Essays Upon Some Controverted QuestionsHuxley, Thomas Henry
Religion
Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions
Huxley, Thomas Henry
Science
My recollections of this time have recently been revived by the perusal of
a remarkable document,[2] {21} 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 {22} to be thereafter fulfilled,"
must be left to the coming generation to decide.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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