ure of the Controverted Question of the age. They
are awake to the unquestionable fact that, if Scripture has been
discovered "not to be worthy of unquestioning belief," faith "in the
supernatural itself" is, so far, undermined. And I may congratulate
myself upon such weighty confirmation of opinion in which I have had the
fortune to anticipate them. But whether it is more to the credit of the
courage, than to the intelligence, of the thirty-eight that they should
go on to proclaim that the canonical scriptures of the Old and New
Testaments "declare incontrovertibly the actual historical truth in all
records, both of past events and of the delivery of predictions to be
thereafter fulfilled," must be left to the coming generation to decide.

The interest which attaches to this singular document will, I think, be
based by most thinking men, not upon what it is, but upon that of which
it is a sign. It is an open secret, that the memorial is put forth as a
counterblast to a manifestation of opinion of a contrary character, on
the part of certain members of the same ecclesiastical body, who
therefore have, as I suppose, an equal right to declare themselves
"stewards of the Lord and recipients of the Holy Ghost." In fact, the
stream of tendency towards Naturalism, the course of which I have
briefly traced, has, of late years, flowed so strongly, that even the
Churches have begun, I dare not say to drift, but, at any rate, to swing
at their moorings. Within the pale of the Anglican establishment, I
venture to doubt, whether, at this moment, there are as many
thorough-going defenders of "plenary inspiration" as there were timid
questioners of that doctrine, half a century ago. Commentaries,
sanctioned by the highest authority, give up the "actual historical
truth" of the cosmogonical and diluvial narratives. University
professors of deservedly high repute accept the critical decision that
the Hexateuch is a compilation, in which the share of Moses, either as
author or as editor, is not quite so clearly demonstrable as it might
be; highly placed Divines tell us that the pre-Abrahamic Scripture
narratives may be ignored; that the book of Daniel may be regarded as a
patriotic romance of the second century B.C.; that the words of the
writer of the fourth Gospel are not always to be distinguished from
those which he puts into the mouth of Jesus. Conservative, but
conscientious, revisers decide that whole passages, some of dogmatic an