r serious consideration, it remains permissible to
ask, Where and when the Church, during the period of its
infallibility, as limited by Anglican dogmatic necessities, has
officially decreed the "actual historical truth of all records" in the
Old Testament? Was Augustine heretical when he denied the actual
historical truth of the record of the Creation? Father Suarez,
standing on later Roman tradition, may have a right to declare that he
was; but it does not lie in the mouth of those who limit their appeal
to that early "antiquity," in which Augustine played so great a part,
to say so.

* * * * *

Among the watchers of the course of the world of thought, some view
with delight and some with horror, the recrudescence of
Supernaturalism which manifests itself among us, in shapes ranged
along the whole flight of steps, which, in this case, separates the
sublime from the ridiculous--from Neo-Catholicism and Inner-light
mysticism, at the top, to unclean things, not worthy of mention in the
same breath, at the bottom. In my poor opinion, the importance of
these manifestations is often greatly over-estimated. The extant forms
of Supernaturalism have deep roots in human nature, and will
undoubtedly die hard; but, in these latter days, they have to cope
with an enemy whose full strength is only just beginning to be put
out, and whose forces, gathering strength year by year, are hemming
them round on every side. This enemy is Science, in the acceptation of
systematized natural knowledge, which, during the last two centuries,
has extended those methods of investigation, the worth of which is
confirmed by daily appeal to Nature, to every region in which the
Supernatural has hitherto been recognised.

When scientific historical criticism reduced the annals of heroic
Greece and of regal Rome to the level of fables; when the unity of
authorship of the _Iliad_ was successfully assailed by scientific
literary criticism; when scientific physical criticism, after
exploding the geocentric theory of the universe and reducing the solar
system itself to one of millions of groups of like cosmic specks,
circling, at unimaginable distances from one another through infinite
space, showed the supernaturalistic theories of the duration of the
earth and of life upon it, to be as inadequate as those of its
relative dimensions and importance had been; it needed no prophetic
gift to see that, sooner or later, the Jewi