VI LIGHTS OF THE CHURCH AND SCIENCE 237 



belief in the transubstantiation of Lot's wife, and 

 the anticipatory experience of submarine naviga- 

 tion by Jonah ; in water standing fathoms deep 

 on the side of a declivity without anything to 

 hold it up; and in devils who enter swine will 

 not increase. But neither is there ground for 

 much hope that the proportion of those who cast 

 aside these fictions and adopt the consequence of 

 that repudiation, are, for some generations, likely 

 to constitute a majority. Our age is a day of 

 compromises. The present and the near future 

 seem given over to those happily, if curiously, 

 constituted people who see as little difficulty in 

 throwing aside any amount of post-Abrahamic 

 Scriptural narrative, as the authors of " Lux Mundi" 

 see in sacrificing the pre-Abrahamic stories ; and, 

 having distilled away every inconvenient matter 

 of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine 

 honours to the residue. There really seems to be 

 no reason why the next generation should not 

 listen to a Bampton Lecture modelled upon that 

 addressed to the last : 



Time was and that not very long ago when all the rela- 

 tions of Biblical authors concerning the whole world were re- 

 ceived with a ready belief ; and an unreasoning and uncritical 

 faith accepted with equal satisfaction the narrative of the 

 Captivity and the doings of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, the 

 account of the Apostolic meeting in the Epistle to the Galatians, 

 and that of the fabrication of Eve. We can most of us re- 

 member when, in this country, the whole story of the Exodus, 

 and even the legend of Jonah, were seriously placed before boys 



