“Proceed,” said Maddock.
“Nay, let us go further still, and notice how we no longer look on the Genesis account of the Creation as more than allegory, of the Flood as being strictly accurate; of the tower of Babel as, again, more than allegory, and so on in many other similar cases. And how in the same way we do not look upon the statements of Christ, and after him of the author of the ‘Revelations,’ of the close approach of the Apocalypse, as literal but only figurative. ‘The statement of Jesus,’ as the Judge puts it, ‘as to his coming again before the then generation have passed away does not mean that he will so come: ‘generation’ being merely used figuratively, but when he does come he is still to come in the clouds of heaven, and with great glory, sounds of trumpets, rushings of winds, and mourning of tribes; for’ (Gildea paused)—‘all this has not yet been falsified by the event.’ This is, I think, undoubtedly the conclusion at which common sense arrives, but common sense is of course wrong.”
“Common-sense is wrong,” said Maddock.
“Common-sense too, as exemplified in this its typical blockhead who cannot ever rise beyond the spiritual Rule of thumb and Three; common-sense observes of the development of divine Truth, as exemplified in the Christian theology of yesterday and to-day, that its ‘golden rule apparently is to adopt those interpretations’ of its Scriptures ‘which best satisfy the exigency of the particular position of the time being,’ and thus we have no further guarantee that the God of to-day will be the God of to-morrow than that the God of yesterday is certainly not the God of to-day. ‘Heaven forgive me,’ exclaims ‘that great poet and brilliant philosopher,’ Heine, ‘but I often feel as if the Mosaic God were but a reflected image of Moses himself.’ And we all remember with what contempt Taine speaks of this God of Christianity, revised and amended to suit the latest edition of scientific and historical discovery—rooted up out of the earth and momentary intercourse with man—driven out of the clouds and the occasional interposition of his strong right hand—spied and telescoped from the radiant bowers of the stars, and finally lodged out of sight, and all but out of mind, in the eternal infinitudes of Time and Space! After all, then, may not our good Judge have had, not of course a perception, but a faint glimmering, of sapience, when he spoke of the position taken up by the orthodox biblical criticism as critically ‘not only untenable, but absolutely suicidal?’ The thought is, as we agreed before, simply appalling. Spirits of Butler, Paley, Neander, Weiss, Westcott, Lightfoot, and many another mortal or immortal immortal, rise and thunder ‘No!’ When this exponent of the average secular intelligence declares that contemporary Theology is an impossible compromise between Reason and Absurdity; that the Protestant is quite inconsistent who with one face rejects ‘the events or miracles propounded by the Roman Catholic Church because they involve a violation or suspension of unvarying natural laws; because such things do not happen, and because reason refuses to give credence to them,’ and with another face accepts as truth the sojourn of Jonah in the belly of some sea-monster (at present conveniently extinct, even to the bones), or the communications of, what Gordon describes as,
‘that duffer at walls,
the talkative roadster of Balaam:—’
rise, I say, and in Olympian accents demonstrate to him and his benighted audience, that these were but links ‘in the development of divine Truth,’ and that ‘one lesson at a time of this difficult kind was enough, and as history shows more than enough, for human weakness.’”
“You are a treacherous and malicious young man,” said Maddock, laughing in spite of himself, “and have no right to quote my words in such an irreverent and grotesque manner!”
“It is my orthodox ingratitude,” said Gildea, “—And yet,” he added suddenly, with a complete change of tone and manner, “in less than fifty years polemics like these will be looked upon as childish, and, those who spent their life and energy upon them, as we now look on the mediæval Schoolmen. It is a sad thought.”
Maddock was a little puzzled at these swift chameleon changes in his friend.