prerogatives which once furnished the foundation of a form of Christian faith which must itself disappear with them. To demonstrate the presence of errors as to fact, as to religion, as to morals, in the Bible to show that many of its prophecies were never fulfilled, and, when they were, hardly surpass human powers of anticipation to find in it books not written by the men whose names they bear, and to trace the presence and growth of legend in its histories, is to render the Biblical evidence for supernatural events too weak to beget and sustain conviction of their occurrence, and also to upset the entire line of argument pursued by apologists of the type of Butler and Paley. It is not without a hard struggle and many a pang that men can be brought to resign a form of faith which they have been accustomed to identify with the essence of all faith.

But while the losses incurred by applying to the Bible the principles of modern criticism are many, and to some earnest minds, painful, they are more than counterbalanced by the gains which result.

(1) First of all, criticism brings with it a certainty of its own such as was, after all, quite unknown in precritical times. Obviously, if the Bible is to tell us its message, whether authoritatively or not, we must first have in our hands as pure a text as possible. Nothing but the criticism of manuscripts, versions, and so forth, can supply this text. Now, it is well known that the texts of both Old and New Testaments which, before the age of modern criticism, were relied upon as the infallible Word of God abounded in false readings. The only certainty which people could feel as to their correctness reposed on the fond superstition that God had miraculously preserved the purity of the letter of his Word. The preliminary service which criticism has already rendered and is seeking still further to render, is that of putting us into the possession of a text which may be deemed as nearly authentic as the text of ancient writings can be reasonably expected to be. 1

1 The margin of the Revised English Bible, and still better, the notes of the Variorum Bible '

This increased certainty which criticism confers attaches in a higher degree still to the interpretation of the Bible. The interpretation of sacred books has been everywhere and always a scandalous satire upon the dogma of their infallibility. Notoriously the interpreters of these books have made them mean everything, and so practically nothing certainly. There is no proposition too absurd, or too degrading, or too unjust, to protect the Bible from prostitution to the proof of it. Every church, every sect, every enthusiast, with their dogmas, heresies, extravagances, have quoted from Scripture and twisted Scripture in their own defence and to the discomfiture of all antagonists. The various precritical systems of Biblical interpretation all united in the one effort of converting the desired safe and sure anchorage of Scripture into

(of Messrs. Eyre & Spottiswoode), or the edition of the Heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments,' translated and edited by Professor Kautzsch and other German scholars, furnish illustrations of the defectiveness of the 'received' texts. See Note A, p. 27.

the most instable and dangerous of quicksands. To all this unfixity of meaning criticism opposes the same measure of reasonable certainty as belongs to the interpretation of ancient books generally;

-a measure of certainty which is infallibility itself compared with the appalling vagaries and wild guesses of precritical interpreters. This service criticism has rendered by first of all putting an end to false and misleading theories as to the unique character and origin of the Bible, and also to the authority of dogmatic systems in relation to its contents. Having established for the interpreter this freedom, it has gone on to apply the same principles of exegesis which have to be used to discover the meaning of the Vedas, or Homer, or Shakespeare. By this means it has. taught the Biblical student to throw himself back into the times and circumstances of the Prophets, the Psalmists, and the Sages of Palestine, and to think over again their thoughts and feel afresh their inspiration. In precritical times, not only was the Law of Moses, but the whole Bible, a

veil over men's minds, hiding from their view the great world of truth; and their own preconceived notions and absurd methods of interpretation even a yet thicker veil over the face of the Bible. Criticism has taken both veils away, letting us see the beauty and glory of both the truth and the Bible.

(2) Criticism has proved a better defence of the Bible than the ablest apologies in view of very serious charges against its historical, moral, and religious character. Beyond doubt there are passages, and even whole books of the Bible, which fall far below the highest standard of present morality and religion (for example, Gen. xxxviii.; Num. xxxi.; I Kings i. and ii. ; Psalms cxxxvii. 8, 9; Esther; Revelation ii. 26, 27; vi. 10; viii. ; ix.; Matt. viii. 28–33 ; xiii. 38-43; Mark ix. 42-48; Luke xvi. 1-12, 19-31; xviii. 1-8). It is also certain that the cosmography of the Old and New Testaments is hopelessly prescientific, and was, as a fact, for long, a serious hindrance to the progress of science. Besides, it is too true that neither the Old nor the New