OLD TESTAMENT 
 CRITICISM 
 
 AND THE 
 
 IGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 
 

 ' :;|}f.f ^§PJ5 2)^1? prinieiu 
 
 Under this general title the Committee of the 
 Religious Tract Society propose to issue a series of 
 Educational books, suited, as far as possible, for 
 ministers, teachers of Bible classes, and for all general 
 readers who take an intelligent interest in subjects 
 connected with Biblical study and with religious 
 life and work. Each volume will be complete in 
 itself, and will be the work of a writer specially 
 competent to deal with the subject of which it 
 treats. Upon those subjects which are still matters 
 of keen controversy, and sometimes extreme theoriz- 
 ing, the aim will be to present the latest and best 
 grounded results as distinct from ingenious guesses. 
 The first two volumes, now ready, are — 
 
 I. EARLY CHURCH HISTORY. A Sketch 
 of the First Four Centuries. By J. Vernon Bartlet, 
 M.A., late Scholar of Exeter College, and Lecturer on 
 Church History in Mansfield College, Oxford. 
 
 Front. . 2 
 
2. THE PRINTED ENGLISH BIBLE. 
 
 1525-1885. By the Rev. Richard Lovett, M.A., 
 Editor of Demaus's 'William Tyndale,' 2nd edition; 
 Author of 'James Gilmour of Mongolia,' etc. 
 
 3. HOW TO STUDY THE ENGLISH 
 
 BIBLE. By Canon Girdlestone. 
 
 4. A BRIEF INTRODUCTION TO NEW 
 
 TESTAMENT GREEK. By Rev. Samuel G. 
 Green, D.D., Author of ' Handbook to the Grammar 
 of the Greek Testament,' etc, 
 
 5. A PRIMER OF ASSYRIOLOGY. By 
 
 the Rev. A. H. Sayce, LL.D. 
 
 6. THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND. 
 
 By the Rev. W. H. Beckett. 
 
 7. PLANTS OF THE BIBLE. By Rev. 
 
 George Henslow, M.A., F.L.S., etc. Illustrated 
 from Photographs of the Plants themselves. 
 
 8. A PRIMER OF HEBREW ANTIQUI- 
 
 TIES. By Rev. O. C. Whitehouse, M.A., Principal 
 of Cheshunt College. Illustrated. 
 
 9. A PRIMER OF ROMAN CATHOL- 
 
 ICISM; or, The Doctrines of the Church of Rome 
 Briefly Examined in the Light of Scripture. By the 
 Rev. C. H. H. Wright, D.D. 
 
 10. A PRIMER OF MODERN MISSIONS. 
 
 Edited by the Rev. R. Lovett, M.A., Author of 
 ' James Gilmour,' etc. 
 
 Other Volumes, dealing with such subjects as Egyp- 
 tology, the Greek Testament, the Contents of the Old 
 and New Testaments, Old Testament History, New 
 Testament History, etc., are in course of preparation. 
 
 The vohinies extend from 128 to 160 pages, are foolscap octavo 
 in size, are bound in cloth boards, cmd published at One Shilling. 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 
 
 AND 
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 
 
Oxfotb 
 
 HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY 
 
Iprcsent 5)a^ prtmerg 
 
 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 
 
 AND 
 
 THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 
 
 BEING A PLEA 
 
 FOR THE RIGHTS AND POWERS OF NON-EXPERTS 
 
 IN THE STUDY OF HOLY SCRIPTURE 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. JOHN KENNEDY, M.A., D.D. 
 
 HONORARY PROFESSOR, NEW COLLEGE, LONDON 
 
 AUTHOR OF ' THE SELF-REVELATION OK JESUS CHRIST ' 
 
 'the RESURRECTION OF JESUS CHRIST, AN HISTORICAL FACT' 
 
 ETC., ETC. 
 
 'In understanding be men.'— i COR. xiv. 20 
 THE RELIGIOUS TRACT SOCIETY 
 
 56 PATERNOSTER ROW AND 65 ST. PAUL's CHURCHYARD 
 1897 
 
PREFACE 
 
 The object of this book is to set forth the relative 
 positions of the Learned and Unlearned in the study 
 of Holy Scripture, — meaning by the unlearned that 
 great class of students who, however intelligent, do 
 not possess the advantage of personal acquaintance 
 with the languages in which the Scripture was 
 originally written, or who, even if they have ac- 
 quired some acquaintance with these languages, are 
 not competent to form a judgement on questions 
 which depend exclusively or mainly on the niceties 
 of pure scholarship. The rights and legitimate func- 
 tions of this class, which with scant propriety we 
 call the unlearned, need to be safeguarded. There 
 is a disposition in many quarters to recognize a class 
 of speciaHsts among Bible students, analogous to 
 the class of acknowledged specialists in the depart- 
 ments of theoretic and practical science, and even 
 to allow them a more exclusive authority than is 
 often allowed to these. Questions which are agitating 
 
6 PREFACE 
 
 the public mind to its very depth, and which involve 
 the most serious issues, in relation to the integrity 
 and trustworthiness of what we have been accustomed 
 to regard as the Word of God, and in relation to 
 the highest spiritual interests, are declared to be 
 * emphatically not people's questions.' ' The solution 
 of these difficulties, if they are ever to be solved,' 
 we are told, ' can only be the work of men who are 
 equipped for the service with special philological and 
 historical knowledge and acumen.' And at the feet 
 of those who are so equipped, they who are not are 
 bidden to sit as humble learners till the solution is 
 published with authority. 
 
 In the following pages the writer endeavours to 
 separate truth from untruth in this matter, and 
 to maintain the legitimate rights of those who may 
 be called non-experts ; and having done so, he sets 
 forth certain reasons which justify these non-experts 
 in holding by the main positions of the older 
 criticism of the Old Testament scriptures, and re- 
 jecting the main positions of the newer, — reasons 
 which are in no respect inconsistent with the highest 
 scholarship, and whose soundness no scholarship can 
 neutralize or render doubtful. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PART FIRST 
 
 PAGE 
 
 A Plea for the Rights and Powers of Non-Experts 
 IN the Study of Holy Scripture stated, argued, 
 
 AND ILLUSTRATED 9 
 
 PART SECOND 
 The Plea confirmed by the consideration of 
 
 REASONS which ARE INDEPENDENT OF EXPERT 
 SCHOLARSHIP 37 
 
 Firstly, that which the new theory would displace has 
 come down unchallenged from the earliest Jewish age, 
 confirmed by prophets and apostles, and by the Lord 
 of both 27 
 
 Secondly, the unlearned reader may well stand in doubt 
 of a theory which, to say the least, places the testimony 
 of Christ in an ambiguous position . . . -37 
 
 Thirdly, the Higher Criticism is condemned by the 
 moral implications and bearings of its processes . . 55 
 
 Fourthly, the new theories do not give us an intelligent 
 and sufficient substitute for that which they would dis- 
 place .......... 08 
 
8 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 FiFTHiA', the old theory is strengthened by the fact that 
 Bible Histories are confirmed by modern archaeological 
 discoveries -72 
 
 Sixthly, the new theory is not saved by the avowal on 
 the part of the critics of faith in the inspiration of the 
 Jewish Scriptures 7^ 
 
 Seventhly, the same sort of criticism, applied to any 
 ancient or even modern book, might be made to yield 
 similar results 82 
 
 Conclusion 89 
 
OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 
 
 AND THE 
 
 RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 
 
 PART FIRST 
 
 THE PLEA STATED, ARGUED, AND 
 ILLUSTRATED 
 
 There are departments of knowledge in reference 
 to which the great bulk of even well-educated men 
 must be content to accept conclusions on the authority 
 of others. Astronomy may be named as an example. 
 The observations and calculations of astronomers 
 belong to a region which is as a terra incognita to the 
 mass of mankind. But the soundness of the Coper- 
 nican theory of the solar system, which underlies 
 them, and of the laws of gravitation which are asso- 
 ciated with the names of Newton, Halley, and Kepler, 
 and which are the bases of astronomical calculations, 
 is proved to the perfect conviction of all men by 
 results, the truth and accuracy of which need no 
 demonstration but that of the naked eye. The most 
 
lO OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 popular and least scientific calendars which we can 
 purchase for a few pence at the beginning of any year, 
 tell us, for example, what eclipses of the sun and 
 moon will take place during the year, the extent of 
 the eclipse, the moment of its commencement, the 
 moment of its ending; and the parts of our earth's 
 surface where the eclipse will be seen. The astro- 
 nomical prediction never fails of accomplishment ; 
 and the authors of it may be called Experts, as 
 distinguished from those who cannot follow their 
 processes and must content themselves with results. 
 
 It scarcely needs remark, and yet the remark must 
 be made, and we shall soon find it of importance, that 
 there is no true analogy between such experts and 
 those who call themselves^ or rather who are called, 
 experts in biblical or literary criticism. There are 
 two departments, it is true, which those who are not 
 versed in the original languages of Holy Scripture 
 must relegate to those who are. These are textual 
 criticism and translation. The very first concern of 
 the late revisers of our English Bible was to settle 
 the Texts ^ which they were to translate ; and in their 
 prefaces they have explained the principles on which 
 they proceeded. The Old Testament revisers tell us 
 that their difficulties in this matter were greater than 
 those of the New Testament revisers, and they thought 
 
 ^ The general rule adopted by both the Old Testament 
 revisers and the New is expressed in the same words, 'That 
 the Text to be adopted be that for which the evidence is 
 decidedly preponderating.' 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED II 
 
 it ' most prudent (they say) to adopt the Massoretic 
 (the Received) Text, as the basis of their work.' So 
 far as known MSS. of the Old Testament are 
 concerned, it seems to be admitted that there is 
 Httle prospect of much further hght being thrown 
 on the subject. Hopes are entertained, however, 
 though not with much confidence, that a more 
 thorough study of the ancient versions— the Greek, 
 Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, and Latin — may result in 
 some improvement of the Text. As to the New 
 Testament, the means of attaining certainty are much 
 greater than in the case of the Old. And ' a revision 
 of the Greek Text was the necessary foundation of 
 the work ' of the revisers ; but they say ' it did not 
 fall within their province to construct a continuous 
 and complete Greek Text.' The main principles by 
 which they were guided are fully explained in their 
 preface. 
 
 This is a matter which the unlearned, the non- 
 Hebraists and non-Grecians, must leave in other 
 hands than their own. But in doing so they do not 
 suffer any material disadvantage in their endeavour to 
 understand Holy Scripture. Consider these points : 
 
 1. The number of Hebrew scholars who are capable 
 and have the opportunity of original textual investiga- 
 tion is after all comparatively small. 
 
 2. The subject of their special study does not admit 
 of the possibihty of a unanimous consensus, as in 
 a matter of science, even on the part of the most 
 select and most skilful of textual critics. 
 
12 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 3. The results of textual criticism, whatever they may 
 be, and with whatever doubt or confidence they may 
 be asserted, are not hidden from the uninitiated, but 
 soon become the possession of the world at large. To 
 these considerations another has to be added, the force 
 of which will be recognized at once, namely ; 
 
 4. That the accumulated experiences of the past 
 in this department confirm our confidence in the 
 substantial trustworthiness of the texts which are 
 represented in our English translation, and leave no 
 room for the expectation that the future will produce 
 any material change. Christians are sometimes 
 alarmed by being told of an enormous number of 
 
 * various readings ' in Greek manuscripts of the 
 New Testament. But it is a false alarm, as any one 
 may discover for himself if he will only observe the 
 few, and, with scarcely an exception, trifling, changes 
 which the revisers have found necessary. 
 
 A learned commentator on Homer, discussing the 
 
 * various readings ' in the great Greek epic, the Iliad, 
 illustrates his subject by an incidental reference to 
 the various readings of the Greek New Testament. 
 ' For the most part (he says) a mere variety in the 
 position of the words, or in the method of spelling, in 
 the presence or omission of the article, or a change 
 in some insignificant epithet, is all the fruit that 
 weeks and months consumed in the laborious work 
 of comparing old manuscripts can boast of; and 
 when we find a learned man like Wetstein devoting 
 his whole life to the comparison of such insignificant 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 1 3 
 
 variations of the Greek Text as our New Testament 
 exhibits, we are incHned ahnost to withhold our pity 
 from him, when we find him complaining that, after 
 long years spent in adjusting the sacred text, he had 
 got as his reward only '' weak eyes and a disqualifi- 
 cation for every other pursuit." ' 
 
 It is not to be inferred, however, that the labours 
 of textual critics are wasted. Far from it. Every 
 correction, the smallest, which is effected by them, 
 is worth the pains which have produced it. And, 
 above all, ' The negative results are of the utmost 
 consequence. The Christian world knows, with 
 a confidence which were otherwise impossible, that 
 the book which contains the charter of its inheritance 
 has lived through centuries, undamaged in all essen- 
 tials, whether from the blundering of ignorant copyists, 
 or the falsification of unscrupulous partisans \' 
 
 It will thus be seen that the unlearned share the 
 fruits of learning, and are not practically damaged 
 by their dependence on others in the department of 
 textual criticism. 
 
 The same line of argument may be followed with 
 reference to their dependence on others for the 
 translation of Holy Scripture, and it need not be 
 repeated. Those who can read the Hebrew and 
 Greek originals for themselves have a certain ad- 
 vantage over others, in that the original often pro- 
 duces a more vivid and more suggestive impression 
 than the familiar English produces. But unless 
 
 ^ Homer and the Iliad. By John Stuart Blackie. Vol. i. 336. 
 
14 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Hebrew and Greek had become universal languages, 
 the greater part of mankind must of necessity depend 
 on translations. And it is an instructive fact that 
 the Jews, the Hebrews themselves, in the time of 
 Christ, especially those of the Dispersion, were more 
 familiar with a translation, than with the originals 
 which had come down to them in the tongue of 
 their fathers. These originals were very sacred, and 
 held a place to which no translation could aspire. 
 But the Greek Septuagint was in general use, and 
 though it was not inspired, and was far from being 
 a correct translation, apostles did not hesitate to 
 quote it, as we quote our English, as the word of God. 
 This is a fact of no mean importance. It does 
 not diminish the reverence that is due to the 
 words that were written by prophets and apostles, 
 and which must ever be regarded as the final 
 court of appeal, but it justifies the right of 
 translation, and proves the possibility of conveying, 
 truly and sufficiently, the Divine meaning of the 
 originals to those to whom the originals are a sealed 
 book. The memorable doctrine which Christ an- 
 nounced to the woman of Samaria has a bearing 
 on languages as well as on places. They that 
 worship the Father in spirit and in truth are not 
 dependent on the tongues of Jerusalem and Gerizim 
 for their knowledge of Him or for their power of 
 worship. The apostles on the day of Pentecost 
 knew that the good news which they were inspired 
 to proclaim was as true and Divine in all the 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 15 
 
 languages that were native to the devout men from 
 every nation under heaven, as it was to the home- 
 born men of Jerusalem who had heard the voice 
 of Christ Himself. On the basis of this fact Bible 
 Societies rest. The day of Pentecost is their model, 
 and by means of the printing-press they essay to do 
 for all nations and for all ages, what the apostles did 
 on that day for the multitude around them. Their 
 work will be completed only when the joyous echo 
 comes from the whole wide world, 'We do read, 
 every man in his own tongue, the wonderful works 
 of God.' 
 
 We now turn to the Book itself, to ascertain whether 
 it indicates any incapacity on the part of those who 
 receive it to understand it, or any indication of an 
 authority standing between them and the Book, to 
 prescribe the sense in which its words are to be 
 understood. Here the way is clear before us. Moses 
 spoke with authority, but he interposed no authority 
 between himself and the people. There needed none. 
 ' This commandment which I command thee this day, 
 it is not hidden from thee [R.V. it is not too hard 
 for thee], neither is it far off. It is not in heaven, 
 that thou shouldest say, Who shall go up for us to 
 heaven, and bring it unto us, that we may hear it, 
 and do it? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou 
 shouldest say. Who shall go over the sea for us, and 
 bring it unto us, that we may hear it, and do it ? But 
 the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in 
 
1 6 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 thy heart, that thou mayest do it ' (Deut. xxx. 11-14). 
 These words were not addressed to a select class, but 
 to the assembled nation. The statutes and judgements 
 with reference to which Moses said, ' I call heaven and 
 earth to record this day, that I have set before you 
 life and death ' (ver. 19), were to be ' taught dihgently ' 
 even to children (Deut. vi. 4-9). At the end of every 
 seven years, ' in the solemn year of release,' it was 
 ordained that the law should be publicly read before 
 ' all Israel.' ' Gather the people together (the Law- 
 giver said), men, and women, and children, and thy 
 stranger that is within thy gates, that they may hear, 
 and that they may learn, and fear the Lord your God, 
 and observe to do all the words of this law ! ' (Deut. 
 xxxi . 10-12). The priests and the elders of the people 
 were charged with the fulfilment of this ordinance, 
 but were invested with no authority besides. When 
 Ezra read ' the book of the law of Moses, which the 
 Lord had commanded to Israel,' to the 'men and 
 women' who had returned from exile, we are told 
 that ' they gave the sense, and caused the people 
 to understand the reading' (Neh. viii. i, 8). This 
 probably means that they translated the Hebrew of 
 Moses into the Aramaic dialect which the people 
 now spoke. It may mean likewise that Ezra and 
 the priests who aided him in this memorable work, 
 expounded to the people as they read the requirements 
 of the law with its promises and threatenings. But 
 exposition implied no authority then any more than it 
 does now. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 17 
 
 What is true of the teaching of Moses is true of the 
 teaching of prophets. They too spoke with Divine 
 authority ; but between their words and the people 
 there stood no one to tell the people how they must 
 understand them. 'Write the vision (the Lord said 
 to Habakkuk), and make it plain upon tables, that he 
 may run that readeth it' (ii. 2). When the vision 
 became at any time as ' the words of a book that was 
 sealed,' it was not that they were hard to understand, 
 but because the people would have it so (Isa. xxix. 
 9-16). 
 
 Reference may be made in this connexion, though 
 it is scarcely necessary, to the Jewish fable of an oral 
 law by which the written law was to be interpreted. 
 The Talmud says that during the whole day while 
 Moses continued on the mount, he was learning the 
 written law, but at night he was occupied in receiving 
 another law explanatory of the first, which he was 
 commanded not to commit to writing, but to hand 
 down by oral tradition. When Jerusalem was taken by 
 the Romans, and the temple destroyed, and the nation 
 scattered abroad, it was feared, we are told, that the 
 traditionary law might be lost, and therefore it was 
 resolved to preserve it by committing it to writing. 
 This was done by ' Judah the holy,' about the 
 middle of the second century of our era. Hence 
 the Talmud. 
 
 Over against this story we need only recite the 
 words of the history of the law-giving : ' Moses came 
 
 B 
 
l8 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 and told the people all the words of the Lord ; . . . and 
 Moses wrote all the words of the Lord ' (Exod. xxiv. 
 3, 4). Throughout the entire history of the nation 
 from that time onward to the latest of the prophets, 
 we search in vain for a single phrase or allusion that 
 might indicate the existence of any other than the 
 written law. And when in the Gospels we find 
 references to traditions of the fathers, we still find 
 no appeal to an oral law contemporaneous with the 
 written. The traditions were only the comments of 
 Rabbinical teachers, and their general effect was to 
 make void the one Law which alone bore the seal 
 of God. 
 
 If we turn to the New Testament we still look 
 in vain for the existence of an authority, outside 
 its own pages, to determine for the reader how 
 he should understand the apostolic words. The 
 matter may be tested by a reference to the Epistles 
 of St. Paul. This great apostle possessed and claimed 
 the authority of Christ for his teaching. He knew 
 ' the mind of Christ.' A dispensation of the gospel 
 was committed to him (i Cor. ix. 17). By revelation 
 there was made known to him the mystery of Christ 
 (Eph. iii. 2-7). What he preached and what he 
 wrote bore the seal of the Lord whose ambassador 
 he was. But between Paul and his hearer or reader 
 there stood no authoritative interpreter. To the 
 Corinthian Church, the fellow Christians of ' all that 
 called upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord in 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 19 
 
 every place' (i Cor. i. 2), he said, 'Judge ye (ye who 
 read my words) what I say ' (x. 15). 
 
 The Epistle to the Romans is often described 
 as the most theological of all the apostle's writings, 
 and it may be assumed that it was to ' some things ' 
 in this Epistle that his fellow apostle Peter referred, 
 when he spoke of ' some things hard to be understood, 
 which the ignorant and unsteadfast wrest, as they do 
 also the other scriptures, unto their own destruction ' 
 (2 Pet. iii. 16, R.V.). But neither apostle prescribed, 
 nor suggested the existence of, any intermediary to save 
 even the ignorant and unsteadfast from wresting the 
 Scriptures ; an intermediary who should impair the 
 right or diminish the responsibility of those whom 
 they addressed. The readers of the apostolic epistles 
 were, many of them, Jews who carried into the 
 Christian Church prejudices which were to them as 
 a second nature; and many of them heathens who 
 found it equally hard to rid themselves of old super- 
 stitions and habits. But the apostles treated them 
 all as capable of understanding their reasons against 
 a Judaic rituahsm, as in the Epistle to the Galatians ; 
 and against heathen corruptions and heathen philoso- 
 phies as in the Epistles to the Corinthians and to the 
 Colossians ; and they held their readers personally 
 responsible for the right understanding of their 
 instructions. 
 
 Christian readers of to-day are not less capable 
 than were those of the first century to understand 
 the apostolic writings ; nor are they less responsible 
 B 2 
 
20 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 personally for the understanding and practice of the 
 will of Christ, as authoritatively declared by His 
 immediately commissioned ambassadors. 
 
 The rejection of the claim of any body calling itself 
 ' The Church,' or of councils presuming to speak in 
 the name of the Church, to come between us and the 
 written inspired word with an authoritative declaration 
 of the meaning of the word, is not to be construed 
 as a rejection of the aids which we may derive from 
 the studies of those who have gone before us — the 
 fathers of bygone ages — or our own contemporaries. 
 Such a rejection would be the sign not of a true inde- 
 pendence, but of self-willed conceit and arrogance. 
 
 If we are right so far, we see (ly that ordinary 
 readers of Holy Scripture enjoy all the benefits of 
 the light which a learning not their own can throw 
 on the original texts of both the Old and the New 
 Testament; and (2) that through translation they 
 enjoy practically all the advantage which those possess 
 who can read the Scriptures in Hebrew or in Greek. 
 We have seen hkewise (3) that the books themselves 
 recognize no authority as standing between them and 
 their readers. The attempt to assert such authority 
 issued, in the case of the Old Testament., not in 
 enforcing, but in making void the Divine law. And 
 the case of the New is not very different. If the 
 apostles had risen from the dead four or six centuries 
 after their lifetime — the age to which some would 
 have us bow as authoritative, — their language of 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 21 
 
 sorrow and amazement would have been, ' \V' e marvel 
 that ye are so far removed from us unto another 
 gospel and other ordinances.' 
 
 But may there not have been developed in our 
 times another class of experts, to whose learning and 
 wisdom it will be expedient that w^e bow ? If so, we 
 have to ask who they are and how^ we shall know 
 them? Are they the men who have attained to 
 a very high knowledge of the language in which 
 prophets spoke and wrote, and of all that can con- 
 tribute, directly or indirectly, to the understanding 
 of the writings of the Old Testament? Do these 
 constitute a class who are entitled to impose their 
 interpretations on the world ? Here we are met 
 at once with an initial difficulty. These very learned 
 men are divided into two irreconcileable and antagon- 
 istic forces, on the very questions in regard to which 
 the unlearned are supposed at present to need 
 guidance. The one party find in their learning 
 a confirmation of what is called, though not with 
 strict accuracy, the traditional theory of the Old 
 Testament ; the theory which was held — not as 
 a theory, but as an unquestioned fact, through the 
 age of Christ and His apostles until a very recent 
 period — that the five books commonly ascribed to 
 Moses were rightly ascribed to him, and that in 
 these books we have the very foundation of the 
 Jewish polity and of the Jewish history. The 
 other party find in their learning reason to deny 
 
22 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 this theory, root and branch, and to maintain that 
 the true beginnings of Judaism and its theology are 
 to be found in the prophets of the eighth century 
 before Christ, and that the histories and laws, with 
 some fragmentary exceptions, which precede these 
 in the book, are due to authors of the prophetic 
 age, and did not attain their present completed 
 form, especially in the matter of law-giving, till after 
 the Babylonian exile. These two classes of the 
 ' learned ' are fundamentally contrary the one to 
 the other, and we cannot bow the knee to both. 
 
 The idea of authoritative experts based on Hebrew 
 learning is exploded by the fact of this fundamental 
 difference. Neither class has a right to an authority 
 which is not conceded to the other. And perhaps 
 it may be said with truth that neither claims or asserts 
 any such right. But it is claimed or asserted for one 
 of them. It has become a fashion on the part of 
 many to regard the scholars who have adopted the 
 new theories regarding the Old Testament as experts, 
 to the exclusion of scholars who are equally learned ; 
 and it is to them alone we are told to look for a verdict 
 on those problems which are to be taken out of the 
 hands of the people. But why should these be 
 invested with a critical dictatorship ? 
 
 (i) They do not themselves claim a personal supe- 
 riority in scholarship over many who differ from them. 
 They may mourn over their learned brethren who ^ will 
 not come to the light ' which has shone on their minds, 
 but they do not deny their equal capacity. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 23 
 
 (2) Some of the most eminent of them confess that 
 the ultimate decision of great Old Testament prob- 
 lems does not depend after all on scholarship. One 
 of them (Dr. Cheyne) has said emphatically, with 
 reference to a question which he has made very 
 specially his own — that of the second portion of 
 Isaiah — that the decision of the critical question will 
 mainly depend on other than purely linguistic con- 
 siderations. As to the fifty-third of Isaiah, he says 
 that the question of its true meaning rests less with 
 the critic than with the heart and judgement of the 
 Christian. Dean Farrar, who accepts one of the most 
 painfully destructive, and, as I think, one of the least 
 tenable, conclusions of the Higher Criticism, in the 
 matter of the Book of Daniel, remarks on the un- 
 certainty of the results that are attained on purely 
 philological grounds, and refers to the fact that two 
 Hebraists, so profound as Ewald and Hitzig, take 
 such opposite views of language that the one can 
 feel sure that the second Psalm is of Davidic, 
 and the other of Maccabean origin {Ori the Minor 
 Prophets^ p. 104). Kuenen confesses that he has no 
 data for his critical speculations that are not equally 
 possessed by all who have the Bible in their hands. 
 Prof. Robertson Smith is equally explicit. ' We have 
 (he says) almost no contemporary helps for the study 
 of Hebrew antiquity beyond the books which were 
 received into the Hebrew Canon ' ( The Old Testa- 
 vient in tJie Jeivish Churchy p. 17). 
 
 (3) There is a third reason why we should dis- 
 
24 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 allow anything like a dictatorship to those who are 
 ordinarily called Higher Critics, and that is the 
 extraordinary differences in the results at which they 
 arrive, while starting from and building on the same 
 critical principles. 
 
 As to the old and ever-new question of the right of 
 private judgement in its many bearings — the right of 
 every man to think for himself and to act for himself 
 in his relations to his Maker — enough to say that the 
 denial of the right by man or magistrate, Church or 
 Churchman, throws on the denier the duty of proving 
 his right to deny. And how is that to be proved ? 
 Only by proving the possession of authority from 
 Heaven. And the attempt to prove this is itself an 
 appeal to the private judgement of those whom it is 
 designed to convince. It cannot be forgotten that 
 even prophets were not entitled to be heard unless 
 they were in a position to prove their prophetic 
 authority. And Christ Himself did not demand 
 hearing or faith without giving abundant evidence 
 that He had a right to speak in the name of God. If He 
 had not done in Israel works such as no man had 
 ever done before. He said, the nation would have been 
 without sin in rejecting His claims. Even a Divine 
 Revelation, then, appeals to the private, the personal, 
 judgement, including the conscience and entire spiritual 
 nature of those whom it addresses ; acknowledges their 
 right, apart from authoritative interference by any 
 one, to consider its claims, and throws on them the 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 25 
 
 responsibility of a decision. It may be called an awful 
 right ; and it is certainly an awful responsibility. An 
 inspired apostle sums up the logical conclusion 
 when he says, ' To his own (the only) Master (Lord of 
 the conscience) he standeth or falleth.' 
 
 Before proceeding further it may be well to explain 
 that I use the term ' Higher Critics ' only in the sense 
 in which it is now popularly bandied about — not 
 meaning thereby critics who have brought criticism 
 to bear on subjects which have been hitherto free 
 from its scope, such as the origin of the books, the 
 original text of the books, the meaning of the books 
 — with everything external to the books and internal, 
 that can throw any light upon them ^ : but critics who 
 by certain processes, whether legitimate or illegitimate, 
 have come to the conclusion that all the ages until 
 very recently have been entirely mistaken with refer- 
 ence to the authorship, and historical or non-historical 
 character, of the five books which are the foundation 
 of our Bible, and of certain other books as well. This 
 criticism is in no proper sense higher or superior, nor 
 are its advocates superior, nor its results. It does not 
 
 ' * Properly speaking the Higher Criticism is an inquiry into 
 the object and character of the writings to which it is applied. 
 It seeks to ascertain by all available means the authors by whom, 
 the time at which, the circumstances under which, and the design 
 with which they were produced. Such investigations rightly 
 conducted must prove a most important aid to the understanding 
 and just appreciation of the writings in question.' — Dr. W. H. 
 Green . 
 
26 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 
 
 raise us to a plane of thought or knowledge that is in 
 any sense higher. And when it claims to be historical 
 we are reminded of a passage in one of Mr. John 
 Bright's great speeches : ' He remarked, we are told, 
 
 that Mr. seemed to read a different history from 
 
 anybody else, or that he made his own history, and, 
 like Voltaire, made it better without facts than with 
 them.' 
 
 The reader may better understand what follows if 
 reminded that the critics, whose position I contest, 
 divide the legislation of the books which we call 
 Mosaic mainly into three codes. The first is the 
 Covenant Code, which is brief, and may be allowed 
 to be really Mosaic, namely, Exod. xx-xxiii. The 
 second is the Deuteronomic Code, consisting of the 
 laws which are found in Deuteronomy, which belong, 
 not to the age of Moses, but to an age probably some 
 eight centuries later. The third is the Levitical or 
 Priestly Code, which we find in the later chapters of 
 Exodus, in the whole of Leviticus, and spread over 
 some ten chapters of the Book of Numbers. This code, 
 none of which, it is held, comes from Moses, was of 
 gradual growth, and did not attain its present propor^ 
 tions till the time of Ezra. 
 
PART SECOND 
 
 THE PLEA CONFIRMED BY THE CONSIDERATION 
 OF REASONS WHICH ARE INDEPENDENT OF 
 EXPERT SCHOLARSHIP 
 
 Being then free, and bound to judge for themselves 
 with such aids as are within the reach of ordinary 
 thoughtful readers of Holy Scripture, non-experts are 
 not without abundant material whereon to form an 
 intelligent judgement respecting questions which some 
 would take out of their hands and reserve for a favoured 
 class, whom they would invest with a quasi-critical 
 dictatorship. 
 
 First of all : They cannot help being struck 
 with the fact that the new theory would displace 
 convictions which have come down unchallenged 
 from the earliest Jewish age until what may 
 be called yesterday. These convictions have been 
 ever regarded as facts, and as having been confirmed 
 in the course of the ages by prophets and apostles and 
 by the Lord of both. 
 
 According to the so-called Higher Criticism, it is 
 maintained that ' the Books of Moses have been falsely 
 
28 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 ascribed to him, and were in reality produced at a much 
 later period. It is afifirmed that the history is by no 
 means reliable, and merely records the uncertain and 
 variant traditions of a past Mosaic age ; and that the 
 laws are not those of Moses, but the growth of centuries 
 after his time.' We meet this averment by an appeal 
 to the principle laid down by the commentator on 
 Homer whom we have already quoted. After dis- 
 cussing the detailed and specific reasons which F. A. 
 Wolf and others assigned for denying the unity of the 
 liiad, and the popular conception of its authorship, 
 he says, * We who stand on the received text have the 
 tradition of long centuries in our favour, and not one 
 substantial reason against us. Possession, in literary 
 as in civil matters, is nine points of the law ; and 
 he who wishes to shake an old received document 
 out of its consistency, must be prepared to bring 
 something more weighty to bear against it than clever 
 guesses and well-devised possibihties \' 
 
 In substance this argument of the learned professor 
 holds good with reference to the Mosaic authorship 
 of the Pentateuch and its legislation. We are as 
 men ^ in possession, who have the tradition of long 
 centuries in our favour.' 'It is an admitted rule of 
 all sound criticism,' says Canon Rawlinson, ' that 
 books are to be regarded as proceeding from the 
 writers whose names they bear, unless very strong 
 reasons indeed can be adduced to the contrary' 
 {^Bampton Lectures^ p. 39). This rule applies to the 
 
 ^ Homer and the Iliad. By John Stuaj-t Blackie. Vol. i. 239, 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 29 
 
 authorship of the I/iad and Odyssey, the Aeneid, the 
 Commentaries de Bello Gallico, Xenophon's Expedition 
 of Cyrus, and a multitude besides. ' These books do 
 not bear their authors' names in the direct form in 
 which a modern title-page declares an author's name. 
 But the age to which they belonged believed in a 
 certain authorship, and later ages have accepted and 
 transmitted the belief.' 
 
 The critic may say that we beg the question when 
 we assert that the tradition of Mosaic authorship can 
 be traced to the age of the events which the books 
 profess to record. But he cannot deny that the books 
 themselves purport, sometimes explicitly, at all times 
 implicitly, to be at least a contemporary record of the 
 events which they record. Even Kuenen writes : ' It 
 is not only the superscriptions that assign the laws 
 to Moses and locate them in the desert, but the form 
 of the legislation likewise accords with this determina- 
 tion and place. Now this may be explained in two 
 ways : either the laws really come from Moses and 
 the desert, or they are merely put into his mouth, 
 and the desert and so forth belong to their literary 
 form and presentment.' The latter alternative the 
 critics choose. Moses was not the author. The 
 laws were put into his mouth in after centuries. And 
 the incidents, circumstances, and colouring of the 
 desert are mere fiction, fabricated as a false setting 
 for the purpose of giving effect to these laws, and thus 
 investing them with an authority to which they had 
 no right. 
 
30 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 The bearing of these bold assertions of dishonesty 
 on the part of the authors of the Pentateuch will be 
 considered farther on. Meantime we have to do only 
 with the acknowledgement that the testimony of the 
 books themselves, whether true or false, is unmis- 
 takable. 
 
 Onward from the days of Moses to the days of 
 Malachi, there are direct references to the statutes 
 which lay at the foundation of the national polity, 
 and other references, threatenings and promises, which 
 pre-suppose the Mosaic legislation of the Pentateuch, 
 and which are utterly unintelligible on the hypothesis 
 that that legislation was not yet in existence. All 
 this has been set forth elaborately by many writers. 
 And the argument is valid that the silence of history 
 during considerable periods of the nation's existence 
 is no proof that Mosaic statutes were not observed ; 
 and if it could be proved that they were not observed, 
 this non-observance would be no proof that they had 
 not been given. In fact, the perpetual complaint 
 of prophets was that their people had forsaken the 
 law of their God, and had followed the devices of their 
 own evil hearts. 
 
 Without attempting to trace the story of the book 
 in detail, the reader's attention may be called to 
 two or three marked epochs in the Jewish annals. 
 David charged Solomon, not merely to keep certain 
 laws which he ascribed to Moses, but to keep all that 
 was ' written ' in a certain book which was known as 
 'The Law of Moses' (i Kings ii. 1-3). David must 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 3 1 
 
 have had this book in his hand when he celebrated 
 the glory of God which the heavens declared to him 
 as he shepherded his father's flock on the plains of 
 Bethlehem, and when he celebrated with no less 
 enthusiasm the statutes of the Lord which rejoiced 
 his heart, which were more to be desired than gold, 
 and in keeping of which there was great reward. Where 
 did David find this law of the Lord ? It must have 
 come to him through the great judge and prophet of 
 his age. And if we ask where Samuel found it, we 
 must go back to find a possible beginning, from 
 generation to generation till we reach the days of 
 Moses. 
 
 Three hundred years after the days of Solomon we 
 come to the reign of Hezekiah, of whom it is said that 
 he kept the 'commandments which the Lord com- 
 manded Moses ' (2 Kings xviii. 6). And within a few 
 verses we are told that the King of Assyria carried 
 away Israel unto Assyria ' because they obeyed not the 
 voice of the Lord their God, but transgressed His 
 covenant, and all that Moses the servant of the Lord 
 commanded, and would not hear them, nor do them.' 
 It is plain that the commandments of the Lord by 
 Moses must have been in a book, and that this book 
 was at this time in the hands of both Judah and Israel. 
 
 The greatest of the prophets ministered in the days 
 of Hezekiah. And it is not a matter of mere inference 
 that he must have regarded the commandments which 
 Hezekiah kept so faithfully as the commandments of 
 Moses, and the book which recorded them as the 
 
32 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 book of Moses. A mistake on the part of Hezekiah 
 would have been the mistake of Isaiah as well. In the 
 book written by himself, Moses is named only in one 
 passage (Isa. Ixiii. 11-14), and that incidentally, and 
 yet in a way which implies all that the preceding 
 history ascribes to him as the leader of the people out 
 of Egypt and in the wilderness. So that here we have 
 another illustration of the i7iiplicit testimony of the 
 prophets to the law of Moses. 
 
 The story of the finding of the book of the law in 
 the house of the Lord, when the temple was being 
 repaired, belongs to the reign of Hezekiah's great- 
 grandson, Josiah, and is recorded in 2 Kings xxii and 
 2 Chron. xxxiv. The version of this story imagined 
 by the Higher Criticism will be considered in a later 
 chapter. At present we are only noting some principal 
 epochs at which we find express mention of the law of 
 Moses. There is nothing improbable in the account of 
 the matter. The reign of Josiah's grandfather, Manasseh, 
 had extended over more than half a century, and was 
 distinguished by a virulent spread of idolatry, by the 
 most cruel persecution of the faithful, and the most out- 
 rageous profanation of the sanctuary. Manasseh's son, 
 Amon, served the idols which his father had for a brief 
 season forsaken. And to this long inheritance of cor- 
 ruption Josiah succeeded when he was only eight 
 years of age. Hezekiah's copy of the law, written 
 according to the requirements of Moses, made seventy- 
 five years before the reign of Josiah, was most probably 
 destroyed during the fierce persecutions of the reign 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 33 
 
 of Manasseh. And there is nothing strange in the 
 supposition that Josiah had not seen a complete copy 
 of the Pentateuch till it was found by Hilkiah, the 
 high priest. 
 
 When we come to the days of Ezra and Malachi 
 we find express mention of the law of Moses on the 
 return of the exiles under Ezra, and still later in the 
 last prophetic writings of the Old Testament. Even 
 if there were more lapses of silence than there are 
 in the history, the words of Malachi are conclusive 
 evidence of the existence of the Mosaic origin of the 
 Pentateuch, of at least a portion of it which is now 
 the matter of dispute. ' Remember ye the law of Moses 
 My servant, which I commanded unto him in Horeb 
 for all Israel, with the statutes and judgements.' 
 
 The identity of the book which we call the law of 
 Moses, and which we find mentioned in the several 
 instances which have been quoted, and in many others, 
 may be illustrated by a familiar example. Bede wrote 
 \\\?> Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation about the 
 year 730 a. d. Suppose we found a reference to Bede's 
 Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation in 1 230 a. d., 
 and another in 1430 a. d., and another in 1630 a.d. ; 
 we should conclude that the book referred to was one 
 and the same, unless some strong and strange evidence 
 was forthcoming that the original book had been 
 destroyed or lost, and that a spurious production, 
 a forgery, in fact, had taken its place. Why not 
 accept on the same principle the fact of the identity 
 of the Law of Moses from the beginning ? The words 
 c 
 
34 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 of Malachi may justly be regarded as a final con- 
 firmation of earlier prophetic words, a summing up of 
 the witness of many ages. 
 
 The four centuries which separated Malachi from 
 Christ were far from being what they seem to many 
 readers of the Bible — a great historic blank. They 
 were most eventful in the external relations of the Jews 
 to the Persian Empire, the Macedonian Alexander 
 and the growing Roman power. And they include 
 specially an event which made the sacred books of 
 the Jews accessible to the civiHzed world outside their 
 own nation, the translation of these books into the 
 language which the conquests of Alexander had made 
 wellnigh universal, or at least universally understood 
 so far as book-learning was concerned. The exact 
 date or dates of the translation, the persons of the 
 translators, and the immediate occasions or motives 
 of the work may be matters of some controversy. But 
 the Septuagint is a fact of great moment, and it comes 
 to us from the age of which we have no Bibhcal history. 
 Whatever may be its imperfections or errors, it bears 
 witness to the continued existence of the book two 
 hundred or two hundred and fifty years after Malachi, 
 and it was sufficiently true to the original Hebrew to gain 
 general acceptance among the Jews themselves. So 
 that in the time of Christ we have the Old Testament 
 in its primitive form held most sacred, and with im- 
 punity not to be tampered with, and in a translated 
 form which became to a large extent the popular 
 Bible. Christ had both in His hands, the original 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 35 
 
 certainly, which alone was read in the synagogue 
 worship. The deductions which we draw from the 
 fact that He did not challenge its integrity or its 
 authority will be considered in another chapter. We 
 are now only tracing the existence of the book, the 
 book which begins with Genesis and the early Mosaic 
 history of the people of Israel and ends with the 
 prophecy of Malachi. We need not trace it farther. 
 From henceforth it was under the guardianship of 
 both Jews and Christians, or rather of Him who was 
 the Divine Angel of the Old Covenant and is the 
 Divine Lord of the New. 
 
 It will now be seen with what entire confidence we 
 may adopt the argument of the Greek scholar, who, 
 while willing to appraise and discuss every objection 
 which the ingenuity of Wolf and others could allege 
 against the Homeric authorship of the Iliad^ argued 
 that ' the tradition of long centuries ' was not to be 
 set aside by 'clever guesses and well-devised pos- 
 sibilities.' On this ground alone the case in support 
 of the Mosaic origin of the law and of the books 
 which contain it, is immensely stronger than that in 
 support of the reputed traditional origin of any other 
 ancient book. Had we only such evidence, partly 
 explicit and partly implicit, as may be gathered from 
 the writings of the Son of Sirach \ Philo, Josephus, and 
 
 ^ The Son of Sirach, the author of the book known in the 
 
 Apocrypha as * Ecclesiasticus,' who wrote from B.C. 200-150, 
 
 was familiar with the classification of the books as the Law, the 
 
 Psalms, the Prophets. Philo, in Egypt, in the age of Christ 
 
 C 2 
 
36 LD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Others, it would be of a kind with that which guarantees 
 to us the authenticity of other ancient books, and it 
 would be difificult to resist its historic validity. We 
 have all this in the case of the Bible books whose 
 origin we are considering. But we have a great deal 
 more, a distinctly divine tradition, which lifts them to 
 an altogether higher plane. 
 
 Himself, wrote large commentaries on the Old Testament. The 
 very specific testimony of Josephus, who wrote after the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem, may be given in full : * We have not a countless 
 number of books, discordant and arrayed against each other, but 
 only two-and-twenty books, containing the history of every age, 
 which are justly accredited as divine [old editions of Josephus 
 read merely, ' which are justly accredited ' — 6^ia comes from 
 Eusebius' transcript of Josephus in Eccl. Hist. iii. 10] ; and of 
 these, five belong to Moses, which contain both the laws and 
 the history of the generations of men until his death. This 
 period lacks but little of 3,000 years. From the death of Moses, 
 moreover, until the reign of Artaxerxes [Eusebius — 'from the death 
 of Moses to that of Artaxerxes ' ; and so most of the Codices, 
 omitting apxris, reign], king of the Persians after Xerxes, the 
 prophets who followed Moses have described the things which 
 were done during the age of each one respectively, in thirteen 
 books. The remaining four contain hymns to God and rules of 
 life for men. From the time of Artaxerxes, moreover, until our 
 present period all occurrences have been written down ; but they 
 are not regarded as entitled to the like credit with those which 
 precede them, because there xvas no certain succession of prophets. 
 Fact has shown what confidence we place in our own writings. 
 For although so many ages have passed away, no one has dared 
 to add to them, nor to take anything from, nor to make altera- 
 tions. In all Jews it is implanted, even from their birth, to 
 regard them as being the instructions of God, and to abide 
 steadfastly by them, and, if it be necessary, to die gladly for 
 them.' 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 37 
 
 Secondly : The unlearned reader of Holy 
 Scripture may well stand in doubt of a theory 
 which, to say the least, places the testimony of 
 Christ in a very ambiguous position. 
 
 Why I bring the testimony of our Lord into the 
 foreground, instead of reserving it to confirm other 
 arguments, will appear as we proceed. The materials 
 for a judgement regarding it are spread over the four 
 gospels, and, were it not that difficulties have been 
 raised or suggested, one might say boldly, 'The man 
 may read that holds the plough.' Without controversy, 
 it may be said, that the learned and unlearned stand 
 on the same level in regard to it. There are no 
 various readings and no various translations to re- 
 quire a verdict on the part of experts. Even with 
 reference to the apostolic words in Phil. ii. 6-8, 
 which have been brought into prominence in 
 relation to the subject, scholars are agreed as to the 
 fittest translation, and we have it in the Revised 
 Version. The bearing of the apostle's words on the 
 condition of Christ in His humiliation is to be 
 determined, not on speculative grounds, but in the 
 light of the facts of His life, which he before us in the 
 gospels 'without a veil.' The reverent reader and 
 learner turns to these facts, to ascertain whether Christ 
 pronounced any judgement on those Scriptures whose 
 origin and authorship are at present in dispute, and 
 what that judgement was. 
 
38 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 1. It is not denied that the Old Testament, as we 
 have it, was in all substantial respects the scripture 
 or scriptures which Christ and the generation to 
 which He belonged held in their hands, and which 
 were read in their public Sabbatic worship. Even 
 if we accepted the Higher Critical theory, it 
 would still be true that our Old Testament in its 
 entireness was anterior to the days of Christ, and 
 that it was Christ's own Bible. 
 
 2. It is not denied that Christ was intimately 
 familiar with the contents of His Bible. In conver- 
 sation with His disciples and in discussions with the 
 Jews, He had occasion to refer to facts and 
 sayings that are scattered over the Old Testament 
 from the first verses in Genesis to the last in Malachi^ 
 
 3. In our Lord's references to the Old Testament 
 it is important to observe (i) that in no instance did 
 He quote from books not found in our Bible or from 
 oral tradition ; and (2) that there are books in our 
 Bible from which He did not quote, or at least of 
 which there is no record that He quoted. This 
 is easily accounted for. His recorded quotations 
 from the Old Testament were incidental, i. e. as 
 occasion arose through circumstances, and through 
 questions and objections on the part of the people or 
 on the part of disciples. 
 
 ^ The author has illustrated this in detail in articles in the 
 Evangelical Magazine for May, June, and July, 1896 ; and he 
 avails himself occasionally of what will be found more fully 
 in these articles. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 39 
 
 4. In addition to specific facts and books, Christ, 
 especially after His resurrection, placed the seal of 
 His authority on the entire collection, under designa- 
 tions by which it was popularly known, such as the 
 law, the prophets, and the Psalms (Luke xxiv. 44). 
 ' Beginning at Moses and all the prophets, He ex- 
 pounded unto them in all the scriptures the things 
 concerning Himself (Luke xxiv. 27). Would, we 
 naturally exclaim, that the evangelist had recorded the 
 gracious and precious words in which Christ traced 
 Himself from the beginning to the end of the ancient 
 scriptures ! But with the key to these scriptures which 
 He supplied — Himself the mystery which has been 
 veiled for ages — and with the fact that He opened 
 the understandings of His disciples to understand 
 what He told them, we may be sure that the gospel 
 records are in no sense misleading as to His Person 
 and His Mission, and equally sure that the teachings 
 of His apostles, to whom He promised the guidance 
 of the Holy Spirit, were in entire accordance with 
 His own words. Searching the Scriptures for our- 
 selves, it is a matter of the deepest interest that we 
 can find Him unveiled in the very earliest of them, 
 as the seed of the woman who should bruise the 
 serpent's head, and in the very latest of them as 
 'The Lord,' 'The Lord of hosts,' who should 
 suddenly come to His temple — these two prophecies 
 binding, not by accident, but by Divine purpose, 
 into a grand consistent whole, those revelations 
 which had been given, at sundry times and in 
 
40 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 divers manners, through at least four millenniums 
 of fallen man's existence on the earth. 
 
 5. There is another fact which lies prominently 
 on the face of the gospel records, this, namely, that 
 Christ spoke with conscious authority. This authority 
 may be described as both delegated and personal. 
 Of His delegated authority He spoke with frequent 
 emphasis. ' The word which ye hear is not Mine, 
 but the Father's which sent Me.' He stood before 
 His countrymen in Galilee and Judea, visibly only 
 as Jesus of Nazareth. Hence it was that when the 
 Jews marvelled and said, ' How knoweth this man 
 letters, having never learned?' Jesus said, 'My doc- 
 trine is not Mine, but His that sent Me.' And yet the 
 very terms in which He thus disclaimed a personal, 
 i. e. in this case a human, a merely human, origin and 
 authorship for His doctrine, pointed to something in 
 His underlying personal relation to His doctrine very 
 different from the relation in which prophets stood to 
 theirs. The difference between Christ and the prophets 
 was not one of degree merely, the difference between 
 a partial and what has been called a ' complete 
 endowment of manhood,' such as is indicated in 
 the statement that God gave not the Spirit by 
 measure to Him. His was a personal authority, such 
 as neither prophet nor apostle dared to assume. 
 Standing before the multitude with the clear memory 
 of all the Divine teaching which the nation had 
 enjoyed for ages, and of Divine pronouncements 
 against such as claimed authority unauthorized, and 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 41 
 
 with a full knowledge of great contemporary inter- 
 preters of the law, and of men of the immediately 
 preceding age, of whom the nation was proud and 
 in whom the nation trusted — standing there in 
 spiritual majesty and conscious of all that His 
 words involved in relation both to God and to man, 
 He repeats, through every point of His exposition of 
 what had been said to them of old, this, and this 
 only, ' I say unto you.' If man never spake like 
 this man, it is because never before w^as there man 
 like this man. How else could He say, ' Heaven and 
 earth shall pass away ; but My words shall not pass 
 away ' (Luke xxi. t,t) ? 
 
 6. We may assume as a fact, although some would 
 call it an inference or deduction, that Christ regarded 
 the Old Testament incidents which He quoted, and 
 on which He based arguments or lessons, not as myths 
 or fables or allegories or uncertain national traditions, 
 but as historically true and real. Beginning w^ith the 
 creation of man and woman and the primitive law of 
 marriage, we read the story of His references onward 
 till we come to His recognition of the foretelling of 
 the coming of a prophet in the spirit of Elijah ; and 
 we find no room in His words for legendary or 
 allegorical hypotheses. Abel, Noah, Abraham, Moses, 
 Elijah, Jonah, and Daniel, were regarded by Him 
 as real personages ; and if the incidents which He 
 quotes, such as the death of Abel, the Flood, the 
 burning bush, the brazen serpent, the ministry of 
 Elijah in the reign of Ahab, the mission of Jonah 
 
42 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 to Nineveh, and the prophecy of Daniel respecting 
 Himself, were not realities, and are not truthfully 
 narrated, He was mistaken. 
 
 7. If this be granted, it can scarcely be denied 
 that Christ regarded the books from which He quoted 
 as truthful and trustworthy. The facts and sayings 
 which He quoted cannot be isolated from the con- 
 nexions in which they stand. They are not aphorisms 
 whose truth is in themselves, and which would be true 
 even if spoken by the Uevil, as nuggets of gold are 
 gold even if found in a mass of rubbish. The ground 
 on which Christ requires His hearers to accept them, 
 apart from His comments and interpretations, is that 
 they found them in the written law of the Lord. 
 * Have ye not read ? ' or ' It is written,' is the ground of 
 His constant appeal. The acknowledged authority 
 of the ' written ' and ' read ' book constituted with 
 His hearers sufficient and undisputed authority for 
 the words which He quoted from it. 
 
 This being so, I do not see how it can be logically 
 questioned that every one of the five books of Moses 
 bears the seal of Christ : — that of Genesis, when, with 
 reference to the law of marriage. He said, ' Have ye 
 not read ? ' (Matt. xix. 4) ; that of Exodus, when He 
 said ' Have ye not read ? ' with reference to the words 
 of God to Moses out of the burning bush (Matt. xxii. 3 1 
 and Luke xx. 37): that of Leviticus, when He instructed 
 the leper to obey a law of Moses found only in 
 Leviticus ; that of Numbers, when He referred to the 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 43 
 
 brazen serpent which Moses hfted up by Divine 
 command ; an incident to be found only in Numbers 
 (John iii. 14) ', that of Deuteronomy, which Christ 
 quoted three times with the formula, ' It is written,' 
 in His conflict with the Tempter (Matt. iv. 4, 7, 10). 
 The seal put thus on the Book of Deuteronomy is of 
 more than argumentative interest. In the awful 
 solitude of His conflict with the Tempter, in the 
 hour which in some respects was the most critical 
 in the history of redemption, the Son of God, whose 
 consciousness of Himself could not be shaken by the 
 Tempter's insinuation of the doubt, does not at once 
 put forth the power which could have smitten His 
 adversary, not into silence merely, but into helpless- 
 ness. He falls back on written words which had 
 been light and strength to the saints of many ages, 
 thus associating Himself with the redeemed of the 
 past and of the future, His 'brethren' (Heb. ii. 11, 
 17, 18), and instructing them how to meet and foil 
 the adversaries of their souls. Was the book which 
 it is evident had yielded spiritual nourishment to the 
 Son of Man, while yet He had not entered on the 
 public discharge of His Divine ministry, and by 
 which now at the very commencement of His public 
 life He quenched the subtle darts of the Wicked 
 One (Eph. vi. 16), other than what it professed to 
 be, a very record of an important epoch in the 
 history of God's ancient people, and of words 
 addressed to them by Divine authority on the eve 
 of their entrance on national existence in a land 
 
44 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 which would be to them a scene of manifold tempta- 
 tions ? 
 
 But there is still more to be said as to the bearing 
 of our review of Christ's testimony on the question 
 of the age and authorship of the legislation and books 
 which have hitherto borne the name of Moses. 
 
 The first thing that strikes us is that Christ did 
 not challenge the national belief in the origin of the 
 oldest even of their sacred books, and in the authority 
 which they derived from their supposed connexion 
 with the man whom they regarded as the very 
 founder of their national constitution. This fact 
 by itself, explain it as you will, is no mean pre- 
 sumptive evidence that they were right in their 
 belief. If they were wrong, they were dominated 
 by an error which was fundamental, and which could 
 not but vitiate their spiritual life and mis-direct their 
 obedience to the Divine will. Christ, we know, was 
 in perpetual conflict with the chief sects of the 
 nation, Sadducees and Pharisees, and with popular 
 sentiment as well. The people often listened gladly 
 to His gracious words, but their opposition, and even 
 bitter hostility, were as often excited by sayings 
 which they considered hard, and which offended 
 their national pride and worldly hopes. The most 
 superficial acquaintance with the pages of the gospels 
 reveals Him as a severely independent and uncom- 
 promising Teacher. He boldly combated the most 
 cherished Jewish notions. How came it to pass 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 45 
 
 that He spared the great error, if error it was, which 
 the people of His age had inherited from their 
 fathers, and thus passed it on from the Jewish age 
 into and through the Christian age, to be discovered 
 at last only by the penetrating and uncompromising 
 intellects of these last days? The only conclusion 
 we can come to, if the honour of Christ is to be 
 preserved unsuUied, is that He did not challenge the 
 national judgement because it was a true judgement. 
 He was Himself the Truth, and only truth found 
 favour with Him. 
 
 Let it not be imagined for a moment that the 
 correctness or incorrectness of the national belief was 
 a matter of little or no consequence in relation to 
 Christ's own work and mission ; in other words, that 
 the testimony of the books to Him was equally valid, 
 whether they had genuinely come from Moses or 
 had been fabricated — possibly for a good end, the end 
 justifying the means— some of them towards the 
 end of that dispensation which an apostle regarded 
 as a schoolmaster ^ to lead on the Jewish people to 
 Christ. We have good reason for saying that Christ 
 Himself did not think so. There is a sense in which 
 His Messiahship, His title to the Messiahship,depended 
 
 ^ The Revised Version (Gal. iii. 24) says * tutor ' instead of 
 ' schoolmaster.' Bishop Lightfoot explains thus : ' The paeda- 
 gogue, or tutor, frequently a superior slave, was entnisted with 
 the moral supervision of the child. Thus his office was quite 
 distinct from that of the teacher. ... As well in his inferior rank, 
 as in his recognized duty of enforcing discipline, this person was 
 a fit emblem of the Mosaic law.' — Oti Gal. iii. 24. 
 
46 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 on the genuineness of these ancient scriptures, that 
 is, on the fact that their prophetic witness to Him had 
 the authority of God Himself through His most 
 honoured (see Num. xii. 7, 8) servant, Moses. 
 
 In nothing does what we may call the independence 
 and originality of Christ appear so significantly as in 
 the matter of the Messiahship. Both He and the 
 people believed in a Messiah to come ; both believed 
 that the Messiah was foremirrored in their sacred books, 
 and that whosoever claimed the office must make good 
 his title out of these books. But their reading of the 
 books did not result in the same conclusions as to 
 what manner of person the Messiah was to be, and 
 what manner of benefits He should confer on His 
 nation. The people, groaning under a foreign yoke, 
 and reading their Scriptures under the influence of 
 a worldly spirit which could imagine, and aspire 
 after, no higher blessing than national freedom and 
 supremacy, concentrated their thoughts on predictions 
 which foreshadowed the power, dominion, and glory 
 of the Messiah. Consequently ' they expected (to 
 use the words of the author of Ecce Homo) to see once 
 more a warrior king, judging in the gate of Jerusalem, 
 or surrounded by his mighty men, or carrying his 
 victorious arms into the neighbouring countries, or 
 receiving submissive embassies from Rome and 
 Seleucia, and in the meantime holding awful com- 
 munication with Jehovah, administering His law, and 
 singing His praise. It was as impossible for them to 
 conceive the true Christ, to imagine what He would 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 47 
 
 do, or how He would do it, as it was impossible for 
 them to fill His place.' 
 
 Both before and after Christ there arose men who 
 were in sympathy with the national spirit, and were 
 bold enough to present themselves to their people as 
 the embodiment and realization of the national hope. 
 But their work soon came to an end. 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth, brought up in, and breathing for 
 thirty years, the feverish atmosphere of Galilean ex- 
 pectations, was conscious of a Messiahship of another 
 order. It was quite natural for His countrymen, when 
 they witnessed the mysterious power with which He 
 could feed thousands, a power which had its parallel 
 only in that which fed the multitude of Israel in the 
 wilderness, and which they associated with the name 
 of Moses, to conclude that He was fit to take the 
 kingship that would secure the victory and freedom 
 for which they longed. But He would not have it. 
 And yet He was a king, and knew it, and boldly 
 avowed it even in the presence of the representative 
 of all-powerful Rome, and that when He seemed 
 Himself to be the most helpless of men. 
 
 But how different His kingship from that of popular 
 expectation ! We may well wonder that He was able 
 to separate Himself so absolutely from the spirit of 
 His age and nation. And we may wonder likewise 
 that one brought up in the meanness and poverty 
 of a carpenter's home, should see in Himself or 
 imagine that He was the One in whom four millen- 
 niums of prophecy culminated, and in whom all the 
 
48 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 nations of the earth were to be blessed. The secret 
 of His knowledge is to be found in Himself, in His con- 
 sciousness of what He was. But how should the people 
 know ? How should their eyes penetrate through 
 the cloud which hid His glory, and which seemed to 
 render the existence of any such glory impossible? 
 He did not ostentatiously or even prominently 
 proclaim His Messiahship and His Divinity. From 
 the first He allowed disciples to render Him homage 
 as the Messiah and the Son of God (John i. 43-51). 
 And on an occasion which has become memorable, 
 though one would imagine it the least likely, He made 
 an express declaration of the fact (John iv. 25, 26). 
 But for the most part He left what He was, to be 
 inferred and proved by His works, His teaching, and 
 His character. Above all, it was necessary that He 
 should not shrink from an appeal to the books, which, 
 though much misunderstood, were the true ground and 
 the true test of the Messianic hope. And this appeal 
 He made boldly. 'Ye search the Scriptures,' He 
 said, ' and they are they which testify of Me ' (John 
 v. 39). Of these Scriptures He made special and 
 emphatic reference to the writings of Moses ; and this 
 reference is of first importance. It is often slurred 
 over by saying that Christ might describe a book, as 
 we often do, simply by the name of its reputed author. 
 But no escape can be found in this idea from the 
 unmistakable force of these words : ' Had ye believed 
 Moses, ye would have believed Me ; for he wrote of 
 Me. But if ye believe not his writings, how shall ye 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 49 
 
 believe My words?' (John v. 46, 47). The traditions 
 with which the Pharisees overlaid the laws and teach- 
 ings of Moses He branded as making the word of God 
 of no effect (Mark vii. 13). But the writings of Moses, 
 unadulterated by tradition, were worthy of the con- 
 fidence which the people placed in them. Their 
 authority rested on the fact that they were the writings 
 of Moses, the servant of God. And if Christ did not 
 so believe, He was seeking support for His claims in 
 a popular fallacy, a popular misbelief — this, viz., that 
 it was Moses, whom the people reverenced as pos- 
 sessed of Divine authority, that had written those 
 things concerning Him which He found in the earlier 
 books in the Old Testament. We have here something 
 very different from a mere casual or incidental quota- 
 tion of an ancient book by the name of its reputed 
 author. We have a solemn argument and remonstrance 
 based on His and the people's belief in the Mosaic 
 authorship -, in fact, an unqualified testimony to Moses 
 as a prophet, a lawgiver, and a writer. To the spirit 
 of this appeal we have a very solemn confirmation 
 in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus. The 
 rich man appeals to Abraham on behalf of his brothers, 
 and Abraham says to him, ' They have Moses and the 
 prophets ; let them hear them. If they hear not Moses 
 and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though 
 one rose from the dead ' (Luke xvi. 29, 31). 
 
 In the matter of Christ's testimony we cannot 
 overlook the fact that He associated the name of 
 Moses expressly with scriptures which are now 
 
 D 
 
50 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 declared not to have been his. For example, to 
 a leper whom He had healed He said^ ' Go thy 
 way, shew thyself to the priest, and oifer the gift 
 that Moses commanded' (Matt. viii. 4). Now the 
 command of Moses is to be found in the very heart 
 of that priestly code which the critics say was 
 framed centuries after the days of Moses. The law 
 concerning leprosy occupies two long chapters in 
 the Book of Leviticus, the thirteenth and fourteenth. 
 It is prefaced thus : ' The Lord spake unto Moses 
 and Aaron, saying;' and this preface is not peculiar to 
 the law of leprosy. It would be only the ' foolishness ' 
 of argument to limit the testimony of Christ to the 
 one law to which He had occasion to refer when 
 He instructed the healed man to do what Moses had 
 commanded. Immediately before and immediately 
 after this law, we have other laws introduced in the 
 same words. And if the one came from Moses, so 
 did the others. 
 
 AVe find Christ associating Moses personally with 
 incidents to which He referred, as in Luke xx. 37 
 and John iii. 14. And it is worthy of notice how 
 He distinguished the part which belonged to Moses 
 and the part which did not, in matters with which 
 he was connected. Thus, referring to circumcision. 
 He reminded the Jews that it did not originate in 
 a law of Moses, Moses having to do only with the 
 day on which the rite was to be performed (John vii. 
 21, 22 ; Lev. xii. 3). And as to the law of marriage, 
 the part which prescribed the giving of a bill to 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 51 
 
 a divorced woman alone belonged to Moses (Matt. xix. 
 7 ; Deut. xxiv. i). One of the laws which Christ thus 
 ascribed to Moses is found in the Levitical or priestly 
 code, and the other in the book which they say was 
 written hundreds of years after his time. 
 
 The reader of the Gospels cannot fail to receive 
 the impression that in all Christ's conversation with 
 the Jews, our Lord regarded Moses not as a mere 
 title by which certain books were known, but as 
 personally the actor in the history which they record, 
 and the author of the legislation which they contain : 
 ' Did not Moses give you the law (Christ said), and 
 yet none of you keepeth the law?' (John vii. 19). 
 ' We are Moses' disciples (the Jews said to the 
 man to whom Christ had given sight). We know 
 that God spake unto Moses : as for this man, we 
 know not whence he is ' (John ix. 28, 29, R. V.). 
 
 This faith in Moses, as the responsible author of 
 the books which bear his name, was inherited by 
 Christ's disciples. The apostle John says expressly, 
 'The law was given by Moses' (John i. 17). And 
 the apostle Paul specifies the very date at which 
 Moses gave the law. It was four hundred and thirty 
 years after the great promise of blessing and grace 
 to mankind was given to Abraham (Gal. iii. 17). 
 In fulfilhng their mission ' to the Jew first,' the 
 apostles invariably appealed to Moses and the 
 prophets. ' Moses,' James reminded his brethren 
 (Acts XV. 21), 'of old time hath in every city them 
 that preach him, being read in the synagogues every 
 D 2 
 
52 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Sabbath day.' And in every synagogue to which the 
 apostles had access their concern was to show out 
 of the Scriptures that Jesus was the Christ. In doing 
 this they began, as Christ Himself had done, with 
 Moses. If the scriptures of Moses were not genuinely 
 his, the apostles were either deceivers or deceived. 
 And if the Messiahship of Jesus of Nazareth could 
 not bear an appeal to Moses and the prophets, the 
 Jews were entitled to reject Him. 
 
 What shall we say to all this — what that can 
 throw doubt on, or minimize, what seems at least 
 to be conclusive evidence that our Old Testament 
 comes to us with, to use a modern phrase, the 
 imprimatur of the Son of God Himself? Some have 
 a vague impression that the testimony of Christ will 
 be materially modified when judged in the light of 
 the apostolic words now translated thus : ' Who, 
 being in the form of God, counted it not a prize 
 to be on an equality with God, but emptied Himself, 
 taking the form of a servant ' (Phil. ii. 6, 7) ; but is 
 it so ? Kenotic theories which are offered to us to 
 explain the inner meaning, the essential contents, 
 of the words ' He emptied Himself,' all leave us 
 unsatisfied and with a feeling that the mystery of 
 the Incarnation and of its effect on the condition 
 of the Incarnate One must remain a mystery. From 
 all attempts at abstract definition we turn aside to 
 the concrete history of the Son of God in the days 
 of His flesh as we have it in the Gospels, What 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 53 
 
 that history tells us on the subject we are now con- 
 sidering is too plain to be mistaken. And reverent 
 expounders of Kenotic theories themselves do not 
 hesitate to say that, whatever amount of truth may 
 be in them, it is certain that not only was Jesus 
 Christ an infallible Teacher, but that He was ' in- 
 capable of misleading.' 
 
 If we are asked whether Jesus Christ Himself did 
 not confess to a limitation of knowledge, we reply 
 that He did on one occasion and as to one thing : 
 ' Of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not 
 the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the 
 Father' (Mark xiii. 32'. The proper inference from 
 these words is, not that there might be many other things 
 which He did not know, but that if there were other 
 things which He did not know. He would have made 
 the like confession instead of this. We find Him 
 actually claiming a knowledge far more wonderful 
 than that which He disclaimed : ' All things are de- 
 livered unto Me of My Father : and no man knoweth 
 the Son, but the Father ; neither knoweth any man 
 the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever 
 the Son will reveal Him' (Matt. xi. 27). The 'all 
 things ' delivered to Christ by the Father are explained 
 in part at least by words used on other occasions — 
 ' All power,' ' all judgement,' the forgiving of sin, and 
 the giving of life. Need we wonder that the apostle 
 Peter should say to Him, ' Lord, Thou knowest 
 all things' (John xxi. 17)? The apostle might be 
 puzzled by metaphysical questions as to omniscience. 
 
54 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 And yet he would not withdraw his words. He had 
 seen enough and heard enough practically to anticipate 
 the claim which Christ asserted for Himself to John 
 in Patmos : ' I am He which searcheth the reins and 
 hearts ' (Rev. ii. 23). Christ had often detected the 
 unspoken thoughts of His disciples and of the scribes. 
 He discerned from the beginning the heart of Judas, 
 and knew that he would betray Him. He prophesied 
 the denial of Peter ; He foretold His own death and 
 the manner of it, His resurrection on the third day, and 
 His ascension ; He foretold the siege and destruction 
 of Jerusalem, and He foretold what is yet future to us, 
 and is therefore still unaccomplished. ' If in all this 
 and much more there was not displayed (as Canon 
 Rawlinson says) a Divine consciousness, knowledge 
 more than human, it is difficult to see how such 
 knowledge could have been manifested ' — knowledge, 
 be it observed, which was His while in that state 
 which is described and covered by the apostolic 
 words, ' He emptied Himself, and took upon Him the 
 form of a servant.' 
 
 It seems almost trifling with a great and sacred 
 subject to suggest that Christ might have chosen 
 to be ignorant, or to pass by, as unworthy of notice, 
 so unimportant a matter as the authorship of certain 
 books. With all reverence we may say that He could 
 not have so chosen. And we have evidence that He 
 did not so choose. There is no element of reality 
 in the favourite formula, ' critical and literary questions ' 
 which might have been left to later ages, that was 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 55 
 
 not included in our Lord's averment touching the 
 'writings of Moses.' At the risk of some repetition 
 let me say, in the words of Professor Cheyne, that 
 Christ could not have mistaken the meaning of His 
 own Bible. The profoundest critical and exegetical 
 question which had to be solved was the true meaning 
 of ancient prophecy. Christ solved it ; and His 
 argument with the Jews involved the solution of the 
 further critical and literary question, who wrote certain 
 books in which prophecy respecting Him was found ? 
 He said it tvas Moses. The authorship was an essen- 
 tial part of His argument. 
 
 Thirdly : The reverent and believing Bible 
 reader may ■well recoil from the processes of 
 the Higher Criticism because of their moral 
 implications and bearings. 
 
 No wider gulf can be found or imagined between 
 the ordinary reader, whose spiritual senses have been 
 exercised to discern good and evil in the matter of 
 honesty and truthfulness, and the criticism which 
 necessitates a charge of untruthfulness and imposture 
 against the writers of large portions of the Old Testa- 
 ment. I am well aware that there are critics who 
 deny that this charge lies fairly against their theories. 
 They repudiate the word forgery, and imagine what 
 they would call scientific explanations of what to 
 the common mind looks very like forgery. But the 
 common mind recoils from the special pleading which 
 
56 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 their case needs, and is disposed to apply to it the 
 words of the prophet, shghtly altered for the occasion, 
 'Though thou wash thee with nitre, and take thee 
 much soap, yet thine iniquity cannot be washed away.' 
 Let any reader, common or uncommon, read without 
 note or comment, the twenty-second chapter of 2 Kings 
 and the thirty-fourth of 2 Chronicles. He can judge 
 of their meaning as well as the most learned scholar. 
 When the temple is being repaired in the days of 
 good King Josiah, a book is found, which in Kings 
 is called *the book of the law,' and in Chronicles, 
 ' a book of the law of the Lord given by the hand of 
 Moses.' Hilkiah the high priest, who found it, sends 
 it by Shaphan the scribe to the king, who, on reading 
 it or some portion of it, sends the high priest and 
 some others ' to enquire of the Lord concerning the 
 words of the book.' They go to Huldah the pro- 
 phetess, and 'commune with her' on the subject, 
 and she confirms the threatenings of the book 
 because * Their fathers had not kept the word of 
 the Lord, to do after all that was written in this 
 book.' 
 
 All this seems very plain. The book that was 
 found was ' the book of the law which was given by 
 Moses.' Even if it was called, as in Kings, only 'the 
 book of the law,' nothing else could be meant than 
 that it was the book of the law of Moses. The ^fathers ' 
 had had this book in their possession, for their sin 
 was that ' they had not kept the word of the Lord, to 
 do after all that was written in this book ' (2 Chron. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 57 
 
 xxxiv. 21). This was the understanding of the high 
 priest, the scribe, the prophetess, and the king. Or 
 they pretended that it ivas. The critical theory is that 
 the book was what is known to us as the Book of 
 Deuteronomy, and that it was written, not in the days 
 of Moses, but now^ in the days of Josiah, to aid Josiah 
 in the reformation on which his heart was set. 
 Dr. Driver prefers to think that it was written in the 
 days of Manasseh, Josiah's grandfather. But this makes 
 no difference in the moral character of the transaction. 
 Whoever wrote it in either reign was guilty of a fraud. 
 If the finder of the book was not himself the author 
 of the book, he was easily imposed on — that he should 
 accept as by Moses, containing laws and threatenings 
 which professed to be of Moses, a book which the 
 ''fathers' had never seen, a book against which the 
 fathers, not having seen it, had not sinned. One won- 
 ders too at the simplicity of the idolatrous multitude and 
 their idolatrous leaders, that they should be frightened 
 out of their evil but much-loved ways, by threatenings 
 of judgement, which, they could easily prove, had not 
 been heard of till some unknown contemporary had 
 falsely put on them the seal of Moses ! 
 
 The glosses which are put on this supposed trans- 
 action to hide its nakedness may be set aside, in view 
 of the boldness, one might say the nonchalance, with 
 which the critics ignore the plainest and most unmis- 
 takable historic statements of the book, and substitute 
 for them their own subjective impressions. Take an 
 example. The great song, worthy even of the great 
 
58 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Moses, and which is associated with the ' song of the 
 Lamb' in Rev. xv, which occupies the thirty-second 
 chapter of the Book of Deuteronomy, is prefaced thus : 
 ' Moses spake in the ears of all the congregation of 
 Israel the words of this song, until they were ended.' 
 The prophetic forecasts of the future of the tribes 
 which we find in the thirty-third chapter are prefaced 
 thus : ' This is the blessing, wherewith Moses the man 
 of God blessed the children of Israel before his death.' 
 But these positive and specific averments are as if they 
 were not — of no account in the way of Dr. Driver's 
 criticism. He will judge for himself when and by 
 whom this 'song' and this 'blessing' were written. 
 And his judgement is this : ' The song shows great 
 originality in form, being a presentation of prophetical 
 thoughts in a poetical dress, which is unique in the 
 Old Testament. The standpoint^ whether assumed 
 or real, from which the poet speaks is subsequent to 
 the Mosaic age, to which (in vv. 7-12) he looks back 
 as to a distant past. The theme is developed with 
 great literary and artistic skill ; the images are varied 
 and expressive ; the parallelism is usually regular and 
 very forcible.' Dr. Driver's only doubt is whether the 
 song is by the same hand as the body of the book. 
 The internal evidence, he thinks, does not absolutely 
 preclude its being by the same author, but ' the con- 
 tents hardly leave it a possibility.' 
 
 I am not concerned to reply to this criticism. 
 Only I may remark that it is rather strange that the 
 ' great literary and artistic skill ' of the unknown author 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 59 
 
 of this composition did not save him from putting into 
 the mouth of Moses words, in which Dr. Driver dis- 
 covers an anachronism which proves it to have been 
 written 'after the Mosaic age' — a great blunder surely 
 on the part of so skilled a writer. My object is to 
 show how the Higher Critical theory of the book 
 necessitates the admission of untruthfulness at every 
 point. The book may say that a certain composition, 
 full of solemn truth and admonition (xxxii. 44-47), was 
 written — all the words of it to the end (xxxi. 30) — by 
 Moses. No, says the critic ; this is to be ascribed to 
 the literary skill and art of the author, unless indeed 
 it was interpolated by some ' redactor ' who found the 
 song somewhere and tacked it on to the book. From 
 such methods of interpretation the reverent reader 
 recoils with the conviction that if the Old Testament 
 is true, the theory is an offence to both the intellect 
 and the conscience of its trustful readers. 
 
 But if we would have an adequate sense of the 
 extent of untruthfulness and deception of which 
 the Book of Deuteronomy is guilty according to the 
 ' critical theory ' so called, we must read the book 
 from beginning to end, and pause over its many 
 averments respecting its own contents, and compare 
 them with the averments or implications of the theory 
 which denies the Mosaic authorship. The very first 
 sentences of the book are these : * These be the 
 words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side 
 Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against 
 
6o OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 the Red Sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and 
 Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab. (There are eleven 
 days' journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir 
 unto Kadesh-barnea.) And it came to pass in the 
 fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day 
 of the month, that Moses spake unto the children 
 of Israel, according unto all that the Lord had given 
 him in commandment unto them ; after he had slain 
 Sihon the king of the Amorites, which dwelt in 
 Heshbon, and Og the king of Bashan, which dwelt 
 at Astaroth in Edrei : on this side Jordan, in the 
 land of Moab, began Moses to declare this law, saying, 
 The Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb, saying' — 
 and so on. 
 
 If it be true that the book was written in the days 
 of Josiah, nine hundred years or thereabouts after 
 Israel entered Canaan, or possibly somewhat earlier, 
 in the days of Josiah's grandfather, and that the 
 addresses to the people which it puts into the lips 
 of Moses were manufactured for a purpose by some 
 unknown genius nearly a millennium after the days 
 of Moses ; and, moreover, that the incidents and 
 circumstances which introduce these speeches, and 
 the recital of principal events which are said to have 
 occurred during the forty years in the wilderness which 
 occupy the earlier chapters of the book, are not 
 real, except so far as vague traditions which may 
 have survived for nearly a thousand years may have 
 suggested them — not real, but imagined and invented 
 to give plausibility to the speeches — how shall we 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 6i 
 
 characterize the book's own description of its contents? 
 How would a judge in a court of law describe it? 
 Would he hesitate to say that if the true history of 
 the book be what certain critics allege, the preface 
 to the book is nothing short of a he ? He would 
 scarcely have patience to listen to explanations or 
 apologies. Let him read the book for himself, and 
 he will tell the men at his bar that the he which is 
 told on the frontispiece of the book pervades it from 
 the beginning to the end. Not a lie — the apologist 
 the special pleader, will say — the book is constructed 
 after the manner of classical historians, 'who put 
 fictitious discourses into the mouths of their principal 
 characters, not with any intention to deceive, but 
 simply for the purpose of throwing light on the his- 
 torical situation.' But in this instance is it not of the 
 very essence of the critical theory, that it was the 
 object of the writer or writers to make the people of 
 the days of Manasseh or of Josiah believe that Moses 
 had spoken the words which they put into his mouth — 
 to give these words greater authority than they would 
 otherwise have, as a protest against idolatry and as 
 a plea for the worship of Jehovah? The ascription of 
 the words which we find in the book to Moses, was, 
 on this showing, a bold conscious falsehood ; and the 
 writers took every precaution to prevent its fictitious 
 character from being discovered. They specified 
 the very year, the very month, the very day of the 
 month, on which they said Moses began to speak 
 what the book records (Deut. i. 3). And to make 
 
62 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 their readers feel quite sure that they had the very 
 words of Moses in the book and no others, they 
 represented him as saying, ' Ye shall not add unto the 
 word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish 
 ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of 
 the Lord your God which I command you ' (ch. iv. 2). 
 
 Nothing can save the writers of this book, if they 
 were, as the critical theory says they were, men of the 
 days of Manasseh or Josiah, from the charge of 
 conscious and painstaking forgery. This, every one 
 feels, is an ugly word. But all its ugliness and conse- 
 quences must be faced by the learned men who deny 
 the book's own statement of its origin and character. 
 
 Colonel Conder has no hesitation in saying, 'We 
 have no knowledge of a Jewish scholar mutilating the 
 writings of his ancestors, or of his composing a book 
 of fragments from unacknowledged sources, linked 
 together by a few words of his own writing. That 
 kind of bookmaking is characteristic rather of our 
 own times ; and no editor who so presented to us, 
 as the law written by Moses, a composite later forgery 
 could escape the charge of literary dishonesty ' {The 
 Bible and the East, p. 90). 
 
 As to the examples of classical historians to which 
 we are referred, who put speeches into the mouths 
 of their characters, 'not to deceive, but to throw 
 light on the historical situation,' when we turn to 
 Deuteronomy we find the speeches not throwing light 
 on the historical situation, but the historical situation 
 throwing light on the speeches. The speeches grow 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 63 
 
 out of the occasions and incidents which the book 
 records, and if either be unhistorical, the other must 
 be hkewise. ' To most of us,' says Principal Douglas, 
 ' a remarkable voucher for the truth of the book is the 
 interlacing of the history and the legislation throughout 
 the whole Pentateuch, so that we feel the utmost 
 difficulty in conceiving how the one should have 
 come into existence without the other ' {Lex Mosaica^ 
 P- 59)- 
 
 The Book of Leviticus shares the fate of the Book 
 of Deuteronomy in the hands of the Higher Critic. 
 Some of its ordinances, he admits, may be based on 
 practices which had somehow already come into 
 existence, but these practices were not based on 
 any Mosaic law. That there is not the shadow of 
 historical authority for implicating Ezekiel and Ezra 
 or any of their contemporaries in the creation of the 
 priestly code, is patent on the face of the books 
 which bear these honoured names. Let it be remem- 
 bered that the most advanced scholarship has no 
 advantage over the non-expert in forming a judgement 
 on this matter, and that the non-expert is quite 
 capable of appreciating the general grounds on which 
 the Mosaic authorship of Leviticus may be main- 
 tained, as these are stated by Canon Rawlinson thus : 
 ( I ) ' The Levitical code is such a law as Moses, from 
 his position and the circumstances of his time, might 
 have been expected to promulgate; (2) That it is 
 such a law as the later history of the people of Israel 
 
64 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 postulates and requires; (3) That the human testimony 
 to the fact of Moses having given this law is amply 
 sufficient to establish it, being extraordinarily full and 
 varied; and (4) That the fact rests not merely, as 
 most facts, on human evidence, but also on a witness 
 who is Divine' {Lex Mosaka, p. 21). 
 
 Our present argument, however, has to do only 
 with the moral implication of the critical theory. 
 Opening the book and reading from beginning to end, 
 we find that all its ordinances and precepts are 
 prefaced by the solemn words, 'The Lord spake 
 unto Moses.' These words occur some thirty times 
 in the book ; these thirty assertions are, according 
 to the theory, thirty falsehoods, and these thirty false- 
 hoods and others of their kind in other books were — 
 one hesitates to write it even hypothetically — written 
 deliberately by holy men, unknown worthies, to 
 create and exalt an order of priests which had not 
 existed before at least by Divine authority; and, it 
 may be (sanctifying the lower motive by a higher) 
 at the same time, the better to secure obedience to 
 the Divine will. The supposition is so gross that 
 it may be rejected at once, not without some indigna- 
 tion, by the moral sense of Bible readers. 
 
 One other instance, incidentally referred to al- 
 ready, in which the non-expert reader is struck with 
 the boldness with which criticism deals with plain 
 historic statements, and practically treats them as 
 untrue. In the story of the re-establishment of the 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 65 
 
 Jews in their own land after their exile in Babylon, 
 we read how that Ezra read to great assemblies, day 
 by day, out of a book the language of which now 
 needed to be translated or interpreted to the people. 
 That book is called again and again * The Book of 
 the law of Moses, the man of God ' (comp. Ezra vii. 6 ; 
 Neh. viii. i, 9, 14; x. 29). While yet in exile Ezra 
 was held in high repute, not as a lawgiver, but ' as 
 a scribe of the law of the God of Heaven.' His com- 
 mission from the Persian monarch describes him as 
 ' the priest, the scribe, even a scribe of the words of 
 the commandments of Jehovah, and of His statutes 
 to Israel ' (Ezra vii. 11). And he had authority not to 
 form a new constitution for Israel, but to restore the 
 old : ' Thou art sent to inquire concerning Judah 
 and Jerusalem, according to the law of thy God 
 which is in thine hand ' (Ezra vii. 14, 21, 26). He was 
 apparently the great-grandson of Seraiah, the chief 
 priest of the beginning of the exile (2 Kings xxv. 
 18 ; Ezra vii. 1-5). That the law which he had in his 
 hand was the law of Moses which his grandfather or 
 great-grandfather had carried with him to Babylon, 
 can scarcely be called a supposition, it is so obviously 
 natural and inevitable, for on no other supposition 
 could he regard the book of which he was so earnest 
 a student in the days of his exile (vii. 10) as the book 
 of the law whose 'statutes and judgements' the 
 Lord had given by Moses, and which he was now 
 ambitious to teach to his people. Such a man, 
 prepared both by education and by personal zeal 
 
66 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 for the great task of the rehgious restoration of 
 Israel, could not be beguiled either through ignorance 
 or through carelessness, into the adoption, as of 
 Moses, of 'statutes and judgements,' not a century 
 old ; and into the absorption or interpolation of them 
 into the body of the ancient book which contained 
 the statutes and judgements which were really Mosaic. 
 But the honour of Ezra and the honour of the history 
 must not stand in the way of theory. Deceived or 
 deceiver, the book which the great scribe, according 
 to the theory, read to his assembled countrymen, 
 was in no proper sense the book of the command- 
 ments of the Lord and of His statutes to Israel by 
 the hand of Moses. Here, however, the critic and 
 the history are irreconcileable — the history knowing 
 nothing of a priestly code which received its ' final 
 touches ' from the hand of Ezra. 
 
 There are critics who take no pains to explain 
 away the conclusion that the critical theory leaves 
 the authors of the historical bocks of the Old 
 Testament chargeable with dishonesty, and in fact 
 that the books are gangrened with fraud. Kuenen, 
 for example, says that the authors of the books from 
 Genesis to Esther * fearlessly allowed themselves to be 
 guided in their statements by the wants of the present 
 and the requirements of the future. They co?isidered 
 themselves exempt from all resfonsibilify ,^ and as to 
 the Books of Chronicles, the priests coloured or 
 invented the history to suit their ends without 
 regard to truth. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 67 
 
 But ' here (as has been well said; endless diffi- 
 culties arise to the critics. The books of Moses are 
 so high in moral sentiment, so pure in moral prin- 
 ciple, so strong in defence of righteousness, and so 
 full of reverence for truth and God, that it is im- 
 possible, morally, to believe that men so falsifying 
 history for a purpose could at the same time have 
 composed such a noble moral structure as the 
 Pentateuch \' To which we may add that the history 
 of literature cannot furnish a parallel to the intel- 
 lectual achievement of the man who could create 
 the Pentateuch out of his own brain, and a few 
 floating national traditions seven or eight centuries 
 after the period and the (supposed) events which 
 it narrates, and give the whole such an air of veri- 
 similitude as to deceive or at least mislead all after 
 ages. The genius, not Isaiah, to whom criticism 
 ascribes the last twenty-seven chapters of the book 
 which bears the name of Isaiah, is not to be com- 
 pared to him. And yet the moral sense of this great 
 genius was so perverse that he did not hesitate to say 
 times without number, that God spoke words which 
 He did not speak, and ordained laws which He did 
 not ordain ! 
 
 Non-experts, the unlearned, are in a position to 
 pronounce an unhesitating verdict on the subject of 
 this chapter. 
 
 ' Dr. Alexander Stewart, of Aberdeen University. 
 
 E 2 
 
68 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Fourthly : The Bible reader does not find 
 in ne"w theories, "what he has a right to de- 
 mand, an intelligent and sufiacient substitute 
 for that which they would displace. 
 
 The non-experts whose cause I am pleading have 
 reason to distrust and reject the new theory of Hebrew 
 scripture and Hebrew history, because it fails to supply 
 an intelligible and consistent substitute for the old. It 
 is no small matter, looking at it merely from a literary 
 point of view, to pronounce condemnation on that 
 old, which has come to us bearing the seal of a great 
 nation whose self-esteem it never flattered, whose 
 misdeeds it unsparingly condemned, unbroken through 
 more centuries than any other nation, any Western 
 nation at least, has lived. Join in such condem- 
 nation, and you are bound to give us a theory of 
 the books and of the history which will recognize 
 acknowledged facts and adequately explain them. 
 On Christian and other grounds we consider our- 
 selves entitled, as we have argued, to reject any 
 theory which involves a charge of historical dishonesty 
 against the Hebrew books. But passing from this, 
 and this aspect of the new criticism, we demand a 
 theory, the fruit, let it be, of the freest manipulation of 
 known materials and the freest use of the critic's imagin- 
 ation, that shall be intelligible and consistent, and that 
 shall supply a credible explanation of the books. 
 
 The critics begin with cutting up Genesis and 
 portions of the other books of the Pentateuch, with 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 69 
 
 the history interspersed, into bits, and these bits they 
 designate with letters which remind one of an algebraic 
 problem. The process began modestly with A, B, 
 C, D. But it grew till we have J. E. Q. P. — with 
 J^ and J-,, E' and E^ P' and P- and P^ D^ and D ■, 
 which represent different strata in the hypothetic 
 original documents. Different redactors are embraced 
 under the general symbol R, Rj, who combined 
 J and E, R^S who added D to J E, and Rh, who com- 
 pleted the Hexateuch (Pentateuch and Joshua) by 
 combining P with J. E. D. The bits, as I call them, 
 thus designated and stamped, written six, eight, and 
 ten centuries after the Exodus, are said to be the 
 primary sources of patriarchal and Mosaic history ! 
 If so, the result must have been accomplished by 
 some such mighty and beneficent power as that 
 which transformed the primeval chaos into kosmos. 
 Readers who do not possess the critical ' second 
 sight' are more likely to conclude that having 
 kosmos already in the Hebrew books, criticism has 
 toiled to convert it into chaos. We ask with con- 
 fidence whether the process alleged by the critics, 
 or anything like it, can be made intelligible to any 
 but the critics themselves ? And it may be fairly 
 asked whether it is intelligible even to them ? 
 
 Then as to consistency. The documents, thus 
 discovered and separated, are further discovered to 
 be at variance with each other in their statements 
 respecting numerous particulars, thus invalidating 
 each other's testimony ; and besides they are very 
 
^o OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 incomplete. Numerous gaps and omissions occur in 
 each. 'But what is more serious,' as Dr. W. H. 
 Green says, ' the parts that yet remain have been 
 manipulated by the various redactors. The order 
 of events has been disturbed, events really distinct 
 have been confused and mistaken for one and the 
 same — while statements which are misleading have 
 been inserted with the view of harmonizing what 
 cannot be reconciled ' — and so on, so on. 
 
 We look in vain for consistency in this process, or 
 in any result which it could possibly effect. Nor 
 are we aided in the least, rather are we further 
 confounded by the hypotheses which have followed 
 one after another to meet fresh difficulties as they 
 have arisen — and which are known by many names, 
 some of them high-sounding — such as Fragment 
 Hypothesis, Document Hypothesis, Supplement 
 Hypothesis, Crystallization Hypothesis, Modified 
 Document Hypothesis, and Development Hypo- 
 thesis. There is no subject that gives more scope 
 both for sarcasm and for sound argument than the 
 history of these hypotheses, and the irreconcileable 
 differences which separate critic from critic, and 
 many times the critic from himself at different 
 stages of his mental development. But we forbear. 
 
 There is a short and easy method by which imagina- 
 tion can account for the unity and self-consistency, 
 the homogeneity and naturalness, of ' the marvellous ' 
 books which we call the ' Pentateuch,' but it does not 
 tind favour with English critics. We owe it to what 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 7 1 
 
 may be called the French school. Give up all attempt 
 to determine what measure of historic truth, if any, 
 can be found in the books of the Old Testament. 
 These books, with one or two unimportant exceptions, 
 had no existence in the ages to which they relate. 
 They are the product of creative genius, in the age 
 which saw the disappearance of the Persian Empire, 
 * when the Empire of Alexander moulded the minds 
 of thinking men in a universalist's mould.' To the 
 creative genius of that age we owe all the prophetic 
 and historical books. ' Their narratives have not even 
 an historical residuum, but are simply illustrative 
 religious lessons, which bring in all the patriarchs, 
 Moses, Elijah, and so on. Old names, Egypt and 
 Assyria and Babylon, are used in the prophecies 
 to represent those successors of Alexander the Great 
 who oppressed the Jews.' 
 
 One cannot help admiring the simphcity of this 
 theory. Sweeping away the entire old fabric, leaving 
 not one stone upon another, it builds afresh on ground 
 not even cumbered with ruins, and, building at its own 
 sweet pleasure, it can give symmetry and harmony to 
 its new structure. But this theory is too advanced 
 and radical even for the boldest of the theorists with 
 whom we have most to do. They, to use the words 
 of Principal Douglas, reject these teachings as wild 
 fancies. ' I agree with them,' he adds, ' only I do not 
 think these fancies essentially wilder than their own. 
 And Vernes and his friends present a view of the 
 construction of our Old Testament which, apart from 
 
72 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 its want of all historical foundation, is much more 
 attractive and perhaps even less burdened with diffi- 
 culties than theirs.' 
 
 The vagaries of criticism can boast both of age 
 and of novelty. Some twenty years ago, or nearly, 
 there appeared a book entitled Peregrinus Proteus^ by 
 J. M. Cotterill of Edinburgh, in which the author 
 laboured, with no small learning, to prove that not 
 a few ancient works, including Clement's famous 
 Letter to the Corinthians, which have hitherto been 
 regarded as genuine, were forgeries, 'the natural 
 productions' of the age of the revival of letters, an 
 'age of fraud,' and that the fabricator of the books 
 was in all probability no less a man than the famous 
 French printer, Henry Stephens, known as a Pro- 
 testant and a fervent denouncer of deceit and super- 
 stition, who died in 1520. A contemporary critic 
 oi Mr. Cotterill's book said that his method of 
 getting rid of historical evidence reminded him of 
 nothing so much as of Cardinal Manning's famous 
 saying, that we must be delivered from history by the 
 infallible dicta of the Church. It is paralleled now by 
 the ' infallible dicta ' of a very faUible Higher Criticism. 
 
 Fifthly : The faith of the Bible reader in 
 the histories of the Old Testament, and in 
 the account which they give of themselves, is 
 strengthened by the fact that they are con- 
 firmed, and that in a very remarkable manner, 
 by modern archaeological discoveries. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 73 
 
 There is one department of inquiry which is 
 accessible to all thoughtful students of Holy Scripture, 
 and in which mere scholarship, Hebrew or Classical, 
 gives critics no advantage over those who do not 
 possess it. It is that which is concerned with the 
 results of modern archaeological discoveries in Assyria, 
 Palestine, and Egypt. The most modern hving ex- 
 perts in this matter, known to England, are such as 
 Boscawen, Sayce, and Lieut.-Col. Conder, and their 
 testimony confirms and greatly expands the conclusions 
 which defenders of the truth of Bible history had 
 already reached with less knowledge of the facts. It 
 almost looks as if not ' the stars ' but a more real 
 power was now fighting conclusively against the 
 assailants of the Bible. Plausible objections to 
 which believers felt that they could offer a sufficient 
 answer, though not an answer that rendered doubt 
 impossible, are now proved, I may say demonstrated, to 
 be utterly groundless. And while these are negatived, 
 positive confirmations of Bible history, the patriarchal 
 and later, as striking as they were unexpected, are 
 furnished by recent discovery. Many pages might 
 be filled with illustrations of this averment. But 
 I content myself with a few general statements. 
 
 Even with reference to the Book of Genesis Col. 
 Conder does not hesitate to say that the tradition of 
 early times which it has preserved is proved correct 
 by the results of monumental study. 'Viewed in 
 the light of extant monuments,' he says, ' the story of 
 Genesis presents to us a true picture of the state of 
 
74 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Asia before the great Egyptian conquests of the 
 sixteenth century b.c' Prof. Sayce writes to the 
 same effect : ' The narratives which the Higher 
 Criticism had pronounced to be the unhistorical 
 fragments of popular tradition are being shown by 
 archaeological discovery to be historical after all. 
 Contemporaneous monuments are continually coming 
 to light which prove that in the story of the Patriarchs 
 [in Genesis] and of the Exodus we have truth and not 
 
 legend Year by year, almost month by month, 
 
 fresh discoveries are breaking in upon us, each more 
 marvellous than the last, but all as regards the 
 Pentateuch in favour of the Old rather than the New.' 
 ' It may come to be recognized,' says Col. Conder, 
 ' that the words of the Pentateuch form a better 
 foundation for history than the fragments of Manetho, 
 or the baseless theories of those who set aside its dates 
 and its geography as fabrications of a later priesthood.' 
 Of Joshua he says, 'On no book of the Bible has 
 recent exploration cast more light than on that 
 relating to the story of the Hebrew conquest of 
 Canaan.' Of all recent discoveries, perhaps the 
 most remarkable is that of letters sent to Egypt 
 by the Amorite king of Jerusalem. 'They show,' 
 says Col. Conder, 'that the Abiri [the Hebrews] 
 came from Seir, and fought at Ajalon ; that they 
 invaded the Philistine plains, and destroyed all the 
 Canaanite rulers. Their notices agree exactly with 
 the Bible account of Joshua's first campaign. The 
 principal passages in the Jerusalem letters clearly 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 75 
 
 indicate the path of conquest.' 'The tone of all 
 the Canaanite letters is a despairing cry for help to 
 Egypt ; but none of them record that any help was 
 sent, though eagerly expected ' ( The Bible and the 
 East, pp. 103-113). 
 
 The most far-reachi7ig discovery of recent archae- 
 ology is probably that which has swept away for ever 
 an allegation which was long boastfully used as an 
 argument to prove that the writing of the Pentateuch 
 by Moses or by any Israelite in his age was an im- 
 possibility. ' It was tacitly assumed that the literary 
 use of writing could not have been known to an 
 Israelite in the time of Moses, and consequently that 
 none of the narratives in the Pentateuch can go back 
 to so early a period. They must all belong, it was 
 urged, to a later age, when little authentic record was 
 preserved of the Mosaic days, and when the imagin- 
 ation of the author or his contemporaries had to supply 
 the missing facts.' There could be, it was alleged, 
 no written contemporaneous evidence of the events 
 of patriarchal times narrated in Genesis, so that the 
 history of any of these events could not be trusted. 
 If, for example, there was no one to record the meeting 
 of Melchizedek and Abram or the conquest of Palestine 
 by the kings of Aram Naharaim, the critic was justified 
 in disputing the historical credibility of these tales. 
 ' Unrecorded events soon pass into forgetfulness or 
 become enveloped in an atmosphere of myth and 
 romance.' 
 
 ' But now a lost world of culture and civilization 
 
76 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 has been brought to light first in Egypt, then in 
 Assyria and Babylonia, and finally in the lands of the 
 Eastern Mediterranean.' ' We can now study the 
 letters of Canaanites who lived before the days of 
 Moses.' The Tell-el-Amarna tablets tell us that in 
 the century before Exodus Palestine was a land of 
 books and schools. All over Canaan there was an 
 active correspondence going on even in a foreign 
 tongue. Such a fact impHes an abundance of schools 
 and teachers and pupils. As in Babylon and Assyria, 
 so too in Canaan, there must have been libraries in 
 which the clay books with their wedge-like letters 
 were stored and studied. The historian who desired 
 to compile a history of the cities of Canaan would 
 have had at his disposal more than enough of con- 
 temporaneous material. From a period earlier than 
 that of Abraham there were documents containing 
 history of the most authentic and trustworthy kind. 
 The assumption that the Israelites who escaped from 
 Egypt and invaded Canaan were a horde of illiterate 
 barbarians is one which cannot be maintained. To 
 admit that the Israelites were once in Egypt, and yet 
 to deny to them a knowledge at the time they fled 
 from it, is certainly not consonant with the principles 
 of probability and common-sense. 
 
 These sentences culled, for the sake of brevity, 
 from Professor Sayce, without the details amid which 
 we find them, justify the general statements which 
 have been already quoted from Sayce and Conder 
 respecting the Book of Genesis. This book, it is 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 77 
 
 obvious, occupies a different position from that of 
 the other books of the Pentateuch, inasmuch as its 
 contents are pre-Mosaic. It was the first battle-ground 
 of criticism. But all that needs to be said about it 
 here is, that, apart from the witness of Christ to its 
 facts, all improbability arising from the nature and the 
 date of these facts, at least the greater part of these 
 facts, is now more than neutralized. There is internal 
 evidence in the book that it is not a mere compilation 
 of documents or documentary fragments that have 
 come from one knows not how many sources, but 
 that it is written on a distinctly careful plan. Of this 
 there is patent sign in the heading or introduction to 
 ten consecutive sections of the book — ' These are the 
 generations,' in ii. 4 ; v. i ; vi. 9 ; x. i ; xi. 10 ; xi. 27 ; 
 XXV. 12; XXV. 19; xxxvi. I ; xxxvii. 2. For the greater 
 part of these there need have been no lack of written 
 materials. But the use of these materials in the pre- 
 paration of the history does not render the book less 
 a book of Moses, than it would have been if it had 
 contained only speculations woven out of his own 
 brain. And it is not too much to say that the materials 
 were welded together by a wisdom more than that of 
 man, a wisdom which could foresee and contemplate 
 the future. 
 
 Well may the believer in Bible history congratulate 
 himself, and expect with confidence the unearthing 
 of more witness to the truth of the old stor}'. 
 
78 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Sixthly : The non-expert, instead of being 
 reconciled to the newer criticism, is repelled 
 from it, by the avowal on the part of the critics 
 of faith in the inspiration of the Jewish Scrip- 
 tures. 
 
 The critics do not deny, rather they maintain, 
 they say, the inspiration of Scripture, Imt^ 'the 
 current doctrine of Scripture and of Divine inspiration 
 requires revision.' Be it so — and, making no account 
 of such critics as Kuenen and Wellhausen, to whom 
 supernatural revelation is non-existent — what revision, 
 of what amount and of what kind, will bring the 
 doctrine of Divine inspiration into harmony with the 
 facts as understood by the critics} We can find no 
 answer to this question in old familiar discussions 
 respecting verbal inspiration and the mode of inspira- 
 tion. We must even go beyond the question of ' the 
 strict inerrancy of Scripture, of absolute accuracy in 
 unimportant minutiae, or precision in matters of 
 science.' ' The question is whether any dependence 
 can be placed on the historical truth of the Bible ; 
 whether our confidence in the facts recorded in the Pen- 
 tateuch and in other books rests upon any really trust- 
 worthy basis; facts, be it observed, not of mere scientific 
 or antiquarian interest, but which mark the course of 
 God's revelations to the Patriarchs and to Moses.' 
 But this is not all. It is a fundamental assumption 
 of critics that the redactors to whom they ascribe the 
 present condition of the books misunderstood or mis- 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 79 
 
 represented their sources- -the more ancient fragments 
 or portions on which they operated ; ' that narratives, 
 which were but varying accounts of the same thing, 
 were supposed by them to relate to distinct occurrences, 
 and they have treated them as such, wrongly assigning 
 them to different occasions and perhaps different 
 persons ; that they have combined their sources in 
 such a way as to give a wrong colouring to their 
 contents, so that they make a false impression and 
 convey a meaning quite different from that which 
 properly belonged to them in their original connexion. 
 And the chief value and interest of the critic is thought 
 to be the new light which he brings into the narrative 
 and the altered meaning which he discovers by undoing 
 the work of the redactors, who are supposed to have 
 cut away much precious material from their documents 
 that is now irrecoverably lost, and to have modified 
 the mutilated remnant which they have handed down 
 to us ' (Green, Higher Criticism of the Pentateitch^ 
 163, 170). 
 
 Now where in all this do we find 'the place of 
 inspiration ' ? In the documents or fragments of docu- 
 ments which are supposed to have been the ' original 
 sources ' ? On the critical hypothesis, no one knows 
 what they were or whence they came — only this is 
 known, that is, to the critics, that they were confused, 
 mutually contradictory, and liable to all manner of 
 misunderstanding. The redactors cannot have 
 believed such documents to have been inspired, 
 — or if they had, would they have dared to treat them 
 
8o OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 as they did ? Shall we find ' the place ' of inspiration 
 in the redactors themselves ? Waiving the fact that 
 these editors, who in successive generations have 
 moulded the book into its present form, belong to the 
 race of the great Unknowns of literature, their work 
 is as unreliable, according to the critics, as was the 
 condition of the materials on which they operated. 
 They misunderstood or misrepresented their sources, 
 and, according to the critics to whom alone we owe 
 our knowledge of their existence, they combined their 
 sources in such a way as to give a wrong colouring 
 to their contents. 
 
 Were they inspired in doing this ? We read of bring- 
 ing a clean thing out of an unclean, but that were an 
 easy process compared with that which we are asked to 
 accept when we are told that the book, as we have 
 it, is the completed product of documents which even 
 in their first estate were either self-contradictory or 
 unintelligible, and of the toils of editors who misunder- 
 stood the documents, and blundered in piecing them 
 together or in framing narratives out of them ; and 
 thus written it is inspired ! Verily our ' doctrine of 
 inspiration ' must be ' revised ' in order to meet the 
 exigency to which we are now reduced. We have 
 still to go in search of ' the place ' of inspiration, and 
 if it is to be found anywhere it must be in the critics 
 themselves. Their predecessors, the redactors, have 
 erred, and their work is not satisfactory. They, now 
 sitting on the throne of judgement, tell us the whole 
 truth and nothing but the truth. If we deny their 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 8l 
 
 claim to authority or to the inspiration which justifies 
 authority, they can produce a precedent from a most 
 venerable source. In the Council of Trent the question 
 was earnestly discussed whether the Vulgate translation 
 of the Scriptures was inspired. There was reasonable 
 likelihood, it was argued, that the Spirit who had 
 dictated the original had also dictated the translation. 
 Nay, it was ingeniously argued, says Mr. Froude, that 
 the Council then sitting was confessedly inspired. The 
 Council therefore had but to approve the Vulgate, and 
 the Vulgate itself would be inspired ! 
 
 Very logical ! Quite a precedent for the critics. 
 They have only to assert their own inspiration, and 
 then all else over which they throw the mantle of 
 their authority becomes inspired in virtue of theirs. 
 In this we have the ultimate ' Revision ' of the doctrine 
 of Inspiration ! 
 
 But the non-expert cannot receive it. It is too 
 hard a saying for both his reason and his conscience. 
 Accepting as he does, and that on grounds which 
 satisfy both reason and conscience, the Old Testament 
 as a record of Divine Revelations given at sundry 
 times and in divers manners, the reverent believer 
 revolts, as I have maintained, from- all theories which 
 imply any approach to dishonesty or fraud in the re- 
 cord. With equal vehemence, I might say with equal 
 loathing, he revolts from any theory which would con- 
 vert the unholy into the holy by putting on it the seal 
 of God, the seal of what apostles held to be the Inspira- 
 tion of the Holy Ghost (2 Pet. i. 21 ; 2 Tim. iii. 16). 
 
 F 
 
82 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 Seventhly : Any argument which may be 
 drawn from the plausibilities of criticism is 
 easily rebutted by the fact that the same sort 
 of criticism, applied to any ancient or even 
 modern book, might be made to yield similar 
 results. 
 
 The remark is often made^ and made with truth, 
 that the processes by which the Higher Criticism 
 disintegrates the books of the Old Testament, might 
 be apphed with equal plausibility to well-known classics 
 of every age, not excepting our own, and produce 
 similar results. This, in fact, has been done. The 
 name of Richard Bentley, whose life ended a century 
 and a half ago, is still held in the highest honour as 
 one of the greatest scholars and critics that England has 
 ever known. His success in disproving the authen- 
 ticity of a series of letters which were ascribed to 
 Phalaris, the semi-mythical tyrant of Sicily, seemed 
 to invest him wath a critical dictatorship. Queen 
 Caroline is said to have expressed a wish that the 
 great critic should exercise his talents upon an edition 
 of Milton, and thus gratify those readers who could 
 not enjoy his celebrated lucubrations on classical 
 writers. ' Probably she thought (says Professor Jebb) 
 that the learning, especially the classical learning, 
 which enters so largely into Milton's epic would afford 
 a good field for illustrative commentary to a classical 
 scholar.' But the critic found what no one had 
 hitherto suspected, that there were many words in 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 83 
 
 the poem which Milton had never dictated, and not 
 a few passages which were in no sense his. And 
 of this strange phenomenon Bentley had a ready 
 explanation to offer. The author was obnoxious to 
 the government, poor, friendless, and, worst of all, 
 blind, and ' could only dictate his verses to be writ 
 by another.' The amanuensis made numerous mis- 
 takes in spelling and printing, which Bentley found 
 no difficulty in correcting. But the Editor was 
 the chief offender. 'The friend to whom Milton 
 committed his copy, and the overseeing of the press, 
 did so vilely execute the trust, that Paradise under 
 his ignorance and audaciousness may be said to be 
 tiaice lost' This Editor is responsible for many 
 careless changes of word or phrase, of which Bentley 
 gives forty-eight examples. But that is not the worst. 
 This Editor, knowing Milton's bad circumstances — 
 the evil days and evil tongues — profited by them to 
 perpetrate a deliberate fraud of the most heartless 
 kind. Having a turn for verse-writing, he actually 
 interpolated many lines of his own, of which Bentley's 
 insight discovered ' sixty-six examples, which can be 
 detected by their own silliness and unfitness.' Besides, 
 Milton himself ' made some slips and inadvertencies." 
 ' There are some inconsistencies in the system and 
 plan of his poem, for want of his revisal of the whole 
 before its publication.' Sixteen examples of these are 
 given. These are beyond merely verbal emendation, 
 and require 'a change both of words and sense.' 
 It is quite unnecessary to criticize this criticism 
 F 2 
 
04 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 of the great critic. The Editor who was guilty of 
 so much wrong owes his existence, as Professor J ebb 
 remarks, to Bentley's vigorous imagination. And if 
 any one should be curious to see what reply may be 
 made to the hypothetic charges of 'wilful interpola- 
 tions and inadvertent changes,' he will find it in the 
 professor's recent life of Bentley. Enough for my 
 purpose to exhibit Bentley's edition of The Paradise 
 Lost as a prophetic precursor of the editions of The 
 Law of Moses^ the Book of the Prophet Tsaiah, and 
 other portions of the Old Testament which are offered 
 to us by the Higher Critics ; only that the foreshadow- 
 ing was faint and timid. For whereas the critic of 
 Paradise Lost i^nagined only one Editor, the critics 
 of the Old Testament imagitie many — a fresh one 
 whenever occasion renders it necessary — to whom, 
 under an appellation unknown to Old Testament 
 history, that of Redactor (? Reviser and Recon- 
 structor), is ascribed everything which the critic 
 thinks cannot have been original \ 
 
 In maintaining that the ancient belief in the Mosaic 
 authorship of the Pentateuch is worthy of all accept- 
 
 ^ Dr. \V. H. Green in his recent work, The Higher Criticism 
 of the Pentateuch, gives other modern illustrations of 'the pre- 
 carious character of the methods and results of subjective 
 criticism/ such as the ' systematic onset upon Cicero's orations 
 against Catiline, of whose genuineness there is abundant proof; 
 and a discussion which arose anent certain portions of Goethe's 
 Faust, which he sets forth as *a beacon to warn classical philo- 
 logists against over-hasty interpolation-criticism.'— Pp. 127-130. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 85 
 
 ation, and that the denial of it involves the destruction 
 of confidence not merely in the inspiration of what we 
 are accustomed to call Holy Scripture, but in its 
 historic truthfulness, and in the veracity of its writers, 
 we do not forget that an attempt is sometimes made 
 to throw doubt on such conclusions by the off-hand 
 averment that we have not the books of Moses as they 
 came from the hands of Moses ; if indeed they were 
 really his. This is a statement which is altogether 
 misleading. We have these books substantially in the 
 only form in w^hich we have any evidence that they 
 ever existed. To the remarks bearing on this point, 
 which will be found in pp. 30-36, may be added an 
 appeal to the Samaritan Pentateuch as a convincing 
 witness to the integrity of ' The Law ' as it came from 
 the hands of Moses. The Samaritans, whose national 
 origin dates from the division of the kingdom on the 
 death of Solomon, declined to accept the later books, 
 which they identified with the rival kingdom of Judah. 
 Had the books which are ascribed to Moses originated in 
 the later age which the Higher Criticism imagines, they 
 could not have become the Bible of the Samaritans. 
 
 There are one or two expressions and one or two 
 verses which, it is affirmed, cannot have been written 
 by Moses. Of these the words in Gen. xxxvi. 31 are 
 specially insisted on : ' These are the kings that reigned 
 in the land of Edom, before there reigned any king 
 over the children of Israel.' These words, it is said, 
 could not have been written till kingship was established 
 in Israel. But Delitzsch holds that the narrator might 
 
86 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 have inserted this clause from the standpoint of the pro- 
 mise to Abraham in Gen. xvii. 6, and to Jacob in Gen. 
 XXXV. II. And Dr. W. H. Green, recalling the fact 
 that Edom had been a nation with dukes and kings 
 for four hundred years, while Israel had been bonds- 
 men and kingless all these centuries, it was only 
 natural to mark the contrast, and after thorough 
 discussion, concludes that ' instead of indicating an 
 anachronism, the form of expression points directly 
 to Moses as its author ' ( The Unify of the Book of 
 Ge?iesis, pp. 425-429). 
 
 But even if this and a few other similar passages 
 can be found which really point to a later age than 
 that of Moses, it is not unreasonable to suppose that 
 they were inserted by prophetic authority to make the 
 story more intelligible to later readers. Whereas if 
 we ascribe the books themselves, as they now stand, to 
 a later age we have to face all the difficulties — logical, 
 historical, moral, and religious — which have been ex- 
 pounded within the too narrow limits of this Primer. 
 
 There is one chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy 
 which it is certain that Moses did not write, that which 
 contains the history of his death. But the criticism 
 which, because Moses did not write the account of his 
 own death found in a book which bears his name, 
 throws doubt on whether he did write, and suggests 
 that he could not have written, the history of events 
 and discourses found in the chapters which precede 
 his death, scarcely deserves the trouble of refutation. 
 It is almost like saying that because the dead man 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 87 
 
 could not tell us how he died, the living man could not 
 have told us how he lived, or what he did while he lived. 
 
 Instead of finding in the last chapter of Deuteronomy 
 any occasion of doubtfulness as to the Mosaic author- 
 ship of the Pentateuch, we find in it strongly corro- 
 borative evidence of the truth of the recorded history 
 of which it is the conclusion. For 
 
 (i) Why should the book — fivefold, as we have it, 
 but really one — be wound up with a detailed account 
 of the death, and that in very peculiar circumstances, 
 of the man Moses? The only answer that is at all 
 rational is — because of the extraordinary position which 
 this man had occupied, and the extraordinary work 
 which had been assigned to him, and whose faithfulness 
 in accomplishing it, as ' the servant of God,' the New 
 Testament does not shrink from comparing with the 
 faithfulness of Christ as ' the Son of God ' (Heb. iii. 
 2 ; Numb. xii. 7). 
 
 And (2) why such a death? at once painful and 
 blessed — in one respect punitive, in another the reward 
 of faithful service ? The preceding history, as we find 
 it in Numbers xx. 12 and xxvii. 12-14, explains its 
 double character. To Moses it must have been a priva- 
 tion of bitter severity to be deprived of the privilege 
 of leading the redeemed host into the promised land, 
 but at the same time it must have been a great joy to 
 see the land, and then to rest from his labours in the 
 peace of God. 
 
 Thus this last chapter of the Pentateuch would be 
 unintelligible without the history which certain critics 
 
88 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 
 
 would stamp as untrustworthy, and that history would 
 be incomplete without this record of the life's-end of 
 the great leader and lawgiver, whose voice we hear and 
 whose steps we follow through its pages. Who wrote 
 this supplemental note we do not know. But how its 
 incidents became known we can understand. As Elisha 
 was permitted to accompany Elijah, and to talk with 
 him, up to the moment when the chariot of fire 
 separated them, so Joshua — why should we doubt 
 it ? — who had been honoured to attend on Moses as 
 his minister on Horeb (Exod. xxiv. 13), was privileged 
 to accompany Moses and hold converse with him until 
 the Lord was pleased to separate them — it may be by 
 a cloud — Moses to die, and Joshua to descend to his 
 work as the Captain of Israel. 
 
 The verses which follow the account of the death 
 of Moses, the last in the book, must have been 
 written long after, probably centuries after, the events 
 recorded in the book, but instead of suggesting 
 doubt respecting the contents of the book, they 
 confirm them. Why should we be told that ' no 
 prophet like unto Moses whom the Lord knew face 
 to face ' had yet appeared in Israel ? Because Moses 
 was the Prophet of the book, and himself had foretold, 
 as written in the book (ch. xviii.), that a prophet like 
 unto him, endowed as he was, and divinely privileged 
 as he was, should at some future time appear in Israel. 
 The words with which the book closes put the seal 
 of a later age on the prophecy and the book which 
 contains it. 
 
CONCLUSION 
 
 There are not a few questions which will occur to 
 non-experts who read these pages, but I can do little 
 more than refer to them. For example, How are 
 we to regard the Bible as a whole in the light of the 
 asserted results of the Higher Criticism ? If these 
 results in regard, say, to the Pentateuch and Joshua, 
 to say nothing of Daniel and many separate passages 
 and chapters in other histories and prophets, are 
 genuine, and give us the truth respecting these 
 Scriptures and portions of Scriptures, what effect 
 will this have on our estimate of the Bible as a 
 whole? I see no logical or common-sense answer 
 to this question, but that the Bible must lose all credit 
 for historical truthfulness or trustworthiness. I can 
 understand the distinction which is insisted on when 
 it is said that the Bible is not the Word of God, it is 
 only the record of the Word — a distinction which is 
 more apparent than real, for if it be a record of 
 Divine revelations, such as is to be found in no 
 other book or collection of books, neither in nature, 
 which we are sometimes reminded is a word of God, 
 
90 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 nor in Providence, which may claim the same honour, 
 — if it occupies so unique a position in the relations 
 between God and man, we cannot be far wrong in 
 calling it ' the Word of God.' It would be difficult 
 to dissuade the devout heart from using an appellation 
 which is not only convenient for its brevity, but which 
 puts emphasis on, and brings into prominence, the very 
 essence of the book. 
 
 But if it be a record of Divine revelations, we must 
 repudiate every theory and every shade of criticism 
 which would stamp any part as untruthful and un- 
 trustworthy. It is the voice of Cxod Himself that 
 comes to us through Jeremiah, ' cursed be he that 
 doeth the work of the Lord deceitfully.' And further, 
 we need have no hesitation in applying to the critical 
 theory w^hich we are discussing the words of Dean 
 Milman in regard to the once popular Tubingen 
 theory of the New Testament : ' It seems to me that 
 instead of the theory being the result of diligent and 
 acute investigation, the theory is first made, and then 
 the inferences or arguments sought out, discerned^ 
 or imagined, and wrought up with infinite skill to 
 establish the foregone conclusion ; at the same time 
 with a contemptuous disregard or utter obtuseness 
 to the difficulties of their own system.' 
 
 At the same time out of evil God educeth good. 
 Whatever may be the immediate or ultimate effect 
 of the speculations of the Higher Criticism, we sym- 
 pathize entirely with the conclusion of Dr. William 
 Henry Green. 'While the hypothesis, i.e. of partition. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 9 1 
 
 has proved futile as an attempt to account for the 
 origin of the Pentateuch, the labour spent upon it 
 has not been entirely thrown away, and it has not 
 been without positive advantage to the cause of 
 truth. (i) It has demonstrated the impossibility 
 of such a partition. The experiment has been tried 
 in every way that the utmost ingenuity could devise, 
 but without success. (2) It has led to the develop- 
 ment of a vast mass of positive evidence of unity, 
 which would not otherwise have been so diligently 
 sought for, and might not have been brought to 
 light. (3) It has led to the elucidation and better 
 understanding of the Pentateuch, from the necessity 
 thus imposed of minute and thorough investigation 
 of the meaning and bearings of every word and 
 sentence, and of the mutual relations of every part. 
 It verifies the old fable of a field which was dug over 
 for a chimerical purpose, but the labour thus expended 
 was rewarded, for an unlooked-for harvest sprung 
 from seed which lay unsuspected in the soil' {Of? 
 the Higher Criticism of the Pe7itafeuch^ p. 132). 
 
 I venture to add the words of warning in which 
 Dr. Green concludes the volume from which I have 
 just quoted. ' Within a very few years professedly 
 evangelical men have ventured upon the hazardous 
 experiment of attempting a compromise in this matter. 
 They propose to accept these hypotheses in spite of 
 their antibiblical character, in spite of their incom- 
 patibility with the historical truth of the Bible, in 
 spite of their contravening its explicit statements. 
 
92 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 in spite of the grave questions which they raise 
 respecting the fallibihty of our Lord's own teaching ; 
 and they expect to retain their Christian faith with 
 only such modifications as these newly adopted 
 hypotheses may require. They are now puzzling 
 themselves over the problem of harmonizing Christ's 
 sanction given to false views respecting the Old 
 Testament with implicit faith in Him as a Divine 
 Teacher. And some of them in their perplexity 
 over this enigma come perilously near impairing 
 the truth of His claims. Would it not be wiser 
 for them to revise their own ill-judged alliance with 
 the enemies of evangelical truth, and inquire whether 
 Christ's view of the Old Testament may not, after 
 all, be the true view ?' 
 
 In drawing this argument to a close the reader's 
 attention is directed to the motto which appears on the 
 title-page — ' In understanding be men.' The reader 
 needs no help towards distinguishing between those 
 attributes of childhood without which we cannot enter 
 the Kingdom of Heaven, and those characteristics of 
 which we are reminded by the words, ' that we hence- 
 forth be no more children tossed to and fro and 
 carried about with every wind of doctrine.' ' Prove 
 all things,' writes one apostle ; ' hold fast that which is 
 good' (i Thess. v. 21). 'Believe not every spirit,' 
 says another, ' but try the spirits whether they are of 
 Cxod : because many false prophets are gone out into 
 the world ' (i John iv. i). It is the author's hope that 
 this little book will be subjected in all its reasonings 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 93 
 
 to the ' proving ' and ' trying ' which are thus enjoined 
 by apostohc authority. It seeks no shelter for them 
 other than is found in their own vahdity and truth. 
 ' In understanding be men.' 
 
 Children are subject to what may be called a centri- 
 petal and a centrifugal force. On the one hand they 
 are exposed to the danger of being drawn too strongly, 
 and of adhering too tenaciously to what they have 
 been taught, and what has become sacred through 
 early associations. And on the other hand they are 
 in danger of being drawn away too readily, startled or 
 frightened away, from what they have been taught by 
 bold and specious novelties, and the confidence, often 
 the supercilious confidence, of men who claim to have 
 discovered what has been hid from the ages that have 
 gone before. We have, as not children but men, on 
 the one hand to guard against a blind and obstinate 
 maintenance of inherited opinions in the face of reasons 
 that should suffice to quench them ; and equally to 
 guard against pretentious theories, whose chief power 
 or fascination is in their ' newness.' It cannot be too 
 strongly insisted upon, that while in science, and in 
 many of the practical applications of science, we have 
 to place ourselves in the hands of experts or specialists, 
 the materials for forming a judgement on the most 
 prominent religious problems of the day are within 
 the reach of ordinary intelligence, and ordinary intel- 
 ligence has to guard against too facile yielding to either 
 centripetal or centrifugal forces. 
 
 Men are sometimes applauded for their courage in 
 
94 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM AND 
 
 breaking loose from old moorings, and advancing, as 
 the phrase is, with the times. But it often requires 
 more courage and more strength to hold fast by the 
 old moorings than to break away from them. The 
 times often advance the wrong way, and have to 
 retrace their steps in search of light and truth. There 
 is nothing more humiliating in the history of human 
 thought than the record which it contains of bold 
 conclusions, adopted in the very name of science, 
 surrounded for a time with a glamour which makes 
 it almost impious to question them, and then repu- 
 diated, cast away as vain idols — only, however, to give 
 place to equally vain idols that may be worshipped 
 for another season. Dean Farrar, speaking of the 
 critics which have from time to time assailed the 
 authenticity of the Gospels, says, 'The schemes which 
 have been proposed by rival critics with so much arro- 
 gant confidence and mutual contempt, have succeeded 
 to each other in such bewildering multitudes, like waves 
 rushing over waves, that we know not whether most to be 
 astonished at their rapidity or to despise their evanes- 
 cence \' The remark is equally true of ' the schemes 
 which have been proposed by critics' for revolutionizing 
 our conceptions of the Old Testament, and reducing 
 the avowed history of the ancient Church of God, very 
 greatly into a mass of legends and myths, and, at the 
 best, of well-intentioned endeavours of unknown men 
 to do good by means which it would require a Jesuit's 
 subtlety to distinguish from forgery. Of these 
 ^ Iliilsean Lectures, p. 52. 
 
THE RIGHTS OF THE UNLEARNED 95 
 
 ' schemes,' another dean, writing in very mild terms, 
 says in answer to the question, ' What does criticism 
 say ? ' ' Here it seems to me that while the questions 
 have been innumerable, and the answers also, the 
 crop of clear, certain, and convincing answers, has 
 been a singularly small one. Nothing seems to me 
 more remarkable than the contrast in our time between 
 the certainties of physical science, and the contra- 
 dictory and uncertain results, the barrenness, as a 
 whole, of criticism applied to the questions which 
 most interest men\' 
 
 Had Dean Farrar carried to the study of the Book 
 of Daniel the principles which he maintained so 
 eloquently in his Hulsean Lectures in defence of the 
 Gospels, he would not have accepted the conclusions 
 of the extremest Rationalism, conclusions which, if 
 true, should drive the book ignominiously out of the 
 canon of Holy Scripture. He would have found no 
 difficulty in proving — and this has often been done — 
 that the Daniel of the Book was what Christ called 
 him, a 'Prophet/ and one who was honoured to supply 
 Christ Himself with words in which to describe the 
 glory of His second coming (Matt. xxvi. 64). 
 
 The late learned Dr. Cairns, writing to his friend 
 Dr. John Brown, said, 'The dulness of criticism [of 
 the Rationalist school] is seen in the non-appreciation 
 of the grandeur of Daniel, which every fool of the 
 Maccabean age is supposed capable of having written, 
 or according to some, a joint-stock company or for- 
 ^ Life of Dean Chunk, p. 337. 
 
96 OLD TESTAMENT CRITICISM 
 
 tuitous concourse of fools and fanatics, whose fabrica- 
 tions run into such subhme shapes as Belshazzar's 
 vision, and Daniel's prayer, not to speak of Nebu- 
 chadnezzar's dream. Surely the time will come in all 
 lands when some sort of elementary feeling for the 
 sacred and the great will be so diffused as to nip 
 such absurdities in the bud, and serve as a foundation 
 for the positive Scripture criticism and exposition to 
 build upon \' 
 
 The unlearned non-experts, whose rights and powers 
 we here plead, need have no fear for the future of their 
 Bible. They need no aid from superstition or ignorance 
 to defend the Book, nor need they shut their eyes 
 against any light that may come from true criticism, 
 from historical discovery, from linguistic progress, or 
 from profounder insight into the truths of revelation. 
 Its destined course among the nations is that of the 
 ' Light, which shineth more and more unto the perfect 
 day.' 
 
 ^ Life of Dr. Cairns, p. 432. 
 
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Old Testament criticism and the rights 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 00040