ries, the members of which have appeared one after another. Thus,
far from confirming the account in Genesis, the results of modern
science, so far as they go, are in principle, as in detail, hopelessly
discordant with it.

Yet, if the pretensions to infallibility set up, not by the ancient
Hebrew writings themselves, but by the ecclesiastical champions and
friends from whom they may well pray to be delivered, thus shatter
themselves against the rock of natural knowledge, in respect of the
two most important of all events, the origin of things and the
palingenesis of terrestrial life, what historical credit dare any
serious thinker attach to the narratives of the fabrication of Eve, of
the Fall, of the commerce between the _Bene Elohim_ and the daughters
of men, which lie between the creational and the diluvial legends?
And, if these are to lose all historical worth, what becomes of the
infallibility of those who, according to the later scriptures, have
accepted them, argued from them, and staked far-reaching dogmatic
conclusions upon their historical accuracy?

It is the merest ostrich policy for contemporary ecclesiasticism to
try to hide its Hexateuchal head--in the hope that the inseparable
connection of its body with pre-Abrahamic legends may be overlooked.
The question will still be asked, if the first nine chapters of the
Pentateuch are unhistorical, how is the historical accuracy of the
remainder to be guaranteed? What more intrinsic claim has the story of
the Exodus than that of the Deluge, to belief? If God did not walk in
the Garden of Eden, how can we be assured that he spoke from Sinai?

* * * * *

In some other of the following essays (IX., X., XI., XII., XIV., XV.)
I have endeavoured to show that sober and well-founded physical and
literary criticism plays no less havoc with the doctrine that the
canonical scriptures of the New Testament "declare incontrovertibly
the actual historical truth in all records." We are told that the
Gospels contain a true revelation of the spiritual world--a
proposition which, in one sense of the word "spiritual," I should not
think it necessary to dispute. But, when it is taken to signify that
everything we are told about the world of spirits in these books is
infallibly true; that we are bound to accept the demonology which
constitutes an inseparable part of their teaching; and to profess
belief in a Supernaturalism as gross as that of any