Note 44 — Chapter V · FORMALISM

Mr. Mivart.

How much intellectual liberty is now enjoyed within the Roman pale may be seen in Mr. Mivart’s most interesting article on “The Catholic Church and Biblical Criticism” published in The Nineteenth Century for July 1887. Mr. Mivart does not think it probable that a line of the Bible was written by Moses, whilst it is “in the highest degree unlikely that Abraham, Isaac, or Jacob ever really existed, and no passage of the history of any one of them is of the slightest historical value in the old sense.” The book of Jonah is a parable, that of Daniel quite untrustworthy and little more than a mass of fiction. With regard to the Deluge Mr. Mivart says, “I well recollect dining at a priest’s house (in or about 1870) when one of the party, the late accomplished Mr. Richard Simpson of Clapham (a most pious Catholic and weekly communicant), expressed some ordinary scientific views on the subject of the Deluge. A startled auditor asked anxiously, ‘But is not, then, the account in the Bible of the Deluge true?’ To which Mr. Simpson replied, ‘True! of course it is true. There was a local inundation, and some of the sacerdotal caste saved themselves in a punt, with their cocks and hens.’”