"
But I am aware that the head and front of my offending lies not now
where it formerly lay. Thirty years ago, criticism of "Moses" was held
by most respectable people to be deadly sin; now it has sunk to the
rank of a mere peccadillo; at least, if it stops short of the history
of Abraham. Destroy the foundation of most forms of dogmatic
Christianity contained in the second chapter of Genesis, if you will;
the new ecclesiasticism undertakes to underpin the superstructure and
make it, at any rate to the eye, as firm as ever: but let him be
anathema who applies exactly the same canons of criticism to the
opening chapters of "Matthew" or of "Luke." School-children may be
told that the world was by no means made in six days, and that
implicit belief in the story of Noah's Ark is permissible only, as a
matter of business, to their toy-makers; but they are to hold for the
certainest of truths, to be doubted only at peril of their salvation,
that their Galilean fellow-child Jesus, nineteen centuries ago, had no
human father.
* * * * *
Well, we will pass the item of 1860, said "the voice." But why all
this more recent coil about the Gadarene swine and the like? Do you
pretend that these poor animals got in your way, years and years after
the "Mosaic" fences were down, at any rate so far as you are
concerned?
Got in my way? Why, my good "voice," they were driven in my way.
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