324 AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY ix 



Only here and there has the progress of scien- 

 tific thought, outside the ecclesiastical world, so 

 far affected Christians, that they and their 

 teachers fight shy of the demonology of their 

 creed. They are fain to conceal their real dis- 

 belief in one half of Christian doctrine by judi- 

 cious silence about it ; or by flight to those 

 refuges for the logically destitute, accommodation 

 j or allegory. But the faithful who fly to allegory 

 / "in order to escape absurdity resemble nothing so 

 much as the sheep in the fable who to save their 

 Wlives jumped into the pit. The allegory pit is 

 too commodious, is ready to swallow up so much 

 more than one wants to put into it. If the story 

 of the temptation is an allegory; if the early 

 recognition of Jesus as the Son of God by the 

 demons is an allegory ; if the plain declaration of 

 the writer of the first Epistle of John (iii. 8), 

 " To this end was the Son of God manifested, 

 that He might destroy the works of the devil," is 

 allegorical, then the Pauline version of the Fall 

 may be allegorical, and still more the words of 

 consecration of the Eucharist, or the promise of 

 the second coming ; in fact, there is not a dogma 

 of ecclesiastical Christianity the scriptural basis 

 of which may not be whittled away by a similar 

 process. 



As to accommodation, let any honest man who 

 can read the New Testament ask himself whether 

 Jesus and his immediate friends and disciples can 



