Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/76

66 belongs the power of deciding whether there are any agencies in the spiritual, which can produce effects upon the material, world. I suppose we shall be told presently that science can decide, by the microscope and the dissecting needle, whether the Sadducee was right in denying either angel or spirit, and the Pharisee was a fool in confessing both. Our agnostic professor may well be happy in the prospect of such unbounded knowledge being obtained by such simple means.

Then we have a very lofty boast about the hopeless position of Christian divines "raked by the fatal weapons of precision with which the enfants perdus of the advancing forces of science are armed." We are tempted to ask if Prof. Huxley himself is one of these "enfants." If so, he must have laid down his arms before he fired off this article. Anything less like a weapon of precision than that which he has shouldered in the fight, it is impossible to conceive. "Old Brown Bess"—with its clumsy bullet, its devious flight, its low penetration, and its enormous windage—is indeed almost a weapon of precision in comparison with that which Prof. Huxley here flourishes against the massive foundations of Christian belief. But, perhaps, he means rather the small arms of the modern critical school. If he does, then precision is the very last characteristic which belongs to it. Its methods are largely subjective. Here and there it may have a clearly ascertained fact to rest upon. Here and there it may have arrived at some tolerably secure results. But in the main its methods are metaphysical, resting on nothing but individual preconceptions, applying tests and private canons of interpretation which are purely arbitrary. There is no credulity like that which leads the agnostic to swallow with open mouth everything that issues from that most copious fountain of fads and follies the—inner consciousness of a German professor.

The assumption which inspires the tone of Prof. Huxley's language on this subject—that precision in research is undermining the credit of the Hebrew Scriptures—is an assumption almost comically at variance with fact. There is, in particular, one weapon of precision which has been of late working wonders in precisely the opposite direction. That weapon is the spade. And what has it been unearthing? Everywhere over that narrow strip of our planet on which its human interests have been most impressive and profound everywhere from Tyre and Sidon from Carmel and Lebanon on the west, to Babylon and Nineveh and the boundary mountains of Assyria, on the east the spade has been disentombing continuous and triumphant proof of the genuine antiquity and historical character of the Jewish books. Out of them comes the light which guides the explorer; and out of them shines the light which is reflected from his spoils. They