t Christianity will survive; and this faith
his opponents fully share.(505)

(505) As an example of courtesy between theologic opponents may be cited
the controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley, Principal Gore's
Bampton Lectures for 1891, and Bishop Ellicott's Charges, published in
1893.

To the fact that the suppression of personal convictions among "the
enlightened" did not cease with the Medicean popes there are many
testimonies. One especially curious was mentioned to the present writer
by a most honoured diplomatist and scholar at Rome. While this gentleman
was looking over the books of an eminent cardinal, recently deceased,
he noticed a series of octavos bearing on their backs the title "Acta
Apostolorum." Surprised at such an extension of the Acts of Apostles, he
opened a volume and found the series to be the works of Voltaire. As to
a similar condition of things in the Church of England may be cited
the following from Froude's Erasmus: "I knew various persons of high
reputation a few years ago who thought at the bottom very much as Bishop
Colenso thought, who nevertheless turned and rent him to clear their own
reputations--which they did not succeed in doing." See work cited, close
of Lecture XI.

VI. RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM.

For all this dissolving away of traditional opinions regarding our
sacred literature, there has been a cause far more general and powerful
than any which has been given, for it is a cause surrounding and
permeating all. This is simply the atmosphere of thought engendered by
the development of all sciences during the last three centuries.

Vast masses of myth, legend, marvel, and dogmatic assertion, coming into
this atmosphere, have been dissolved and are now dissolving quietly away
like icebergs drifted into the Gulf Stream. In earlier days, when some
critic in advance of his time insisted that Moses could not have
written an account embracing the circumstances of his own death, it was
sufficient to answer that Moses was a prophet; if attention was called
to the fact that the great early prophets, by all which they did and
did not do, showed that there could not have existed in their time
any "Levitical code," a sufficient answer was "mystery"; and if the
discrepancy was noted between the two accounts of creation in Genesis,
or between the genealogies or the dates of the crucifixion in the
Gospels, the cogent reply was "infidelity." But