ore and more convinced that I suffer, not from a
shiny or showy impertinence, but from a simplicity that verges upon
imbecility. I think more and more that I must be very dull, and that
everybody else in the modern world must be very clever. I have just been
reading this important compilation, sent to me in the name of a number
of men for whom I have a high respect, and called "New Theology and
Applied Religion." And it is literally true that I have read through
whole columns of the things without knowing what the people were talking
about. Either they must be talking about some black and bestial religion
in which they were brought up, and of which I never even heard, or else
they must be talking about some blazing and blinding vision of God which
they have found, which I have never found, and which by its very
splendour confuses their logic and confounds their speech. But the best
instance I can quote of the thing is in connection with this matter of
the business of physical science on the earth, of which I have just
spoken. The following words are written over the signature of a man
whose intelligence I respect, and I cannot make head or tail of them--

"When modern science declared that the cosmic process knew nothing of a
historical event corresponding to a Fall, but told, on the contrary, the
story of an incessant rise in the scale of being, it was quite plain
that the Pauline scheme--I mean the argumentative processes of Paul's
scheme of salvation--had lost its very foundation; for was not that
foundation the total depravity of the human race inherited from their
first parents?.... But now there was no Fall; there was no total
depravity, or imminent danger of endless doom; and, the basis gone, the
superstructure followed."

It is written with earnestness and in excellent English; it must mean
something. But what can it mean? How could physical science prove that
man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do
not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of
depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall?
What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a
fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages
would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a
slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is
simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite untrue in
themselves and