in the first chapter of Genesis ; or to 

 accept, as a literal truth, the story of the making 

 of woman, with the account of the catastrophe 

 which followed hard upon it, in the second 

 chapter ; or to admit that the earth was repeopled 

 with terrestrial inhabitants by migration from 



1 "Whoso says that Moses wrote even a single verse [of the 

 Pentateuch] from his own knowledge, denies and contemns the 

 "Word of God," bab Sarihedrin 99a, cited by Schiirer, Geschichte 

 des Judischen Volkes, Bd. II. p. 249. The account of the death 

 of Moses in the last eight verses of Deuteronomy was, of course, 

 dictated to and written by himself, like all the rest. Admit 

 prophetic inspiration and what becomes of the difficulty ? 

 Surely, a quite unanswerable argument. 



