Hardly less dangerous was the endeavour of some apologists to assist the difficulty of belief by attenuating the minimum required of it. The exposure of their rather circular arguments--basing Faith on the inspired Bible, and the inspiration of the Bible on its internal evidence--titillated in the untrained thinker who had rejected (as he was encouraged to reject) the claim of the Church to be the repository of inspired tradition, a sense of his own logical acuteness. With a warm glow of self-approval he abandoned the ancient shibboleths and left off going to church, being convinced that no really well-informed intelligence could tolerate the mutual contradiction of science and religion. With no more ability to understand the arguments which supported the one than the philosophy which lay at the root of the other, and quite unaware that religious belief is capable of development and is as much a product of evolution as any material phenomenon, he considered according to temperament that religion was either a mischievous invention calculated to clog the progress of the world, or a pardonable aberration of amiable minds seeking consolation in superstition of one sort or another. The religiously-minded thinker of the same calibre welcomed with enthusiasm the antagonisms of scientific schools discovered for him by the less wary of his teachers, and decided that Darwin was wrong, that Huxley was following false scents, and that science would have to revise all its later conclusions. In neither case (naturally) was ... "divine philosophy, Not harsh and crabbèd as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute," called into the assize. "Mistakes of Moses," to be either proved or justified, were popularly supposed to be the touchstone of religion's fate. Meanwhile, though the combatants in the popular arena were quite unaware of it, the true thinkers were realising vast depths which science had left still unexplored, and the very investigations undertaken to account for the beginnings of life on this planet were proving the belief in the spontaneous generation of life a figment. Whatever effect science may have had upon myth, it was doing nothing to assail the ultimate mystery which is the basic fact of religion.