mass of fiction. The book of Judith is regarded as a mere romance, as also the more edifying book of Tobias, which was apparently unknown to Josephus, and is first mentioned by Clement of Rome.

14

Such is what I believe to be a fair statement of the results and views at which the more learned and accomplished of modern Biblical critics have, up to this time, arrived. It is of course impossible here to give the evidence adduced in support of the views. cited. It may be confidently affirmed, however, that they seem satisfactorily to solve a number of problems which otherwise appear insoluble. It is as if the pieces of a broken mosaic had been so put together as to form a picture which by the harmony of its parts shows that the fragments composing it have been properly adjusted. Moreover, a refutation of these views has not even been seriously attempted by Catholics. Nevertheless, as I before said, 'Exegesis is not my study.' It would be a monstrous presumption on my part to affect to judge about dates and details of authorship where such questions hang upon nice points of scholarship. I would not therefore be understood to accept and endorse all the views I have just presented to my readers. Indeed I should be inclined strongly to suspect that many of them will be found to require much modification in detail, and some portions of them may be rash, exaggerated, or even quite erroneous. Yet there can, I venture to think, be little doubt that, in the main, they represent the truth, and certainly are, at any rate, indefinitely nearer to it than are the older beliefs which are still most widely accepted in the Christian world and were universally accepted till the middle of the last century. Though long aware in a general way that Biblical criticism was making great advances, I had paid little attention to the subject, because I was under the impression that a good knowledgeof Hebrew was a necessary condition for being able to form any satisfactory judgments respecting it. Nevertheless in my former paper I took occasion incidentally to point out 15 that the freedom for Catholics' so happily gained, through Galileo, for astronomical science, has, of course, been gained for all science-geology, biology, sociology, political economy, history, and Biblical criticism-for whatever, in fact, comes within the reach of human inductive research and is capable of verification.' Since writing these words my attention happens to have been strongly called to the labours of modern critics, and I find that it is quite possible to form satisfactory judgments about many Biblical matters, and especially about the main results of modern criticism, without having any recourse to the Hebrew tongue. It has been with great reluctance, and only after much anxious inquiry, that I have come to recognise the necessity for grave modification in the Biblical views generally received, and nothing but a conviction of imperative duty has impelled me (in deference to the advice of learned theologians having strong claims on 14 Loc. cit. p. 43. 15 Ibid. p. 41.

6

my acquiescence) to call attention to the results of modern criticism. Those results, as above stated, are certainly strangely different from the views which are still commonly taught to Catholics and to the great majority of English Christians. Nevertheless it would, I think, be a mistake to suppose that their perusal would have, at first, much effect upon the English Catholic laity. They are commonly so little acquainted with Scripture that I should not be surprised if some of them were even disposed to chuckle over a disproof of the Bible's truth as being a matter likely to dish' the Protestants, and so to make their own religious position more secure and more evidently the true one. With Catholic ecclesiastics, however, it will of course be a very different matter, and especially with some of those venerable from age and of high position in the hierarchy. Certainly to them, the appearance of a serried phalanx of calm and learned critics, who without haste, but without hesitation, advance views as to the Bible which are more and more startling, and which seem utterly incompatible with the old traditional beliefs, must be an unwelcome apparition. The outlook does certainly, at first sight, seem very threatening; for those traditional beliefs repose on positive decrees of the Councils of Trent and of the Vatican. The Council of Trent anathematised, indeed, all those who denied that the sacred books, with all their parts, were 'sacred and canonical.' For all that it did not define the meaning of those two terms which admitted several wide interpretations. The Vatican Council, however, has drawn the lines much closer,16 and has declared that it is not enough to affirm those books with all their parts to be sacred and canonical as approved by the Church,' or 'as containing revelation free from error,' but that they must be held to be such for the reason that they, being written under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, have God for their Author and have been presented to us, as such, by the Church.'

As to the meaning of having God for their author,' one of the most distinguished and generally deferred to of recent theologians, Cardinal Franzelin, has said :

If in the (inspired) book there were inserted by the human writer any statement, even though true, which God had not inspired him to write, much more if ... there were contained therein statements not in themselves true (as a recent theologian has dared to affirm to be possible concerning those matters which we have called 'revealed per accidens'), then God would not be the author of these statements.

16 Qui quidem veteris et novi Testamenti libri integri cum omnibus suis partibus prout in ejusdem Concilii [of Trent] decreto recensentur, et in veteri Vulgata latina editione habentur, pro sacris et canonicis suscipiendi sunt. Eos vero Ecclesia pro sacris et canonicis habet, non ideo quod sola humana industria concinnati, sua deinde auctoritate sint approbati; nec ideo dumtaxat, quod revelationem sine errore contineant; sed propterea quod Spiritu Sancto inspirante conscripti Deum habent auctorem, atque ut tales ipsi Ecclesiæ traditi sunt.'-From the Constitution Dei Filius,' as printed at Parma, 'typis rev. Cam. Apostolicæ,' 1870.

Further than this, great importance is attached to what is called 'the consensus of theologians' and the ordinary magisterium or teaching of the Church,' and there can be no question but that a 'consensus' of the kind may be quoted in favour of a rigorous view, such as is ordinarily taught to Catholics, about the authority and inspiration of every one of the canonical books, amongst which are some of those known to Protestants as the Apocrypha. The danger of conflict seems also all the greater because the Church habitually appeals to texts of Scripture in support of her own authority, and therefore might hardly be expected to allow the authenticity of those texts to be called in question by modern Biblical criticism. It would seem, then, to be an impossible thing that the highest authority at Rome should even silently tolerate such views as those which have been above quoted as the latest results of modern historical science. Here, then, we seem to have reason to expect a combat to the death. But a little patient consideration of past experiences may make those confident of a fatal issue pause in their sinister vaticinations.

That we may be the better able to estimate what may be in store for us in the future as to this matter, let us briefly consider certain analogous facts of past history. There have been three conspicuous instances in which the Church seemed committed to views which science afterwards showed to be untrue; one as regards the celestial spheres; another as regards the structure of the earth; and the third respecting the world's living inhabitants.

It is not probable that science will again be the occasion of so great a disturbance to prevalent pious beliefs' as when it first introduced heliocentric astronomy to the Christian world. The earlier notion of the universe had in its favour alike the convictions of the learned, the plain meaning of the sacred books, and the enormous force of a habit of thought entertained from immemorial antiquity. More than that, the whole conception of a heaven above' a world beneath the surface of which lay the abyss of hell, harmonised with a religious teaching which represented that world as the centre of creation, and as formed purposely to be the abode of man, the one special object of the Creator's care and predilection. Yet the uprooting of this whole physical conception, far from destroying the Church, seemed to demonstrate experimentally that it had been so preorganised as to be be successfully to withstand even so vast a change.

This great astronomical revolution of the seventeenth century was followed by a geological revolution in the eighteenth. The views which science then brought forward about the natural genesis of this planet, its vast age and the gradual formation of its crust, accompanied by changes on its surface out of all relation with the six creative days of Genesis, mightily scandalised the weak. Buffon

had to recant in obedience to the Sorbonne, while other men of science were censured and reproached. Some persons, with imprudent confidence in seemingly established views, even ventured to treat the geologists of their day either with fierce scorn or with mild irony, like our own gentle poet, who complained of those who ransacked the bowels of the earth to prove that the God who made it, and revealed its date to Moses, was mistaken in its age.' It must, however, be allowed, as has been allowed by our illustrious Sir Charles Lyell, not only that Catholic teachers had no monopoly of narrowness in this matter, but that some of them contrasted favourably with ministers of other denominations. Italians of the strictest orthodoxy freely ridiculed narrow Biblical cosmologies such as those of our Bishop Burnet. Vallisneri exclaimed against the injury inflicted on religion, no less than on science, by such a use of texts. Generelli, a Carmelite friar, addressing, in 1749, a learned assembly at Cremona, observed: 'I hold in utter abomination, most learned academicians, those systems which are built with their foundations in the air, and cannot be propped up without a miracle; and I undertake to explain geological phenomena without violence, without fiction, without hypotheses, and without miracles.' No wonder, when such a spirit animated distinguished members of its clergy, that the Church passed safely through this second scientific ordeal. So complete has been its adjustment to modern science in our day, that no doctor of divinity would now venture to maintain the theological certitude of the universality of the deluge, even as regards the human race, or to censure any geological view whatever.

The third scientific ordeal which the Church has undergone is the promulgation and general acceptance of the doctrine of evolution; and this probably supplies us with as good a test as could be devised of the Church's capacity to survive future developments of science. Till the other day, the belief that all existing kinds of animals and plants were miraculously and suddenly created, as affirmed in Genesis, was generally accepted; and of course the writers of the Middle Ages were all thoroughly imbued with it. Here, then, we might well expect to find the Church of to-day bound by antecedent authoritative statements which it could not repudiate. Yet the very reverse is, in fact, the case, and the actual words of early and mediæval ecclesiastical writers of authority may be quoted 17 in favour of the modern doctrine.

Viewing, then, th present situation in the light to be derived from past experience, it seems to me that even an ordinary external observer will find that he has no valid reason for concluding that the Catholic Church is on the eve of shipwreck, through history, when he considers what has before taken place as regards Copernicanism in.

17 See my Lessons from Nature (John Murray), p. 448.

astronomy and evolution in biology. Who, in pre-Copernican times -say the thirteenth century-would have expected that the Church. could accommodate itself to so great a change in all its ways and habits of regarding the Universe? Who, in the sixteenth century, would have deemed it possible for the Church to allow that her doctrines concerning the Biblical narrative of the creation of Adam and the miraculous formation of Eve from his rib, could accord with a belief that the ribs of both Adam and Eve were formed by natural generation in the womb of some non-human animal? Yet we have lived to witness both these events. Why, then, may it not be that, as regards Biblical criticism, we are living in what may, by analogy, be called a pre-Copernican period? The Biblical teachings of Kuenen, Wellhausen, Colenso, Reuss, and their allies, may startle and offend 'pious ears,' now, as the doctrines of the earth's motion and of Adam's brute ancestry would have startled and offended the 'pious ears' of bygone generations; but it is at least conceivable that the alarm at present felt is as groundless as we now know the alarm of older days to have been.

But, it may be replied, 'these instances refer to physical science, whereas the interpretation of Scripture pertains to the domain of moral truth.' Well, in matters of morals, what could have been more unequivocal than the most authoritative and distinct decrees of popes and councils against usury? Yet, what ecclesiastic has now a single word to say against it?

It may, however, yet further be objected that I have taken no notice of the fact that the Church often refers to Scripture as a support for various doctrines and a sanction for matters of discipline. This is most true; but the consequences which such an objection supposes to follow from the fact, are by no means necessary consequences, as experience shows us. Every competent person knows that it is freely admitted by all theologians that even Ecumenical Councils and Popes may err in quoting Scripture in support of their decrees. The failure of the basis on which a decree, opinion, or practice may have been based by no means discredits the decree, opinion, or practice itself. It may suffice, in this matter, to refer to what happened with respect to the famous forged decretals.' Matters both of doctrine and discipline were largely based upon them and received very efficient support from them. The authenticity of the decretals was long defended. It was maintained by a distinguished Jesuit, Father Turrianus, in 1572, and even in the seventeenth century Father Liberius à Jesu (a leading Carmelite of his day, high in favour with Pope Clement the Eleventh) was zealous in their defence. Now, however, everyone admits them to have been forgeries. Yet, not a single point of doctrine or matter of discipline which they were invoked to support has fallen with them!

The mystical theology of the Church has been largely built up