at this new interlude. The chairman looked
grateful; the bishop leaned forward.

"But the 'Civilta Cattolica,'" said Father Duff, "which we may regard as
official, says, in its review of the same book: 'Biblical history cannot
be any longer stated except in agreement with the true and correct
teaching of the Bible and the reasonable conclusions of the natural
sciences.'"

"Quite so," said Father Letheby, "that applies to the certain
discoveries of geology and astronomy. But surely you don't maintain that
philology, which only affects us just now, is an exact science."

"Just as exact as the other sciences you have mentioned."

"That is, as exact as a mathematical demonstration?"

"Quite so."

"Come now," said my curate, like a fellow that was sure of himself,
"that's going too far."

"Not at all," said Father Duff; "I maintain that the evidence of history
on the one hand, and the external evidence of monuments on the other,
combined with the internal evidence of Scriptural idiomatisms of time
and place, are equivalent to a mathematical demonstration."

"You'll admit, I suppose," said Father Letheby, "that languages change
their structures and meanings very often?"

"Certainly."

"The English of Shakespeare is not ours."

"Quite so."

"Even words have come to have exactly antithetical meanings, even in a
lapse of three hundred years."

"Very good."

"And it is said that, owing to accretions, the language we speak will be
unintelligible in a hundred years' time."

"Possibly."

"Now, would you not say that a contemporary of Shakespeare's would be a
better judge of his poetry and its allusive and natural meaning than
ever so learned a linguist, after an interval of change?"

"Well, I should say so. I don't know where you are drifting."

"What is the reason that we never heard of these 'internal evidences,'
these 'historical coincidences,' these 'exclusive idioms,' from Origen
or Dionysius, or from Jerome or Augustine, from any one of the Fathers,
who held what we hold, and what the Church has always taught, about the
authorship of the Sacred Books, and to whom Hebrew and Greek were
vernacular?"

"But, my dear sir, there are evident interpolations even in the
Gospels. Do you really mean to tell me that that canticle of the
_Magnificat_ was uttered by a young Hebrew girl on Hebron, and was not
rather the deliberate poetical conception of the author of St. Luke's
Gospel?"

I jumped from my seat; but