rs to the still, small, voice of reason, to escape from the
fetters which ecclesiasticism has forged; the melancholy fact remains,
that the position they have taken up is hopelessly untenable. It is
raked alike by the old-fashioned artillery of the churches and by
the fatal weapons of precision with which the _enfants perdus_ of the
advancing forces of science are armed. They must surrender, or fall back
into a more sheltered position. And it is possible that they may long
find safety in such retreat.

It is, indeed, probable that the proportional number of those who will
distinctly profess their belief in the transubstantiation of Lot's wife,
and the anticipatory experience of submarine navigation by Jonah; in
water standing fathoms deep on the side of a declivity without anything
to hold it up; and in devils who enter swine--will not increase. But
neither is there ground for much hope that the proportion of those who
cast aside these fictions and adopt the consequence of that repudiation,
are, for some generations, likely to constitute a majority. Our age is
a day of compromises. The present and the near future seem given over
to those happily, if curiously, constituted people who see as little
difficulty in throwing aside any amount of post-Abrahamic Scriptural
narrative, as the authors of "Lux Mundi" see in sacrificing the
pre-Abrahamic stories; and, having distilled away every inconvenient
matter of fact in Christian history, continue to pay divine honours to
the residue. There really seems to be no reason why the next generation
should not listen to a Bampton Lecture modelled upon that addressed to
the last:--

Time was--and that not very long ago--when all the relations of
Biblical authors concerning the whole world were received with a
ready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith accepted
with equal satisfaction the narrative of the Captivity and the
doings of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, the account of the
Apostolic meeting in the Epistle to the Galatians, and that of
the fabrication of Eve. We can most of us remember when, in this
country, the whole story of the Exodus, and even the legend of
Jonah, were seriously placed before boys as history; and
discoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of Agincourt or
the history of the Norman Conquest.

But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the
growth of scientific criticism to its full strength.