HIGHER CRITICISM CONTINUED

IV. Notice the results of this criticism.

"By their fruits ye shall know them." The critics have been cutting and dissecting and mutilating and tearing to pieces the Bible for more than a century. If we take them at their word and believe what they say, they have taken our inspired Holy Bible, which gave us the revealed and authoritative will of God as an infallible guide to heaven, and put it through their critical machine, and hand it back to us a mince meat of myths, fables, inventions, folklore tales, sagas, legends, pious frauds and well intended forgeries!

They take our Bible, written by holy men "as they were moved by the Holy Ghost," and hand back to us a purely human "scrap-book of anonymous compilations" with which lie Holy Spirit had nothing whatever to do, made by an indefinite number of unknown, unknowable, and undateable pseudonymous redactors, with nothing in it inspired, miraculous, supernatural or divine, and which cannot speak with any authority to a human heart.

A professor in an American University founded by the consecrated money of a most noble Christian man writes a book "setting aside as unworthy of belief almost everything that hitherto has been accepted as Christian theology; the account of creation, the origin of sin, sacrificial religion, and Christ as the final judge of men, are without hesitation put on the retired list."

Another professor in a college founded by a Godly soul says: "Rationalism is the antithesis of all systems which depend on authority as the source of truth. Modern thinkers reject the strictly miraculous everywhere. Hence they reject the authority of the Scriptures. The incarnation is totally unintelligible, no theologian having yet succeeded in putting any intelligent meaning into the proposition that in Christ is found two natures, divine and human.

With the incarnation will also disappear the doctrine of the Trinity and the Atonement."

In another college, a professor was lecturing before a large class, when a ministerial student ventured to ask: "Doctor, what about the atonement of Jesus Christ?" He made no reply but turned to the blackboard and wrote in large letters, "Rot." In another school a professor said: "Whiskey brings temporary insanity, and so does a revival of religion. This is simply a form of drunkenness, no more worthy of respect than the drunkard in the ditch."

"Such language," says another, "is too mild, religious revivalism is a social bane more dangerous to society than drunkenness. As a sot, man falls below the brute; as a revivalist, he sinks lower than the sot." Think of Wesley, Finney and Moody!

From another school comes this: "Humanity cannot be saved through the suffering and crucifixion of Christ. Providence works no transformation upon the heart of a man through expiation by sacrifice, and ransom by blood." "There are no God-given commandments; incest is not contrary to the laws of nature, or disapproved by any fancied ordinances of God." "An attempt to divert or gratify God through worship, is as if a chemist should chant a litany to change the power of hydrogen."

An English Theologian teaches in a book that, "Jesus is not essentially unlike other men in kind. His power to heal did not differ in kind from that which other good men in His day possessed. He causes sin to be forgiven by awakening in men the spirit of repentance. He died because of loyalty to His own religious ideals, not to make it possible for an angry God to forgive. He certainly arose from the dead, not physically; but spiritually. All theories about a historic fall, original sin, and total depravity are foreign to the genius of modern thought."

A professor in another American University "pronounces as untenable and false such Christian tenets as Bible inspiration, Bible miracles, the immaculate conception, the resurrection of Christ, and the entire supernaturalism of the Scriptures." Another late book assures as that "Moses was a myth, and Samuel a fortune teller; that the sofourn in Egypt is a fiction, and the book of Deuteronomy a document concocted after the exile, by a clever Jewish priest; that the miracles of the New Testament are legends, and the accounts of Christ's birth and resurrection are ingenious fabrications out of whole cloth."

A Bible class teacher in a Sunday school in America, of more than ordinary intelligence, recently said, that the Bible was of no more value for a class of young people than an old almanac! A few years ago, when the International Sunday school lessons were on Jesus' conversation in the Upper Chamber, and His Intercessory Prayer, a minister in a Congregational Church in Michigan, turned away from that glorious Scripture and taught a young man's Bible Class about "Portugal." These are choice specimens of the kind of fruit this Higher Criticism is bearing in our country on all sides.

Doctrinal Results in England

We turn to England and it is no better. Some books fresh from over the sea lie before us. One chapter in one of them wholly discredits the Virgin Birth. The next impeaches the sinlessness of Jesus, and denies that there were two natures in His person; and the last chapter denies the doctrine of the physical resurrection of our Lord. The writer admits that St. Paul believed it, but he does not. He further says: "Paul could believe that those who would be on the earth at the second coming would be changed in the twinkling of an eye, but we must not ask men today to believe so." And so he goes on, page after page, with bald rationalism.

Here is another volume from a clerical infidel. The most aggressive infidel in London says in his paper: "I am as much of a Christian as Dr. Reginald Campbell, and he is as big an infidel as I am." The following quotations are a proof. "No orthodox theologian of any repute now believes in an actual historical fall of the race. What I now wish to insist upon is that it is absolutely impossible for any intelligent man to continue to believe in the Fall as it is literally understood and taught." . . . "No doubt the Genesis myth about Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden forms the background of it, but it is not consonant with the doctrine itself. The Genesis narrative says nothing about the ruined creation or the curse upon posterity. There is no hint of individual immortality, much less of heaven and hell; no Christ, no cross, no future judgment, no vicarious atonement." . . . "There is a tendency to take the legend of the Fall more or less literally." . . . "Paul took some kind of a fall for granted when unfolding his system of thought. It is doubtful whether he took the Genesis story literally or not, and he certainly made Adam the type of the unideal or earthly man who had become estranged from God. . . . Right through Christian history the tendency has run to look upon the world as the ruins of a Divine plan marred by man's perversity and self-will. It is time we got rid of it, for it has had a blighting, deadening influence upon hopeful endeavor for the good of the race." . . . "Why should God feel himself so much aggrieved by Adam's peccadillo. If it were not for the theological atmosphere which surrounds the question we should see at once that it was ridiculous" . . . "The doctrine of the Fall is an absurdity from the point of view of ethical consistency and common sense." . . . "The Fall Theory is not only impossible in face of the findings of modern science; it is a real hindrance to religion."

"Jesus was God, but so are we. Jesus was not God in the sense that He possessed an infinite consciousness; no more are we." . . . "The doctrine of the virgin birth operates as a hindrance to spiritual religion, and a living faith in Jesus. The simple and natural conclusion is that Jesus was the child of Joseph and Mary." . . . "An adherent of the so-called orthodox view of the Atonement believes that it is of the utmost value to Christian experience; which it is not, and never was. The doctrine as popularly held, is not only not true, but ought not to be true; it is a serious hindrance to spiritual religion. Why in the world should God require such a sacrifice before feeling Himself free to forgive His erring children?" . . . "One of the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of many devout and intelligent minds today is that of the supposed binding authority of the letter of Scripture." . . . "Apparently Paul's belief was that no one would ever have died but for the sin of Adam. Paul was wrong." . . . "There is no direct reference in the Old Testament to the atoning work of Jesus. The fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, and all similar passages have nothing whatever to do with Jesus." ... "I know of nothing that is such a hindrance to Spiritual religion as the supposed authority of the letter of Scripture." . . . "Never mind what the Bible says about this or that if you are in search for truth." . . . "An everlasting hell is in the nature of things a contradiction. . . The soul is potentially infinite and cannot have its true nature denied." "What Paul thought about the resurrection of Jesus is now impossible to any one." . . . "Paul's theory as to the resurrection of every physical human body is just nonsense." "Sin is actually a quest for life, but a quest that is pursued in the wrong way. Sin is always a blunder." . . . "Salvation and Atonement are just as operative on the other side of death as on this. The blind soul goes on for a while in its blundering selfishness, and the Christ spirit goes on seeking to win it to the truth. In the end the truth must prevail."

So the author goes on, page after page, with sneers at the doctrine of the Fall, the Atonement and the Cleansing Blood, the Deity of Christ, the Resurrection, the authority of Scriptures, the evil of sin,-a horrible concoction of rationalism, infidelity, and conceited diabolism. This infidel preacher went on with his infidel rot till he wrecked one of the noblest churches in London.

We open another London publication a year old, and find the following nuggets of infidelity lying everywhere over the surface. "The Higher Criticism may be described as a virtual, though not intentional, (we doubt it) attack on the historicity of the Bible. The result has been to show in almost every part, if not every part,of Scripture that what we have is not history." "The Bible writer used facts when it suited his purpose, but he would have no hesitation in subordinating facts to Ms purpose" (deliberately lied). "As a result of the Higher Criticism the Four Gospels are a complete wreck as historical records. It is long since the Fourth Gospel was relegated to the realm of spiritual imagination. It is a pure assumption to suppose that there was any such nucleus of fact." "It can never be proved that a historic person called Jesus uttered the great teachings of this Gospel. The same is substantially true of the Synoptic Gospels. As authorities for a-life of Jesus they are hopelessly shattered by the assaults of the Higher Criticism. How little they tell us of an historic Jesus! And that little full of contradictions and discrepancies, of impossible incidents and errors... So called facts of history are, after all, very trivial matters. What can it interest the people of today to know what took place in Palestine two thousand years ago?" "Higher Criticism has destroyed the Virgin birth, as history. The same is true of almost every so-called incident in the synoptic gospels. It is impossible to regard as historical the Temptation, the Transfiguration, the cleansing of the Temple, and the numerous miracle incidents with which they are filled." "The Higher Criticism is beginning to lay its hands on the Trial and Death and Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus, and to point out the impossibility of reconciling these with history." . . . "Jesus was a Jewish fanatic bent on forcing on his death in order to precipitate the coming of the promised Kingdom of Heaven." "A flesh and blood Christ is a contradiction in terms." "The story of the fall is not history but an allegory. Eden is no garden of earth, but the soul." "The voice that tempted Adam came from no serpent." "The idea that man is saved by a historical Savior who lived at a definite time in human history, is the great error of the Christian Church." "The four Gospels are not the biography of an individual (Jesus Christ) but a spiritual drama or allegory." "The Christ within is the spiritual self of every man, and is identical with the Divine Son of God ever living in the bosom of the Father." So every man is his own Christ. "A perfect person such as the historic Jesus is held to be, could not exist in the imperfect society of to-day, far less in the Graeco-Roman world of the first century." "The speeches of God reported by the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc., must no doubt be regarded as legendary and imaginary." "The personal, careful, individual attention of Deity to prayer is neither needful nor credible." "The benefit of prayer is subjective only." "Christ Himself was a man of His age, without pretension to foreknowledge of the future of the world." "Supplicatory prayer is mainly a matter of long tradition, habit, and education, but there is no deep-seated belief among Christians in its being heard and complied with by God." "A sign of the times is the greater freedom of Sunday observance on the part of all classes. Motoring, cycling, excursions by train and steamboat, and even golfing are more or less common on the Lord's Day."

Doctrinal Results in Germany

Now we turn to Germany, the foul fountain of this mighty stream of Infidelity. Professor Bousset of Goettingen, says: "We can no longer adhere to the belief in miracles." Dr. Fischer of Berlin, affirms: "Our faith in God must not include a faith in miracles." The Christliche Welt says: "It must be regarded as settled that no miracles in the sphere of nature can be accepted." But we have a historic Christianity or none at all.

Dr. Boussett says: "The doctrine of the Trinity too, is lost in the development of modern theological thought." "Jesus was a human being and the Holy Spirit was no divine person." So, according to the infidel critic, the doctrine of Trinity is gone.

The same critic says: "Nowhere in history do we find any place for special divine revelation; of a divine working by the side of the human; of a supernatural exhibition of divine power in the history of a redemption." So the supernatural Bible is swept away as if it were a mere cobweb.

Ritschl says: "A passively inherited condition cannot be regarded as sin; the doctrine of original sin cannot be proved by experience. It is only a notion." "The idea of the universal corruption of the human race we cannot accept." So the doctrine of depravity, the basis of Pauline theology, is swept away.

Boussett says: "That which Matthew and Luke in the first chapters of their Gospels report concerning the beginnings of the life of Jesus is a myth and legendary." So Jesus, instead of being conceived by the Holy Ghost, was simply a bastard son of a fallen girl.

Wernle says: "Jesus was not sinless," and Boussett says: "His nature was not entirely free from evil." So our Jesus, "holy, harmless, undefiled, separate from sinners and higher than the heavens," is gone! ' Boussett says: "Tradition has made Jesus a miracle worker, who awakened the dead, walked upon the sea, commanded the winds and the waves, and fed thousands with a few loaves. All these stories are nothing but the outgrowths of legends. There is nothing unique in the life of Christ in this respect." So our Almighty Christ is dwarfed by Higher Criticism to the level of John Smith or Bill Jones!

Wernle declares: "Neither His blood nor His death has any special redemptive significance for us." "One thing is sure, namely, that the idea of a forgiveness of sins has nothing to do with the death of Jesus." And thus Christ's vicarious sacrifice and atonement are swept away, or contemptuously set at nought.

Pfleidever says: "The belief of the church is a mythical symbol wrapped in a pious phantasy." Harnack says: "We must have the Easter faith but not accept the Easter Message." Wernle declares: "The empty grave is an invention of the evangelists." Boussett says: "In the resurrection we see the lively contact of Jesus with His disciples." The Kirchliche Gegenwart affirms: "Words that came from a tomb that was empty amount to little." And thus Higher Criticism robs people of their faith in the resurrection, and with it Christianity is gone forever.

Boussett says: "In the expression 'Son of God' the dogma of the eternal Divine nature of Jesus cannot be found." Our faith is not dependent on the conviction of the superhuman, unique nature of the Redeemer-God, but on the earthly personal life of our Lord. Jesus never passed beyond the limit of the purely human. We no longer believe that Jesus was absolutely a different being from ourselves. He from above and we from below. We do not rob Jesus of his honor if we do not accept His divinity." Hamack says: "Christ was a man of a limited world of thought, but with a pronounced consciousness of God." All this is simply bald Unitarianism.

Fischer says: "Jesus, because he was Himself religious and humanly pious, cannot be an object of religious adoration; as He prayed Himself, no prayers can be addressed to Him." So hush your prayers, these critics would say, to your Divine Savior; for it is a waste of time and breath..

Boussett says: "Jesus never demanded a faith in Himself, but only in God (see Mark 2:5; John 3: 16, 3: 36, 14: 1 and Matthew 18: 6). Paul has changed the simple Gospel of Jesus into a faith in Christ, and in this way has materially changed the Gospel." Wernle says: "It is foolishness to speak of a faith or of a justification." Julicher says: "The Protestant doctrine of justification by faith is a lost dogma." "There is a practical agreement that Paul invented this doctrine." So St. Paul was an old fraud, and the doctrine of Salvation by Faith is buried by criticism forever.

And these infidel critics are as complimentary to the Old Testament as to the New Testament. "Abraham is a myth." "Joseph is an obvious Astral myth." It is uncertain whether Moses ever lived or not. Professor Winckler assures us that "Joshua was no human being, but was a personification of the Sun. His companion was Caleb. But Caleb stands for Kaleb, and Kaleb stands for Kelb, and Kelb is a dog. So of course, Caleb is clearly put for the dog star Sirius." Now who could resist such lucid, cogent reasoning? To the minds of these infidels it is as clear as mud and as certain as a weathervane.

Our theological students of America cross the sea to hear such rationalists and infidels, amidst the fumes of beer and tobacco-smoke, sneer at the Deity of Christ, mock at the efficacy of His cleansing blood, deny the depravity of the race, to save us from which He died, deride His miracles as myths, scoff at His resurrection, ridicule justification by faith, and insult the Holy Ghost.

Then they come back to America, and by wire-pulling and dexterous arts, get into theological professorships and prominent pulpits, and proceed to ventilate their up-to-date knowledge. With daring irreverence and flippant conceit, they dissect and mutilate and criticize the Holy Book, deny its authenticity, make light of its miracles, deride the superhuman and the supernatural, and teach that the Bible is a compilation of legends and inventions and forgeries which, in some inexplicable way, got palmed off on the keenest minded natians and in the most intellectual age of ancient history as the Word of GodI And the poor, unfortunate world has waited eighteen long, weary centuries for these smart infidels to arise and point out our mistake! O what a boon these dear critics have brought to us! We can now go back and live like heathen, wallowing in sin, with no inspired Bible to rebuke us, and no Divine Savior to save us, and no Holy Spirit to trouble us, and wander on in darkness, "having no hope and without God in the world"!

Spiritual Effects.

Let us now look away from the teaching, to the moral and spiritual effects of Higher Criticism on the people. Perhaps the effect is best seen in Germany; for there the disease started and has reached its crisis. Dr. Townsend of Boston quotes Dr. E. Petersilie one of the leading statisticians of Prussia, as follows: "The thirty million Germans in 1830, sent to the universities, 4,267 students to study theology. In 1905 with a population of fifty:five millions, if the ratio had kept up, there would have been 7,854 students of theology; but there were only 2,352. In 1830 the theological students constituted 30 % of the whole student body. But in 1905 they constituted but six per cent. During the last ten years law and medical students have increased more than half.

When Berlin had over a million people, she had but one hundred and ten ministers of religion, and their average congregation was less than one hundred. It was reported seven years ago "that largely throughout Germany the churches have almost done away with evangelical beliefs and evangelistic efforts. Society is socialistic and coming to be anarchistic. Men's souls are sick, and suicide is prevalent as never before." A German student of such problems tersely says: "Germany is now reaping the harvest of her advanced thought; the prisons are full." Dr. Baur, one of the imperial chaplains, in a sermon preached before the Emperor, said: "Affection, faith and obedience to the Word of God are unknown in this country, which formerly was justly called the home of faith. Marriages are concluded without the blessings of the Church; we have a Sunday only in name; the afternoon and evening of it are spent by plain people in public houses and music halls; while the upper classes rush to the races, preferring to hear the panting of tortured horses rather than sentences from the Word of God."

The hopeful sign in the sky of religious thought is that there is a widespread alarm in Germany over the peril threatening the German people, in consequence of this advanced theology. Great mass meetings have been held in the interest of faith in the Old Bible in German cities. There was no auditorium in all Leipsic large enough to hold the people who wished to attend. Professor Hommel said: "I seem to see signs of the approach of a new era, in which men will brush away the cob-web theories of the Higher Critics, and attain clearer perception of real facts, and increase of godlessness following this teaching.

Since these German confessions were written the great world war, launched by Germany, has come and gone. The revelation it made of the degradation of the moral character of the German people has shocked the moral sense of the civilized world. Their barbarities have surpassed all historic deeds of barbarism. Their deeds of savagery have outdone all the recorded acts of the most savage tribes ever discovered. Their self-confessed diabolism written down in their diaries boastingly, and found in the pockets of their dead soldiers, would shame the fiends of hell. Germany deliberately trained her youth for years to this unfeeling cruelty that they might be ready for the great struggle for world dominion. By their own college-professors' books, and the daily training of their schools, they got rid of conscience, and popularized the war-license to cruelty, lawlessness, murder and lust. And when the war they had planned for a generation broke, they were ready to put the vandal torch to universities, and libraries, gather the defenseless into churches and shoot them or burn them alive; ready to shoot the wounded on the battlefields, and bomb hospitals; and carry off thousands of females for purposes of lust, and murder the aged, and crucify and starve prisoners, and stick their bayonets through babies and swing them over their shoulders, and sing as they marched; ready to poison wells, and to sink the peaceful ships of commerce freighted with innocent human lives.

This people, that once led the world in Christian virtue and piety, became a nation of trained intellects and leprous hearts, to whom crimes were virtues, whose solemn covenants were "scraps of paper," whose statesmen were villains, whose diplomats had secret agents carrying bribes, organizing sedition, maturing plots and foulest crimes against nations with whom they were at peace, thus raising diplomacy to the nth degree of infamy. Their editors justified, their state-preachers defended, and their university professors and rulers glorified the sinking of women and children on steamers, "the rape of Belgium and Northern France, the assassination of Poland, the deliberate, cold blooded plot to exterminate Armenians." Their favorite philosopher boasted that he had "slain God," and declared that Germany's gift was brute force and not intellect. Their author-general declared that "weakness is the only sin against the Holy Ghost." Their All-Highest Kaiser with mildewed lips christened his soldiers "Huns," and his generals burned the name into their foreheads with the hot implements of merciless war-a brand they will carry for untold generations. No nation of history ever fell into such an abysmal depth of infamy in so short a time. And Germany could not have done it, if she had not first destroyed the influence of the Bible upon the minds of her people from princes to peasants, turned from the worship of Christ and Jehovah, and made the Devil her God.

In England there has also been a decline of evangelical piety as a result of this infidel criticism. All the leading independent denominations reported a decline in membership in 1910, and one strong denomination had declined in membership five years in succession. Strikes, and anarchy, and class hatred, and bitterness, and Sabbath desecration, and irreligion generally are as sure to follow this teaching as darkness succeeds the setting of the sun. "The entrance of thy Word bringeth light." A discredited Bible means moral darkness to the people.

Professor Townsend of Boston well says: "When people are told that scholars have decided, that the Bible is a book of fables and myths; that it is without special authority; that the hell it describes is only 'a medieval nightmare' only 'an invention to frighten weak-minded and superstitious people'; that God is too merciful to punish sinners, however much steeped in guilt-when told this and when it is believed, will oaths in the work-shop and on the street be fewer and less blasphemous? Will bitterness be less bitter and hopelessness less hopeless? Will the strike be less angry and bloody, or the occasion for it less aggravating? The man who says, 'yes,' is as ignorant of human history and of human nature as a monkey, from whom some of these scholars who are inveighing against the Bible, insist they have descended."

In the United States the results of this Higher Criticism are the same as elsewhere. It naturally breeds only desolation and death. Crimes and violence, murder and suicides are increasing, and naturally follow in its wake. It breeds evil and only evil, and that continually.

Here are some church statistics from the most reliable sources. In 1893 four per cent of the M. E. churches were barren, that is had no converts for a year. In 1905 there were eight per cent barren; the number of barren Presbyterian churches in 1893, was nineteen per cent; the number in 1905 was twenty-nine per cent. In 1893 the number of barren Congregational churches was twenty-five per cent, and in 1905 the number was forty-one per cent. The aggregate number of churches in these three denominations which in 1905 did not add a single soul on confession was nearly 7,000.

From 1902 to 1905, there was an actual loss of 164,000 Sabbath school scholars in United States when there should have been a gain of 751,000 scholars to keep pace with the growth of population. At a great Sunday school convention in 1911 Rev. Edward Blake said: "The Evangelical churches of America are facing a very serious situation. The six leading denominations showed a net increase of only 384,000 members in 1910. This represents the combined efforts of more than 160,000 churches, 17,000,000 members and an expenditure of $250,000,000 yearly. Each net gain of one represents the year's work of forty-four church members, and the cash outlay of $650.00.

The New York Tribune informs us that of the two hundred and two leading colleges in United States at the commencement in June, 1911 there was a falling off of fifteen per cent in the number of graduates deciding to enter the ministry. This has now been going on for twenty years, and all this while our population increases one million a year. From our one hundred theological seminaries, there were 66 fewer graduates entering the ministry than the year before. There were twenty-five per cent fewer men graduated in 1911 than the churches demand for immediate service.

A Religious Weekly informs us, that "30,000 Methodist Churches in the land, in the past four years had but 28,000 converts." It seems incredible that that great church, once such a revival power, has fallen so low and become so weak. But they are playing with this specious infidel criticism in high places, and it is surely doing its deadly work. The New York Christian Advocate of 1911 says: "Conversions are comparatively few in Protestant Churches, and are becoming fewer still with each passing year. . . . We are rapidly approaching the crisis... In 1927, a government official reported 60,000 Protestant churches in the United States that did not have a convert. Surely such an array of statistics furnishes food for very serious thought. But can these things be wondered at?

After we have allowed conscienceless infidels to destroy our Bible-the life-giving Book, and undermine our faith in its eternal verities, what else could we expect? If what these critics are saying is true, who can blame the bright minded college students of Germany, England and America for not entering the ministry? They would have no authoritative truth to proclaim, no Divine, Omnipotent Savior to hold up, no atonement for sin to offer, no heavenly message to preach. If they accept the teaching of the critics they are infidels themselves; and then to enter the evangelical ministry and pretend to preach Christianity, is to brand themselves as infamous hypocrites!

The religious statistics of January, 1913 show that Congregationalists in England lost the year previous 2,221 members and 3,178 from the Sabbath school. The Baptists lost 2,500 church members, and 4,900 from the Sabbath School. The Primitive Methodists lost 848 church members. There has been an annual loss of members among Methodists and Congregationalists for five years, and among the Baptists for seven years. Every church in England suffered decline but the Roman Catholics.

The Literary Digest of February 22, 1913, shows us that in the United States the loss in the net increase in 1912 as compared with that of 1911 is 300,000-almost one-third. In all the churches Roman Catholic and Protestant, with 36,675,000 church members there was an increase of 579,000; which means that it required the labor of 63 communicants for each net gain of one, even with immigration to help them.

It is, at the best, a painful showing, and as says the "Christian Advocate of New York," "gives Christians an occasion for serious thought," The truth is that Higher Criticism and its bastard child, "New Theology," and all their infidel progeny are being weighed in the balance and found wanting.

It is time we think very seriously before we proceed farther in the direction we are now going. We need to "about face" and "double-quick march" back to the old faith in an inspired Bible, and a Divine Son of God, and the atonement through His blood, and a sanctifying Holy Ghost who endues with power from on high.

V. The Fallacies of the Critics, Scriptures Vindicated.

In discussing this point we may begin anywhere. It will make no difference. The folly of the critics will appear, and the truth of Scripture will be amply vindicated. The facts will speak for themselves.

1. The critics assume that if a book can be dissected, and by adroitly selecting passages, and putting them together, two or more continuous and connected stories can be made, then it is a sure sign that the book is a compilation of those previously written accounts, or documents. But the defenders of the Bible have abundantly shown that any book can be subjected to the same mode of treatment with a like result. As Dr. Green shows: "Paragraphs of greater or less extent can be removed from any piece of writing whatever without the reader suspecting it, unless he is informed of the fact. The proofs are abundant that each of the so-called documents either directly alludes to, or presupposes, what is contained in the others. This is, of course, quite inconsistent with the hypothesis of their independent origin. The utmost pains have been taken by the critics to avoid this interrelation, but it has been impossible for them to prevent it altogether."

Professor Green himself has tried his hand at it, and divided the parable of "The Prodigal Son," and of "The Good Samaritan," with much more show of reason than the critics have divided Genesis. He concludes: "These illustrations are sufficient to give an idea of the method by which the critics undertake to effect the partition of the Pentateuch; and to show how they succeed in creating discrepancies and contradictions, where none really exist, by simply sundering what properly belongs together. The ease with which these results can be accomplished, where obviously they have no possible significance, shows how fallacious and inconclusive this style of argument is. No dependence can be placed upon a process that leads to palpably erroneous conclusions in other cases. An argument that will prove everything proves nothing. And a style of critical analysis which can be made to prove everything composite is not to be trusted. A professor shows that Knight's History of England can thus be decomposed into five apparently original documents all written on different subjects. A scholar declares that he can divide Csesar's Commentary on his Gallic Wars into four separate books, and make it appear plausible. Professor Mead of Hartford Theological Seminary, has thus divided in an ingenious way, "The Epistle to the Romans," to illustrate the utter deceptiveness of such higher criticism. "Any book in the Bible, or out of the Bible, could be spliced and splintered in the same way and by the same method of argument."

2. The second fallacy is the assumption of the critics that two accounts of similar events must be different accounts of the same event. For example Abraham's deception about his wife, and Isaac's deception about his, are declared to be only one event described in two documents which have been compiled. The same argument may be and has been, made about the feeding of the multitudes on two occasions by Jesus. But such a principle of interpreting literature, if adopted, would throw all history into confusion. Doubtless the higher critics of three thousand years from now will decide that the two battles at Bull Run in successive years in the late war of the rebellion, both issuing in the defeat of the northern army, were merely different accounts of the same battle. But there would not be a shadow of proof that there was but one battle. The conclusion would simply be based on the assumption or imagination of the critics.

So the critics first adopt an assumption that our Bible is not trustworthy history. Then the record of the sacred historian is set aside, in favor of the baseless conjecture of the hostile critics. "This reveals the unfriendly animus of the current critical analysis of the Bible which is inwrought into it, and inseparable from it." It is essentially hostile, untrue to fact, and unscientific.

3. It is another fallacy of the critics to reject as historic any event in the Bible because there is dissimilarity in the different Scriptural accounts of it. They industriously pick out the discrepancies and disagreements, which may be only omissions, magnify them into large proportions, and then foolishly decide that the event itself was only a creation of fiction. They have thus scoffingly set aside the story of Christ's resurrection and a hundred other great facts of sacred history.

Let us see how this would work in modern history. Read Greeley's History of the civil war in the United States; then read Pollard's and carefully note the hundreds of disagreements. No histories agree about the single battle of Gettysburg. But was there no war between the North and the South, and no battle of Gettysburg? This great nation is not yet recovered from the expense and agonies of that awful conflict; and you could not quite persuade the South that there was no fight at Gettysburg.

It is said that there are several accounts of the battle of Sedan, the great historic struggle between France and Germany, all written by eye witnesses, and one of them by a famous general of the American Army. "There are hopeless and bewildering discrepancies in regard to details." No two accounts agree; and, though hundreds of thousands of soldiers are still living who fought in that battle, no one can find out just how it occurred. Shall we therefore deny that there was a war and a battle? Only the hostile infidel critics, who are bent on destroying the Bible, reason in that way. It would be difficult to persuade France that something very serious did not take place at Sedan, the bitter memory of which will haunt the minds of Frenchmen for generations to come.

4. Another fallacy of the critics is the assumption that, in two compared writings, similarity of style, proves identity of authorship. Schmauk observes: "It is more easy for two authors, if they have the same order of mind, the same subject and thought, the same atmosphere and environment, the same training, the same common fund of information, to have some striking resemblances and similarities, than to avoid them."

An illustration of the viciousness of the application of this fallacy, is the attempt on the part of the higher criticism, by Ignatius Donnelly, in his "The Great Cryptogram," and by others, to prove that there never was a Shakespeare, and that the latter's plays were written by Francis Bacon.

It appears that Bacon kept a commonplace book, which is now in the British museum, and which contains 1,655 entries. Many of the suggestive and striking phrases, proverbs, aphorisms, metaphors and quaint turns of expression jotted down in it are also found in the plays of Shakespeare. Two of these entries appear in a single sentence in Romeo and Juliet. The critic says that, "Peculiarities of thought, style, and diction are more important in a contested case of authorship than the name of the title-page." He further says that Bacon was most learned and a great wit and imaginative, while of Shakespeare we know little, and so he arrives at the conclusive demonstration that there never was a Shakespeare. Ignatius Donnelly is as conceited, and supremely satisfied over his argument against Shakespeare's existence as the infidel critics are certain of their annihilation of Moses. But we visit Straford-on-Avon, and see the room in which little William was born, and the museum full of collected relics, and the oak desk on which the young scamp carved his name in school, and on another street to the southeast is the schoolhouse in which he was studying, now nearly four hundred years ago; and on the next street east is the Memorial Theater, erected to his memory; and farther down the Avon to the southeast is.the church where he is buried; and yonder to the southwest is the thatched cottage, and great fireplace, and the seat beside it on which he sat and courted Ann Hathaway. And the whole town lives on the glory and fame of this man whom the critics have relegated to the realm of myth and fable.

5. Another fallacy of the critics is the assumption of their possession of a marvellous subjective literary instinct, "a perspicacity, verging on omniscience" by which they determine with the utmost assurance, the authorship not only of books, or large sections, or paragraphs, but of individual sentences and clauses, and fragments of clauses! Now nothing is more fallacious in the history of literature than this has proved to be.

The scholarly F. A. Wolf more than a hundred years ago (1795) threw doubts on Homer's authorship of the Iliad and Odyssey. It was assumed that the Greeks did not have literary writing farther back than the sixth century before Christ. Finally the critics became so bold as to doubt the very existence of the Greek heroes and of Troy itself. Heroes, Troy and Homer were all relegated to the realm of legends. But Schliemann's spade, unearthing Troy, resurrected the heroes from their graves, and covered the critics with confusion and shame.

The same Wolf, cast doubts upon Cicero's orations. This was taken up by others who were ambitious to appear smart, when Orelli in 1836 decided that Cicero did not deliver either the Second, Third or Fourth Oration, though Cicero himself published them, and claimed them all in a letter to Atticus. The critic reaches the incredible conclusion that the orations were forged and the letter was forged after Cicero's death; and by whom? By Cicero's own freedman, Tiro!!! The critic would have us believe that this faithful friend of his master, who had never made a speech in public in his life, thought to honor Cicero, the greatest and most polished orator Rome ever produced, by forging three orations and publishing them in his master's name, so soon after his death; and that he succeeded in making all the world believe for eighteen centuries that Cicero delivered them!

It is precisely such drivelling foolishness as this that is tinkering away at our Bible. Sir Robert Anderson, the great London lawyer says: "In no civilized country would an habitual criminal be convicted of petty larceny on such evidence as these critics bring forward. And yet on these 'grounds of probability,' and 'plausible arguments,' we are called upon to give up our sacred books which our Divine Lord accredited as 'the Word of God.'"

Professor Sanday, who poses as a conservative critic, that is, tries to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, kindly admits that "there is an element in the Pentateuch derived from Moses himself." An element! But he cautiously adds, "However much we may believe that there is a genuine foundation in the Pentateuch, it is difficult to lay the finger upon it, and to say with confidence, here Moses himself is speaking. The strictly Mosaic element in the Pentateuch must be indeterminate. We ought not, perhaps, to use them without reserve, for Moses himself." Now the reason of this excessive caution is perfectly plain. If Sanday should put his finger on one little verse and say, "Moses wrote this," the whole pack of boar-hound critics would be on him in a trice, and gore him to death. He wishes to train with them, and yet not wholly break with Christian faith and decency.

But is not all this most remarkable? These smart, ambitious, infidel critics can find a rabble of unheard-of singers composing the most remarkable poems, of the Greek race; but they cannot find Homer. He is "merely a popular illusion." They can find Cicero's freedman; but they cannot find Cicero in his own orations. They can find the rabble of unknown, and unheard of and purely imaginary E's and J's and D's and P's and R's and Q's without number, for whose very existence there is not one shred of traditional or historic evidence; but they cannot find Moses in the Book he claimed to write, and which has been attributed to him for 3,500 years. Moses the hero of the ages, and the most potential purely human character that ever walked this planet I Verily, there are no moral fools so big, and hopeless and helpless as those whom God gives over to believe the lie they love.

6. Another fallacy of the critics is a stupid and apparently wilful blindness to the fact that a "heterogeneous miscellany,"-a compilation of scraps from an unlimited number of unheard-of authors scattered through many centuries, would never produce a literary work like the Pentateuch. It is "a coherent whole, possessing orderly arrangement in accordance with a well-devised plan, which is consistently carried out with a continuous narrative." Says Professor Green, "With no abrupt transitions, and no such contrasts or discords as would inevitably arise from piecing together what was independently conceived and written by different persons at different times, and with no regard to mutual adjustment." "It has one theme from first to last to which all that it contains relates. This is throughout treated upon one definite plan which is steadfastly adhered to. And it contains a continuous, unbroken history from the creation to the death of Moses, without any chasms or interruptions."

In the same strain writes Dr. Schmauk: "The negative theory fails to note the force of the argument from general internal consistency. Take the Pentateuch. It is strong presumption in its favor, that the whole, as a whole, forms a unit in plan, purpose and theme. In spite of such divergencies as the details of history and of actual life ever verify, the book is not an artificial construction, but an organic growth. Its laws are interwoven in the historic background, and there is no intimation that they ever existed separately.

"The Book of Deuteronomy consists of three addresses by Moses to the people and an historical appendix. Those addresses are intimately related to one another and to the laws which are included in the second address; the aim of the whole being to urge Israel to obey these laws. The style and language are identical; one spirit reigns throughout, and like recurring phrases frequently reappear. The objections to the unity of the main body of the book, and to Moses as its author, are of the most trivial description. In the appendix, Moses is expressly said to have written the song, and to have spoken the blessing.

"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 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."

"Then there are the Psalms, the contents of a large number of which would fix their date, if it was any other book than the Bible. They are just such compositions as David and the great men of his time would have written, and they do not fit the age of the Maccabees to which the critics assign them. And it is so with the historic books.

"On the whole, the argument from internal consistency militates against the theory of a post-exilian pious fraud, unheard of in the history of the world."

7. Another colossal fallacy of the critics was the assumption that the Tribes of Israel were "the merest wandering Bedouins," and Moses was too ignorant to be the author of anything, and that a code of laws, such as are ascribed to him, could not have been originated at so early an age in the world. We will let Professor Sayce, of Oxford, recognized throughout the world as an authority in Assyriology, Egyptology, and Archaeology, give answer. He says: "We are just beginning to learn how ignorant we have been of the civilized past, and that it was literary from the very earliest, remotest past, Babylonia and Assyria were filled with libraries; and the libraries were filled with thousands of books. While the Egyptians could not even hew a tomb out of the rocks, without covering its walls with lines of writing. All these conjectures of the critics the testimony of monuments prove untenable. The evidence of Oriental Archaeology is distinctly unfavorable to the pretensions of the higher criticsm. "The art of writing in the ancient East, so far from being of modern growth, was of vast antiquity, and the two great powers-Egypt and Assyria, which divided the civilized world between them, were each emphatically a nation of scribes and readers. Centuries before Abraham was born, Egypt and Babylonia were alike full of schools and libraries, of teachers and pupils, of poets and prose writers, and of the literary works which they had composed.

Egyptian literature goes back almost to the earliest period of its history. Notes written in a cursive hand have been found in the tombs of the First Dynasty (which according to M. Mariette was 5,000 B. C.). The Proverbs of Ptah-hotep, in fact, though written more than five thousand years ago represent the close of a period in the history of Egyptian literature. They had been preceded by earlier books many of which survived to a later day.

There were moral philosophies, historical novels, political satires, and books of travel. No one could live in Egypt without coming under the spell of its literary culture.

Babylonia, too, was a great commercial community, and for the purposes of trade, a knowledge of reading and writing was required among all classes.

There were grammars and dictionaries, vocabularies, phrase-books and interlinear translations of other languages, as well as grammatical analyses, and explanations of difficult passages, before Abraham was born. There have lately been discovered by Dr. Hilprect of the University of Pennsylvania and the American excavators at Nippur in Northern Babylonia, seventeen thousand tablets, the most recent dating 2,280 years before Christ. The Babylonia of the age of Abraham was a more highly educated country than the England of George III."

For a long time the critics daringly and impudently affected to sneer at these discoveries. But in 1887 they were rudely shocked by the discovery of the Tel el-Amarna Tablets on the eastern bank of the Nile. "They showed that the Mosaic age instead of being an illiterate one, was an age of high literary activity, and education throughout the civilized East. This culture was shared by Asia Minor and Syria, and Palestine. From one end of the civilized ancient world to the other, men and women were reading and writing and corresponding with one another; schools abounded and great libraries were formed in an age which the smart infidel critics declared was almost wholly illiterate. Moses not only could have written-the Pentateuch, but it would have been little short of a miracle had he hot been a scribe. The age of Moses, and even the age of Abraham was almost as literary an age as our own."

A Babylonian account of the Deluge has been discovered which is in wonderful agreement with the account in Genesis. "It must have been known," says Sayce, "in Canaan, long before Moses was born. Indeed it must have been familiar to Abraham himself, before he migrated from Ur."

"At the end of the year 1901 an important discovery was made in Susa-'Shusan the palace,' as it was called in the Book of Daniel. There M. de Morgan's excavations brought to light the blocks of polished marble, covered with cuneiform characters. It was found that they embodied a complete code of laws, the earliest yet discovered, earlier than that of Moses by eight hundred years, and the foundation of the laws promulgated and obeyed throughout Western Asia.

This discovery utterly downed the critics. They had told the world that the Prophets preceded the Law, because the civilization of the world was not advanced enough to make such laws in Moses' age. They denied: 1. That writing was used for literary purposes in the time of Moses; 2, That a legal code was possible before the period of the Jewish kings. But the Tel el-Amarna tablets disproved the first assumption; the discovery of the code of Kham-murabi has disproved the second. The codification of the law, therefore, was no new thing in the days of Moses. Not only could the Hebrew leader have compiled a code of laws; we now see it would have been incredible had he not done so.

There are great similarities between them, and it is quite evident that the great Lawgiver of Israel had the code of his predecessor before him when he wrote. The Mosaic code relates to the needs of a wandering people, and must belong to the age to which tradition assigns it, and presupposes the historical conditions which the Biblical narrative describes. No writer of a post-Mosaic date could have imagined or invented them. Thus the critics' evolution theory is overthrown; the Law preceded the Prophets; the Bible is vindicated, and the Higher Criticism, as usual, goes down in utter defeat!

"The early chapters of Genesis have a Babylonian coloring and background. The discovery of the Babylonian story of the Deluge was followed by that of the Babylonian story of creation, which showed that here, too, the cuneiform tablets and the Book of Genesis were in close accord. The cosmological story must have been known to Abraham before he left Ur of the Chaldees; for they were pictured on the walls of the Babylonian temples and taught in the Babylonian schools. The resemblance between the Babylonian Epic of the Creation and the first chapter of the Book of Genesis is too striking not to attract attention. 1. In both alike there is in the beginning a watery chaos, above which the darkness brooded while 'the earth was without form and void.' 2. In both alike the creation of the present world commences with the creation of light. 3. In both there is a firmament dividing the waters above from the waters beneath. 4. In both the creation of the heavens and earth preceded the appointment of the heavenly bodies to measure time. 5. In both the creation of man is the consummation of the Creator's acts. 6. The artificial division of the Babylonian epoch into seven books, corresponds with the seven days of the Hebrew account. Undoubtedly the earlier epic was known to Moses, but he made a remarkable difference. The Genesis story has no rival God to the Great Creator, and no materialism. The Eastern Epic commences with the description of a formless matter, independent of the Creator, generating itself and developing into the divine. In the Genesis story, chaos and the deep were not the first of things; God was already there, and His breath or Spirit brooded over the abyss. The Hebrew writer must have had the Babylonian version before him, and intentionally gave an uncompromising denial to all in it that impugned the omnipotence and Unity of God.

Whence came the revelation of the true nature of God, and His relation to man, which is announced in the first verse of the Pentateuch, and which stamps the literature of the Old Testament to the end? It did not come from Babylonia, or Canaan or Egypt. The higher critics have not accounted for it. After denying inspiration and the supernatural, they cannot. And when did this Babylonian Epic reach the author of the Pentateuch, but in the Mosaic epoch when there was such constant interchange of thought and literature between the Nile and the Euphrates? Thus the Old Bible and Mosaic authorship are vindicated once more.

8. Another fallacy of the critics, in perfect accord with the spirit of all infidelity, is "to make their own ignorance the measure of the credibility of the ancient documents" (Sayce). Time after time they have assumed the statements of the Bible to be untrue, because they did not know of any external evidence of support of biblical statements of fact. It is the same old Satanic spirit of infidelity that is determined not to believe anything in the Bible unless obliged to. All higher criticism is rank with it from start to finish.

Says Professor G. Frederick Wright, D. D., LL. D., of Oberlin: "Until the decipherment of the inscriptions on the monuments of Egypt and Assyria, the numerous references in the Bible to this mysterious people, the Hittites were unconfirmed by any other historical authorities, so that many regarded the biblical statements as mythical, and an indication of the general untrustworthiness of biblical history. A prominent English critic wrote not long ago that an alliance between Egypt and the Hittites was as improbable as would be one at the present time between England and the Choctaws. As late as 1904 a scholar said, 'I do not believe there ever were such a people as the Hittites.' But, lo! the excavators get to work and reveal in Palestine and Syria, and westward to Lydia, and northward to the Black Sea beyond Marsovan, a great people. As Schliemann's spade resurrected Troy from her grave of uncertainty, so Winkler's spade in 1906 resurrected Boghaz-Keui, seventy-five miles southwest of Marsovan (the principal capital of the Hittites). A great ancient empire was brought to light in Asia Minor, with central power, and treaty rights, on equal terms with the greatest nations of antiquity, thus making the Hittite power a third great power with Babylonia and Egypt. Rameses II, made a great treaty with this Hittite Empire, and a daughter of the Hittite king was given in marriage to Rameses." And thus, to the great chagrin of the infidel critics, the multitude of biblical references to the Hittites are completely corroborated. "It was pure ignorance and not superior knowledge, that led the critics to discredit the biblical historians." In this particular instance they were not to blame for their ignorance; but they were to blame for the diabolical use they made of it, by casting suspicions on the veracity of the Holy Book.

A college professor and higher critic said a few years ago in England: "There is no evidence that the Children of Israel were ever in Egypt." "Now in 1883 there were uncovered a short distance east of Bubastis, the remains of vast vaults which had served as receptacles for storing grain. The engineers of the railroad had unwittingly named the town Rameses. But from the inscriptions that were found it is seen that its original name was Pithom, and its founder was none other than Rameses II. It proves to be the very place where it is said in the Bible that the Children of Israel 'built for Pharaoh store-cities, Pithom and Raamses' (Ex. 1: 11) when the Egyptians made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar and in brick." It was in connection with this work that the cruel oppression reached its climax, when they were compelled (after the straw failed) to gather stubble for themselves, and finally to make brick without straw.

Now as these store pits at Pithom were uncovered by Mr. Petrie, they were found (unlike anything else in Egypt) to be built of brick which contained straw, the middle layers were made of brick in which stubble instead of straw had been used, and the upper layers were of brick made without straw." "A more perfect circumstantial confirmation of the Bible account could not be imagined." Says Professor Wright, "Every point in the confirmation consists of unexpected discoveries. Thus have all Egyptian explorations shown that the writer of the Pentateuch had such familiarity with the country, the civilization, and the history of Egypt as could have been obtained only by personal experience." What honest man can doubt that the author was Moses?

Professor Wright tells us that "Among the places mentioned in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence carried on about 1,400 B. C. are Gebal, Beirut, Tyre, Accho, Hazor, Joppa, Ashkelon, Mak-kadah, Lachish, Gezer, Jerusalem, Rabbah, Sarepta, Ashtaroth, Gaza, Gath, Bethshemesh, all of which are familiar names, showing that the Palestine of Joshua is the Palestine known to Egypt in the preceding century. Also about 1,600 B. C. Thothmes III, conquered Palestine and gives in an inscription the names of more than fifty towns which can be confidently identified with those in the Book of Joshua. Finally, the forty-two stations named in Numbers 33, as camping places for the Children of Israel on their way to Palestine, can be determined in sufficient numbers to show that it is not a fictitious list, but a real history.

Professor Sayce, in his "Monumental Facts and Higher Critical Fancies," shows that all the archaeological discoveries prove that the geography of Egypt at the time of the Exodus agrees exactly with the account in the Bible, and it could not have done so either a short time before or afterward. "History fixes the Exodus of Israel in the epoch of the nineteenth Dynasty, and geography assigns it to the same date. To that period and to that period alone, does the geography of the Pentateuch apply. It describes events which actually took place. It is no fiction or myth, no legend whose only basis is folklore and unsubstantial tradition, but history in the real sense of the word. We may rest assured, 'criticism notwithstanding,' that Israel was once in Egypt, and that the narrative of its flight under the leadership of Moses is founded on sober fact."

Professor Wright quotes approvingly, Sir Walter Besant, secretary of the Palestine Exploration Fund, who said: "To my mind, absolute truth in local details, a thing which cannot possibly be invented, when it is spread over a history covering many centuries, is proof almost absolute as to the truth of the things related." "Such proof," says Professor Wright, "we have for every part of the Bible. These discoveries so unexpected, confirming so remarkably the truth of the Bible, can be nothing else than providential. When the faith of many was waning, and many heralds of truth were tempted to speak with uncertain sound, the very stones have cried out with a voice that only the deaf could fail to hear. Both in the writing and the preservation of the Bible we behold the handiwork of God."

But to all these confirmatory proofs the infidel critics are wilfully, wickedly deaf and blind. The plain, unvarnished reason is, because they did not have manhood and honesty enough to own their manifest defeat. They are determined to break down the power of the Bible over human hearts and lives. But when the heathen raged and the people imagined vain things against Jehovah and against His Anointed, saying, Let us break their bond's asunder and set aside the authority of their Word, He that sitteth in the heavens only laughed. He had the evidence for the truthfulness of his Book buried in the earth for thousands of years. He simply moved the excavators to ply their spades in the right places, and up arose the past from the forgotten graves and swept away the arguments of their brazen effrontery of infidelity, as the breath of God scatters the chaff of the summer threshing floor.

9. It remains, in closing to call attention to the carnal spiritual dulness, and benumbed moral consciousness exhibited by these critics. They would have us believe that Godly men, like Ezra and others were the authors of colossal frauds and forgeries, and deliberately planned to cheat and deceive the whole people, in the interests of religion and civic righteousness! They would further have us believe that a holy God connived at all of this invention and falsification of documents, and set his seal upon it by using them to make known among men his holiness! Such a theory grossly maligns the great men of God, and also blasphemes the God that wrought through them. Any man not calloused to moral principle would instantly feel how abhorrent such theories were to Christian consciousness. After they have destroyed the very foundations of the Christian faith, and robbed the Bible of all inspiration, authority and Divinity, then they glibly chatter about the "Divine element" left, "that is more precious than ever." They never make plain to anybody what it is; but to their beclouded minds it is something quite consistent with forgery and falsification! Gibbering monkeys could show more sense.

After these critics, with daring profanity, have reduced the Savior of the world to the level of the common herd, nay, a little lower, by making Him "the son of Joseph born out of wedlock," or "the son of a Roman soldier by an unknown Jewish maiden"; after telling us that no angels sang at His birth, and He wrought no miracles, and spake with no special authority, and no superhuman knowledge, but only with the ignorance and the prejudices of a peasant of His age; and that "he did not die upon the cross but only swooned," and that "the stories of His resurrection, and of His ascension were fabricated by His devoted but deluded followers";-after telling us all this, these critics look at us with an idiotic leer and tell us that "it will make no difference with the essentials of Christian theology"!! The moral stupidity of such a remark is simply fathomless! The critics are only branding themselves as "profane fools." Let such rank heresy be widely proclaimed and universally believed, and who would read the Bible with the old time reverence and Godly fear? What would the man in the street, working for three dollars a day, care about the church, or the family altar, or secret prayer? What would restrain the criminally rich from oppressing the poor, who are already goaded by avarice and a consuming greed for gain? What would quell the riotous mobs in the great city strikes, stung by a sense of injustice and fired by the spirit of revenge? "There was no hanging in Chicago from October 22, 1909 until February 15, 1912, but in that time there were 800 homicides and murders," and, meantime, the professors in Chicago University were amusing themselves by criticizing the Bible and dethroning its influence over the people! A judge in a municipal court in New York City removed the Bible from his court room because it was a desecration to use it there! The courts of the whole country so notoriously corrupted by the great corporations and trusts and millionaries that the cry of indignation is rising from the whole land, and then reducing the Bible to the level of a work of fiction!!

A gentleman carefully studying New England life declares: "In ninety per cent of New England towns the large majority of people have no intelligent faith about anything, and do not wish to have. Serious religion which interferes with personal aims and pleasures is shunned, and its advocates ridiculed. The condition seems utterly hopeless. In such places the liberal preaching of the past decades, and the refined criticism of the Holy Bible have enabled the people to throw off nearly all restraints of conscience, so that God is no longer loved or feared, and human life grows cheap. Wherever the pulpits of New England have been untrue to the Bible and to the Deity and authority of Christ, in those places irreverence, profanity, immorality and godlessness almost hopelessly exist."

And here is the influence this wretched criticism had upon a noble doctor of divinity, who was pastor of a church of twenty-five hundred members, until God in infinite pity rescued him: "The Old Testament was slipping away from me. I dreaded to open it, and I dared not shut it. The darkness seemed growing denser. On I pressed and stumbled; sometimes nearly losing my footing. The eddy became a maelstrom whose hissing and swirling waters threatened to suck me into their cavernous depths. None knew my agony, for I bore it in silence. Sunday after Sunday I went into my pulpit to preach the Gospel, while my heart was ready to break. I lost my childhood faith, and there was nothing to take its place."

Marcus Dods was one of the prominent higher critics of Scotland and England, and was the author of some commentaries. In 1918 he made this confession in print to the Christian world of his spiritual state in his own words: "I used to enjoy prayer, but for years I have found myself dumb. I wish I could live to be a spectator through the next generation, to see what they are going to make of things. The churches won't know themselves fifty years hence. It is to be hoped some little ray of faith may be left when all is done. For my own part, I am sometimes entirely under water and see no light at all."

This clipping was sent to me from England, and we read it to the students in this college chapel. That day a minister brought me a textbook he had been compelled to study in a M. E. Theological Seminary, written by this same Marcus Dods. Over one chapter, this student had written: "This chapter is from the pit."

On the margin of one passage, he had written "devilish." It was as follows: "Every one is already aware that the idea very widely prevails that the gospel miracles are an excrescence marring the beauty and simplicity of the life of our Lord, and that, if once they served a purpose, which is very doubtful, it were better now to say nothing about them."

After thus doing what he could to destroy the faith of others in the Bible, is it any wonder that his own faith was wrecked, and he could not pray?

Three years later, as all must, he came to die. From his deathbed, he sent forth this message through his son. "I now take no interest in prayer. I am down under the waters of doubt. I see no blue sky, no light." And so Dr. Marcus Dods, by his higher criticism, committed spiritual suicide, and went out in darkness to meet the Savior whose miracles he had derided.

Some years ago, a president of a holiness college chanced to be in Chicago, and went out to visit Chicago University. He asked a student on the college grounds, in what building President Harper taught. His laconic answer was: "President Harper makes infidels in that building over there!" What a comment for a college student to make about his president!

Some years ago a secular paper, "The Chicago Chronicle," made some caustic remarks about "Our Agnostic University," and Professors Foster and Smith. Here are some of the cutting words: "We are struck with the hypocrisy and treachery of these attacks on Christianity. This is a free country and a free age, and men can say what they choose about the Bible and religion without being called to account for it; but this is not what we arraign these divinity professors for. They are to be criticized on other grounds.

"Is there no place in which to assail Christianity but a divinity school? Is there no one to write infidel books except the professors of Christian theology? Is a theological seminary an appropriate place for a general massacre of Christian theology? Mr. Manga-sarian delivers infidel lectures every Sunday in Orchestra Hall and no one is shocked; but wfyen professional defenders of Christianity jump on it and assassinate it, the public-even the agnostic public cannot but despise them!"

If the expression of these infidel sentiments by Christian teachers makes a marked and saddening impression on mature minds, how must it affect the young people in attendance at the university? These young people are not contaminated by Mr. Mangasarian, nor by the teachers of Spiritualism, Theosophy and free thought who abound in Chicago; but when the very men whom they regard as the pillars of faith bend under them like a broken reed, it is inevitable that they will leave the university confirmed infidels!

Even so, we are not championing either Christianity or infidelity, but only condemning infidels masquerading as men of God and Christian teachers." Let Harry Emerson Fosdick and Bishop Brown take notice!

This infidel criticism has made infidels of thousands of college students, "clouded the open vision of many a preacher, silenced the divine voice in his soul, and opened the gateways to temptation and sin."

Wherever this new theology is preached there is found a spiritually incompetent pulpit shorn of its power, and a listless, unbelieving people who will soon desert the sanctuary and exchange the ministration of doubt and unbelief for the comforts of the parlor or the excitements of society and public amusement.

If the critics were not sunken in spiritual dullness they would be horrified by the fruit of this tree of their own planting. They would behold this growing infidelity in social and commercial life; hi courts of justice and in business; in workshop and street life; hi political and official positions, that has steadily kept pace with the growth of this higher criticism and new theology and is the logical sequence of it, and stand aghast at the work of their own hands. But not they! It is precisely the result that the skeptical, rationalist leaders have aimed at all along. They caress this hideous brat of their own begetting, and glory in their shame.

Another evidence of their carnal, spiritual blindness, is their treatment of the Fourth Gospel. They tell us: "As a result of the work of Higher Criticism the Four Gospels are a complete wreck as historical records. It is long since the Fourth Gospel was relegated to the realm of spiritual imagination. . . . They must go on the rubbish heap of the world."

Now the whole board of higher critics might be safely challenged to add ten reputable verses to the Sermon on the Mount, or three appropriate sentences to the "Lord's Prayer." And as to the Fourth Gospel, no man that has known the deep things of God, or is filled with the Spirit will for a moment doubt or question its credibility or authenticity or inspiration. It carries its own evidence to all who have the Spirit of God. We would as soon question our own existence as to question the truth of this Fourth Gospel.

We remember when we were students at Yale going through this Gospel with our beloved teacher, Dr. Timothy Dwight, the noble Greek Exegete, who afterward became president of the university, we were studying the conversation of Jesus in the upper chamber, and were in the seventeenth chapter. A death occurred in Dr. Dwight's family. When he met the class the next time he said to us: "Young gentlemen, you know that in our home we have just passed through an experience that brings men's souls face to face with eternal realities, and clarifies the spiritual vision. We have been made to feel afresh the preciousness of this Scripture, as the most deeply spiritual passage in all the world's literature. Thought can go no deeper, and be within the reach of human comprehension."

We reverently say, "Amen!" The Fourth Gospel is no creature of fiction, and no earth-born child. It passes unchallenged with those who have the experience for which Jesus prayed in His great Intercessory Prayer. From our very heart we pity the poor critics so dead and blind to spiritual things that they can coolly cut to pieces the Fourth Gospel, and callously carry the mutilated remains "to the dump-heap of the world."

The destructive higher criticism, in its animating purpose, and spirit, and arguments, and conclusions wickedly reflects on the holiness of God, and only spiritually blind men could fail to see it. It is simply a historical fact that God has used the Bible above all other books ever written to uplift the nations and cure mankind of its sin and woe. Uncounted millions of martyrs have given their lives for their faith in the Son of God whom it reveals, and millions more would do it if necessary. The atoning death of this Divine Savior has been the truth of the Bible that God has most used to draw men unto Him. But these blind critics have taken the crown of glory from the brow of Jesus, made Him a fanatic, or an impostor and a deceiver of men. They have reduced the whole Bible to a compilation of forgeries, and fictions, and artful stories, invented to deceive the world. And then we are asked to believe that the holy God has set His seal upon this Book,-this concoction of fiction and falsehood, and used it to teach all men to hate sin, and love Him, and practice righteousness!! Such a theory makes God Himself an endorser of iniquity, and the arch-deceiver of mankind. This is some more critical idiocy!

I know we are told that what would be fraud in the modern Christian world was no fraud in ancient Israel and its ideas of morality; but what about the immutable God, under whose inspiration, if we are to believe Christ and His Apostles, the law was given to Israel? These critics seem to be singularly blind, or utterly indifferent to the fact that their theories involve the honor of God and His holy Son.

Moreover the method of these critics who boast so much of their science, is "essentially vicious," and "unscientific, unhistorical and unscholarly." They reject a world of evidence that is notoriously and increasingly against them, and build on assumptions and foregone conclusions. Nothing could be more unscientific, or more fatal to their own ultimate reputation. Archaeological discovery is burying them in confusion and defeat deeper than the ancient cities were buried. It is entirely unfavorable to the assumptions of the critics and all their infidel conclusions. The exhumed documents of other nations prove the truth of our Bible. Against all this corroborative testimony what have the critics to offer but some linguistic arguments, which other lifelong Hebrew scholars, quite equal to themselves in linguistic knowledge, utterly scout as mere speculations, often of infidel minds.

Still further, there is one tremendous fact to which these critics conveniently shut their eyes,-the doctrines and traditions of the church of the Living God for three millenniums, guided by its divine Founder and the Spirit of God, yea, the Church of God itself is a tremendous fact, the greatest and most potential fact of all human history,-precisely the one thing for which God created our race and is managing the history of this world. The Son of His glory is the Head, of which His Church is the body. The New Testament gives us the artless record of the life and words of this Divine Person,-the Son of God and the Savior of the world. The value and the greatness of the Bible are in this life that it discloses to us. It is upon Jesus that the whole Bible turns. The Book that reveals to us Jesus and His salvation is not to be compared with any other book on earth for preciousness. It is the one Book that we all ought to know by heart. The Old Testament shows us the way preparing over the mountains, and across the morasses of sinful years, by which the swift feet of the messengers approach, that tell of His coming. The New Testament lifts the veil and bids us, "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." The worth of the Bible is that it helps us to see Him, and know Him and build our lives into Him,-becoming the Church of God, against which the gates of Hell shall not prevail!

Now such an august institution must be accounted for. This Bible has revealed Christ to us, and that great body of doctrines, which have been the inspiration in life and the comfort in death of millions of the noblest of mankind, which have been witnessed to by saints and martyrs through all ages, and brought a message of hope and healing to all humanity. The idea that such a Book is a composite of fiction and deception, fraud and forgery, and that this Church of God is built on such a foundation of sand, is the wild dream of moral insanity!

We may have seemed harsh in calling these critics "infidels." But the time has come when loyalty to Christ and His Book demands that the real, naked truth should be spoken without any softness of speech and honeyed phrases. In our early ministry we were horrified at the infidelity of Hume and Voltaire, Tom Paine and Ingersoll. But every wretched piece of sophistry, that can be found in their writings, every unfair argument, and vile insinuation and contemptible sneer, or cavil or scoff, can be matched and duplicated, multiplied times in these writings of the destructive critics. If these men are not infidels there never were any. Paine wrote for notoriety and fame. Ingersoll was an infidel for five hundred dollars a night.

They made no pretensions to any thing better. They were just what they claimed to be, professional infidels, like the professional soldiers, who coolly sat down at the foot of the cross, and gambled for Christ's garments. But Paine and Ingersoll were respectable gentlemen, compared with these Judas Iscariots of infidelity who sit in chairs in theological seminaries and stand in Christian pulpits and undermine the faith of men in the Bible and the Son of God. These are they who, under the fair name of criticism, destroy the confidence of their fellow men in the one Book that can bring them home to heaven, and for thirty paltry pieces of silver, betray the holy Son of God with a kiss. They are the least honorable and the most dangerous infidels the Christian centuries have produced.

A noble physician who reads the Bible in the original languages told us of the pastor of a Congregational Church in California, who was a higher critic. An honest hearted girl came to him with her Bible, and asked him to please mark the texts that she could trust and be guided by. "Such preachers," said the doctor, "are worse than highway robbers." We may add, they are doing more harm, and deserve a deeper damnation!!

James Russell Lowell, when United States Minister, at the Court of St. James, made the following reply at a banquet in London, to those who seem to enjoy robbing mankind of their hopes of religion, and their confidence in the Bible. It is wholesome reading for these clerical infidels: "When the microscopic search of skepticism which has hunted the heavens, and sounded the seas to disprove the existence of the Creator, has turned its attention to human society and has found a place on this planet ten miles square, where a decent man can live in comfort and security, supporting and educating his children unspoiled and unpolluted, a place where age is reverenced, infancy nourished, manhood respected and womanhood honored-when skepticism can find such a place where the gospel of Christ has not gone and cleared the way, and laid down the foundations and made decency and security possible, it will then be in order for champions of skepticism to move thither and ventilate their views. But so long as these men are dependent upon religion which they discard for every privilege they enjoy, they may well hesitate a little before they seek to rob the Christian of his hope, and humanity of its faith in that Savior, who alone has given to man that hope of life eternal which makes life tolerable and society possible, and robs death of its terrors and the grave of its gloom." Noble words of a noble man, fitly spoken, appropriate now and evermore!