out over them) are both popular and learned science in their criticism of the Bible. And for the learned science one feels no tenderness, because it has gone wrong with a great parade of exactitude and philosophy; whereas all it really did was to take the magnified and non-natural Man of popular religion as God, and to take Jesus as his son, and then to state the relations between them metaphysically. No difficulties suggested by the popular science of religion has this learned science ever removed, and it has created plenty of its own.
But for the popular science of religion one has, or ought to have, an infinite tenderness. It is the spontaneous work of nature. It is the travail of the human mind to adapt to its grasp and employment great ideas of which it feels the attraction, but for which, except as given to it by this travail, it would have been immature. The imperfect science of the Bible, formulated in the so-called Apostles' Creed, was the only vehicle by which, to generation after generation of men, the method and secret of Jesus could gain any access; and in this sense we may even call it, taking the point of view of popular theology, providential. And this rude criticism is full of poetry, and in this poetry we have been all nursed. To call it, as many of our philosophical Liberal friends are fond of calling it, 'a degrading superstition,' is as untrue, as it is a poor compliment to human nature, which produced this criticism and used it. It is an Aberglaube, or extra belief and fairy-tale, produced by taking certain great names and great promises too literally and materially; but it is not a degrading superstition.
Protestants, on their part, have no difficulty in calling the Catholic doctrine of the mass 'a degrading superstition.' It is indeed a rude and blind criticism of Jesus Christ's words: He that eateth me shall live by me. But once admit the miracle of the 'atoning sacrifice,' once move in this
