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ness. There must be some difficulty, some apparent, if not 
real, unsuitableness in Old Testament numbers, to form the 
basis of his sceptical structure ; some spark, to account for all 
the volumes of smoke which he has emitted, to cloud both the 
sacred page and the mind of the believer. And it is our duty 
as seekers after, and champions of, truth, to agree with him 
where he is right, and not to consign his statements as a whole 
to the region of condemned falsehoods. If he has really 
found a weak point in our popular belief, it is not our duty 
only, but our interest, to give up that point, lest we subject 
ourselves morally and intellectually to the same penalty and 
the same disgrace as military law assigns to those who obsti- 
nately defend a post plainly untenable. Indeed, there is 
nothing, perhaps, which has more tended to alienate men of 
science from religion, and to bring about the present attitude 
of the scientific world towards the Christian Church, than the 
dogged and inflexible manner in which believers have main- 
tained, as if part of the Christian faith, propositions at 
variance with philosophy, and either not really deducible at 
all from the words of revelation, or, if deducible from the 
letter, not necessarily and unavoidably so resulting. Revela- 
tion tells us of sunrise and sunset ; and we may deduce from 
these words that the sun moves, while the earth remains stid. 
But the conclusion is not inevitable, for the words may be 
used in a popular sense; and thousands of people, who caip 
at the unscientific phraseology of Scripture, do habitually use 
these words without thinking what an inference may be drawn 
from them. To insist upon this one conclusion, and to main- 
tain it as an article of the faith, was the error of Galileo's 
opponents; and the error has remained even to the present 
time. 
3. As I have thus frankly avowed our own faults, I take the 
liberty of digressing a little, to add that our opponents are by 
no means free from it. They insist upon affixing to Scriptural 
expressions one meaning and one only, and that the most un- 
scientific they can discover, and then discuss leisurely the in- 
correctness and errors of the Bible, without listening to any 
declaration of the real signification of the statements they 
criticise. Thus, the rakla because, forsooth, the LXX. 
renders it crrspeioiuLa , u firmament," means (C something solid ; 
and we are not allowed to plead that the word signifies simply 
extension , and has nothing to do (necessarily) with solidity. 
Or, if we read of hares chewing the cud, we are told this 
means that they are ruminants with four stomachs, and cannot 
mean anything else ; and are silenced or disregarded if we argue 
that there is nothing about stomachs in the word garar ; that 
