contained in the second chapter of Genesis, if you will;
the new ecclesiasticism undertakes to underpin the superstructure and
make it, at any rate to the eye, as firm as ever: but let him be
anathema who applies exactly the same canons of criticism to the
opening chapters of "Matthew" or of "Luke." School-children may be
told that the world was by no means made in six days, and that
implicit belief in the story of Noah's Ark is permissible only, as a
matter of business, to their toy-makers; but they are to hold for the
certainest of truths, to be doubted only at peril of their salvation,
that their Galilean fellow-child Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no
human father.

* * * * *

Well, we will pass the item of 1860, said "the voice." But why all
this more recent coil about the Gadarene swine and the like? Do you
pretend that these poor animals got in your way, years and years after
the "Mosaic" fences were down, at any rate so far as you are
concerned?

Got in my way? Why, my good "voice," they were driven in my way. I had
happened to make a statement, than which, so far as I have ever been
able to see, nothing can be more modest or inoffensive; to wit, that I
am convinced of my own utter ignorance about a great number of things,
respecting which the great majority of my neighbours (not only those
of adult years, but children repeating their catechisms) affirm
themselves to possess full information. I ask any candid and impartial
judge, Is that attacking anybody or anything?

Yet, if I had made the most wanton and arrogant onslaught on the
honest convictions of other people, I could not have been more hardly
dealt with. The pentecostal charism, I believe, exhausted itself
amongst the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as
I have done, to copious objurgations, strewn with such appellations as
"infidel" and "coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts
the existence of a "gift of tongues" in the Churches of our time;
unless, indeed, it should occur to him that some of these outpourings
may have taken place after "the third hour of the day." I am far from
thinking that it is worth while to give much attention to these
inevitable incidents of all controversies, in which one party has
acquired the mental peculiarities which are generated by the habit of
much talking, with immunity from criticism. But as a rule, they are
the sauce of dishes of misrepresenta