172 HOGARTH S ELECTION FEAST. [CHAP. XII. 



gone on year after year distributing hundreds of thousands of 

 Bibles, not only without striking out this repudiated verse, but 

 without even affixing to it any mark or annotation to show the 

 multitude that it is given up by every one who has the least 

 pretension to scholarship and candor. 



* Let Truth, stern arbitress of all, 

 Interpret that original, 

 And for presumptuous wrongs atone ; 

 Authentic words be given, or none !&quot; 



It is from no want of entire sympathy with the sentiment 

 expressed in these lines of Wordsworth, and written by him on 

 a blank leaf of Macpherson s Ossian, that literary or scientific 

 men, whether Protestant or Catholic, European or American, 

 clergy or laity, abstain in general from communicating the results 

 of their scientific or biblical researches to the million, still less 

 from any apprehension that the essential truths of Christianity 

 would suffer the slightest injury, were the new views to be 

 universally known. They hesitate, partly from false notions of 

 expediency, and partly through fear of the prejudices of the vulgar. 

 They dare not speak out, for the same reason that the civil and 

 ecclesiastical rulers of England halted for one hundred and 

 seventy years before they had courage to adopt the reform in the 

 Julian calendar, which Gregory XIII., in accordance with astro 

 nomical observations, had effected in 1582. 



Hogarth, in his picture of the Election Feast, has introduced 

 a banner carried by one of the crowd, on which was inscribed 

 the motto, &quot; Give us back our eleven days,&quot; for he remembered 

 when the angry mob, irritated by the innovation of the new 

 style, went screaming these words through the streets of London. 



In like manner, the acknowledged antiquity of Egyptian civil 

 ization, or of the solid framework of the globe, with its monu 

 ments of many extinct races of living beings, might, if suddenly 

 disclosed to an ignorant people, raise as angry a demand to give 

 them back their old chronology. Hence arises a habit of con 

 cealing from the unlettered public discoveries which might, it is 

 thought, perplex them, and unsettle their old opinions. This 

 method of dealing with the most sacred of subjects, may thus be 



