IX AGNOSTICISM AND CHRISTIANITY 347 



me not easy to say. But it is hardly less difficult 

 to conceive that he could have distinctly nega- 

 tived any of them ; and, more especially, that 

 demonology which has been accepted by the 

 Christian Churches, in every age and under all 

 their mutual antagonisms. But, I repeat my 

 conviction that, whether Jesus sanctioned the 

 demonology of his time and nation or not, it is 

 doomed. The future of Christianity, as a dog- 

 matic system and apart from the old Israelitish 

 ethics which it has appropriated and developed, 

 lies in the answer which mankind will eventually^ 

 give to the question, whether they are prepared to 

 believe such stories as the Gadarene and the 

 pneumatological hypotheses which go with it, or 

 not. My belief is they will decline to do any- 

 thing of the sort, whenever and wherever their 

 minds have been disciplined by science. And 

 that discipline must, and will, at once follow and 

 lead the footsteps of advancing civilisation. 



The preceding pages were written before I 

 became acquainted with the contents of the May 

 number of the " Nineteenth Century/' wherein I 

 discover many things which are decidedly not to 

 my advantage. It would appear that " evasion " 

 is my chief resource, " incapacity for strict argu- 

 ment " and " rottenness of ratiocination " my main 

 mental characteristics, and that it is "barely 

 credible" that a statement which I profess to 



