to it; the reason of his coming forward as a public and active champion of his views in this matter was partly to make a counter attack on the enemies of science, and partly his innate respect for the propagation of truth.  He had the inevitable respect of an Englishman for the English Bible as one of the greatest books in our language, and we have seen how he had advocated its adoption in schools.  He had the veneration for its ethical contents common to the best thinkers of all ages since it came into existence, and few writers have ever employed loftier or more direct language to express their respect and admiration.  As a venerator of freedom and of liberty he regarded the Bible as the greatest text-book of freedom.

“Throughout the history of the Western world,” he wrote, “the Scriptures, Jewish and Christian, have been the great instigators of revolt against the worse forms of clerical and political despotism.  The Bible has been the Magna Charta of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen so strongly laid down.  Assuredly the Bible talks no trash about the rights of man; but it insists on the equality of duties, on the liberty to bring about that righteousness which is somewhat different from struggling for ‘rights’; on the fraternity of taking thought for one’s neighbour as for oneself.”

It was not against the Bible but against the applications made of it and implications read into it that he strove.

“In this nineteenth 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, from the days of Galileo until now, whose lives have been embittered and their 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 bottles of Judaism, compelled by the outcry of the same strong party?  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.