bout way of appealing to the tribunal, the jurisdiction of
which they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian
supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and
furnished the elephant with standing ground on the tortoise of
"antiquity," they, like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been
content to look no further; and have thereby been spared the horror of
discovering that the tortoise rests on a grievously fragile
construction, to a great extent the work of that very intellectual
operation which they anathematise and repudiate.

Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course
true that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not,
depends on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the
Christian scriptures; and that the infallibility of these depends upon
the infallibility of the judgment of the persons who selected the
books of which they are composed, out of the mass of literature
current among the early Christians. The logical acumen of Augustine
showed him that the authority of the Gospel he preached must rest on
that of the Church to which he belonged.[11] But it is no less true
that the Hebrew and the Septuagint versions of most, if not all, of
the Old Testament books existed before the birth of Jesus of Nazareth;
and that their divine authority is presupposed by, and therefore can
hardly depend upon, the religious body constituted by his disciples.
As everybody knows, the very conception of a "Christ" is purely
Jewish. The validity of the argument from the Messianic prophecies
vanishes unless their infallible authority is granted; and, as a
matter of fact, whether we turn to the Gospels, the Epistles, or the
writings of the early Apologists, the Jewish scriptures are recognised
as the highest court of appeal of the Christian.

The proposal to cite Christian "antiquity" as a witness to the
infallibility of the Old Testament, when its own claims to authority
vanish, if certain propositions contained in the Old Testament are
erroneous, hardly satisfies the requirements of lay logic. It is as if
a claimant to be sole legatee, under another kind of testament, should
offer his assertion as sufficient evidence of the validity of the
will. And, even were not such a circular, or rather rotatory,
argument, that the infallibility of the Bible is testified by the
infallible Church, whose infallibility is testified by the infallible
Bible, too absurd fo