HIGHER CRITICISM

Queen Victoria is regarded by common consent as the greatest civil ruler of the Christian centuries. But she was more than a queen. She was a noble wife and mother. She walked the high places of the earth in the white robes of unstained Christian womanhood. It is notorious that she elevated all the courts of Europe by her exalted Christian character.

Now would the many descendants of this great Queen, in a family council, select an author to write her biography who

1. Denied the legitimacy of her birth;

2. Questioned her right to reign;

3. Was bent on blackening her Christian character;

4. Was determined to break down her influence;

5. Was committed to lowering her standing in the estimation of the hundreds of millions over whom she graciously ruled? We repeat, would the royal family select such a biographer? It is simply unthinkable.

But our precious Bible is The Royal Book of all the ages. It has blessed the nations, as no other book that was ever penned. It has turned countless millions of sinners into the saints of God. It has inspired the races of men, and led the march of human progress. It is against sin, the curse of the world, and is in favor of holiness from cover to cover. In short, above all other books, it blesses the living and comforts the dying, and points the way for a fallen humanity from a sin cursed earth to a holy heaven.

But multitudes of Christian people are letting infidel Higher Critics write the biography of their Royal Book for them, men who declare that it is a bastard begotten of forgery, and conceived by fraud; that it never did have any right to command the obedience of men; that it has no divine character of supernatural origin; that its claims are utter falsehoods; its history is a compilation of fables, and a tissue of lies;-men who do not, indeed, believe that there ever was, or can be, any specially Divine Book.

This may seem to be a severe arraignment of the Higher Critics; but we shall prove what we say of them.

We wish to say at the outset, that there is a conservative, reverent, devoutly spiritual higher criticism of the Holy Word, which seeks to know all the facts, and to preserve the Book free from every error, and send it out as the supernatural and inspired oracle of God to bless the world. The Bible is safe in such hands. Hengstenberg and Home are examples.

But there are Higher Critics whose avowed purpose is destructive; who study the Word with one fell object to destroy its influence, and bring it into discredit in the minds of men.

When men thus seek for whatever may destroy confidence in the integrity and credibility and truthfulness of the Bible; when their animus is like that of Jehoiakim, who cut with his penknife the sacred roll and cast it into the fire, because his wicked heart did not like its contents, we should draw back from them, and be very slow to adopt their conclusions.

I. Let us consider the vile fountain from which this stream of Bible criticism has flowed.

1. Spinoza, the rationalist and pantheist Dutch philosopher, first impunged the received date and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and ascribed it to Ezra, in 1670 A. D.

2. Hobbes, the famous English infidel, adopted the theory and, besides denying the Mosaic authorship, denied the necessity and possibility of any revelation.

3. Astrue, a profligate, free-thinker of France, in 1753, propounded for the first time, the Jehovistic and Elohistic divisive hypothesis, and opened a new era of criticism. He was the father of the documentary theories.

4. Eichhorn, born 1752, was the first rationalistic free-thinker to use the phrase "higher-criticism."

Professor Cheyne of Oxford informs us that what led Eichhorn to enter on his task was his hope to make the Bible popular with German rationalists, by reducing it to the level of a merely human book. It was to be done by eliminating out of it everything that was miraculous. We may remark that if the Bible is sufficiently criticised and degraded it might be made popular in the bottomless pit.

5. Reuss, Graf, Vatke, Kuenen, and Wellhausen and many others, we are informed, were all rationalists who practically ruled out the supernatural and the miraculous, "and believed in an evolution of a practically deistic kind." So writes Prof. J. J. Reeve who himself was once caught in the meshes of this dragnet of criticism.

These are the continental gods of this wave of modern infidelity that has swept over Christendom. The English and American destructive critics are simply weak reflections of these continental infidels. They are utterly destitute of, and quite ignore, the religious sense and spirit. They seem to be utterly lacking "a God-consciousness." As one noble scholar and writer says: "How far removed from the realms of a true higher criticism are such men as Kuenen, a professed polytheist, or Wellhausen, a confirmed deist, or Harnack, a scoffer of the divine Christ, or Cheyne, whose mind is so clouded with unbelief, that he can see nothing supernatural in the Bible, or in Christianity."

6. Moreover, the theory of evolution is the muddy pool from which they drink. They go to their work with a predetermination to alter or eliminate anything that stands in the way of driving this theory through the Bible. Their animus is shown by one of them lately, who said: "Our purpose is to reconstruct Bible History in harmony with the theory of evolution; to eliminate by this process all that is supernatural from the Bible record; and to unite scholars in support of sweeping changes in the orthodox view of the Holy Scriptures."

"A rational public sentiment should confront such a critic," says Professor Townsend, "and brand his animus as vicious, and his method as basely unscientific. The views of such men may well be debarred from the realms of respectable scholarship."

Another reviewer says: "As Vatke, made the hypothesis ot evolution the guiding presupposition of his critical work, so today does Professor Jordan, the very latest representative of the higher criticism, say: "The nineteenth century has applied to the history of the Hebrew people its own magic word, evolution. The thought represented by that popular word, has been found to have a real meaning in our investigations regarding the religious life and the theological beliefs of Israel." So it would seem that their "assured results" so-called, have not been gained by scientific induction, but by twisting and dissecting the Bible pages, and rearranging them to make them conform to a preassumed hypothesis of evolution. The boasted "results" have no existence, therefore, save in the infidel critic's imagination.

To such men as Graf, Vatke, Kuenen, Harnack and Wellhausen, all nature and religious as well as secular history, are a product of forces within, and in process of development. There has not been, and could not be, any direct action of God upon man; there could be no break in the chain of cause and effect. Hence there can be no miracle, or anything of what is known as the supernatural. God is a prisoner in his own world, unable to do anything but in the way of ordinary processes. There could be no epoch-making revelation, no revivals, no declensions, no special exhibition of divine power, no incarnation, no redemption. They study the Bible through the glasses of this foregone conclusion, and the entire question is practically settled beforehand.

Manifestly, the Bible is in transparent disagreement with such a theory; therefore it must be rearranged, and dissected, and expurgated, and divided, and eliminated, until what is left may seem to them to be in harmony with their precious evolution theory. These impious, vandal hands treat the Holy Book with no more regard or reverence than might be accorded to a last year's almanac advertising a quack nostrum. We could say much more about this vile fountain of infidel criticism; what wonder that the stream has been so pernicious and so vile!

It would seem to a calm and reasonable mind to be enough for the Higher Critics to degrade the Bible into a book of myths and fictions, forgeries and folklore tales. It would seem as if they would be satisfied to deny the inspired and the miraculous and the ancient in the Holy Word; to question the existence of Abraham and Moses; to deny that the Pentateuch is authentic; that the Children of Israel ever were in Egypt; that if there ever was a Moses, it matters little, for he never wrote anything; neither did David write any Psalms; and there was a whole school of Isaiahs, living in several different centuries. Such a wholesale destruction of a literature that was the light of the world for above a thousand years ought to appease the destructive tendencies of almost any perverted mind.

But not so. The less they can leave of the Bible that is not discredited and destroyed, the better these infidel theological professors are satisfied. So they march over into the New Testament for a new world to conquer. To their vandal hands, nothing is sacred. It was not enough to reject the Gospel of John as so much rubbish, and to discredit the other Gospels as wholly unreliable, and to degrade the Savior of the world into a mere man, of good character indeed, and somewhat clever, but only the bastard son of a fallen Jewish maiden, quite fanatical and partially insane. Even all this does not fill up the measure of their carnal audacity, and their low craving for notoriety, and their depraved ambition to lead all others in a malign assault upon the Christian faith. Their dislike of all bonds, and all allegiance to the blessed Son of God, and all the claims of gratitude and devotion made by Him who bought them with His blood, reveals itself in a still more daring assault of their infidelity.

Two German critics, Professor Zimmern, and Professor Jensen of Marburg, now actually advance the daring theory that no such person as Jesus Christ ever existed, Christ is essentially a Jewish version of the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epos. "Practically all of the Gospel narrative is purely legendary, and there is no reason at all to consider anything that is told of Jesus as historical. The Jesus legend is an Israelitish Gilgamesh legend." In his concluding chapter of a book of a thousand pages, Professor Jensen writes: "Jesus of Nazareth, in whom, as in the Son of God, and the Saviour of the world, Christianity has believed for nearly two thousand years, and who is regarded, even by the most advanced scholarship of our own day, as a good and great man who lived and died, the sublime pattern of the ideal, ethical life-this Jesus has never lived upon earth; neither has he died, because he is nothing but an Israelitish Gilgamesh (a hero of fiction). We, the children of a much-lauded time of progress and achievements, we who look down upon the superstitions of the past with a forbearing smile, we worship in our cathedrals and churches, in our meetinghouses and schools, in palaces and shanties, a Babylonian deity!"

And so this audacious German infidel while teaching in a Christian (?) institution, looks Christianity in the face, and tells us that the scholars of nineteen Christian centuries have, in their childish simplicity, worshipped Christ Jesus, as a real being-the God-man who lived upon this earth, and died for our redemption, and rose from the dead and ascended to the right hand of God to intercede for our salvation, when, lo! he is only a creation of fiction,- a literary invention, an imaginary character borrowed from Babylon, that never had an existence save in an author's mindl Was there ever such modesty as is incarnated in this German professor's breast! But what a pity that he did not come upon the stage of action, long centuries before! How he might have undeceived the deluded, uncounted millions of the Christian centuries, who have poured their precious ointments on the head of this fictitious Christ, and laid their priceless treasures at His imaginary feet! What countless prayers might have been saved! What sorrowful confessions from contrite hearts might have remained unspoken! What solemn vows of devotion might never have been made, and what deathless love for this unreal being would never have been called out!

But, laying jest aside, was there ever a bigger fool than an impractical German professor can make of himself, or moral madness greater than he can show, when his unrestrained infidelity and carnal conceit display themselves in the field of Higher Criticism? If there is, it must be the Englishman, or the American who tries to ape him, and says "me too," to all his folly. The theory impeaches the intellectual and moral sanity of the Christian ages.

When I was in England the last time, I received from the author, a book "Has Jesus Ever Lived?" with a letter. It was filled up with the same infidel screed copied from the two German infidels last named. Not an original thought in the book! The poor man could not write his letter, or copyright his book, or make a legal contract, or write a bank check, or register a deed to a piece of property, anywhere in the civilized world, without dating it from the birth of that despised Jesus Christ, who he thought had never lived! What a silly fool the man made of himself, aping German infidelity!

II. Consider its underlying purpose.

The men who have been most distinguished as the leaders of the higher critical movement in Germany and Holland, have been men who have had no faith in the God of the Bible, and no faith in either the necessity or the possibility of a personal, supernatural revelation. So their system of criticism has been based on hypothesis and supposition which have for their object the destruction of the traditional view of the Bible. The method and tone and animus of their writings show that they have studied and written with that predetermination not to confirm the credibility and authority of the Scriptures, but to discredit their genuineness, and destroy all confidence in the Holy Word.

Professor Townsend, of Boston University quotes Professor Kruger, as saying with brutal frankness: "It is the calling of the theological professor not only intentionally to shake their hearers in their naive faith, but to lead them into doubt, even though there are those who, on this dangerous way, are lost; hence it is our task to endanger souls." An imp of hell is as fit to fill a chair in a theological seminary as a man capable of writing so diabolical a sentence. It arouses the righteous indignation of every truly Christian soul.

Dr. E. B. Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford, "who in a book recently published, has completely demolished the theories of Professors Driver and Cheyne as to the Maccabean origin of the Book of Daniel," says: "The criticism of Rationalism is but a flimsy veil which hides from no eyes but its own (if indeed it does that) the real ground of its rebellion, which is the repugnance to receive a revelation from God to which it must submit." Being a professor in the same university with these critics he probably knows what he is talking about. At any rate the carnal heart and the cloven hoof are plainly manifest in their writings.

Dr. Emil Reich, in "The Failure of Higher Criticism," with the distinguished Dean of Canterbury in the chair, said: "What is called Higher Criticism is one of the greatest crimes of modern times; its essential position implies that the Bible is a stupendous fraud."

It is painful to be obliged to write such things about these men. But their persistent adherence to discredited opinions; their determined pushing of unproved hypotheses, known to be destructive to the blessed Book, coupled with a contemptuous ignoring of all opposing facts, gives conclusive evidence of special pleading, that is unscientific, dishonorable, and determinedly hostile to the Holy Word.

III. Their Methods and Riding Hypotheses.

Matthew Arnold is quoted as saying: "If you shut a number of men up to make study and learning the business of their lives, how many of them, from want of some discipline or other, seem to lose all balance of judgment, ALL COMMON SENSE." Canon Dyson Hague, M. A., of Toronto, Canada, says: "It is notorious that some of the most learned German thinkers are men who lack, in a singular degree, the faculty of common sense, and knowledge of human nature. For hypothesis weaving and speculation, the German theological professor is unsurpassed, and it is amazing to what length the German fancy can go in the direction of the subjective and the conjectural." One of the foremost thinkers used to lay it down as a fundamental truth in philosophical and scientific inquiries that no regard whatever should be paid to the conjectures or hypotheses of thinkers, and quoted as an axiom the great Newton, and his famous words: "Non fingo hypotheses" (I do not frame hypotheses).

But with these higher critics their hypotheses are the chief stock in trade. In their discussions, the most sacred truth, or the most solemn utterance of God Almighty is not half so important as their own hypothesis. "It is absolute, and dominates every attempt to understand the record, shapes every conclusion, arranges and rearranges the facts in its own order, discards what does not fit, or reshapes it to make it fit." The critics may deny this; but their treatment of the Old Testament is too well known to need any proof of it. The use of the Redactor is a case in point. This purely imaginary being, unhistorical and unscientific, is brought into requisition at almost every difficulty. It is acknowledged that at times he acts in a manner wholly inexplicable. To assume such a person interpolating names of God, changing names, and making explanations to suit the purpose of their hypotheses and imagination, is the very negation of science, notwithstanding their boast of a scientific method. Their minds seem to be in abject slavery to their theory. No reason is more impervious to facts than one preoccupied with a theory which does not agree with facts. They give more credence to the guesses of some so-called scholar, than to the teaching of Scripture, supported by any amount of archaeological evidence. They feel instinctively that to accept the Bible statement would be the ruin of their hypothesis, because the two are absolutely irreconcilable. As their theory must not be interfered with, the Bible is coolly set aside as a forgery, or a collection of unhistoric myths."

But we must be more specific about these critical methods, and state definitely their hypotheses. They may be stated thus:

1. They deny miracles and reject the truthfulness of any miraculous narrative. What we Christians consider to be miraculous, they say are only "legendary exaggerations of events that are entirely explicable from natural causes."

2. They deny the reality of prophecy and the validity of any prophetical statement. What Christians, and Christ and the Apostles, have called prophecies, they call dexterous conjectures, coincidences, fiction, or imposture; or an account written after the event, and skilfully profected back, into the past as a prophecy. Otherwise a prophecy would be a miracle, and they deny the possibility of a miracle.

3. They deny the reality of inspiration. Men who wrote the Bible were no more inspired of God than any other clever writers of any age or race.

4. They deny the reality of revelation in the sense in which it has ever been held by the Christian Church, from the Apostles' time until now. They, the German leaders, have been avowed unbelievers of the supernatural. They have gone on the assumption of the falsity of the Scriptures, and utterly scouted their claim to be the Word of God. Spinoza repudiated utterly a supernatural revelation. Eichhorn discarded the miraculous, and declared that everything supernatural was an oriental exaggeration. De Wettes' views as to inspiration were entirely infidel. Vatke and Leopold George were Hegelian rationalists, and regarded the first four books of the Old Testament as entirely mythical. Kuenen wrote in the interest of an avowed Naturalism. He was a free-thinking agnostic who did not believe in the Revelation of the one true and living God. The utterances of the prophets were all their own. Wellhausen held that the religion of Israel did not come from God, but was a naturalistic evolution from heathendom, an emanation from an imperfectly monotheistic kind of semi-pagan idolatry. It was simply a human religion, like all the others of the world.

Such are the ruling principles of these leaders, as given by Canon Dyson Hague in his History of the Higher Criticism. They were simply infidels, like all other literary infidels, writing to break down the Bible, and undermine its influence over men. Their unbelief was the parent and antecedent, and not the consequent, of their criticism.

5. Notice their criticism and methods.

(1) Because in Gen. 1:1 to 2:3 the Hebrew word for God, Elohim is used, and in Gen. 2:4 to 3: 24, God is usually Jehovah Elokim, and in chapter 4 He is called Jehovah, and in chapter 5, He is called Elohim, and in chapter 6: 1-8, He is Jehovah, and in the rest of chapter 6, He is Elohim, a French infidel profligate suggests that Genesis was compiled of two previously existing documents, the Elohim document called Elohim, and a Jehovah document called Jehovah.

(2) To get rid of Moses and the truthfulness of the Bible history and make room for evolution, they say that Elohim was written about 800 B. C., that is 650 years after Moses died; then fifty or a hundred years afterward Jehovah was written. Others say, for these all-knowing higher critics never agree, that Jehovah was written first, and Elohim was written fifty or a hundred years later.. But,

(3) The fourteenth chapter of Genesis is utterly impossible and nothing but a literary invention. There were no such kings as Amraphel and Chedorlaomer, and Arioch and Tidal making war upon the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah. The critics say, "The story must be pure myth or fiction," since there was no record of Babylonian expeditions into Palestine in the patriarchal age. But, as we shall see, it has all proved to be not fiction, but sober fact. The very names of these kings have been resurrected from the dead past by the spade of the archaeologist. It was only the infidel critics who were mistaken and not the writer of Genesis.

(4) But this dividing of Genesis made such a sensation for the critics that they became elated and went on with the rest of the Bible. The Jehovah and Elohim documents were fused together into Jehovah Elohim by another unknown somebody, called a Redactor, by the critics.

(5) But some later critics, Vater Hartmann and others divided Elohim into several Elohims and Jehovah into several Jehovahs and gave us the Fragment Hypothesis which is "the Document Hypothesis run mad."

(6) Then some other unknown nobody wrote Deuteronomy, about 621 B. C. and palmed it off on King Josiah and the people of his day, and started them to keeping a code of hitherto unheard of laws,-the most unlikely story that could be invented. This last book is called by the critics, Deuteronomy.

(7) Then another Redactor No. 2, combined Jehovah and Elohim and Deuteronomy, and added an introduction and an appendix. Who he was, or what he did it for, not even the all-knowing infidel critics can tell.

(8) Then some other unknown nobodies began to put the priestly laws into writing. Their various efforts were put together by Ezra, about 444 B. C. This production is called P and this was redacted by a final redactor about 280 B. C. They must place the laws very late, because nobody knew enough to make such laws in the time of Moses. But here is a most unaccountable difficulty with this theory, (a) The critics tell us that there probably never was a Moses; and if there ever was such a person, he never wrote anything anyway. But (b) the author of Deuteronomy, and Ezra, the author of the priestly code in Leviticus, wrote their books to bless the nation; and (c) by pious brand and literary forgery they profected them back into the past a thousand years, and attached them to that unknown and obscure but influential Moses, to make them pass with the people!!! No wonder thoughtful people think these critics lack common sense.

(9) After Jehovah, Deuteronomy, Elohim and P have been properly redacted into Jehovah Elohim Deuteronomy, by R2, then Joshua is written a thousand or so years after the old warrior went to glory.

(10) Every little while "Elohim" appears in the wrong place, and the critics are compelled to introduce another unscrupulous redactor. Someone must be invented who took liberties with the documents. Then "Jehovah" will appear out of place, and another rascally redactor must be invented by the critics to save their hypothesis. Let heaven and earth pass away, and the elements dissolve with fervent heat; but by all means save the hypothesis of these infidel critics, for it is the only sacred thing left in this corner of the universe! So with every misplaced name of Deity, and every miracle and everything supernatural, and every historical fact that annihilates their theory, they fortify themselves by inventing a fresh batch of redactors who "must have interpolated" some wrong name of God, or a fiction about a miracle, or a story about an impossible event, while they were redacting the redactions of preceding redactors! "Hence new divisions, and the gradual resolution of the original Jehovah Elohim into the nebulous series Jehovah 1, Jehovah 2, Jehovah 3; Elohim 1, Elohim 2, Elohim 3; PI, P2, P3, P4; Rl, R2, R3; and they have added Ql, Q2, Q3, Q4, Q5; all of which have now become part of the recognized apparatus of the critical schools" (Dr. Orr). To any one who has the sense of humor left in him, the intellectual and literary performances of these critics is becoming more supremely ridiculous than the roaring farce of a cheap theater. Some of the American shadows of the European critics modestly calculate that there were ten or twelve writers in the Hexateuch. But Kuenen thinks there were eighteen. Wellhausen things there were twenty-two. And Driver, not to be outdone by anybody in this exhibition of folly, ambitiously "divides Joshua alone into ninety different pieces, no two consecutive pieces being by the same author. It is hard to say how many hands were engaged in putting together this simple story." W. Robertson Nichol, D. D., LL. D., says of this complicated but confidently maintained scheme, "It is just too complete, too wonderfully finished, too clever by half! Any other book of such vast antiquity could be put through a modern mincing machine (of higher criticism) and produce a similar result." What wonder that a writer in Christliche Welt expresses strong fears that the "whole theological structure" reared by "the advanced clans," of criticism, "will fall in pieces like a house built of cards?" And Professor Adolf Juelicher, of Marburg, himself a critic, castigates his brethren in scathing terms, ridiculing their "arrogance, pretense of knowledge, and rejection of longrecorded history"; their "enormous traffic in hypotheses"; their "mania for piling up details in support of preconceived and revolutionary theories." He taunts them with "explaining away historical personages," describes their science as "a disease," and says "they are becoming weaker and weaker through the whole field of rhetorical research."

(11) The story of the tabernacle must be destroyed. For if it remains it will prove that a priestly code, and moral and spiritual laws, and a completed system of sacrificial worship existed in the time of Moses; and it would be of divine origin and not a human evolution. But that would be fatal to their hypothesis of evolution, and their whole fabric of criticism would go down. The tabernacle was built under the direction of God, by Moses, at Sinai. Thirteen chapters of Exodus are devoted to a minute description of the plan and construction of the building. Then the book of Leviticus and ten chapters of Numbers tell us how it was to be set up, and how it was to be taken down, and who were to carry it, and all of itsj utensils, when the people journeyed from place to place, and how the sacrifices were to be offered. For five hundred years it was a very conspicuous object in ancient Israelitish history. In the New Testament the Epistle to the Hebrews is devoted to explaining from a Christian point of view the typology and religious significance of that old building.

It is mentioned also in other books of the Bible. Joshua and Samuel, and Chronicles, and Kings and Jeremiah and Psalms. Collateral testimony comes from Josephus, and from Archeology. The very spot where it stood at Shiloh for more than three hundred years has been discovered.

But behold the method of these critics. No matter with what evidence anything in Scripture is supported; if it stands in the way of their hypothesis, it must be got rid of at any cost.

With absolute unscrupulousness, and unbounded and most presumptuous audacity, they deny the very existence of the tabernacle. The whole story of it in the Bible is a fiction dexterously woven into book after book of the Old Testament. In other words it is a wicked literary forgery of Ezra or some of his priestly friends after the exile, to help in the introduction of a new temple ritual at Jerusalem. In this way not only the Pentateuch but the whole historic Bible is to be destroyed and made a disjointed patchwork of fiction, and myths and fraud and forgery!

The reason of it all is that it would never do for the critics to admit that away back in the Mosaic times the Tabernacle, with all its elaborate ritual, and with the lofty moral and spiritual ideas embodied in it, could have existed; because that would be equivalent to admitting the falsity of their whole doctrine. With the unblushing effrontery of all other infidels, they would rather make the world believe that the Bible speaks falsely, and is an utterly untrustworthy book. The excuses that the critics make for their views are simply frivolous.

1. They say that the Bible account of the construction is unrealistic or impractical;

2. That the tabernacle was altogether too costly, highly artistic, and ponderous an affair, to have been produced by the Israelites at Mt. Sinai, and afterward carried by them all through the wilderness.

3. These people in the desert, and at Mt. Sinai, they say, were "mere wandering Bedouins" having but little civilization, and were "poor even to beggary," and they possessed neither the means nor the intellectual capability necessary for the construction and transportation of the Tabernacle.

The answer to all this is plain to a novice.

(a) They had jewels and gold in abundance, for when they left Egypt "they spoiled the Egyptians."

(b) There were precious stones and mines of copper in that very country and the shittim-wood or Acacia grew in abundance at Sinai out of which the boards and pillars and poles of the Tabernacle were constructed.

(c) These Hebrews were born and had always lived in Egypt, the most advanced nation in the world in arts and architecture, palaces and temples, pyramids and obelisks, and carved statues and columns. These Hebrews were the working classes, the very people who would have the mechanical skill, and handicraft-wisdom of their age. Professor Sayce affirms that, regarded, as an invention, the Tabernacle story is "too elaborate, too detailed to be conceivable." It must be true. The infidel critics will go down in disgrace before the indubitable facts. See Professor Heagle's "Tabernacle in the Wilderness."

(12) The prophetic element in the Bible must be disposed of, as it militates against the rationalistic infidelity of these critics. So, for an example, Isaiah must be divided. The prophecies in the last twenty-seven chapters were too remarkable to let pass. Therefore, the critics say, "there must have been" a deutero Isaiah who wrote the latter part of the book at the close of the exile, after the events occurred. To be sure, there is no intimation in any quarter that any such prophet lived at that time, to whom these chapters might be ascribed, or that they were, in fact, ever attributed by anyone in ancient times to any other than Isaiah, the Son of Amoz. But that does not make the slightest difference to an infidel when he has once imagined an hypothesis with which to attack the Bible. Then they began to increase the number of Isaiahs. They fairly spawned them, till, Cheyne, bidding higher than anybody else for the crown of folly and future infamy, "is said to have taken great pains to tear the book of Isaiah's prophecies into one hundred and sixty pieces, all by unknown writers; which pieces were scattered through ten different epochs including four and a half centuries!" Such a literary conclusion is modesty itself!

(13) The whole order of national thought and literary development must be rearranged to be adjusted to their theory of evolution. So these infidels set at nought all that the Bible authors say about themselves, and about each other, and all. that God's people have believed about them for nearly three thousand years. "The laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, are so intimately blended with the history as to be inseparable. Whoever wrote the one must have written the other likewise. And Genesis is plainly conceived and written as introductory to the Mosaic history and legislation. One consistent topic and method of treatment is pursued through the Pentateuch; the genealogies are continuous and mutually supplementary; a consistent chronology is maintained; there are implications and allusions in one portion to what is found in other portions by way of anticipation or reminiscence which bind all together."

"There are Psalms in which all the events of the exodus and the history of Israel as far as the first king, are recalled. What rational principle allows their composition to be assigned to a period eight or nine centuries farther on? Then there are numerous Psalms in which royalty plays an elevated and prevailing part. Could these have been written centuries after the kings had disappeared; in the very centuries when it is supposed the Jews were given to satire against kings?" So asks Schmauk. And it is a most pertinent question in view of the fact that the critics have decided that the Pentateuch was composed about one thousand years after Moses, and the Psalms were written some two hundred years before Christ, as "the war-songs of the Maccabees."

Now this theory is against nature, and contrary to the order of development of literature in every great nation of history. "It was not the case with the literatures of Egypt, of Assyria, of Rome, of Greece, of Germany, or of England." "It makes," says Schmauk, "all Israel's literature spring from the period of the nation's decline and fall. It leaves the basal and institutional epochs of Israel's early strength, and the balmy and propitious periods of her maturer prime without a literature. It assigns her grandest writings to the age of Ezra and later, and places all her productive powers, after her national decay."

The great men who have stamped the world with their abiding influence - Moses, Joshua, Samuel, Nathan, David, Solomon, - wrote nothing and the greater part of what is assigned to them and to Isaiah and Jeremiah, was not written by these men at all, but by unknown scribes, obscure men, who made no mark on their own generation, and left no name to the generation that followed. Oftentimes some obscure man has done great work; but when we are called upon to believe that throughout a nation's entire history, the great men have done substantially nothing, and the nobodies have done everything, that is beyond the bounds of ordinary credibility." The improbability that this matchless literature, the most influential and beneficent this world has ever had, was produced by writers, no one of whom was ever heard of, is well-nigh infinite,

(14) These critics have built up their destructive theories on "words," and "sentences," "literary style," and their own "subjective sense" of who "must have written" this or that, or who "could not have written" this or that passage or verse. They call it "internal evidence." Thus they try to make the Bible destroy itself. Now this is sufficient to condemn their whole work. "Circumstantial evidence," says Schmauk, "is captivating as a rule in its plausibility, and striking to the human imagination; but a long experience has taught the judicial tribunals of the race, that circumstantial evidence is an unsafe thing by which to effect a proof. It is a valuable and clinching confirmation of positive proof. In the absence of the latter it is not entirely safe and trustworthy. There is especial need for caution when it is used to overthrow beliefs that have been generally held by humanity for ages and ages." Again he says, "The whole theory is dependent entirely upon internal evidence." But internal evidence is a very dangerous and flimsy thing on which to entirely rest a new theory. The difficulties in the case are so great that there are many presumptions against it, to one in its favor.

"Literary tact," says Professor Sayce of Oxford, "is but another name for a purely subjective impression; and the subjective impressions of a modern European in regard to ancient Oriental history are not likely to be of value... Of recent years, however, criticism has endeavored to bolster up the weakness of the philological method by an appeal to the doctrine of evolution. But here again, as in the case of "literary tact," the appeal is to subjective impressions and beliefs rather than to scientifically established facts... All theories about the evolution of ideas, whether religious or otherwise, are absolutely valueless. There is no single line of growth along which they must necessarily have moved, and, apart from the archaeological evidence, we can no more say that a particular phase of faith or thought has been evolved out of another than, apart from physiology, we can say that a particular form of life has a special ancestry.

"In both England and France books have been published of late years which we know to have been the joint work of more than one writer. The novels of Besant and Rice, and of Erkmann and Chatrian are familiar instances in point. They are written in languages which are both living, which embrace vast literatures, and with which we are thoroughly acquainted. And yet there is no Englishman who would undertake to say where Besant ends and Rice begins in the novels which they wrote together; and no Frenchman who would venture to do so in the case of the two French novelists.

How then is it possible for the European scholar of today to analyze an old Hebrew book into its component parts, to lay down with accuracy what section of the same verse belongs to one writer, what to a second, and what to a third, and even to fix the relative dates of these hypothetical authors?...

It follows from all this that the "critical" method is scientifically unsound, and its results will not stand the application of a scientific test. It is quite as much an artificial creation as was the Ptolemaic system of the universe, and like the latter requires for its support an ever-increasing number of fresh hypotheses and complicated qualifications. The varying dates assigned to these hypothetical authors of the Pentateuch, the successive strata of religious belief and custom supposed to be discoverable in it, the denial of the historical character of the narratives it contains, must all alifce go with the foundation of sand upon which they have been built. An edifice reared on the subjective j ancles and assumptions of the modern European scholar is necessarily a house of cards."

On this same point, Professor Matthew Leitch of Belfast, says: "To divide a book into two or three parts, and assign each to a separate author, judging solely by internal evidence, might be possible in certain circumstances; but it is very difficult. Shakespeare in some of his plays, has worked up the writings of older dramatists, and it is very difficult to decide what is Shakespeare's own, and what is taken from others. No one is able to do it with any certainty, unless he has some external evidence to guide him, and no one would attempt it, judging merely by style and phraseology, if he has only brief scraps, and extracts of the writing used. Yet here are critics who can judge of the style and phraseology of a single verse, or half-verse, and assign it with confidence to an author of whom they know little or nothing. They can tell not only what parts of lost documents were adopted by the compiler, but what passed over. They can split up a small book like the Pentateuch into fragments and assign them to above a score of authors." That this book, which has proved its literary unity and powerful individuality by winning its way to the hearts of young and old for a hundred generations, is an artificial combination of scraps of literature, patched together by a score of unknown compilers, is a theory big with absurdity. It proves more than anything else, the unbounded conceit of the critics.

(15) These infidel critics assume that any writer only has one style, and any composition not in that peculiar style cannot be his. Nothing could be more absolutely fallacious. Such an assumption allows a Bible writer no spontaneity or versatility in style. If he diverges a hair's breadth from what the critic considers to be his style, a redactor is at once brought in to account for the divergency. Some authors have shown a surprising diversity, in their style of writing. How would the critics get along with John Milton's L' allegro, and Paradise Lost, and Areopagitica, and Latin poems, and Italian sonnets, and Comus? What about Gladstone's speeches in parliament and his writings about the Greek Classics, and "The Impregnable Rock of Scripture?" What would the same kind of critics say two thousand years from now about the earlier and later style of Thomas Carlyle, or about the "indescribable mixture of the sublime and grotesque, tragic pathos and riotous humor" of "Sartor Resartus"; or the "fierce sardonic, furious," Latter-Day Pamphlets, and his "calm and tender" Life of Sterling? They would solemnly tell the world that "all scholars are agreed" that one dozen authors had made the books attributed to Carlyle. And if the twenty or more publications of our own Bayard Taylor should be preserved so long, and should be examined by a board of Higher Critics in the year 4000 A. D. they would be so bewildered by his travels, translations, novels, ballads, pastorals, lyrics, songs and odes, that they would solemnly declare, "all scholars are united" in the belief that the "Isaiah family" is outnumbered by the "Bayard Taylor family," and "it is admitted" that the works of at least one hundred authors, writing through several centuries, have come down to us under the common name of "Bayard Taylor"! Of the correctness of this opinion there can now be "no possible doubt"! Wonderful, all-knowing, infallible critics!

(16) Another standing method of these critics is to display an assumption of infallibility in their statements and claims, which is evidently intended to make an impression upon young and untrained minds. Canon Dyson Hague, M. A., of Toronto, says this even of George Adam Smith and Driver; much more is it true of Cheyne, Kuenen, Wellhausen and their like. To quote: "With a kind of sic volo sic jubeo airy ease he (Driver) introduces assertions and propositions that would really require chapter after chapter, if not even volume after volume, to substantiate. On page after page his 'must be,' and 'could not possibly be,' and 'could certainly not,' extort from the average reader the natural exclamation: 'But why?' 'Why not?' 'Wherefore?' 'On what grounds?' 'For what reason?' 'Where are the proofs?' But of proof or reason there is not a trace. The reader must be content with the writer's assertions. It reminds one, in fact, of the 'we may well suppose,' and 'per-haps' of the Darwinian who offers as the sole proof of the origination of a different species his random supposition!' ("Modern Ideas of Evolution," Dawson, pp. 53-55). This is simply a planned and deliberate method of these men to make an impression on unreflecting minds when they have neither facts nor argument; for they know too much not to know better!

(17) Another favorite method quite akin to this is their haughty and contemptuous treatment of every fact, and every sacred belief, and every irrefutable evidence that conflicts with their hypothesis, begotten of their rationalism and carnality. As one defender of the faith says, "It has

grown to be 'color-blindness and critical insanity! " Another learned theological professor, who once accepted their views, says, "Their onesided intellectualism, biassed against Biblical Christianity, is responsible for a vast amount of intellectual pride, an aristocracy of intellect, with all the snobbery that accompanies that term. . . . Under the spell of this sublime contempt, they think they can ignore anything that does not square with their evolutionary hypothesis. Supremely satisfied with themselves and their self-constituted authority, they feel perfectly competent to criticize the Bible, the thinking of all the centuries, and even Jesus Christ himself!" Another oriental scholar, and author of a critical Bible dictionary, pronounces their kind and method of Biblical criticism to be "a species of moral insanity."

When a theory to which they have steadfastly adhered for a half century is hopelessly and forever shattered by an archaeological discovery, they ignore it and affect scorn for it, and go on with their mad folly. Such conduct is unscholarly, unscientific, and is downright, diabolical dishonesty. What Christian scholars demand is an honest, thorough, critical examination of the Bible; but they are opposed to the Biblical criticism of rationalists and unbelievers, whose judgment is biassed by a foregone conclusion and warped by a heart hostile to truth. Such criticism "characterized by the most arbitrary conclusions drawn from the most spurious assumptions," has no claim to the respect of thoughtful men.

(18) Another method of this school of thinkers is both to covertly assume and openly boast that all scholars are in agreement with them, and that there is no scholarship on the other side. This arrogant boast would be only amusing, were it not so misleading and harmful to young men, who do not know the facts, and are anxious to be "up-to-date" in opinions and thought. But the truth is, the monstrous conceit of this claim is only equalled by its atrocious mendacity. It would be impossible to name the scholars among us who are opposed to these infidel critics, and are quite the peers in scholarship of any of them, because the list is so extended. We gather, however, some interesting facts here and there which throw light on this question of scholarship. While the faculties of many Congregational, Baptist and Methodist schools are divided, we read , that here in the United States the Baptist Theological School at Waco, Texas, and Louisville, Ky., are a unit against the New Theology. So are all the Lutheran Theological Schools of our country, the third largest Christian denomination in the land. They declared; in a General Synod at Pittsburgh some five years ago: "We thank God there is no Higher Criticism among us." All the faculties of ; the Christian Disciples, the fourth largest Protestant denomination in the United States, are free from this infection. The German seminaries at Dubuque, Iowa, and Berea, Ohio, the school of the United Brethren at Dayton, Ohio, the Cumberland Presbyterian School at Lebanon, Tenn., the Dutch Reformed School at New Brunswick, N. ]., the United Presbyterian Seminaries at Pittsburgh, Pa., and at Xenia, Ohio, are each opposed to Higher Criticism; not a member of either of their faculties advocating it. In the Presbyterian Seminaries located at Allegheny, Pa., Cincinnati, Ohio, Omaha, Neb., at Columbia, S. C., at Richmond, Va., at Louisville, Ky., and San Jose, Calif., the faculties are all of one mind and one voice against the New Theology; "and the school at Princeton, N. J., which easily outranks all other theological schools on the continent, every member of the large faculty being a scholar of the highest standing, is uncompromisingly opposed to the new theology." This denomination is being rewarded for its loyalty to ; the faith by leading all others in America in effective evangelism and in accessions by profession of faith. Of course in these mutable times, these facts may not remain permanent about all those faculties. But they prove abundantly the absolute falsity of the claim ; that there is no modern scholarship defending the Bible.

Here are more than twenty Theological Seminaries all the members of whose faculties utterly reject Higher Criticism-a hundred scholars.

Then there are the late Dr. Samuel Curtiss of Chicago Theological Seminary, Professor G. Frederick Wright, D. D., LL. D., of Oberlin, known around the world and equal to the highest in; authority, and Professor A. T. Clay of the University of Pennsylvania, author of "Babylonian Testimony to the Bible," and Professor Edmund G. Wolf, of Gettysburg Theological Seminary, and President G. W. McGarvey, of Lexington, Ky., author of "Should Isaiah Be Sawn Asunder?" and Rabbi Solomon Schechter, president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, who has written in defense of the Bible, and Dr. Melvin Grove, of Frankford, Pa., the leading Egyptologist of America, author of four books defending the old Bible, and Professor Lampe, who punctured the bladder on which Dr. Briggs was floating, and Professor Howard Osgood of Rochester Theological Seminary,-a rare Hebrew scholar, who wrote "Exploded Theories Revived," and Dr. Edward Cone Bissell, professor of Hebrew in Hartford Theological Seminary, author of "Historic Origin of the Bible," and "The Pentateuch, Its Origin and Structure" and "Bible Antiquities," and Dr. John D. Davis, Professor of Oriental Literature of Princeton, and Dr. Robert Dick Wilson, of Princeton, and the late Dr. William Henry Green, chairman of the Old Testament Revision Committee, author of "Unity of the Book of Genesis," and "Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch," and Dr. Robert Cameron. Dr. Theodore E. Schmauk, editor of "The Lutheran Review" and author of "The Higher Criticism," and Daniel S. Gregory, editor of "Bible Student and Teacher." Dr. J. B. Thomas of Newton Theological Seminary, and Dr. Francis L. Patton of Princeton Seminary, and Dr. Willis G. Beecher of Auburn Theological Seminary, and a defender of the faith, and Franklin Johnson, D. D., LL. D., author of "Fallacies of Higher Criticism," and Professor J. J. Reeve, of Southwestern Theological Seminary, and Professor David Heagle, Ph. D., D. D., Ewing College, and Principal Wm. Caven, D. D., LL. D., of Toronto, Canada, and Canon Dyson Hague, M. A., of London, Ontario. Here are twenty-five more men, honored in the world of scholarship and authorship, to which list might be added the worthy names of Dr. Daniel Steele and Professor L. T. Townsend, D. D., S. T. D., of Boston University and Professor Geo. P. Fisher, D. D., LL. D., of Yale. Talk about the schools and the scholars of America all being on the side of the New Theology. A ranker piece of misrepresentation than that never has been perpetrated upon an innocent and unsuspecting public."

I quote from Professor Townsend's "New Theology Only Bubbles" much of the above list of scholars, and also the following about the scholars of Europe. "Dr. Klostermann of Kiel; Dr. Hoffman, of Berlin; Dr. Fritz Hommel, Professor of Semitic Languages, University of Munich; Dr. H. H. Kuyper, Dr. Bavinck, and Dr. Rutgers of Amsterdam. Dr. Koberle of Eclangen, Professor C. Von Orelli of Basle; Professor Kettle, of Leipzig, and Professor Edward Konig; Dr. Alfred Jeremias of Leipsic; Dr. Dornstetter; Dr. E. Sellin, of University of Louvain; Professor Kautsch of Galle; Professor Earth of Berne; Professor Von G. Hoberg of Freiburg; Professor John Kunz, of Leipsic; Professor F. Bettex, D. D., of Stuttgart, Germany and Professor Holtaman of. Berlin, who declares that "Higher Criticism has already run its round in Germany," and Professor Ruprecht, who after making a survey of American, English and German theology, declares, "The number of those who are taking the conservative view of Bible Criticism is constantly on the increase." The cry now is "Back to tradition." "Back to Christ and His Testimony!" What a pity it is that our American Theological Students, for the last quarter of a century had been so fast to finish their studies by going to Germany and loading up on rationalism and infidel criticism! "Professor Wellhausen's day is already over. Some ten years ago a visitor to his class-room in Gottengen University, found him lecturing to one student, and that student was not taking notes but cleaning his finger nails! Kuenen, too, is waning. First the pastors of Amsterdam fell in with his heresy. But they soon found that it emptied their churches. "They came together," says an Amsterdam pastor, "asked God's forgiveness, resolved to abandon Kuenen's theology and return to the historic faith of Holland. They are now preaching the Bible again to full churches, as the reformers preached it."

When we turn to England, Scotland and Ireland we find Professor Pusey, Regius Professor of Hebrew in Oxford, and Dr. D. S. Margoliouth, Jewish professor of Arabic at Oxford; Dr. John Urquhart; Dr. George C. M. Douglas, professor of Hebrew in the Free Church College of Glasgow, and Dr. Leitch, president of Assembly's College, Belfast; Dr. John Smith of Edinburg, author of "The Integrity of the Scriptures"; Professor G. Patterson Smith, author of "The Old Document and the New Bible," and "How We Got Our Bible." Dr. Archibald Henry Sayce, professor of Assyri-ology of Oxford; Dr. Emil Reich, author of "The Bankruptcy of Higher Criticism." Bishop Welldon, also the Dean of Canterbury. Dr. P. H. Wace, and Sir Robert Anderson, King's Counsellor, K. C. B., LL. D., author of "Christ and Criticism." Who speaks of "The sham criticism of the German Skeptical crusade against the Bible, which is now fathered by so many English scholars, professors, and theologians of inferior rank. I say this because not a single English Theologian of the first rank has identified himself with the movement." Sir Robert Anderson further declares, "Their great influence conies not from superior scholarship, but from the positions they fill as ministers and professors. Their power to attack the Bible is mainly due to positions they have gained by giving solemn pledges that they would defend the Bible. They accept the Christian's creed, while they destroy the foundations on which it rests, posing meanwhile as persons of superior enlightenment and intelligence! In no other sphere would such trifling be tolerated. If only these men could-be 'got into court' and subjected to cross-examination, they would lose not only their case but their reputation. Let no one be brow beaten out of one's belief by these attacks on Holy Scripture. The critics represent indeed that the scholarship of Christendom is with them. But the claim is absolutely unfounded."

This great lawyer is a reasoner, and is said to be "one of the brainiest men in the British Empire," and he has entered this field of theological controversy out of his love for the Bible and Christianity, and his profound disgust with the baseless assumptions and fallacious reasoning of the higher critics, and because of the peril which he believes this passing wave of infidelity is bringing, to the Empire. The claims of these critics to superior knowledge reminds us of little boys jumping up and down on the scales to make themselves weigh more.

With Sir Robert Anderson, are standing such leaders of thought as "the Bishops of Durham and Argyle; the Archdeacon of Liverpool; the Canons, Faussett, Courtenay, Morr, Gayer, and Griddle-stone. Such scholars as Dr. Wace, dean of Canterbury and principal of Kings College, London; Dr. Landish, professor of Arabic, in Oxford; Dr. Clayton, Rural Dean of Oxford; Dr. C. H. Wright, Bampton lecturer of Oxford; Dr. James Robertson, professor of Oriental languages in Glasgow University, and Dr. James Orr, professor of Systematic Theology, United Free Church College, Glasgow. Dr. Robert Watts, professor of Theology in Belfast. Dr. F. Watson of Cambridge, England.

We have given this list of scholars who still believe in an inspired Bible, and it might be indefinitely extended, for the benefit of the uninformed. Among them are many minds who are scholars of the highest repute, and many of them, too are more than the peers of these infidel critics in wide learning. When these critics boast that all scholars are agreed in accepting the findings of their infidel criticism, it is difficult to decide which is the greater, the audacity or the mendacity of their claims.

(19) Perhaps the last peculiar method of these critics which we will take the time to mention is their infidelic boasting-"all critics are agreed" and "the assured results of Biblical Criticism." This is nothing but buncombe. The critics are not agreed, and their results are not assured. They agree only as Pilate and Herod were agreed to combine against Jesus. Every reader of the critical literature knows that they constantly clash in their theories, their views and their so-called "results." They differ:

1. As to whether Genesis was all myth and legend, or whether there was a basis of historic fact;

2. As to whether there ever were any such persons as Abraham, Isaac and Jacob;

3. As to whether Moses was a real historic personage or a character of fiction; whether he ever wrote anything, or not;

4. Whether the Children of Israel were ever in Egypt or not;

5. As to how many different writers composed the Pentateuch, five, or "ten," or "eighteen," or "twenty-two";

6. As to whether "two" or "ten" or "ninety authors" wrote Joshua.

7. As to whether David wrote much, or little or nothing. Ewald thinks he wrote all or a part of fifteen Psalms. Driver thinks Ewald's list quite too extended. Professor Cheyne graciously admits that he might have had something to do with the eighteenth; but, after more mature deliberation, he kindly excuses him of all responsibility for having written anything for that disgraceful compilation of myths and forgeries called the Bible. Fortunate man! But what a narrow escape David had!

8. There was first the "Document Hypothesis." This was later displaced by the "Fragment Hypothesis." This was all overturned and refuted by the next generation of critics who were repelled by the inconsistencies and incongruities of the Fragment Theory. These invented the "Supplement Hypothesis." But this in turn was refuted, and a fourth scheme,-the "Crystallization Hypothesis" was proposed. Then a "Modified Document Hypothesis" was proposed.

9. These critics do not agree about Isaiah as to when it was written, or whether there were "two" Isaiahs, or ten or "one hundred and sixty" 11

10. They differ among themselves more than fifty years as to the date of the Fourth Gospel.

Thus are the critics "agreed" on a multitude of questions! To quote Professor Townsend of Boston University: "Professor Harnack almost fiercely assails the conclusions reached by Wellhausen. Wellhausen denies the Mosaic origin of the decalogue; Kuenen claims that the Exodus was an historical event; Stade says the thing was impossible and that the Israelites probably never dwelt in Egypt; Wellhausen gives one date for the Pentateuch; Professor Dillman another, and Professor Driver disputes them both, and decides that no one knows anything about it.

And if the conflicting views held on the one side by Professor Driver, and on the other side by the higher critic, Professor Cornill, as to the date and contents of Deuteronomy and Isaiah, were compiled they would make a book of many pages. This out and out higher critic, Professor Cornill, also berates Delitzsch because he irrationally exaggerates Babel at the expense of the Bible.

As to the origin of the book of Genesis, George Adam Smith, Dr. Driver, Dr. G- P. Peters, Dr. Cheyne and Dr. Briggs are at war with one another. In discussions on the so-called sources of the Pentateuch, one critic insists that "D" is earlier than "P"; others contend that "P" is earlier than "D," and as to the order in which "J," "E," "D," and "P" should be placed, almost every possible arrangement has been assigned by the critics. In a word, for more than half a century, "the whole realm of higher criticism has been characterized by the sound of clashing swords, and the scene of friend slaying, friend."

This is a truthful picture, and the half is not told. One of the critics uses such scathing terms against his fellows, as, "arrogance," "pretense of knowledge," "enormous traffic in hypotheses," "mania for piling up revolutionary theories," etc., etc.

It looks to an ordinary logical mind as if these "assured results," were nothing but a conglomerated hodge podge of infidel guesses, unproved theories, and unsubstantiated conjectures.

Professor Sayce of Oxford says: "Higher Criticism has betrayed the critic into a dogmatism as unwarranted as it is unscientific. Baseless assumptions have been placed on a level with ascertained facts; hasty conclusions, have been put forward as principles of science, and we have been called upon to accept the prepossessions and fancies of the individual critic as the revelation of a new Gospel,"