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ably with a like liability to error. That in some sense the Holy Scriptures contain something of a human element is clear, as to the New Testament, from diversities of reading, from slight conflicts in the narrative, and from an insignificant number of doubtful cases as to the authenticity of the text. We have also the Latin Vulgate partially competing with the Greek original on the ground that it has been more or less founded on manuscripts older than any we now possess. As regards the Old Testament, we find the established Hebrew Text to be of a date not earlier than I believe the tenth century of our era, and to be at variance in many points with the Greek version, commonly termed the Septuagint, which is considered to date wholly or in part from the third century before the Advent of our Saviour. Thus the accuracy of the text, the age and authorship of the books, open up a vast field of purely literary controversy, and such a question as whether the closing verses of St. Mark's Gospel have the authority of Scripture must be determined by literary evidence as much as the genuineness of the pretended preface to the Eneid or of a particular stanza in Catullus.

Toward summing up these observations, I will remind the reader that those who believe in a Divine Revelation, as pervading or as contained in the Scriptures. and especially who accept the doctrine of literalism as to the vehicle of that inspiration, have to lay their account with the following (among other) considerations, which it is hard for them to repudiate as inadmissible. There may possibly have

been

1. Imperfect comprehension of that which was communicated:

2. Imperfect expression of what had been comprehended :

3. Lapse of memory in oral transmis

sion :

4. Errors of copyists in written transmission :

5. Changes with the lapse of time in the sense of words:

6. Variations arising from renderings into different tongues, especially as between the Hebrew text and the Septuagint, which was probably based upon MS. older than the compilers of the Hebrew text could have had at their command:

7. That there are three variant chronologies of the Old Testament according to

the Hebrew, the Septuagint, and the Samaritan Pentateuch, and that it would be hazardous to claim for any one of them the sanction of a Divine revelation while an historical argument may be deducible, on the other hand, from the fact that their variations lie within certain limits.

No doubt there will be those who will resent any association between the idea of a Divine revelation and the possibility of even the smallest intrusion of error in its

vehicle. But ought they not to bear in mind that we are bound by the rule of reason to look for the same method of procedure in this great matter of a special provision of Divine knowledge for our needs as in the other parts of the manifold dispensation under which Providence has placed us. Now that method or principle is one of sufficiency, not perfection; of sufficiency for the attainment of practical ends, not of conformity to ideal standards. Bishop Butler, I think, would wisely tell us that we are not the judges, and that we are quite unfit to be the judges, what may be the proper amount and the just conditions of any of the aids to be afforded us in passing through the discipline of life. I will only remark that this default of ideal perfection, this use of twilight instead of a noonday blaze, may be adapted to our weakness, and may be among the appointed means of exercising our faith. But what belongs to the present occasion is to point out that if probability, and not demonstration, marks the Divine guidance of our paths in life as a whole, we are not entitled to require that when the Almighty, in His mercy, makes a special addition by revelation to what He has already given to us of knowledge in Nature and in Providence, that special gift should be unlike His other gifts, and should have all its lines and limits drawn out with mathematical precision.

I have then admitted, I hope in terms of sufficient fulness, that my aim in no way embraces a controversy with the moderate or even the extreme developments of textual criticism. Dr. Driver, the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford,* personally as well as officially a champion of the doctrine that there is a Divine revelation, has recently shown with great clearness and ability that the basis of that criticism

*Contemporary Review, February, 1890, pp. 215-9.

is sound and undeniable. It compares consistencies and inconsistencies of text, not simply as would be done by an ordinary reader, but with all the lights of collateral knowledge. It pronounces on the meaning of terms with the authority derived from thorough acquaintance with a given tongue. It investigates and applies those laws of growth which apply to language as they apply to a physical organ

ism.

It has long been known, for example, that portions of the historical books of the Old Testament, such as the Books of Chronicles, were of a date very far later than most of the events which they record, and that a portion of the prophecies included in the Book of Isaiah were later than his time. We are now taught that, according to the prevailing judgment of the learned, the form in which the older books of the Old Testament have come down to us does not correspond as a rule with their titles, and is due to later though still, as is largely held, to remote periods; and that the law presented to us in the Pentateuch is not an enactment of a single date, but has been formed by a process of growth, and by gradual accretions. To us who are without original means of judgment these are, at first hearing, without doubt, disturbing announcements. Yet common sense requires us to say, let them be fought out by the competent, but let not us who are incompetent interfere. I utterly, then, eschew conflict with these properly critical conclusions.

But this acquiescence is subject to the following remarks. First, the acceptance of the conclusions of the critics has reference to the literary form of the works, and leaves entirely open every question relating to the substance. Any one who reads the books of the Pentateuch, from the second to the fifth, must observe how little they present the appearance of consecutive, coherent, and digested record; but their several portions must be considered on the evidence applicable to them respectively, and the main facts of the history they contain have received strong confirmation from Egyptian and Eastern research. With regard to the Book of Genesis, the admission which has been made implies nothing adverse to the truth of the traditions it embodies, nothing adverse to their antiquity, nothing which excludes or discredits the idea of their having formed

part of a primitive revelation, simultaneous or successive. The forms of expression may have changed yet the substance may remain with an altered literary form, as some scholars have thought (not, I believe, rightly) that the diction and modelling of the Homeric Poems is comparatively modern, and yet the matter they embody may belong to a remote antiquity.

Further, our assent to the conclusions of the critics ought to be strictly limited to a provisional and revocable assent; and this on practical grounds of stringent obligation. For, firstly, these conclusions appear to be in a great measure floating and uncertain, the subject of manifold controversy, and secondly they seem to shift and vary with rapidity in the minds of those who hold them. In editing and revising the work of Bleek,* Wellhausen accepts in a great degree the genuineness of the Davidic Psalms contained in the first Book of the Psalter. But I understand that this position has been abandoned, and that, standing as he appears to do at the head of the negative critics, he brings down the general body of the Psalms to a date very greatly below that of the Babylonic exile. It is certainly unreasonable to hold a critic to his conclusions without exception. But, on the other hand, it may be asked whether they ought not to contain some element of stability? The opening of new sources of information may justify all changes fairly referable to them; and in minor matters the fine touches of the destructive, as well as the constructive, artist may complete his work. But if reasonable grounds for change do not determine its limits, there must be limits on the other hand to the duty of deference and submission on the part of the outer and uninstructed world with respect to these literary conclusions. The most liberal estimate can hardly carry them farther than this, that we should keep an open mind till the cycle of change has been run through, and till time has been given for the hearing of those whose researches may have led them to different results.

In the present instance we have an example which may not be without force in

"Einleitung in das Alte Testament," Haupttheil I., C. Die Psalmen. [The edition published and adopted by Wellhausen, to which I refer, is (I think) dated 1870; but the book had been published in 1860.]

support of this warning. Mr. Margoliouth, the Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford, and a gentleman of academical distinctions altogether extraordinary, has published his Inaugural Lecture,* in which he states his belief that, from materials and by means which he lucidly explains, it will be found possible to reconstruct the Semitic original, hitherto unknown, of the Book of Ecclesiasticus. It was written, he states, by Ben Sira, not in the Hebrew of the Prophets, but in the later Hebrew of the Rabbis (p. 6). I understand that there are three great stages, or states, of the Hebrew tongue-the Ancient, the Middle, and the New; and that of these the earlier or classical Scriptures belong to the first, and the Book of Nehemiah (for example), to the second. The third is the Rabbinical stage. The passage from one to another of these stages is held, under the laws of that language, to require a very long time. Professor Margoliouth finds that Ben Sira wrote in Rabbinical Hebrew, and the earlier we find Rabbinical Hebrew in use, the farther we drive into antiquity the dates of books written in middle and in ancient Hebrew. Suppose, by way of illustration, that Professor Margoliouth shows Rabbinical Hebrew to have come into use two hundred years earlier than had been supposed, the effect is to throw back by two hundred years the latest date to which a book in middle or in ancient Hebrew could be assigned. No wonder, then, that Professor Margoliouth observes (p. 22)

"Some students are engaged in bringing down the date of every chapter in the Bible so late as to leave no room for prophecy and revelation."

But he goes on to add that if, by the task which he has undertaken, and by those who may follow and improve upon him, this Book shall be properly restored, "Others will endeavor to find out how early the professedly post-exilian books can be put back, so as to account for the divergence between their awkward MiddleHebrew and the rich and eloquent NewHebrew of Ben Sira. However this may be, hypotheses which place any portion of the classical or Old-Hebrew Scriptures between the Middle-Hebrew of Nehemiah and the New-Hebrew of Ben Sira will

"On the place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature." Clarendon Press, 1890.

surely require some reconsideration, or at least have to be harmonized in some way with the history of the language, before they can be unconditionally accepted."

Hence the spectator from without, perceiving that there is war, waged on critical grounds, in the critical camp, may surinise that what has been wittily called the order of disorder is more or less menaced in its central seat; and he may be the more hardened in his determination not to rush prematurely to final conclusions on the serious, though not as I suppose vital, question respecting the age and authenticity of the early books of the Old Testament in their present literary form.

There is such a thing as mistaking the indifferent for the essential, and as a slavish adherence to traditions insufficiently examined. But the liabilities of human nature to error do not all lie on

one side. It may on the contrary be stated with some confidence that when error in a certain direction after a long precedence is effectively called to account, it is generally apt, and in some cases certain, to be followed by a reign of prejudices or biassed judgments more or less extended and in a contrary direction. There is such a thing as a bias in favor of disintegration. Often does a critic bring to the book he examines the conclusion which he believes that he has drawn from

And

Often when he has not thus imported it, yet the first view, in remote perspective, of the proposition to which he leans will induce him to rush at the most formidable fences that lie ahead of him, instead of taking his chances of arriving at it by the common road of reason. often, even when he has attained it without prejudice, he will after adopting defend it against objectors, not with argument only, but with all the pride and pain of wounded self-love. of wounded self-love. And every one of these dangers is commonly enhanced in the same proportion in which the particular subject-matter embraces the highest interests of mankind.

What I would specially press upon those to whom I write is that they should look broadly and largely at the subject of Holy Scripture, especially of the Scriptures of the older dispensation, which are, so to speak, farther from the eye, and should never allow themselves to be won away from that broad and large contemplation into discussions which, though in their

own place legitimate, nay, needful, yet are secondary, and therefore, when substituted for the primary, are worse than frivolous. I do not ask this from them as philosophers or as Christians, but as men of sense. I ask them to look at the subject as they would look at the British Constitution, or at the poetry of Shakespeare. If we were pressed by the apparent absurdity that any one branch of the British Legislature can stop the proceedings of the whole, or that the House of Commons can reduce to beggary the whole Army, Navy, and Civil Service of the country, and that neither law nor usage make any provision for meeting the case, though there would ensue nothing less than a frustration of the purposes for which men join together in society, there are probably not ten men in the country whose estimate of the Constitution they live under would be affected by these supererogatory objections. And if we are in any measure to grasp the office, dignity, and authority of the Scriptures, we must not suppose we are dealing adequately with that lofty subject by exhausting thought and time in examining whether Moses edited or wrote the Pentateuch as it stands, or what was the book of the law found in the temple in the times of Josiah, or whether it is possible or likely that changes of addition or omission may have crept into the text. If the most greedily destructive among all the theories of the modern critics (so seriously at variance with one another) were established as true, it would not avail to impair the great facts of the history of man with respect to the Jews and to the nations of the world; nor to disguise the light which those facts throw upon the pages of the Sacred Volume; nor to abate the commanding force with which, bathed, so to speak, in the flood of that light, the Bible invites, attracts, and commands the adhesion of mankind. Even the moral problems, which may be raised as to paror portions of the volume, and which may not have found any absolute and certain solution, are lost in the comprehensive cor emplation of its general strain, its immeasurable loftiness of aim, and the vastness of the results which it and its immediate accompaniments in institution and event have wrought for our predecessors in the burney of life, for ourselves, and for the most forward, dominant, and responsite portions of our race.

In a passage which rises to the very highest level of British eloquence, Dr. Liddon,* exhausting all the resources of our language, has described, so far as man may describe it, the ineffable and unapproachable position held by the Sacred Volume. It is too long to quote, too special to appropriate; and to make extracts would only mangle it. The commanding enminence of the great preacher of our metropolitan Cathedral will fasten the public attention on the subject, and powerfully serve to show that the Scriptures, in their substantial tissue, rise far above the region of criticism, which can do nothing permanent or effectual to lower their moral and spiritual grandeur, or to disguise or intercept their gigantic work.

The impression prevails that in this and other countries the operative classes, as they are termed, have at the great centres of population, here and elsewhere, largely lost their hold upon the Christian creed. There may be exaggeration in this belief; but, all things taken together, there is evidently a degree of foundation for it. It does not mean, at least among us, that they have lost respect for the Christian religion, or for its ministers; or that they desire their children to be brought up otherwise than in the knowledge and practice of it; or that they themselves have snapped the last ties which, on the cardinal occasions of existence, associate them with its ordinances; or that they have renounced or modified the moral standards of conduct which its conspicuous victory, after an obstinate contest of many centuries, and its long possession of the social field, have established. It means no more and no less than this, that their positive, distinct acceptance of the articles of the Creed, and their sense of the dignity and value of the Sacred Record, are blunted or effaced.

In passing I may be permitted to observe that the assent thus more or less largely withheld by the less well-to-do segment of society is still, notwithstanding the sceptical movement of the day, very generally yielded by the leisured and better provided classes. There seems to be within certain limits some approach to a reversal of the respective attitudes which prevailed in the infancy of our religion.

*Sermon preached at St. Paul's on the Second Sunday in Advent, Dec. 1889; pp. 28-31.

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Then the " poor" were the principal objects of the personal ministry of Christ Our Lord, and it was their glory to be the readiest receivers of the Gospel. They were then, the poor of this world, rich in faith, and heirs of the kingdom which He hath promised to them that love Him." * They had fewer obstacles, especially within themselves, to prevent their accepting the new religion. It was less hard for them to become as little children." They had by contrast more palpable interests in the promise of the life to come, as compared with the possession of the life that now is. The apparent change in their comparative facility of access to the Saviour as respects belief is one to afford much matter for meditation. The present purpose is to deal, in slight outline at least, with one of its causes. I mean the wide disparagement of the Holy Scriptures recently observable in the surface currents of prevalent opinion, as regards their title to supply in a supreme degree food for the religious thought of man, and authoritative guidance for his life.

Among the suppositions which tend to produce this disparagement are the following:

I. That the conclusions of science as to natural objects have shaken or destroyed the assertions of the early Scriptures with respect to the origin and history of the world and of man, its principal inhabitant. II. That their contents are in many cases offensive to the moral sense, and unworthy of an enlightened age.

III. That man made his appearance in the world in a condition but one degree above that of the brute creation, and by slow and painful but continual progress has brought himself up to the present level of his existence.

IV. That he has accomplished this by the exercise of his natural powers, and has never received the special teaching and authoritative guidance which is signified under the name of Divine Revelation.

V. That the more considerable among the different races and nations of the world have established from time to time their respective religions, and have in many cases accepted the promulgation of sacred books, which are to be considered as essentially of the same character with the Bible.

* James ii. 5.

VI. That the books of the Bible, in many most important instances, and especially those books of the Old Testament which purport to be the earliest, so far from being contemporary with the events which they record, or with the authors to whom they are ascribed, are comparatively recent compilations from uncertain sources, and therefore without authority. To this assumption most of the foregoing remarks refer.

There are propositions wider still, but wholly foreign to the present purposesuch as that God is essentially unknowable, that we have no reasonable evidence of a life beyond the grave, and that rational certainty is confined to material objects and to the testimony of the senses. Passing by these propositions, I confine myself wholly to what preceded them, and I shall endeavor, from some points of view, to present an opposing view of the spiritual field. Moreover, as each of these is the subject of a literature of its own which may be termed scientific, I here premise that what I have to say will, though I hope rational and true, be not systematic or complete, but popular and partial only, and will have for its immediate aim to show that there are grave reasons for questioning every destructive proposition, and for withholding our assent from them until these reasons (and, as I conceive, many others) shall be confuted and set aside.

I shall, however, as being in duty bound to follow the truth so far as I can discern it, have to make many confessions in the course of my argument to the prejudice, not as I trust of Christian belief or of the Sacred Volume, but only of us, who as its students have failed gravely and at many points in the duty of a temperate and cautious treatment of it, as unhappily we have also failed in every other duty. But, as the lines and laws of duty at large remain unobscured, notwithstanding the imperfections everywhere diffused, so we may trust that sufficient light yet remains for us if duly followed whereby to establish the authority and sufficiency of Holy Scripture for its high moral and spiritual purposes. For the present, I have endeavored to point out that the operations of criticism properly so called, affecting as they do the literary form of the books, leave the questions of history, miracle, revelation substantially where they found

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