as thirty-eight
out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church. It
does not appear that the signataries are officially accredited
spokesmen of the ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but
I feel bound to take their word for it, that they are "stewards of the
Lord, who have received the Holy Ghost," and, therefore, to accept
this memorial as evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early
days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the
colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of
Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it
did sixty years ago. And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to
offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of "a dishonour to
God," imperilling his salvation.

It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they
discern the real nature of the Controverted Question of the age. They
are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been
discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the
supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate
myself upon such weighty confirmation of an opinion in which I have
had the fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the
credit of the courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight
that they should go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of
the Old and New Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual
historical truth in all records, both of past events and of the
delivery of predictions to be thereafter fulfilled," must be left to
the coming generation to decide.

The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think,
be based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of
which it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put
forth as a counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary
character, on the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical
body, who therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare
themselves "stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In
fact, the stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I
have briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even
the Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to
swing at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican
establishment, I venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are
as ma