m and Inner-light mysticism, at the top,
to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the same breath, at the
bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of these manifestations is
often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms of Supernaturalism have
deep roots in human nature, and will undoubtedly die hard; but, in these
latter days, they have to cope with an enemy whose full strength is only
just beginning to be put out, and whose forces, gathering strength year
by year, are hemming them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in
the acceptation of systematised natural knowledge, which, during the
last two centuries, has extended those methods of investigation, the
worth of which is confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region
in which the Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.

When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic Greece
and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of authorship
of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific literary
criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after exploding the
geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar system itself
to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks, circling at
unimaginable distances from one another through infinite space, showed
the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the earth and of life
upon it to be as inadequate as those of its relative dimensions and
importance had been; it needed no prophetic gift to see that, sooner or
later, the Jewish and the early Christian records would be treated in
the same manner; that the authorship of the Hexateuch and of the Gospels
would be as severely tested; and that the evidence in favour of the
veracity of many of the statements found in the Scriptures would have to
be strong indeed if they were to be opposed to the conclusions of
physical science. In point of fact, so far as I can discover, no one
competent to judge of the evidential strength of these conclusions
ventures now to say that the biblical accounts of the Creation and of
the Deluge are true in the natural sense of the words of the narratives.
The most modern Reconcilers venture upon is to affirm, that some quite
different sense may be put upon the words; and that this non-natural
sense may, with a little trouble, be manipulated into some sort of
non-contradiction of scientific truth.

My purpose, in an essay[11] which treats of the narrative of the Deluge,
was to prove,