present course.

In the article on "The Dawn of Creation and Worship," it will be
remembered that Mr. Gladstone unreservedly commits himself to
three propositions. The first is that, according to the writer
of the Pentateuch, the "water-population," the "air-population,"
and the "land-population" of the globe were created
successively, in the order named. In the second place, Mr.
Gladstone authoritatively asserts that this (as part of his
"fourfold order") has been "so affirmed in our time by natural
science, that it may be taken as a demonstrated conclusion and
established fact." In the third place, Mr. Gladstone argues that
the fact of this coincidence of the pentateuchal story with the
results of modern investigation makes it "impossible to avoid
the conclusion, first, that either this writer was gifted with
faculties passing all human experience, or else his knowledge
was divine." And having settled to his own satisfaction that the
first "branch of the alternative is truly nominal and unreal,"
Mr. Gladstone continues, "So stands the plea for a revelation of
truth from God, a plea only to be met by questioning its
possibility" (p. 697).

I am a simple-minded person, wholly devoid of subtlety of
intellect, so that I willingly admit that there may be depths of
alternative meaning in these propositions out of all soundings
attainable by my poor plummet. Still there are a good many
people who suffer under a like intellectual limitation; and, for
once in my life, I feel that I have the chance of attaining that
position of a representative of average opinion which appears to
be the modern ideal of a leader of men, when I make free