e accepted them, argued from
them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic conclusions upon their historical
accuracy?

It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to try
to bide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable
connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked. The
question will still be asked, If the first nine chapters of the
Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the
remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of
the Exodus than of the Deluge, to belief? If God not walk in the Garden
of Eden, how we be assured that he spoke from Sinai?

In other essays[13] I have endeavoured to show that sober and
well-founded physical and literary criticism plays no less havoc with
the doctrine that the canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare
incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all records." We are
told that the Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual
world--a proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I
should not think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to
signify that everything we are told about the world of spirits in these
books is infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology
which constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess
belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any primitive people--it
is at any rate permissible to ask why? Science may be unable to define
the limits of possibility, but it cannot escape from the moral
obligation to weigh the evidence in favour of any alleged wonderful
occurrence; and I have endeavoured to show that the evidence for the
Gadarene miracle is altogether worthless. We have simply three,
partially discrepant, versions of a story, about the primitive form, the
origin, and the authority for which we know absolutely nothing. But the
evidence in favour of the Gadarene miracle is as good as that for any
other.

Elsewhere I have pointed out that it is utterly beside the mark to
declaim against these conclusions on the ground of their asserted
tendency to deprive mankind of the consolations of the Christian faith,
and to destroy the foundations of morality: still less to brand them
with the question-begging vituperative appellation of "infidelity." The
point is not whether they are wicked; but, whether, from the point of
view of scientific method, they are irrefragably true. If they are they
will