some special use? And if he does, how does he account for that adaptation arising exactly when and where it is needed? Was it purely accidental? Does he worship at the shrine of the great goddess Fortuity? Where is his "passion for clearness" when all these questions are evaded? If he finds such mysteries in a purely physical science, why should he sneer at conceptions also "seen through a glass darkly" in the spiritual regions of belief? He is certainly narrower than the higher aspects even of his own pursuit. But, besides the cramping effect of all specialisms when exclusive, Prof. Huxley has most clearly approached the subject under the strongest animus. "The slings and arrows of outrageous" clerics at church congresses seem to goad him on. His one desire appears to be to trample on them. If he can here and there catch some popular divine committing himself to some argument or idea which may be ridden to the death, he hugs it with effusion. He gives it the requisite dressings of his own verbal evolution. Then turning round he endeavors to tie down the whole of Christian theology to ridiculous conclusions under the choppings of a childish logic.
But there is one thing we had a right to expect from Prof. Huxley, and that is, that when in the course of his argument he comes across questions of purely physical science, he should treat them as candidly and fairly when they are supposed to bear upon "Christian theology" as when he delivers a scientific lecture or writes an article for an encyclopædia. Yet this is just what he has failed to do in the case before us. His canons of biblical interpretation are not more crude and violent than his dealings with the discoveries of geology, and still worse, if possible, his dealings with the things which geology has not yet discovered. I proceed to define and illustrate what I mean.
Prof. Huxley selects the story of the Deluge as his particular battle-horse in the fight. He is quite right, and well within his right, in doing so. That story is special in the fact that it purports to give an account of an event within the limits of human experience, and that in doing so it narrates occurrences which may to some extent be brought within the cognizance of discovery in more than one branch of physical science. Prof. Huxley has a very definite theory as to the origin of the story. He thinks it probably arose out of some terrible inundation of the two great rivers of Mesopotamia.[1] This is quite an intelligible hypothesis, since we know from the facts of our own day, in the case of the Yellow River in China, what an enormous destruction of human life may be caused by river floods bursting in upon low, flat plains thickly peopled. But this hypothesis fails to give any adequate
- ↑ Pages 14, 15.
