nce turned out to be a mere heap of dry sticks and brushwood, and
one might walk through it with impunity: the which I did. But I was
still young, when I thus ventured to assert my liberty; and young
people are apt to be filled with a kind of _saeva indignatio_, when
they discover the wide discrepancies between things as they seem and
things as they are. It hurts their vanity to feel that they have
prepared themselves for a mighty struggle to climb over, or break
their way through, a rampart, which turns out, on close approach, to
be a mere heap of ruins; venerable, indeed, and archaeologically
interesting, but of no other moment. And some fragment of the
superfluous energy accumulated is apt to find vent in strong language.

Such, I suppose, was my case, when I wrote some passages which occur
in an essay reprinted among "Darwiniana."[2] But when, not long ago
"the voice" put it to me, whether I had better not expunge, or modify,
these passages; whether, really, they were not a little too strong; I
had to reply, with all deference, that while, from a merely literary
point of view, I might admit them to be rather crude, I must stand by
the substance of these items of my expenditure. I further ventured to
express the conviction that scientific criticism of the Old Testament,
since 1860, has justified every word of the estimate of the authority
of the ecclesiastical "Moses" written at that time. And, carried away
by the heat of self-justification, I even ventured to add, that the
desperate attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical
mythology into elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary
to go on making a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet,
has "the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the
"incubus of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not
yet, has "the zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet,
are the weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their
fruitless toil "to harmonise impossibilities," and "to force the
generous new wine of science into the old bottles of Judaism."

But I am aware that the head and front of my offending lies not now
where it formerly lay. Thirty years ago, criticism of "Moses" was held
by most respectable people to be deadly sin; now it has sunk to the
rank of a mere peccadillo; at least, if it stops short of the history
of Abraham. Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic
Christianity