elieve,
without any warrant from the Bible itself, thrust the book in my way.

I had set out on a journey, with no other purpose than that of
exploring a certain province of natural knowledge; I strayed no hair's
breadth from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue;
and yet I found that, whatever route I took, before long, I came to a
tall and formidable-looking fence. Confident as I might be in the
existence of an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood
the thorny barrier with its comminatory notice-board--"No
Thoroughfare. By order. Moses." There seemed no way over; nor did the
prospect of creeping round, as I saw some do, attract me. True there
was no longer any cause to fear the spring guns and man-traps set by
former lords of the manor; but one is apt to get very dirty going on
all-fours. The only alternatives were either to give up my
journey--which I was not minded to do--or to break the fence down and
go through it.

Now I was and am, by nature, a law-abiding person, ready and willing
to submit to all legitimate authority. But I also had and have a
rooted conviction, that reasonable assurance of the legitimacy should
precede the submission; so I made it my business to look up the
manorial title-deeds. The pretensions of the ecclesiastical "Moses" to
exercise a control over the operations of the reasoning faculty in the
search after truth, thirty centuries after his age, might be
justifiable; but, assuredly, the credentials produced in justification
of claims so large required careful scrutiny.

Singular discoveries rewarded my industry. The ecclesiastical "Moses"
proved to be a mere traditional mask, behind which, no doubt, lay the
features of the historical Moses--just as many a mediaeval fresco has
been hidden by the whitewash of Georgian churchwardens. And as the
aesthetic rector too often scrapes away the defacement, only to find
blurred, parti-coloured patches, in which the original design is no
longer to be traced; so, when the successive layers of Jewish and
Christian traditional pigment, laid on, at intervals, for near three
thousand years, had been removed, by even the tenderest critical
operations, there was not much to be discerned of the leader of the
Exodus.

Only one point became perfectly clear to me, namely, that Moses is not
responsible for nine-tenths of the Pentateuch; certainly not for the
legends which had been made the bugbears of science. In fact, the
fe