Collected Essays, Volume V | Page 2

perverted and disfigured out of all likeness to the original.
The simple fact is that, as I have already more than once hinted, my
story is that of the wolf and the lamb over again. I have never "gone out
of my way" to attack the Bible, or anything else: it was the dominant
ecclesiasticism of my early days, which, as I believe, without any
warrant from the Bible itself, thrust the book in my way.
I had set out on a journey, with no other purpose than that of exploring
a certain province of natural knowledge; I strayed no hair's breadth
from the course which it was my right and my duty to pursue; and yet I
found that, whatever route I took, before long, I came to a tall and
formidable-looking fence. Confident as I might be in the existence of
an ancient and indefeasible right of way, before me stood the thorny
barrier with its comminatory notice-board--"No Thoroughfare. By
order. Moses." There seemed no way over; nor did the prospect of
creeping round, as I saw some do, attract me. True there was no longer
any cause to fear the spring guns and man-traps set by former lords of
the manor; but one is apt to get very dirty going on all-fours. The only
alternatives were either to give up my journey--which I was not minded
to do--or to break the fence down and go through it.
Now I was and am, by nature, a law-abiding person, ready and willing
to submit to all legitimate authority. But I also had and have a rooted
conviction, that reasonable assurance of the legitimacy should precede

the submission; so I made it my business to look up the manorial
title-deeds. The pretensions of the ecclesiastical "Moses" to exercise a
control over the operations of the reasoning faculty in the search after
truth, thirty centuries after his age, might be justifiable; but, assuredly,
the credentials produced in justification of claims so large required
careful scrutiny.
Singular discoveries rewarded my industry. The ecclesiastical "Moses"
proved to be a mere traditional mask, behind which, no doubt, lay the
features of the historical Moses--just as many a mediæval fresco has
been hidden by the whitewash of Georgian churchwardens. And as the
æsthetic rector too often scrapes away the defacement, only to find
blurred, parti-coloured patches, in which the original design is no
longer to be traced; so, when the successive layers of Jewish and
Christian traditional pigment, laid on, at intervals, for near three
thousand years, had been removed, by even the tenderest critical
operations, there was not much to be discerned of the leader of the
Exodus.
Only one point became perfectly clear to me, namely, that Moses is not
responsible for nine-tenths of the Pentateuch; certainly not for the
legends which had been made the bugbears of science. In fact, the
fence turned out to be a mere heap of dry sticks and brushwood, and
one might walk through it with impunity: the which I did. But I was
still young, when I thus ventured to assert my liberty; and young people
are apt to be filled with a kind of _sæva indignatio_, when they
discover the wide discrepancies between things as they seem and things
as they are. It hurts their vanity to feel that they have prepared
themselves for a mighty struggle to climb over, or break their way
through, a rampart, which turns out, on close approach, to be a mere
heap of ruins; venerable, indeed, and archæologically interesting, but of
no other moment. And some fragment of the superfluous energy
accumulated is apt to find vent in strong language.
Such, I suppose, was my case, when I wrote some passages which
occur in an essay reprinted among "Darwiniana."[2] But when, not long
ago "the voice" put it to me, whether I had better not expunge, or
modify, these passages; whether, really, they were not a little too strong;
I had to reply, with all deference, that while, from a merely literary
point of view, I might admit them to be rather crude, I must stand by

the substance of these items of my expenditure. I further ventured to
express the conviction that scientific criticism of the Old Testament,
since 1860, has justified every word of the estimate of the authority of
the ecclesiastical "Moses" written at that time. And, carried away by
the heat of self-justification, I even ventured to add, that the desperate
attempt now set afoot to force biblical and post-biblical mythology into
elementary instruction, renders it useful and necessary to go on making
a considerable outlay in the same direction. Not yet, has "the
cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew" ceased to be the "incubus
of the philosopher, and the opprobrium of the orthodox;" not yet, has
"the