5. No serious attempt has, I think, been made to show that the view of the development of the Old Testament literature which the modern critical schools, with great unanimity, demand of us, is contrary to any determination of Church authority. By this it is not meant that the theology of the Church suggests this view: it is not the function of the Church to advance literary knowledge, except indirectly; and thus the Church has not had the power to anticipate the critical, any more than it had to anticipate the scientific movement. The advance of knowledge comes in all departments through the natural processes of intellectual enquiry. It is only now, in fact, that the critical problem is before the Church; but now that it is before the Church it does not seem that the Church ought to have any _more_ difficulty in welcoming it and assimilating it, than it has had in welcoming and assimilating the legitimate claims of science. With reference to the bearing of Church authority on the present discussion, there are three points which I should wish to urge. First, that the undivided Church never took action on the matter, in spite of an extravagant tendency to allegorism in Origen and those who were influenced by him. Secondly, that as a result of this the patristic theology leaves a wide opening at least for what we may call the modern way of regarding the opening chapters of Genesis. Thus a Latin writer, of the fifth or sixth century, who gives an interesting summary of the Catholic faith, and is clearly nothing else but a recorder of accepted beliefs, after speaking of the origin and fall of man and woman, continues thus: 'These things are known through God's revelation to His servant Moses, whom He willed to be aware of the state and origin of man, as the books which he produced testify. For all the divine authority (i.e. the scriptural revelation) appears to exist under such a mode as is either the mode of history which narrates only what happened, or the mode of allegory in such sense that it cannot represent the course of history, or a mode made up of these two so as to remain both historical and allegorical[41].' A great deal more in the same sense as this might be produced. Thirdly, it must be urged that since the division of Christendom no part of the Church appears really to have tightened the bond of dogmatic obligation. Our own formularies are of course markedly free from definition on the subject, and the refusal of the Roman Church to define the scope of inspiration, beyond the region of faith and morals, has been remarkable[42].