THE CONTROVERSIALIST 183 



seemed to the onlooker, by Huxley's intellectual 

 dynamite, Mr. Gladstone reappeared, as if never dis- 

 turbed therefrom, on the Impregnable Rock of Holy 

 Scripture^ as he called it. In that book he reaffirmed, 

 in ingenious variation of phrase, all that Huxley had 

 disproved concerning the succession of life-forms, 

 and, passing from the organic to the inorganic, con- 

 tended that " the nebular theory supplies a new and 

 remarkable establishment of accord between natural 

 science on the one hand (so far as its reasoning has 

 proceeded) and the Book of Genesis on the other. ,, 1 

 Mr. Gladstone had no sympathy with the invertebrate 

 theologians who would transfer Christianity from a 

 historical to a psychological base. " We are," he 

 says, " professors of a religion which rests not so 

 much on abstract principles as on matters of fact, 

 inseparable from the revelation itself." Such physical 

 facts are the Creation, the Incarnation, the Resur- 

 rection. 2 As to the validity of these, no doubt had 

 ever possessed him. He writes as a man of apparently 

 open mind, but throughout life every avenue had been 

 shut against the admission of anything telling against 

 preconceptions which were theological to the core. 



1 Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, chap, vi., " On Recent 

 Corroborations of Scripture from the Regions of History and Nat- 

 ural Science." 



2 Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture, chap, ii., " The Creation 

 Story." 



