To discuss the sacred problems of Scripture Inspiration is not my purpose here. Elsewhere[3] I have attempted to deal with some of them. All I would do here is, in view of what is truly a "present necessity," to ask my Brethren, very deliberately, not to be in haste to take up with the last and boldest word of what is called the Higher Criticism (I speak particularly now of its application to the Old Testament), as if its "advances" were always towards light and fact. I have no complaint against the term Higher Criticism, which has a recognized place in literary technical language, denoting that familiar and lawful process, the study of books not for their grammar and style only, but in order to infer from their whole phenomena what their age is, and their structure, and their character. The Higher Criticism is a term pointing not to methods and results transcending ordinary intelligence, but to a study which aims "higher" than grammatical and textual questions considered as final. And thus of course the most earnest defender of the supernatural character of the Scriptures may be, and very often is, as diligent a "higher critic" as the extremest anti-supernaturalist.
[3] Veni Creator, ch. iii
A PLEA FOR CAUTION.
It is not its definition in the abstract but its actual work and spirit, as seen in many leading instances, which constrain me to enter an earnest protest against a too easy confidence in this criticism of, particularly, the Old Testament Scriptures. It is "a thing to give us pause" when we are asked to accept it as proved, or at least as extremely probable, that righteous Abel is a myth; that there was little, if any, monotheism before Abraham; no theophany at Sinai; no Wilderness-Tabernacle; no record of the conquest of Canaan written till long generations after the event; not much written record at all till Samuel; few, if any, Psalms before the age of the Captivity, if not before the age of the Maccabees; certainly two if not more Isaiahs, and probably hardly one Daniel; at least, that the book bearing his name dates from the second century before Christ, and is in fact a Palestinian story-book which has not, perhaps, even a nucleus of history within it. It ought to make us stop and think when we are told that Isaiah did not predict coming events; indeed (for the drift of this teaching goes very strongly in that direction), that predictive prophecy is hardly to be recognized anywhere; that it is better out of our thoughts; that it is but "soothsaying" after all, and that the true work of the prophet was not to fore-tell but to "forth-tell," to proclaim present and eternal principles, which again were not revealed to him from above but arrived at by intuitions and meditations within his own consciousness. It is a grave thing to be asked to believe, as many would have us do, that such was the lack of feeling for veracity in ancient Judah that Hilkiah, Jeremiah, and Huldah could arrange for the "discovery" of a fabricated Deuteronomy, and then (see the narrative in the Second Book of Kings [xxii. 8-20.]) get the prophetess to follow up the fabrication with awful denunciations—all fulfilled—in the name of the Lord Himself. Such theories we are asked to hold in face of our Master Christ's deliberate, persistent, manifold testimony to the supernatural character and authority of the Old Testament; to the solidity of its records of fact, to the reality of its predictive element—on which He stayed His sacred soul in Gethsemane, and on the Cross itself. It is no longer a question of details, an inquiry whether the numerals are invariably authentic and accurate; whether the minute particulars of a king's death as told in Chronicles tally with the account in Kings. It is a question whether the Old Testament at large is not a singularly and flagrantly untrustworthy record. It is a question whether its literature as a whole is not to be explained, practically, by "natural causes"; including a causation by deliberate, elaborate, and interested untruth.
A GRAVE ALTERNATIVE.
Is it too much to say that the alternative has come to be this: Was our Lord Himself right or very gravely wrong about the nature of Scripture? Did the Spirit of Pentecost guide the Apostles into all truth, or leave them under a vast illusion in this central matter of their witness? "Do not follow this Book, young men; follow Christ": so said a speaker of high Christian reputation, holding up a Bible, before a great gathering in America, not long ago. But what does this mean? Christ carries the Book in His hand; if you follow Him you must follow it. If you decline to follow the Book, your following Him is a following—so far as at present you agree with Him, and not further.
WITNESSES FOR SCRIPTURE.
Meantime, what are some facts of the case, facts not nearly so well remembered now as they should be? One comprehensive fact is that the testimony of nature and of history goes, as a whole, to affirm the veracity of the Scripture records, and to do so more and more pointedly as research advances. In a remarkable recent essay by the Duke of Argyll (Nineteenth Century, January, 1891), the growing accumulation of geological evidence for a Great Flood, affecting at least the northern hemisphere, and falling within the human period, is forcibly set out by a master hand. In the same paper is indicated the fast-gathering evidence, now digging up month by month from the soil of Palestine, to the accuracy of the picture of Canaan drawn in the Pentateuch and Joshua. The Ordnance Survey of Sinai has amply shown that the geology of the peninsula confirms down to minute details the record in Exodus.[4] And now the Oxford Arabic Professor is making it, at the least, extremely likely that the Hebrew written two centuries before Christ was more modern by many generations than that presented by the Book of Daniel.[5]
[4] See Sir J. Dawson: Modern Science in Bible Lands, "The Topography of the Exodus."
[5] See Margoliouth: The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature.