But neither is there ground for much hope that the proportion of
those who cast aside these fictions and adopt the consequence of
that repudiation, are, for some generations, likely to
constitute a majority. Our age is a day of compromises. The
present and the near future seem given over to those happily, if
curiously, constituted people who see as little difficulty in
throwing aside any amount of post-Abrahamic Scriptural
narrative, as the authors of "Lux Mundi" see in sacrificing the
pre-Abrahamic stories; and, having distilled away every
inconvenient matter of fact in Christian history, continue to
pay divine honours to the residue. There really seems to be no
reason why the next generation should not listen to a Bampton
Lecture modelled upon that addressed to the last:--


Time was--and that not very long ago--when all the relations of
Biblical authors concerning the whole world were received with a
ready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith accepted
with equal satisfaction the narrative of the Captivity and the
doings of Moses at the court of Pharaoh, the account of the
Apostolic meeting in the Epistle to the Galatians, and that of
the fabrication of Eve. We can most of us remember when, in this
country, the whole story of the Exodus, and even the legend of
Jonah, were seriously placed before boys as history; and
discoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of Agincourt or
the history of the Norman Conquest.

But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the
growth of scientific criticism to its full strength. The whole
world of history has been revolutionised and the mythology which