rock of Holy Scripture, there appeared to many excellent people an urgent necessity that science should be set right, that the theory of Evolution (by which was meant, for these thinkers, Darwinism) must be disproved: otherwise all faith must go by the board, and the world must descend into pure materialism. The Biblical criticism produced in Germany, and apparently received in the very heart of the Christian camp, seemed to plain men not merely to assail this irrefragable rock but to strike at the roots of religion itself. Atheism, having become unfashionable, was exchanged from an "agnosticism" of which the popular conception was not a great deal more philosophical. The whole question of religion was conceived to hang together. The Bible was the Word of God: if the Bible could not stand, God must fall. And the stability of the Bible was considered to rest upon scientific accuracy. A miscellaneous collection of writings, certainly of great, but of variously computed antiquity, was to be absolutely right (which no other documents of anything like the same age have ever been) on scientific facts; otherwise it could not be retained as a text-book of the churches. The latter (sometimes themselves claiming inspiration) had declared the Bible to be directly inspired: and by some people inspiration was taken to imply literal and detailed truth, though literal and detailed truth would certainly have made the collection utterly incomprehensible by the persons who have used it during all but the last comparatively insignificant portion of its existence, and to most persons even then. Evidently such a conception of the Bible, accompanied by the opinion that religion could only exist on the basis of the Bible, was dangerous to popular religion in proportion as the opinions here summarised met with public support.