as has been said,
supplied really the basal authority for the whole Protestant order, and
speaking merely as a historian one is well within the facts when one
says that even before the enlightenment of the last two generations the
traditional way of thinking about the Bible had not proved satisfactory.
The more free-minded were conscious of its contradictions; they could
not reconcile its earlier and later moral idealisms; they found in it as
much to perplex as to help them. Some of them, therefore, disowned it
altogether and because it was tied up in one bundle with religion, as
they knew religion, they disowned religion at the same time. Others who
accepted its authority but were unsatisfied with current interpretations
of it sought escape in allegorical uses of it. (We shall find this to be
one of the distinct elements in Christian Science.) But after all it did
answer the insistent questions, Whence? and Whither? and Why? as nothing
else answered them. Therefore, in spite of challenge and derelict faith
and capricious interpretations and forced harmonies it still held its
own. Directly science began to offer its own answers to Whence? and
Whither? and Why? curiosity found an alternative. Science had its own
book of genesis, its own hypothesis as to the creation of man, its own
conclusions as to his ascent. These had a marvellously emancipating and
stimulating power; they opened, as has been said, vast horizons; they
affected philosophy; they gave a new content to poetry, for the poet
heard in the silences of the night:

"AEonian music measuring out
The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance--
The blows of Death."

The challenge of science to the book of Genesis specifically and to the
miraculous narratives with which both the Old and the New Testaments are
veined more generally, doubtless stimulated Biblical criticism, but the
time was ripe for that also. The beginnings of it antedate the
scientific Renaissance, but the freer spirit of the period offered
criticism its opportunity, the scientific temper supplied the method and
the work began.

Inherited faith has been more directly affected by Biblical criticism
than by the result of scientific investigation and the generalizations
based thereon. The Bible had been the average man's authority in science
and history as well as faith. That statement naturally needs some
qualification, for before evolution took the field it was possible n