HUGH MILLER 125 



intruder, and it required much time to assuage the 

 fears on the one hand and lessen the rather vague pre- 

 tensions on the other, before the lines of demarcation 

 could be firmly drawn, if indeed, in a certain class of 

 both theological and scientific minds, they can be said 

 to be even yet settled. There is still the Voltairian 

 type of thinker which is not yet exploded ; and which, 

 even in the case of Professor Huxley, has imagined that 

 a mere shaking of the letter of a text or two is tanta- 

 mount to an annihilation of the Christian faith. * That 

 the sacred books,' as Carlyle says, 'could be all else 

 than a Bank of Faith Bill, for such and such quantities 

 of enjoyment, payable at sight in the other world, value 

 received ; which Bill becomes a waste paper, the stamp 

 being questioned ; that the Christian Religion could have 

 any deeper foundations than books, nothing of this 

 seems to have even in the faintest matter occurred to 

 Voltaire. Yet herein, as we believe the whole world 

 has now begun to discover, lies the real essence of the 

 question.' Science, in fact, after a long regime of even 

 more than Macaulayesque cocksureness, is now abating 

 its tone. It now no longer threatens like a second 

 flood to cover the earth, and it is possible for mental 

 and historical science to reappear like the earth out of 

 the waters, and a clear line to be drawn between the 

 limits of mind and matter. Happily, accordingly, it is no 

 longer possible for a Voltaire to meet the theologian 

 with a belief that the shells found on high hills were 

 dropped by pilgrims and palmers from the Holy Land, 



