My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of a remarkable document,[9] signed by as many as thirty-eight out of the twenty odd thousand clergymen of the Established Church.  It does not appear that the signataries are officially accredited spokesmen of the ecclesiastical corporation to which they belong; but I feel bound to take their word for it, that they are “stewards of the Lord, who have received the Holy Ghost,” and, therefore, to accept this memorial as evidence that, though the Evangelicism of my early days may be deposed from its place of power, though so many of the colleagues of the thirty-eight even repudiate the title of Protestants, yet the green bay tree of bibliolatry flourishes as it did sixty years ago.  And, as in those good old times, whoso refuses to offer incense to the idol is held to be guilty of “a dishonour to God,” imperilling his salvation.

It is to the credit of the perspicacity of the memorialists that they discern the real nature 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 an 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