The miracles and graces so freely dealt in by Fassola and Torrotti find no place in the more recent handbooks. The Ex Votos and images in wax and silver with which each chapel formerly abounded have long disappeared, and the sacred drama is told with almost as close an adherence to the facts recorded in the Gospels, as though the whole had been done by Protestant workmen. Where is the impress of Christ’s footprint now? carted away or thrown into a lumber room as a child’s toy that has been outgrown—so surely as has been often said do the famous words “_E pur si muove_” apply to the Church herself, as well as to that world whose movement she so strenuously denied. The same thing is happening here among ourselves. As the good churchmen at Varallo have thrown away their Flemish dancer, their footprint of the Saviour, and their Virgins that box thieves’ ears and persist in turning round and smiling even after they have been asked not to do so, so we, by the mouths of our Bishops, are flinging away our Genesis, our Exodus, and I know not how much more. In the _Nineteenth Century_ for last December the Bishop of Carlisle says that the account of Creation given in the Book of Genesis “does not pretend to be historical in any ordinary sense”—or, in other words, that it does not pretend to be historical, or true, at all. Surely this is rather a startling jettison. The Bishop goes on to say that “the account of the flood is a very precious tradition full of valuable teaching,” and is, he doubts not, a record of some great event that actually occurred; “but,” he continues, “I confess that until Bishop Colenso brought his arithmetic to bear upon it and some other portions of Old Testament history, I was quite [why “quite?”] under the impression that the common sense of Christians abstained from criticising this ancient record by the canons applicable to ordinary history.” This was not my own impression, but the Bishop’s is doubtless more accurate. If things, however, go on at this rate, a hundred years hence we shall have a Bishop writing to the _Twentieth Century_ that till X, Y or Z brought their canons of historical criticism to bear on the Resurrection itself, he was “quite” under the impression that the common sense of Christians abstained from criticising this ancient record by the canons applicable to ordinary history. The Bishop appeals, and rightly, to common sense. This is of all courts the safest and rightest to abide by, but it must not be forgotten that the common sense of one generation is not that of the next, and that the modification with which common sense descends cannot be effected, however gently we may try to do so, without some disturbance of the pre-existing common sense, and some reversal of its decrees.