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Original copia* in printad papar covara ara filmad baginning with tha front covar and anding on tha laat paga with a printad or illuatratad impraa- (ion, or tha back covar whan appropriata. All othar original copiaa ara filmad baginning on tha first paga with a printad or illuatratad impras- aion, and anding on tha laat paga with a printad or illuatratad improaaion. Tha laat racordad frama on aach microficha ahall contain tha fymbol •^ (moaning "CON- TINUED"), or tha symbol ▼ (moaning "END"), whichavar appliaa. Mapa. plataa. charts, ate. may ba filmad at diffarant raduction ratios. Thosa too larga to ba antiraly includad in ona anpoaura ara filmad baginning in tha uppar laft hand cornar. laft to right and top to bonom, aa many framas aa raduirad. Tha following diagrama illustrata tha mathod: Las imagas suivantaa oni *ti raproduitas avac la plua grand sain, compta tanu da la condition at da la nanatO da I'aaamplaira filma. at an eonformlt« avae laa conditions du conirat da fllmaga. Laa axamplairaa originaux dont la couvartura an papiar aat ImprimAa aont filmaa an eommancant par la pramiar plat at an tarminani soit par la darniira paga qui comporta una amprainta d'lmprasslon ou d'lllustration. soit par la sacond plat, salon la eaa. Toua laa autras axamplairas originauK sont fllmta an eommancant par la pramlAra paga qui comporta una amprainta d'impraasion ou d'illusuation at an tarminant par la darnitra paga qui comporta una taila amprainta. Un daa symbolaa suivants tpparaitra sur la darniAra imaga da ctiaqua microficha. salon la caa: la symbola ^» signifia "A SUIVRE". la aymbola V algnifia "FIN". Laa cartas, planchaa. tablaaux. ate. pauvant aira filmto t das taux da reduction diffOranis. Lorsqua la documant ast trop grand pour atra raproduit an un saul clich*. il sat filma a partir da I'angla supAriaur gaueha. da gaucha i droiia, at da haut an baa, an pranant la nombra d'imagaa nteasaaira. Las diagrammas suivants illuatrant la mOtttoda. 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 MiaOCOfr MSOIUTION TEST CHAIT (ANSI ami ISO TEST CHART No 2) 1.0 [ri^ 13^ Hi ■16 [2.2 2.0 ''.25 11.4 ^ x^PPUED IN/MGE In, leSJ Easi Mam 5'r< THE HIGHER CRLTICISM ITS AflSUllPTIONH, MKTHODH AND EPPEfTS A SKETCH REV. R. 8. FORNERL B. D. MKRKICKVILLE, ONT. ftutOLB OoPT, 25 Onm; Ttvic Ooptsg, $l.oo: Ten Copim, |i.a To mm UAO av mc Orrici of Publication. I Ontabio Ohuhchmam Dbbbrohto, Out. To My Diocesan, The Right Reverend William Lennox Mills, D. D., Lord Bishop of the Diocese of Ontario, Are Inscribed With Sincere Respect and Regard, These "Words for Truth." PRKFACE. The writer of this sketch on the Higher Criticism (which was by request prepared for a Ruridecanal meeting held n Prescott on May 6th, 1902) has been inducec. to publish it in Its present (arm, in the hope that ii may be servic- able to some who, without entering deeply into the subject would be glad to gain an insight ioto the true inwardness of this most recent attempt of rationalism to dethrone the Holy Scriptures. With the object of making this issue more complete, some matter has been added to the original paper, and a number of illustrative notes have been appended. Observations On the Assumptions. Meth- ods, and Effects of "The Higher Criticism." In what I am about to say upon the suhject of "Till' If I had the abihty, to enter into the depths of this i,„. p.)rtant, difficult, and, just now, arnunj; U,bl,cal students burning question. All I propose to do is to make some observations upon the Assumptions. M thods and Kffccts of the new critical treatment of the O' Testament Scrip- ures. And perhaps it may be as well . mention just here that I employ throughout the terms "Higher Critic" and Higher Criticism,- as they arc now gencially use.l to designate a certain Schnol of critics and criticism . , h bishop Ellicott prefers to call 'Analytical," representc ,y Keuss and Graf, Kuenen and Wcllhausen, R. VV Smith Cheyne,and Driver. ' .rV'Tu^V^'y *° '^'"^ ""y '■"""" 'he mysteries ot the Higher Criticism before perceiving that, in the pre- sent aspect of the subject, much more is involved in these modern discussions on the Old Testament than the date authorship and mode of composition of the Hooks, partic! ularly of the Pentateuch. It will soon be discovered that underlying all these questions is a theory which professes to interpret the history of Israel according to the principle ol a continuous natural development, from the lowest stages of belief up to monotheism, and from primitive usage up te the complete Levitical system. This theory was not always in vogue among Higher Critics. Its adoption niar1v which the Biblical writers take of the history of their nation. It is patent in every part of the books themselves ; and it must be confessed that it is wonderfully consistent in its lenor. Kead in the light of this theory, the Biblical narrative w..,Js along its course perfectly naturally and easily. Its complete consistency is proved by the fact that all down the centuries and until quite recently, no one ever thought that any other account could be derived from the Scrip- tures, than that the history of the Hebrew nation is a history of miraculous intervention, and their literature the product of Divine inspiration. The problem, then, before the critics .s twofold. First, to explain away the Biblical interpretation of the history ; and, secondly, to fit the facts to the opposite theory. In a word, their task is destructive and constructive. I ^u%"'"". "^ "''" **"'' °^ *•'* '"ffi<="'«y °f the prob- lem before them, for Kuenen tells us that "the conception of Isarel s religious development, which he dares to form forth in the Old Testament." But what can baffle the ingenuity of the Higher Critics ? They begin their task by another assuii.otion. Thev impute bad faith, or something very like it, to the authors of Old Testament history. The Biblical writers say • "we write thus, because thus things occurred." The critics ^^^^ul .u'^^'T '^''^ "°* '° ■'""'■ What we maintain IS that the scheme of the Hebrew writers, whereby they attribute to the Israeli-s high ideas of duty and a true knowledge of God at the beginning of their history, is an afterthought, which by a process of manipulation of the older documents, and by a systematic presentation of earlier events in the light of the later times at which they wrote, has been made to appear as if it were the original and genuine development." (Robertson) Upon this understanding, which the critics do not argue about, but simply take for granted, they proceed to the analysis of the documents. These as having been worked over ,n the interests of a theory, cannot, of course, h- trustworthy throughout, and it now becomes the business of the critics to find out the truth about them. This they do in a manner which suggest the peculiar features of the Inquisition. They place the books on the rack of a cruel and harsh criticism, and rack them to pieces ; when dislo- cated and disintegrated in every part, they are prepared to deny the truth of their own old and wondrous story and to bear out the assumptions of their inquisitors. This is no overdrawn picture or caricature of modern critical methods ; if anyone thinks it is, let him listen to what Professor Robertson says on the 466th page of his interest- ing volume, "The Early Religion of Israel." "The hypo- thesis of Graf," he says, "carries with it the assumption that the narratives of the Pentateuch are not history in the proper sense of the word at all, but the product of late imaginative writers, and, in short, fictitious. And not only are the narratives of the Pentateuch so treated ; the historical and prophetical ,. oks are in a similiar manner discredited, so as to be admissible as testimony only after they have been expurgated or adjusted on the principles of the underlying theory. The historical books, we are told, were written long after the events they relate, and even when they contain the record of historical facts, these records are overlaid with later interpretations of the facts, or even glossed over to obliterate them. Even the Prophetical books are not to be relied upon to deter- mine the religious history, for the books, in the first place, have undergone great alterations in the process of canoni- zation, and in the second place, even where there is an unambiguous declaration of a prophet as to a certain sequence of events, it is open to us to accept or reject his statement on critical grounds. Modern critical writers, in fact, can scarcely lay their hand 0.1 a single book and say : Here is a document to be relied upon to give a fair, unbiased, and untarnished account of things as they are." And now, having reduced the books to the condition just described by their destructive criticism, the work thereafter is constructive. Having separated the precious from the vile, the neucleus of fact from the legendary set- ting, the historical from the pseudo-historical, the early fragments from the later accretions and editorial additions, ml ft f v'°"'°^*''' """"'^ materials that re- thevlileV T '.f "6 process, proceed to construct what they like to describe as a scientific history of the Hebrew nation, fitting each document, each section, each frae- men , into its proper position, like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle, all along the line of natural evolution, the Prophets earlier than the Uw, the Psalms later than both f„r the '^rLl^l '"rl'"^ '° ^^"^"'^ '" '^^ ''="'»" °^ Greek period-the whole so compacted together as to exhibit r.h V ^ ' P'""'' °' expansion, from the lowest to the highest conception of deity, from the simplest obser- E^ra^days ''*''°""' '"'="'°"'^' °^ "'«= J'^'='"y <^od^ o( In this way everything in the Bible is accounted tor utilized or rejected, and when completed, the fabric has all' the attractiveness of a new creation ; order has been evolv- ed out of chaos, -the touch of genius has transformed a mere heap of stones into a gorgeous palace, or a grand harmonious temple. " What wonder if the critics contem- plate their new creation with entire satisfaction, as we may judge from the praise they lavish on one another, See with what gratification Professor Pfleiderer hailed the ad- vent of the book that secured the triumph of Grafs hypothesis. "I welcomed this work of Wellhausen's " he says, more than almost any other ; for the pressing prob- lem o the history of the Old Testament appeared tome to be at last solved, in a manner consonant to the principle of human evolution, which I am compelled to apply to the history of all religion. ' ■ *^^ ^ But now. I ask, what are we to think of this system ofcr.fc.sm? Does it deserA'e the na.ne of scientific ? Is It not rather a travesty of scientific methods ? I will let someone answer for me who has the very best right to be heard-Sir J. W. Dawson. In the July number of the • Ninetceth Century, 1890, he writes as follows : "I cannot accept the estimate some have of the scientific value of the so-called Higher Criticism, of which Robertson Smith, in England, and Wellhausen, in Germany, may be taken ai advanced exponents. To me the methods of these men appear to be the reverse of those of legitimate science, inasmuch as they are not inductive but rather analogical and speculative, while it is their habit to build the most stupendous conclusions on the smallest posible basis of fact, or even of plausible conjecture. Th.;ir ingenious at- .tempts to invert the pyramid of historical truth, and poise it upon its apex, would, if applied to any department of natural science, involve it in hopeless confusion, and would merit the reprobation of all legitimate, scientific workers." Hut there is more to be said in answer to the critics' assumption that the "Israclitish religion is nothing more" than one of the principal religions of the world. There are outstanding facts abuut the Hebrew race too wonderful and manifest to be gainsaid or overlooked, of which, neverthe- less, our critics take no account whatever. One of these facts relates to the Bible itself How is it that a people, notoriously lacking in originality, should have been the authors of a literature, unsurpassed for moral beauty and grandeur, and which has guided the wisdom of ages, and even now shows no signs of losing its pre-eminence ? That is one fact. The other is even more marvellous, if possible. It dilTerentiates Israel's religious history from all others when we behold the ruined and downtrodden remnant of an intolerant race, at a time of great moral declension, giving birth to a religion whose spirituality is unique, whose sympathies, aims and hopes are universal, and whose influer .e in the world wheresoever it has pene- trated, has been overmastering. Surely these two facts, which give the Hebrew people a an marvellous position among earth's races, should prepare the Higher Critics for Bnding in the history of that people something more and something very different from the phenomena which other religions present. "To come, therefore, to the examination of Israel's religion," says Prof Robertson, "with a formula, or equation, that will represent the.history of all religions, and then apply it to the religion of Israel, is to prejudge the whole question in a most unscientific way, and to run in the teeth of histor- ical fact." "The science of Comparative Religion," says Professor Robertson, again, "is legitimate and most use- ful ; but it becomes unscientific when it is a levelling science." We know how the Bible expUins the problems raised by these and the other equally marvellous facts of Jewish history, by saying tha.they were a divinely guided people, that their religion was originated and maintained by supernatural interpositions at sundry limes and in divers manners, and surely, if the forces which entered in- to the development of their history cannot be explained on natural principles, the inference is legitimate, nay, unavoidable, that they must have come from above. "It is the Lord's doing, and it is marvellous in our eyes." Another observable thing about the methods of this new criticism, and which is largely responsible for its sur- prising results, is that it is almost altogether a subjective process. It relies upon internal evidence alone. De Wette, whose Introduction to the Old Testament marks an epoch in the history of the Higher Criticism, proclaimed this as the method of his school. Criticism, he maintained, must henceforth set aside tradition, and get to the facts by means of its own researches. All external sources of infor- mation, it was said, were wanting ; but their loss was not material, and by. no means to be regretted ; for it called in- to existence that which after all wai the lureit.gulds— the i-^'gher Criticiim. This principle has become sne of the chief cornerstones of the new system. Now, on the very face of it, such a method of critic sm is necessarily imperfect and unreliable. It is altogether onesided. It does not compare its con- clusions with anything. It does not bring them to the test of any form of contemporaneous evidence bearing up- on them, consequently there is ample sccipe for the indulg- ence of speculation or fiction to any extent. As Rev. Dr. Morgan Dix remarks in one of his sermons : "It practically invests the modem critic with a power of in- tuitive discernment, an ability to recognize truth without any aid from historic or other facts. In examining the sacred canon, the critic has no n^ew facts to show; yet he says, with an air of supreme authority, if not actual omnis- cence. 'This writer was a romancer and fabulist ; that writer never lived ; this book was not written by him whose name it has borne between two and three thousand years ; these discourses anl this history were * . invention of subtle priestly conspirators. ' And when asked how he has made these astounding discoveries, he has not a word of historic testimony to present, but he says ; My criticism proves them ; modern learning establishes them ; they are the ascertained results of the best thought of the day ; in fact, these results thus paraded before us, come down, at last, to nothing better than guess-work and fancy ; they are the fruit of difficulties which lie in the mind of the critic, and have no foundation in legitimate enquiry. They are the result of a process correctly described as 'free con- jecture operating upon the Sacred text. ' " What wonder if this kind of criticism should have broken down wherever it could be tested. W^may recall the failure of similar methods in the sphere of Grecian litera- u ture. when a German i.-holar, F. A. Wolf, more than a century ago undertook to prove that the poems which go under the name of Homer are not his (if, indeed, such a person ever lived), and did not exist in their present form for centuries after Homer's time, when they were put together out of various independent epic sonr v the produc- tion of a number of unknown authors, calle. .thapsodists. For a time the Wolfim theory carried all before it. Of course there was no external evidence to support it. Like the higher criticism of the Old Testament the the c in- tents of the works themselves supplied the only mater, iais for forming a judgment. But notwithstaading the support it received from scholars as learned, and critics as keen as our modern Biblicil critics, the attempt to dethrone Homer failed. Towards the close of the last century, a reaction set in, the traditi inal belief was rein- stated. The contention dwindled to nothing. The issue is now dead. An amusing example of the flimsiness of such criticism is that of Scherer's brilliant analysis of the Prologue of Faust, which distributed its parts to their proper periods, widely separated, of Goethe's life, on the ground of deep reaching differences of style and internal inconsistencies, such as were thought inexplicable sive on the supposition of composition at different times and subsequent combina- tion. But another scholar, Ehrich Schmidt, publishes the oldest manuscript of the poem, and lo ! "it is the 'young Goethe' who wrote the prologue essentially as it now stands, in a single gush ; it is the same 'young Goethe,' who a.ssumes the style, at the same time, of an efferves- cent youngster, and of a cynical grey-beard." Prof. Margoliouth, a Semitic scholar of the highest repute menti.->ns in his "Lines of Defence," page 279, a remarkable case wherein^the. Higher Critics employed their methods to their own confusion, by involving themMlvei in the most lerioui error that had ever been committed in the dates and analyzing of documents. It seems that a com- position called the Cairene Eccleiiasticus wps discovered a few years ago. After a close critical investigation it was pronounced by all the leading Hebraists to be a work of the 2nd centu 'V C, more than that it was declared to be the source of the existing Greek and Syriac translations of Ecclesiasticus. It afterwards turned out to be the pro- duction of the eleventh century, after Christ. It was proved, moreover, to be itself a compilation from those translations. The critics had blundered egregiousi. both as to dnte and source. They had made a mistai.e of twelve or thirteen centuries, and they had taken the off- spring for the parent. What reliance can be placed on a method of criti:ism so plainly inconsequential? Before we leave this division jf the subject, there is a question to be put and answered. Is the contention of the critical School from De VVette to Driver true ? Is it true that no external evidence for the age and authorship of the Sacred Books exists ? Emphatically no, it is not true. External information docs exist. There is outstanding testimony ; there are matrrials wriereby the truth of the critical views may be tested. First of all there is Tradition. "The Jews," says Prof. Driver, "possess no tradition worthy of real credence or regard," while Dr. Brigjjs, of New York, sneers at the arguments of the "Traditionalists," as he calls them, as "speculative dogmas," as "appeals to popular prejudice." But Messieurs Higher Critics, you cannot, by a stroke of the pen, rule out of court the witness of a whole nation. You cannot give the lie to a theorj' of Bible history, which has been substantially ac- cepted by the Synagogue and the Church for 2,coo years. We are aware, gentlemen, that it is quite according to your lofty and dogmatic style to lay, with Dr. Brigga : "In the field of fcholarshipthe ciuestion i« lettled. It only remains for the ministry and people to accept it, and udapt thcm- lelves to it ;" but we respectfully decline on your mere dictum to believe that the Jewish race was composed of a people so dull and unreflective that they had no memory of or veneration for the past. No, we shall maintain, until the contrary is infallibly proved, that the Bible contains at least as credible and correct a history of Israel as the re- cord of other nations are, and that the traditions of the race were as scrupulously guarded, and as intelligently handed down as those of other peoples. Nay, more, the Jews, believing that their Scriptures were the Oracles of God and that they were their divinely appointed keepers, preserved them with passionate fidelity,* despositing them in the innermost and holiest apartment of the Sanctuarj-. There Moses caused the Torah Roll to be laid up, and there 700 years afterward?, it was discovered by Hilkiah in the days of Josiah. The testimony of Philo and Joscphus is just what we should expect with regard to such a perple as the Jews were, and are to this day. Josephus, who was but thirty years old at the death of St. Paul, speaking of t' ■. whole volume, which we call the Old Test;...ient, says : "Although so many ages have now elapsed since these books were written, no one yet has ever Jared either to *Piof. W. B. Smith, in "The Old TestKnimt in the Jewish Church," wlViiinu to the fitlelity of the Jews in pie- serviiiK nnd tiimstnitting sncied text iif the O. T., »Hy», "Tha Jews, fiiiiii the time when theii- nHtimial life wjis extinniiiahed, and their whnle soul conceiitmted upon the preneiviition of the monuments of the pant, devoted most strict and punctilious attention to the exact transmission of the received text, down to the snialiest peculiarity of spellinn, and even certain irregu- larities of writing, ' (p. 70). add anything, to them, or take anything from them, or change anything in them ; for it is a principle received by every Jew from his birth that these writings are the revela- tion of God, to cling to them as such, and if occasion should require, cheerfully to die in their behalf." Philo's testi- mony is equally strong. Moreover, it was because of their adherence to Scripture that the Jews suffered under the persecution of Antiochus. And when to the tradition of the Jewish nation, we add that of the Christian Church, of the Apostles and early Christians who dwelt in the gbw of Pentecost, of the great fathers and students and scholars, who have from the be- ginning known and used the Scriptures ; of the Catholic Councils, and of the interrupted and universal assent of nearly two Christian milleniums, I think that the position of the "Traditionalists" is well nigh impregnable, and there is small danger that we shall ever have to lower the ban- ner that floats over our heads, emblazoned with the Vincen- tian motto : "Semper, Ubique, et ab Omnibus." But it seems to me that the question of the trustworthi- ness of Jewish tradition is a more serious one for the Higher Critics than they would cire to acknowledge. In reality, it places them on the horns of a huge dilemma. For if, on the one hand, they accept Jewish tradition concerning the Bible, their criticism is falsfied ; but if, on the other hand, they reject it, they no longer have any Bible to criticize. For how does it happen that the Higher Critics can read their Hebrew Scriptures ? Without a knowledge of t'.,e vowel sounds they could not do so. Yet we know that the vowels remained unwritten from the time of the composition of the several books until about the middle of the eighth century! How, then, was the vocaliza- tion of the Old Testameni preserved ? There is no other re- in I I ply, than by Jewish tradition. * "The correct pronunciation of the words," says Prof. Margoliouth, "was handed down from father to son, from teacher to pupil through a period of more than 1,000 years." Now, I think, it would be in order for the critics to explain how it is that they can and do rely upon Jewish tradition extending through more than ten centuries, for such minutiae as vowel points, but when it comes to important questions, such as the authorship and dates of their Scriptures, they contemptuously discard it— refuse to give it a hearing But tradition is not the only external testimony avail- able to support the credibility of the Old Testament writings. There is another witness that is day by day be- coming more powerful, as it goes forth conquering and to conquer the Higher Critics. I refer to modern arch- *SpeHkinf< of the system of Vowel Points invented liy the MHSoiets, so called hecnnse they were the *'Pusses8oi-s of ti'Hd'tion— that is of the ti-Hdition of the proper way of writ- ing the Bible," Prof. Smith says : "Now let me ask yon to realize piecisely how these scrihes procetded in dealing with the Bible. They had nothinfi; before them hut the bare text denuded of its vowels, so that the same words might often be read and inreipreted in two differ- ent ways." Tn exemplify this unibigiiity the Piofnascir mentions the Hebrew word H.VIMTTH whirh depended on the voc»iliza- tion whether it w-is translated "the bed," (a& in Gen. 47 : 31) or "the staff," (as in Heh. xi. 21, after the Ixx). He then proceeds, "Beyond the biire text, which in this way wa« often ambifiious, the Scribes had no guide bnt Oral Teaching. Thny ha.1 no rules of grammar to gi> by : the kind of Hebrew which they them- selves wrote often admitted grammaticul constructions which the old language forbade, and when they came to an ob-^olete word or idiom, they had no guide to its meaning unless their masters had told them that the pronunciation and the sense were so and so." (pp 50. .51.) 17 aeological discoveries. Everywhere the stones cry out against the critical conclusions. Everywhere where the spade of the excavator is at work, some unexpected find attests or else illustrates some incident or declaration of the Scriptural narratives. For example, from the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates records have been brought, dat- ing before Christ more than 2,000 years, which corroborate in many essential particulars the Hebrew accounts of the Creation and Deluge. Again, at the very moment, when the critics were pro- claiming the unhistorical character of Chedorlaoir.i-.'s cam- paign, and the meeting between Melchizedek and "Abram, the Hebrew," described in the 14th chapter of Genesis, clay records of the past rose up and vindicated the trust- worthiness of the narratives in the most complete and un- expected manner. It used to be an axiom with the critics that the art of literary composition among the Canaanites and Israelites was unknown before Moses, and that consequently he could not have written the Pentateuch, but recent discoveries, especially the discovery at Tel-elAmarna, in Upper Egypt, of tablets belonging to the century before the Exodus, have wiped this assumption out of existence, by proving that there must have been at that time throughout Western Asia plenty of schools and teachers as well as of pupils and books. Further, when the Higher Critics impugned the credi- bility of the Books of Kings, because of their allusions to Hittites living north of Syra (no such people being known to classical writers), the Assyrian monuments dis- closed the fact that not only did the Hittite tribes inhabit the very district mentioned in Kings, but that once they were a very powerful and important people. Again, the critics objected to the books of Esther and Daniel, that their descriptions of Oriental customs and in- stitutions violated all probability, but discovery and history have united in compelling the critical writers of the pres- ent day to retract their statements and to adniit that what is written in those books is not romance, but fact. Once more, Prof. Robertson (5th chapt.) mentions a remarkable feature of the earlier sacred records, which is at variance with critical conclusions as to the mode of their composition and historic value, and that is, "the ex- tiaordinary correspondence bi. ween the Biblical accounts and the Ic aUties in which they are placed." "The ordi- nary reader (he says) will find it very hard to believe that in 'the manifold variants and repetitions of the same stories' this feature of minutely accurate local picturing could have been preserved. And when we take into accouut that not only in the stories cf the patriarchs, but everywhere in the historical books, this accuracy is maintained, and bear in mind the liability to error which is inherent in local trans- mission, we have a problem to solve which cannot be brushed aside by the obiter dictu of the critics." The words of Prof. Sayce will suitably conclude this particular : "It is not possible here to go in detail thror-h the numerous cases in which the archaeological discoveries of the last few years have re-established the credit of the writers of the Old Testament, and dissipated the ingenious objections that have been raised against them. Assyriology, Egyptology, pro-historic archaeology, even explorations in southern Arabia and Asia Minor have alike been contri- buting to this result— the vindication of the historical char- acter of the Biblical narratives." But now, what are we to think of Dr Driver and his school, who in the face of the facts that have been brought forward, unblushingly assert that there is no external evidence on which .they can dc- r pend ; that all the materials for forming their conclusions lie within the books themselves ? But this false critical canon receives its final contradic- tion, and the old view of the Bible its crowning confirma- tion from the lips of Him Who was proclaimed in heaven to be the "Faithful and True Witness." Jesus Christ, in passing through the world, stamped with His own Divine authority the Old Testament volume, and having His in- fallible testimony to these Scriptures, that they are indeed what they have all along professed to be, we need no other as we can have no higher warrant ; as Canon Liddon said in his famous sermon on "The Worth of the Old Testa- ment." "For Christians it will be enough to know that our Lord Jesus Christ set the seal of His infallible sanction on the whole of the Old Testament. He found the Hebrew canon as we have it in our hands today, and He treated it'as an authority that was above discussion. " The whole sermon is worth learning by heart. Our blessed Lord with His own lips quoted from most of the twenty-two books composing the Old Testament volume, bub the question of His recognition of the.n is not so much con- cerned with single quotations, as with his whole method of treating them and speaking of them. For example, Hejconstantly applies to the Scriptures, as a whole, the term Graphe or Graphai, which is used fifty-one times in the New Testament, but never once in the mere sense of writing ; always in that holy, and as may call it, technical or appropriated sense, which we attach to the word P';ripture.* *The Rev. D. W. BullinKer, D. D., EnglHnd, has some remm-ks on the Revised Version of U Tim. iii, 16, which are woi-th trunscribinjjf. "Every Sci-iptupe inspired nf God is also profitable." This is not English, to say nothing of Oreelc. 20 Again, our Lord's life was nothing but a fulfilment of the scriptures from beginning to end "I am come," He said, "to fulfil the law and the prophets," accordingly He did all that the Scriptures prescribed. He kept them with minute care, and He caused His disciples to keep them with Him. Furthermore, our blessed Saviour, when in the perfection of His risen state He revisited His disciples, caused them to read His history in the same Old Testat- men ; lor beginning at Moses and all the prophets. He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things con- cerning Himself." And surely, it is no collection, or jumble rather, of human writings for the express purpose of com- prehending which he opened, as we are told he did, His disciples' understandings. The Higher Critics, instead of adjusting their theories to accord with the testimony of our Lord Jesus Christ as to It so hnppena that the very siime Greek conBtiuctinn occurs severiil times in the New Teetiiiiient e. (?-. R"i>i' "»• 1^ • 1 ^"r. xi, 30; 11 Cor. x, 10: I Tim i, 15, II iii, iv49; II Tim. iii, 16; Heh. iv, 13. The A. V. tr«nsl«tes all these nine passiiges in precisely the Game way, and im the same principles. But the Revised Version translates eight of them in one way (i. e. like tlie A. V.) while its renders oneonqnite aditferent principle. To he Consistent the revisers shonld have translated these eight passages in the following way : Kie outcome of their own reflec- tions and sagacious anticipations of what was going to happen ; or their so called "predictions" were written after the events referred to. Isaiah is the patchwork of two or more Isaiahs, while Daniel is the production of some great unknown in the time of the Maccabees. The Psalms are very late productions, scarcely any were writ ■a ten by David, certainly not those ascribed to him in the New Testament. We look through the "New Bible" in vain, for any genuine Messianic predictions. The miracles, w' discover, are the imaginative embellishments of the ant. t stories that grew up in the course of centuries." Such is the kind of Bible that even the moderate higher critic would place in our hands, and if it be the true Bible— the true story of Israel's history— then the old Bible, accord- ing to Moses and the prophets, is from beginning to end a mockery and a fraud, and though it may still be an in- teresting collection of documents for critics and antiquar- ians, its authority as an inspired account of God's revelation of Himself to men, and as a touchstone of truth and doctrine, is gone forever. No longer can its utterances be quoted a.i the end of controversy. It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this question. The authority of Holy Scripture was the great subject of the Reformers' conflict with Roras. Rome exalted the Apochrypha, Tradition and Decrees into co-equality with the Scriptures, whilst the Reformers con- tended that the Scripture only was the Word of God and therefore infallibly true and authorative, and alone author- ative ; and this their judgment respecting Holy Scripture they have unequivocally expressed in the Articles and Formularies by them authorized. And from the time when England through her national Church honoured God ' by honouring His Holy Word, will any one who reviews her history for the last three hundred years and over, and contrasts it with that of other countries (France, Italy,' Spain, where the Bible has not been similarly recoglnized and disseminated) deny that she has been marvellously privileged and protected, whilst war and distruction were devastating the neighbouring continent ? But now we witness a wonderful and alarming thing In the Church of England. Professors of Divinity have risen up at the centres of the nation's intel'iectual and moral life, and dignitaries have staod up in the Church's pulpiu to inculcate views of the Bible, destructive to be- lief in its inspiration and authority and these views are find- ing their way through a thousand channels to the pop- ular mind, and diffusing abroad an atmosphere of uncert- ainty regarding religious belief The men who do such things are not unacquainted with the history of rationalism in Germany and elsewhere. They are aware of the havoc it has wrought in foreign lands, how it has doubted and questioned, subtilized and analyzed, until it has made truth a phantom, sown Protest- antism with the salt of barrenness, aud left humanity like a ruined wreck, to drift rudderless on the dark ocean of sceptical uncertainty. * Yet these unhappy critics, un- warned and undismayed by the experience of other coun- tries and churches, go forward in the path of ruin they have entered. Even while they are calmly telling us that the authority of Scripture is not affected by their cin- clusions, the question of the "Seat of Authority in relig- ion" is becoming one of the great problems of the hour. Books on this subject have been published by scholars in •'•I «in mllinK rudilcrleM." gaid S. T. Colcridfce, in 1807, "the Treck (if what I once was." "VVietohed, helpless, hopele.s," was his desciiption of himself seven years luter. Coleridge had drunk deep of aennnnisni, and on him primarily rests the responsibility of introducing it into England. Dr. Pusey, too, when as a young roan he vinited Germany, did not pass through it unscathed, hut he was warned in time and retraced his steps, and has left as a monument of his steadfastness in Catholic belief that mine of learning his '-Lectures on Daniel the Prophet,'- which the Higher Critics ignore because they cannot refute. America. Scotland and England, and however divergent their idea* may be in other respects thev all agree in de- throning the Bible from its place of supremacy. Dr. Martineau's words will serve to express the mmd of all these writers, wherein he declares that "he rejects the Bible as the sole authority in religion, for the reason that it ij not what it purports to be either as to authorship, dates, contents or trustworthiness." Of course the whole Bible is involved in this discreditment, for no one can imagine that if the Old Testament be invalidated, the New Testament would escape the same fate. For, in the first place, the Higher Critics must in con- sistency apply to the New Testament the same methods which they adopt in dealing with the Old. The whole Bible must be subjected to the same critical tests. Ac- cordingly we find Archdeacon Wilsoa of Manchester, at the Rhyle Church Congress (.891) after criticismg away the veracity of Old Testament history, procerdmg to declare with regard to the Gospels "that we can afford to acknowledge some halo of legend round a nucleus of fact." Some moderate critics, like Dr. Nichol, would like to warn their more progressive brethren from the New Testa.-nent, on the plea that the great Gos- pel verities should not be treated as open questions, but the critical wave flows onward and sweeps be- fore it everything that is fundamental to the Christian Faith, as is abundantly evident in the pages of the Ency- clopaedia Biblica, edited by Canon Cheyne, wherein the truth of Dr. Dale's words recicve a fearful verification, The (critical) storm has moved round the whole horizon, but is rapidly concentrating its strength and fury above one Sacred Head." But secondly, the Hebrew and Christian writings are so intimately bound up together that if the trustworthiness of the former can be disproved, the latter muit U\\ with it. "In Vetere Twtimento Novum Utet. in Novo vetus patct." "Those who would undermine the Old Testament a3 a reliable record, would remove that by which the claims of Christ and Christianity were established at first. They would destory the sources from which Jesus Christ Himself and the Apostles and the Church in its first age derived the evidences of Hit mission." But let us follow this subject a little further down stream. dui. When the Higher Critics have dragged down the Bible from its seat of Sovereign authority as the veritable V\ ord of God, what do they or their disciples propose t™ put in its place? They would substitute some power or quality inherent in the human breast called the "vciifying faculty, or "devout reason," "universal intuition," or ' the voice of God within." Says a writer in the Arena: The growth of the scientific temper is nowhere more clearly traced than in the transition from the religion of the Refor- n,ationtothc religion of the twentieth century. The soul of the Reformation lay in the appeal from tnc Church to the Bible, the life of the new theological movement is in the appeal from the Bible to the indwelling God." Of course this nullifies utterly all external authority, and makes every man an authority to himself. "The faith of Jesus." says another writer, in the Arena, took for its working basis the divinity of life, and sought to awaken in each man the Godhood that would make him a law .into himself." This suits perlectly the temper of the time ; what it pleases each to believe he believes; and what it pleases him to reject he rejects; and thus an opening is made for any and every form of error to enter mto the morally diseased hearts of fallen men, which they may choose under Satan's inspiration to imagine * Such being the Spirit of the age, what wonder that the days in which we live should be fraught with solemn and alarming import. We have it from the lips of the most iaithful watchmen on Zion's battlements that the night of evil appears to be growing darker. They tell us that the masses are growing more and more alienated from every form of religious belief, while the cultured classes are largely leavened with the materialistic teachings of our phys- ical Scientists Theology, too, is undergoing a change. t The old forms of religious thought are passing away, and *To what height of impietjr men lUfty reach when they throw off the restrnints of a belief in the Divine inspira- tion and authority of the Bible, and acknowledge no author- ity but their own wish and will ia hut too plainly exemplified by the words of Dr. Herron in an address to a crowded audience, in New York recently. "The New religion," he said, "must take life as its own law and protection, and common human experience as its Scripture, for we ourselves are the true Holy Bible. In life man will always read the title to his own true Godhood. By the same law he will bee that he must achieve his own freedom. The New religion must bind each man to nothing save to put no htmds upon any of his brothers, and leave every soul to be God's adventurer. Human life must itself become the New religion and daily toil of hand and mind the Worship. The humiiu individual is the divinest and wisest force wo know. * * * Men will respond only to an era making Word of tremendous and divine significance. The world waits for that Woi*d — the daring Word which shall tell the average man he is a God to be reverenced." (Compare II. Thess. ii.: 3, 4.) tDr. Delitzsch in the Expositor of April, 1889, remarks that there lies between the Old and New theology a deep gulf— a gulf not less deep than separates Ptolemy from new ideas of a naturalistic evolutionary character are taking their place. A laxity of morair i .(.rywhere a subject of complaint, Between the ch .ich and tilt vorld the moral distinctions are gradual!; vonishing, Ic-cause the Church is s'nking down to the w(ir!J'« level, ."here seems to a growing inclination among professing Christians to sacrifice a sense of duty and divine obligation, to self-will, interest, or pleasure. Sunday desecration is also increas- ingly prevalent and threatens to turn that holy day into a common holiday. No one can view without an.xious foreboding this rising flood of scepticism and demoralization. It m'lst increase unto more and more ungodliness as the fruits of the grow- ing denial and rejection of Divine authority in the world and in the Church develop more and more. Take from men, who have once bowed to the authority of God's Word and then cast it from them, the steadying influence which has been bronght to bear upon them by such submis- sion. Teach men to burst asunder the bands which rever- ence for Divine law and Divine truth has hitherto imposed on them and what must follow but lawlessness ; men will be- come "as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, which have no ruler over them." Moreover, the barriers to un- restrained individual liberty of thought and action having been destroyed, society and governments will be left naked and bare to many and many a danger from popular licanti- ousness. It appears to me to be only too evident, from the present aspect of Christendom, that the decay of faith Copernicus. Fur of one of these systems God is the Sun aud Centre, illuminating every corner of Holy Writ with the light of His revealed truth ; ou the other all is of earth earthy, fallible man is the pivot on which everything turns. before the end of predicted by our Lord, and the latter- day apostacy foretold by His apostles have now begun to set in, and that the disintegration and confusion thereby produced will become so intolerable that men will seek to escape from it by placing themselves under some hand strong enough to protect their temporal interests from dis order and ruin, and that hand will be found in ANTI- CHRIST. But the instructed Christian, seeing in all these things as they come to pass, the exact fulfilment of many a saying of prophet and apostle, will turn with increasing confidence and singleness of purpose to the Living Oracles, and loving Christ he will keep His Word, even as he who loves Him not contemns His Word, little thinking that the Word he thus despises is the Father's who sent the Son, and that it will judge him at the last day, for "The Grass Withereth and the Flower Fadeth, but THE WORll OF OUR GOD SHALL STAND FOREVER." I will now with a few strong words from Gladstone's pen bring these remarks to a close : "I have placed in the foreground of these observations the high sounding title of "The impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture," because they convey in a positive and definite manner the conclusion my observations aim at sustaining, and enforcing as a great rule of thought and life. They lead upwards and onwards to the idea that the Scriptures are well called Holy Scriptures ; and that though assailed by camp, by batte-y, and by mine, they are nevertheless a house builded upon a rock, and that rock impregnable, that the weapon of offence which shall impair their effici- ency for practical purposes has not yet been forged, and that the sacred Canon, which it took (perhaps) two thou- sand years from the accumulations of Moses down to the acceptance ef the Apocalypse to construct, is like to wear out the storms and the sunshine, and all the wayward obsrn-vations of humanity, not merely for a term as long, but until time shall be no more." [FINIS.]