eternal verities on which our faith is founded. The higher criticism may, indeed, cause us to modify some of our views regarding literary or textual problems, but as to the basal truths of Scripture, they stand absolutely in all their divine immutability untouched and absolutely unassailable. It was, indeed, with a feeling of joy and gratitude that I could, sixty years after my first acquaintance with Nineveh, feel, while contemplating the ruins of the famous city, that there was still in my soul nothing changed of that faith of a Breton peasant--a faith which, as it was my most precious inheritance in early youth, has ever continued to be my greatest consolation from then to beyond the Scriptural age of three score years and ten. That the discoveries at Nineveh or elsewhere should ever prove to be in conflict with revealed truth, has to me never seemed possible. How could they be? Science and religion belong to entirely different spheres of thought. They are as far separated from each other as are the theories of electricity, of the constitution of matter, of the origin of species, and of universal gravitation from the doctrines of creation, redemption, Providence, sanctification. For this reason I can now repeat as unreservedly as I did a quarter of a century ago that “I am as firmly convinced as I can be of anything, that God is the Lord of science, that science is the handmaid of religion, that the two, speaking of the same Author, must voice the same testimony, and that this testimony must be not only unequivocally true but also unequivocally one.”[378] When, therefore, the eminent Assyriologist, Friedrich Delitzsch, tells us that “the conviction is becoming more general that it is the results of the excavations in Babylonia and Assyria in particular, that are destined to inaugurate a new epoch as regards both the way in which we must understand the Old Testament and the estimate we must form of it,”[379] we must tell him that our viewpoint will be unchanged in all essential matters and that, whatever may be the future discoveries of Assyriologists, all of them will eventually be harmonized with the Bible and with the fundamental doctrines of the Church just as science and religion have always been reconciled with each other from the days of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine of Hippo to those of Bossuet of Meaux and Wiseman of Westminster. CHAPTER XV FLOATING DOWN THE TIGRIS ON A KELEK _When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free_ _In the silken sail of infancy,_ _The tide of time flow’d back with me,_ _The forward-flowing tide of time;_ _And many a sheeny summer-morn,_ _Adown the Tigris I was borne,_ _By Bagdad’s shrines of fretted gold,_ _High-walled gardens green and old._ TENNYSON.--“Recollections of the Arabian Nights.”