methods were like Chinese gongs and dragon lanterns against rifled cannon.'1

But what has now become of the notion of some that fossil remains were due to Noah's flood? What of Scheuchzer's Homo diluvii testis (1726), which turned out to be not a drowned giant, but a harmless fossil lizard? Where are all the scores of triumphant refutations of the wicked geologists?

In all such conflicts a self-styled theology, intruding into regions of which it is profoundly nescient, exhibits nothing but its own impotence and rage. No sight is more distressing than that of religious teachers who, knowing little of anything, and nothing of science, and not exhibiting the smallest sign of moral elevation over others, but often very much the reverse, assume oracular airs of superiority over the patient students of God's works. Nothing but rout has ever followed such attempted usurpations. Whatever inferences may have been drawn from the misapplication of the narrative of creation, there is no sane person who now believes that the world was made in six solar days; or that the trees and plants were created before there was any sunlight; or that all the stars were created after the earth was covered with vegetation; or that all the fishes and birds were created previ

&c. See Lecky, England in the Eighteenth Century, ch. ix.; Lyell, Introduction to Principles of Geology.

1 The favourite weapon of the "orthodox" party was the charge that the geologists were "attacking the truth of God." They denounced geology as "a dark art," "dangerous and disreputable," "infernal artillery," "an awful evasion of the testimony of Revelation." This attempt to scare men from the science having failed ... it is humiliating to human nature to remember the annoyances, and even trials, to which the pettiest and narrowest of men subjected such scholars as Silliman, Hitchcock, and Louis Agassiz.'-Dr. White.

ously to all quadrupeds and reptiles; or a multitude of other details which have been inferred from regarding the first chapter of Genesis as a scientific document instead of regarding it as a religious revelation. It is now understood by competent inquirers that geology is God's revelation to us of one set of truths, and Genesis of quite another.

vi. Again, which of us does not remember the burst of scorn and hatred with which the theory of evolution was first received? Mr. Darwin endured the fury of pulpits and Church Congresses with quiet dignity. Not one angry or contemptuous word escaped him. The high example of patient magnanimity and Christian forbearance was set by him; the savage denunciations and fierce insolence came from those who should have set a better example. What has happened since then? The hypothesis of evolution, taken in its whole extent, is still an hypothesis only. Proofs final and decisive are confessedly wanting. On the admission of its supporters links are still missing from the evidence in its favour. Yet before Mr. Darwin's life was over two things had happened. On the one hand his hypothesis had been accepted as a luminous guide to inquiry by the large majority of the leading scientists of Europe and America; and even those who reject its extreme inferences fully admit that it rests on a wide induction and furnishes an explanation for many phenomena. That there is such a law as that of natural selection in the struggle for existence all are now agreed. Further, the theory of evolution has now been admitted as a possible explanation of the phenomena of life by leading theologians, and we have been told on all sides that, if it should prove to be true, there is nothing in it which is contrary to the creeds of the Catholic faith. Not a voice was raised

in opposition when Mr. Darwin was laid with a nation's approval in his honoured grave in Westminster Abbey; and-seeing how noble was his example, how gentle and pure his character, how simple his devotion to truth, how deep his studies, how memorable his discoveries, even apart from the view which is mainly associated with his nameI regarded it as an honour that I was asked to be one of the bearers of his pall, and to preach his funeral sermon in the nave of 'the great temple of silence and reconciliation.'

vii. The dim and furious battle between science and that which was mistaken for religion has been chiefly waged over the first chapter of Genesis. That chapter is of transcendent value, and in a few lines corrected the Idolatry, the Polytheism, the Atheism, the Pantheism, the Ditheism, the Agnosticism, the Pessimism of millions of mankind. No science has ever collided with, or can ever modify its true and deep object, which was to set right an erring world in the supremely important knowledge that there was one God and Father of us all, the Creator of heaven and earth, a God who saw all things which He has made, and pronounced them to be very good. It was written to substitute simplicity for monstrous complications, and peace for wild terrors, and hope for blank despair.

It is not worth while to expose again the absurdities distorted out of this great chapter by its professed commentators. I have shown in my Bampton Lectures the masses of folly educed from it by the systematised and fatal art of Jewish and Christian misinterpretation.1 They who will may there read the trivialities, heresies, and forced inferences, for which the very first verse of it was made responsible by the Talmudists, by Philo, by the 1 History of Interpretation (Bampton Lectures, 1885), pp. 36–41.

Fathers, by the Kabbalists, by Pico of Mirandola, and many more. St. Augustine, far wiser in some of his general remarks than in the minutiae of his detailed explanations, truly says that 'the Sense of Scripture is Scripture;' but by giving it a wrong sense,' says Bishop Wordsworth, 'men make God's word become their own word, or even the Tempter's word, and then Scripture is used for our destruction, instead of making us wise unto salvation.'1 1 Miscellanies, ii. 17.

CHAPTER XIII

THE BIBLE NOT THE ONLY SOURCE FROM WHICH

WE CAN LEARN OF GOD.

The fulness of Him who filleth all in all.'-Eph. i. 23.

'God hath filled all things, and hath penetrated all things, and hath left nothing empty or void of Himself.'-PHILO, De Legg. Allegg. iii. 2.

'One accent of the Holy Ghost

The heedless world has never lost.'-EMERSON.

"Three volumes he assiduously perused,

Which heavenly wisdom and delight infused,

God's works, his conscience, and the Book inspired.'
BISHOP KEN, Hymnotheo.

It was the once widely current saying of Chillingworth that 'the Bible and the Bible only is the religion of Protestants.'

The phrase was far from accurate; for how can a book be a religion?

Many definitions of religion have been attempted. It has been called 'a likeness to God according to our ability' (Plato); 'reverence to the moral law as a divine command' (Kant); 'the union of the Finite with the Infinite' (Schelling); 'the whole duty of man' (Jeremy Taylor); 'submission with homage' (Holbeach). The essence of it has been said to consist 'in the sense of an open secret which