orderly faculty that is gradually evolving a new world out of chaos; comparative philology in the place of happy or unhappy guesses by good or bad linguists; history in the place of chronicles; and the basis of a positive belief in the place of old cosmogonies or traditions of miracle. Probably few of this generation can appreciate the incalculable debt which even men of this generation have owed to the critic. Professor Agassiz, whom many still living can remember with affection and reverence, was brought up under teachers who held that God had scattered fossils about the world as a test of faith;[1] and an Oxford teacher of the highest local repute at least thirty years later published his belief that the typical vertebra—a column with lateral processes—was multiplied all over the world as a proof of the Crucifixion.[2] A little later an Oxford divine, the accredited head of a great party in the Church, was consulting with an Oxford anatomist to know if it was not possible to point to a whale that might have swallowed Jonah. Now, it is of course demonstrable that a great deal which is false may be believed without substantial injury to the reasoning powers or faith. Machiavel based a work of acute political philosophy on ten books of Livy, which are a repertory of fable, and Sir Matthew Hale combined very sound judgment as a lawyer, and Sir Thomas Browne a rather rational religion with belief in witchcraft. What we have to consider, however, is first whether men like Machiavel would not have been incomparably more useful to society if they had started from the standpoint of Niebuhr and Maine, and next whether for the mass of men such a belief as that in witchcraft, which
- ↑ Professor Agassiz told me this himself.
- ↑ Christian Ethics, by the Rev. W. Sewell.
