criticism, but he dwelt at the same time on the necessity of the
most thorough study of the sacred Scriptures, and especially on the
importance of adjusting scriptural statements to scientific facts. This
utterance was admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation
by both sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of
view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope has
shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over the troubled
waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained from condemning any
of the greater results of modern critical study that the main English
defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father Clarke, did not hesitate
publicly to admit a multitude of such results--results, indeed, which
would shock not only Italian and Spanish Catholics, but many English
and American Protestants. According to this interpreter, the Pope had
no thought of denying the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the
plurality of sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship
of Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of St.
Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole encyclical, the
distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the power of the papacy at
any time to define out of existence any previous decisions which may
be found inconvenient. More than that, Father Clarke himself, while
standing as the champion of the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged
that, in the Old Testament, "numbers must be expected to be used
Orientally," and that "all these seventies and forties, as, for example,
when Absalom is said to have rebelled against David for forty years, can
not possibly be meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful
shock to some Protestant believers in plenary inspiration, he, while
advocating it as a dutiful Son of the Church, wove over it an exquisite
web with the declaration that "there is a human element in the Bible
pre-calculated for by the Divine."(491)

(491) For these admissions of Father Clarke, see his article The Papal
Encyclical on the Bible, in the Contemporary Review for July, 1894.

Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to be
grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances, which
perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the old and the
new than could have been framed by engineers more learned but less
astute. Evidently Pope Leo