Testament sufficiently appreciates the love of truth and knowledge for their own sake. Consequently, enlightened and progressive minds, reading the Bible under the influence of precritical theories of its unity and general infallibility, have often assailed it with open hostility or contemptuously turned from it. They thereby saved their own souls-but with needless loss in manifold forms; and they wronged the Bible cruelly. The wrong and the loss it is the mission of criticism to prevent in future. By separating distinct documents and strata of tradition; by tracing the successive stages of moral and religious and social progress; and by estimating every moral and religious, and every cosmographical view in accordance with the conditions of the time and place, Biblical 'offences' of this nature practically cease. Nowadays, we no more dislike the Bible than we dislike Homer on their account; and we are able to enjoy and profit from the high and perfect things on its pages in proportion as criticism enables us to distinguish and separate them from what is

of inferior moral and religious value. For instance, in the two accounts of the Creation we can drop the science of the Elohist, Gen. . 1-ii. 4a, or of the Jahvist ii. 46-25, and retain the religion and humanity of both; we can admire the story of David's patriotism, magnanimity, romantic heroism, in the book of Samuel, and yet condemn the implied standard of his morals and the superstition of his religion; we can transfer some Psalms, or parts of Psalms, to our Prayer Books, and assign others their place amongst the Records of the Past; we may find in Luke's Gospel an Ebionite 'source,' and so avoid laying to the charge of Jesus some questionable ethics and theology; we can appropriate the eternal truth (God is love'), and pass by the temporal error (we are of God') of such a chapter as I John iv.; we can do as Luther did, remove certain books from the position they once occupied in the Bible to a less honourable one at the end. So criticism really saves the Bible from rejection, and secures for what is religiously and morally best in it, a lasting place in

our reverence and affection, and for what is æsthetically venerable, natural, strong and interesting in it, an assured place in immortal literature. Henceforth, it is a great and dear treasure. We may compare it with other Sacred Books, if we like, and even with other literatures generally, and see in what respects it is equal, or inferior, or superior to them. But such comparison ought never to be made with the view of depreciating other books and exalting it at their cost. Religions and literatures are not rivals, but allied revelations of God and man, having all alike their own peculiar defects and their own peculiar excellences. There are passages in the Bible which Plato could not have written, and passages in Plato quite beyond the reach of Hebrew or early Christian thought and aspiration. What in literature is good is good in itself, and not in rivalry with anything else. The great things in Isaiah, Job, the Psalms, Paul, and the Gospels, may indeed eclipse less perfect ones within the same books: but they do not come into competition with things on

the same high level either within the Bible or in other ancient or modern writers. Perfect things are Divine, and Divinity knows no degrees, and above all, knows no jealousy.

(3) Criticism has recovered for the Bible its proper dignity and spiritual power by rescuing it from the debasement of an idol or fetish, and restoring it to its original human and Divine form. The precritical notion of the Bible as throughout the inspired and infallible Word of God converted, as Coleridge says, ' this breathing organism, this glorious panharmonicon, which I had seen stand on its feet as a man, and with a man's voice given to it, at once into a colossal Memnon's head, a hollow passage for a voice, a voice that mocks the voices of many men, and speaks in their names, and yet is but one voice and the same :— and no man uttered it, and never in a human heart was it conceived.' To make anything, but especially a beautiful thing, an idol, is to debase it, and to make it what it is not, to use it for offices which it cannot perform, to disregard its proper qualities

and functions; and all to the unhappy end of degrading mentally and morally the superstitious worshipper also. The degradation and wrong are immeasurably sad when a noble literature—' the precious lifeblood' of a glorious line of ' master-spirits,' embalmed and treasured up to a life beyond life,' is the victim of this superstition. Such bibliolatry commits the crime of which Milton speaks: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image: but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.' In saddest reality, precritical bibliolatry, by changing the books, 'the precious life-blood' of Hebrew Prophets and Psalmists, Wise Men and Historians, and early Christian Evangelists and Apostles, into the mechanical vehicles of superhuman and unearthly communications, killed the reason and the image of God therein reflected. Criticism has restored to life Isaiah and Job, Jesus and Paul. Once more we read their thoughts in their own language. They speak to us. and with us as living men speak to living

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