S PREFACE 



Such, I suppose, was my case, when I wrote 

 some passages which occur in an essay reprinted 

 among " Darwiniana." l But when, not long ago 

 " the voice " put it to me, whether I had better 

 not expunge, or modify, these passages ; whether^ 

 really, they were not a little too strong ; I had to 

 reply, with all deference, that while, from a merely 

 literary point of view, I might admit them to be 

 rather crude, I must stand by the substance of these 

 items of my expenditure. I further ventured to 

 express the conviction that scientific criticism of 

 the Old Testament, since 1860, has justified every 

 word of the estimate of the authority of the 

 ecclesiastical " Moses" written at that time. And, 

 carried away by the heat of self-justification, I even 

 ventured to add, that the desperate attempt now set 

 afoot to force biblical and post-biblical mythology 

 into elementary instruction, renders it useful and 

 necessary to go on making a considerable outlay in 

 the same direction. Not yet, has " the cosmogony 

 of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the 

 "incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium 

 of the orthodox ; " not yet, has " the zeal of the 

 Bibliolater " ceased from troubling ; not yet, are 

 the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest 

 from their fruitless toil "to harmonise impossi- 

 bilities," and " to force the generous new wine of 

 science into the old bottles of Judaism." 



But I am aware that the head and front of my 



l Collected Essays, vol. u., "On the Origin of Species" (1860). 



