er the fact that a good deal of the medieval building
in Peterborough Cathedral was found to be flagrant jerry-building as
a criticism of the Dean's sermons. For good or evil, we have made
a synthesis out of the literature we call the Bible; and though the
discovery that there is a good deal of jerry-building in the Bible
is interesting in its way, because everything about the Bible is
interesting, it does not alter the synthesis very materially even for
the paleographers, and does not alter it at all for those who know
no more about modern paleography than Archbishop Ussher did. I have
therefore indicated little more of the discoveries than Archbishop
Ussher might have guessed for himself if he had read the Bible without
prepossessions.

For the rest, I have taken the synthesis as it really lives and works in
men. After all, a synthesis is what you want: it is the case you have to
judge brought to an apprehensible issue for you. Even if you have
little more respect for synthetic biography than for synthetic rubber,
synthetic milk, and the still unachieved synthetic protoplasm which
is to enable us to make different sorts of men as a pastry cook makes
different sorts of tarts, the practical issue still lies as plainly
before you as before the most credulous votaries of what pontificates as
the Higher Criticism.

THE PERILS OF SALVATIONISM.

The secular view of Jesus is powerfully reinforced by the increase in
our day of the number of people who have had the means of educating and
training themselves to the point at which they are not afraid to look
facts in the face, even such terrifying facts as sin and death. The
result is greater sternness in modern thought. The conviction is
spreading that to encourage a man to believe that though his sins be
as scarlet he can be made whiter than snow by an easy exercise of
self-conceit, is to encourage him to be a rascal. It did not work so
badly when you could also conscientiously assure him that if he let
himself be caught napping in the matter of faith by death, a red-hot
hell would roast him alive to all eternity. In those days a sudden
death--the most enviable of all deaths--was regarded as the most
frightful calamity. It was classed with plague, pestilence, and famine,
battle and murder, in our prayers. But belief in that hell is fast
vanishing. All the leaders of thought have lost it; and even for the
rank and file it has fled to those parts of Ireland and Scotland