Notes and Comments. 211 
‘WHAT IS TRUTH ?’ 
It was assuredly in no jesting mood that Pilate asked, 
“What is truth?’ and had he waited for an answer until 
Bacon’s essay on Truth was published he would still have 
found it undefined. Mr. Stebbing did not aspire to answer 
the question. His humbler task was to examine particular 
instances of what is not truth. When we looked at the 
problems involved in human affairs, laws or ethics, where did 
we find anything like agreement or finality? In spite of 
the fact that the struggle between orthodoxy and heresy has 
been repeatedly determined by the sword, it may still be 
maintained that all reasonable human controversy must be 
engaged in bywords. -When a fallacy is embodied in a single 
word it may escape notice. There was no word more mis- 
leading in the English language than ‘ Bible,’ which had 
become almost an object of idolatry. Sometimes the title 
“The Book’ was amplified into ‘The Holy Bible.’ Yet it 
was a selection of many books, whose conflicting contents were 
summed up in the description of the national theology of 
England as given by a famous poet in his invocation beginning 
“Of man’s first disobedience.’ 
SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM. 
Almost every word of this summary of our national theology 
was now challenged by scientific or other criticism as untenable, 
misleading, and impossible to reconcile with any claim to 
Divine inspiration. Can it be a matter of indifference to our 
law-givers, bishops and clergy, masters of public schools, 
whether tenets which most of them are bound officially to 
accept, and to instil into others, are really of Divine origin, 
or, alternatively, unworthy of belief ? How could missionaries 
confronted with every grade of culture meet men their equals 
in the discipline of argument if they showed themselves lament- 
ably ignorant or wilfully scornful alike of science and the art 
of reasoning ? Those they wished to convert were confronted 
by the geologist with the alternative of believing either that 
Omnipotence spent six days in creating the globe, or that 
Omniscence deliberately inspired Moses to falsify the record. 
THE BOOK OF GENESIS. 
The speaker proceeded to test the Book of Genesis from 
the astronomical, geological and anthropological standpoints, 
bringing the Articles of the Church of England into the com- 
‘parison. How many women of intelligence even among the 
most devout will be willing to acknowledge the Biblical account 
of the actual origin of their sex. Yet in the New Testament 
the sanctity of marriage was based on a quotation from this 
account. Mr. Stebbing next dealt with the talking, argu- 
mentative serpent, and quoted Professor Owen’s description 
of the capabilities of the serpent, which, he remarked, was a 
4916 July 1. 

