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 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,