In short, I only say that the ideas of popular science and scepticism about these things are very much in a tangle. The sceptics do not distinguish between what, on their own principles, they could or could not believe; or between what, on other principles, they would be required to believe. They would doubtless be required to believe many things which at present they could not believe; but they have not at present the least notion of what the things are....I have tried in vain to hammer into the head of Mr. H.G. Wells, for instance (if I may allude to so large and illustrious a head in so irreverent an image) the perfectly elementary historical fact that the mystic and partially symbolic interpretation of Scripture is the old and orthodox interpretation of it; and that the mania for materialistic exactitude is a modern mania. At the very beginning of Christian history, St. Augustine said that some things in Scripture must be read as symbols, and that it was puerile to do anything else. But right at the end of Christian history, Brigham Young and the Mormons refused to see anything symbolic even in God's eye or right hand; and insisted that He must physically exist, like a sort of giant. A certain margin of mystical interpretation was an idea perfectly familiar to the Fathers and Schoolmen; and it was not their fault, or the fault of the Bible, if the idea was less familiar to Billy Brimstone, the saved Bootlegger of Kansas City, or Freeze-the-Devil Debora, the sweet and winning Prophetess of Potluck, Neb.
-April 20, 1929, Illustrated London News
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