Collected Essays, Volume V | Page 3

zeal of the Bibliolater" ceased from troubling; not yet, are the
weaker sort, even of the instructed, at rest from their fruitless toil "to
harmonise impossibilities," and "to force the generous new wine of
science into the old bottles of Judaism."
But I am aware that the head and front of my offending lies not now
where it formerly lay. Thirty years ago, criticism of "Moses" was held
by most respectable people to be deadly sin; now it has sunk to the rank
of a mere peccadillo; at least, if it stops short of the history of Abraham.
Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic Christianity
contained in the second chapter of Genesis, if you will; the new
ecclesiasticism undertakes to underpin the superstructure and make it,
at any rate to the eye, as firm as ever: but let him be anathema who
applies exactly the same canons of criticism to the opening chapters of
"Matthew" or of "Luke." School-children may be told that the world
was by no means made in six days, and that implicit belief in the story
of Noah's Ark is permissible only, as a matter of business, to their
toy-makers; but they are to hold for the certainest of truths, to be
doubted only at peril of their salvation, that their Galilean fellow-child
Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no human father.
* * * * *
Well, we will pass the item of 1860, said "the voice." But why all this
more recent coil about the Gadarene swine and the like? Do you
pretend that these poor animals got in your way, years and years after
the "Mosaic" fences were down, at any rate so far as you are
concerned?
Got in my way? Why, my good "voice," they were driven in my way. I
had happened to make a statement, than which, so far as I have ever

been able to see, nothing can be more modest or inoffensive; to wit,
that I am convinced of my own utter ignorance about a great number of
things, respecting which the great majority of my neighbours (not only
those of adult years, but children repeating their catechisms) affirm
themselves to possess full information. I ask any candid and impartial
judge, Is that attacking anybody or anything?
Yet, if I had made the most wanton and arrogant onslaught on the
honest convictions of other people, I could not have been more hardly
dealt with. The pentecostal charism, I believe, exhausted itself amongst
the earliest disciples. Yet any one who has had to attend, as I have done,
to copious objurgations, strewn with such appellations as "infidel" and
"coward," must be a hardened sceptic indeed if he doubts the existence
of a "gift of tongues" in the Churches of our time; unless, indeed, it
should occur to him that some of these outpourings may have taken
place after "the third hour of the day." I am far from thinking that it is
worth while to give much attention to these inevitable incidents of all
controversies, in which one party has acquired the mental peculiarities
which are generated by the habit of much talking, with immunity from
criticism. But as a rule, they are the sauce of dishes of
misrepresentations and inaccuracies which it may be a duty, nay, even
an innocent pleasure, to expose. In the particular case of which I am
thinking, I felt, as Strauss says, "able and called upon" to undertake the
business: and it is no responsibility of mine, if I found the Gospels,
with their miraculous stories, of which the Gadarene is a typical
example, blocking my way, as heretofore, the Pentateuch had done.
I was challenged to question the authority for the theory of "the
spiritual world," and the practical consequences deducible from human
relations to it, contained in these documents.
In my judgment, the actuality of this spiritual world--the value of the
evidence for its objective existence and its influence upon the course of
things--are matters, which lie as much within the province of science,
as any other question about the existence and powers of the varied
forms of living and conscious activity.
It really is my strong conviction that a man has no more right to say he
believes this world is haunted by swarms of evil spirits, without being
able to produce satisfactory evidence of the fact, than he has a right to
say, without adducing adequate proof, that the circumpolar antarctic ice

swarms with sea-serpents. I should not like to assert positively that it
does not. I imagine that no cautious biologist would say as much; but
while quite open to conviction, he might properly decline to waste time
upon the consideration of talk, no better accredited than forecastle
"yarns," about such monsters of the deep. And if the