ty very different from those recognised by
the Church. It has certainly not impaired their significance as records
of successive developments of religious and moral progress, nor has it
diminished their value as expressions of the loftiest and most enduring
religious sentiments of mankind; but in the eyes of a great section of
the educated world it has deprived them of the authoritative and
infallible character that was once attributed to them. At the same time
historical criticism has brought with it severer standards of proof,
more efficient means of distinguishing the historical from the fabulous.
It has traced the phases and variations of religions, and the influences
that governed them, with a fulness of knowledge and an independence of
judgment unknown in the past, and it has led its votaries to regard in
these matters a sceptical and hesitating spirit as a virtue, and
credulity and easiness of belief as a vice.

This is not a book of theology, and I have no intention of dilating on
these things. It must, however, be manifest to all who are acquainted
with contemporary thought how largely these influences have displaced
theological beliefs among great numbers of educated men; how many things
that were once widely believed have become absolutely incredible; how
many that were once supposed to rest on the plane of certainty have now
sunk to the lower plane of mere probability or perhaps possibility. From
the time of Galileo downwards, these changes have been denounced as
incompatible with the whole structure of Christian belief. No less an
apologist than Bishop Berkeley declared that the belief that the date of
the existence of the world was approximately that which could be deduced
from the book of Genesis was one of the fundamental beliefs which could
not be given up.[58] When the traveller Brydone published his travels in
Sicily in 1773, conjecturing, from the deposits of lava, that the world
must be much older than the Mosaic cosmogony admitted, his work was
denounced as subverting the foundations of the Christian faith. The same
charges were brought against the earlier geologists, and in our own day
against the early supporters of the Darwinian theory; and many now
living can remember the outbursts of indignation against those who first
introduced the principles of German criticism into English thought, and
who impugned the historical character and the assumed authorship of the
Pentateuch.

It is not surprisin