204 PIONEERS OF EVOLUTION PART 



prevailed, but it is in harmony with its spirit.' For 

 those doctrines, as the Venerable apologist may learn 

 from the evidence in Frazer's Golden Bough (chap. iii. 

 passim), are wholly mythological, because barbaric. 

 But, in truth, there is not a dogma of Christendom, 

 not a foundation on which the dogma rests, that 

 Evolution does not traverse. The Church of Eng- 

 land adopts ' as thoroughly to be received and be- 

 lieved,' the three ancient creeds, known as the 

 Apostles', the Athanasian, and the Nicene. There 

 is not a sentence in any one of these which finds 

 confirmation ; and only a sentence or two that find 

 neither confirmation nor contradiction, in Evolution. 

 The question, on which reams of paper have been 

 wasted, lies in a nutshell. The statements in the 

 Creeds profess to have warrant in the direct words 

 of the Bible ; or in inferences drawn from those 

 words, as defined by the Councils of the Church. 

 The decisions of these Councils represent the opinion 

 of the majority of fallible men composing those as- 

 semblies, and no number of fallible parts can make 

 an infallible whole. As Selden quaintly puts it 

 (Table Talk, xxx. 'Councils'), 'they talk (but blas- 

 phemously enough) that the Holy Ghost is president 

 of their General Councils, when the truth is the odd 

 man is still the Holy Ghost.' With this same 'odd 

 man ' rested the decision as to what books should 

 be included or excluded from the collection on which 

 the Church bases its authority and formulates its 

 creeds. So, in the last result, both sets of questions 

 are settled by a human tribunal employing a circular 

 argument. But, dismissing this for the moment, let 

 us see to what issues the controversy is narrowed, to 



