434 
point of view, by a brief historical parable. Two officers, let us suppose, 
before Waterloo, are consulted by the Duke, on the line of defence to be 
occupied next day by the British army. The first says, “ Beware, my Loid, 
that you do not occupy Hougoumont ; it lies much too forward, out of j our 
true line of defence. It will be the first point attacked, and cannot be held. 
The troops placed in it will be slaughtered, the rest will be demoralized, and 
the battle will be lost.” The second says, “ Be sure, my Lord, that you do 
occupy Hougoumont. Man it with some of your best troops, and hold it 
firmly. It lies forward, it is true, but it is an essential part of the position. 
If you give it up to the enemy, and only place your troops on the ridge be- 
hind, their first step will be to seize it. They will have a secure fortress, from 
which their artillery will enfilade the whole position. Whole regiments will 
be swept away by the raking fire, and the battle will be lost almost as soon 
as it is begun. But it has a strong wall that can never be forced. The 
strife will be hot and fierce. The enemj r will swarm round it, and may 
occupy the orchard for a moment, but they can never make good their 
entrance within the building itself. We can hold it, we ought to hold it, 
we must hold it to the last, and the battle will be won.” Both officers 
might be equally sincere in their advice, and fight with equal bravery in the 
field. And still, if the Duke had listened to the first, the result would 
have been just as disastrous as if the advice had been given by a secret 
enemy. 
In these opening pages of my paper I am not really the assailant, as Canon 
Titcomb seems to think, but the defendant, and one who has been first 
assailed. In The Bible and Modern Thought, perhaps the most widely, 
circulated of my works, I have given a hundred pages to this very subject. 
My friend, in his paper, lays down the law that his line of defence of 
Scripture is the only one tenable, and that mine is mischievous and unsound. 
He condemns it in the strongest terms. Now my present object was to carry 
one part of my previous argument a step further than I had done before, 
as to the harmony between the words of the Bible and the facts of modem 
astronomy. How could I do this, with his paper full in my face in the recent 
Transactions of the Institute, unless I first showed briefly some reasons for 
my entire dissent from the law he sought to impose on every future champion 
of the Bible and Divine Revelation ? I had every reason for wishing to 
avoid the necessity. He is a friend whom I have known for twenty years, a 
member of the Council, and I am only an associate, and he has written papers 
before, which I think valuable, and helpful to the cause of Bible truth. Public 
disagreement, in defenders of that cause, is always a stumbling-block to the 
weak, and involves a loss of moral power. To answer the paper fully would 
have needed a second, at least as long, and even a very brief reply robbed me 
of one-third of the space 1 needed for my own main subject. But there was 
no help for it. Till my main principle had been vindicated from the vehement 
onset he had made on it, I could not, honestly or logically, take a step further 
