Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 24.djvu/803

Rh does not profess that these doctrines can stand by themselves apart from a belief in revelation. The issue between the bishop and those whom he styles agnostics is not really as to these two abstract doctrines, but as to the validity of the whole miraculous system of which his lordship is a responsible exponent. If we can imagine a person simply holding, as the result of his own individual reasonings or other mental experiences, a belief in God as a spiritual existence animating and presiding over the works of Nature, and a further belief in a future existence for the human soul, I do not see that there would necessarily be any conflict between him and the most advanced representatives of modern thought. No, the trouble does not begin here. The trouble arises when these beliefs are presented as part and parcel of a supernatural system miraculously revealed to mankind, and embracing details which bring it plainly into conflict with the known facts and laws of Nature. To detach these two doctrines, therefore, from the system to which they belong, and put them forward as if the whole stress of modern philosophical criticism was directed against them in particular, is a controversial artifice of a rather unfair kind.

We are reminded by the right reverend author that no chain is stronger than its weakest link, and we are asked to apply the principle to the doctrine of evolution, some of the links of which his lordship has tested and found unable to bear the proper strain. The principle is undoubtedly a sound one; but has it occurred to his lordship that it is no less applicable to the net-work of doctrine in which he believes than to the doctrine of evolution? Some links of that net-work are snapping every day under no greater strain than the simple exercise of common sense by ordinary men. It is a beautiful and well-chosen position that his lordship takes up as champion of the doctrines of God and immortality against "agnostic" science; but it would have argued greater courage had the banner been planted on the miraculous narratives of the Old and New Testament. A gallant defense of the scriptural account of the taking of Jericho, of the arresting for a somewhat sanguinary purpose of the earth's rotation, of the swallowing of Jonah by a whale, and his restoration to light and liberty after three days and nights of close and very disagreeable confinement, of the comfortable time enjoyed by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fiery furnace, of the feeding of five thousand men with five loaves and two fishes and the gathering up of twelve basketfuls of the fragments—a gallant defense, I say, of these things would be very much more in order; for these are the links that criticism has attacked and which the common judgment of the nineteenth century is daily invalidating. Modern philosophy in its negative aspect is simply a revolt against the attempt to force such narratives as these upon the adult intelligence of mankind—against the absurdity of assigning to Hebrew legends of the most monstrous kind a character of credibility which would be scornfully refused to similar productions of the imagination