PART III.—SECOND DIVISION.—SCRIPTURE CONTRADICTS SCRIPTURE.

Contradictory Texts 46 CONCLUSION 61

INTRODUCTION.

“THE myths of paganism,” says Professor Huxley, {3} “are as dead as Osiris or Zeus, and the man who should revive them, in opposition to the knowledge of our time, would be justly laughed to scorn; but the coeval imaginations current among the rude inhabitants of Palestine, recorded by writers whose very name and age are admitted by every scholar to be unknown, have unfortunately not yet shared their fate; but even at this day are regarded by nine-tenths of the civilised world as the authoritative standard of fact, and the criterion of the justice of scientific conclusions in all that relates to the origin of things, and among them of species.

“In this 19th century, as at the dawn of modern physical science, the cosmogony of the semi-barbarous Hebrew is the incubus of the philosopher and the opprobrium of the orthodox. Who shall number the patient and earnest seekers after truth . . . whose lives have been embittered and good name blasted by the mistaken zeal of bibliolaters? Who shall count the host of weaker men whose sense of truth has been destroyed in the effort to harmonise impossibilities,—whose life has been wasted in the attempt to force the generous new wine of science into the old bottle of Judaism? It is true that if philosophers have suffered, their cause has been amply avenged. Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science, as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain. But orthodoxy is the Bourbon of the world of thought: it learns not, neither can it forget; and though at present bewildered and afraid to move, it is as willing as ever to insist that the first chapter of Genesis contains the beginning and the end of sound science, and to visit with such petty thunderbolts as its half-paralysed hands can hurl those who refuse to degrade Nature to the level of primitive Judaism.”

We purpose, in this pamphlet, with all possible brevity, to show that Scripture is irreconcilable with science, experience, and even with its own statements.