letter to the spirit, from clinging to the outer walls, to seek Him who is the sum and substance, the Master and the King of the Scriptures.

Here the people and critics are agreed, who can doubt it ?

"As if the vast multitude of Christian souls who really used it did not believe in a Bible, which in its parts is vital and saving as well as in the whole, which is superior in its central lessons to all the errors of editors and translators, and which can even convey eternal life by its reproduction in sermons, however weak, that are faithful to its spirit, though they do not literally give back one of its sentences." "'*

As Tyndale, our great English reformer, says:

"The Scriptures spring out of God and flow unto Christ, and were given to lead us to Christ. Thou must therefore go along by the Scripture, as by a line, until thou come to Christ who is the ways end and resting-place." + "For though the Scripture be an outward instrument and the preacher also to move men to believe. Yet the chief and principal cause why a man believeth, or believeth not, is within; that is, the Spirit of God leadeth His children to believe." +

* Prin. Cairns, Unbelief in 18th Century, p. 152. ↑ Works, Parker Series, I., p. 317.

Works, III., p. 139.

CHAPTER VII.

THE HIGHER CRITICISM.

We have shown in our previous chapters that the Ref. ormation was a great critical revival; that evangelical biblical criticism was based on the formal principle of Protestantism, the divine authority of the Scriptures over against ecclesiastical tradition; that the voice of God Himself, speaking to His people through His Word, is the great evangelical critical test; that the reformers applied this test to the traditional theory of the canon and eliminated the apocryphal books therefrom; that: they applied it to the received versions, and, rejecting the inspiration and authority of the Septuagint and Vul. gate versions, resorted to the original Greek and Hebrew texts; that they applied it to the Massoretic traditional pointing of the Hebrew Scriptures, and, rejecting it as uninspired, resorted to the divine original unpointed text; that they applied it to the traditional manifold sense and allegorical method of interpretation, and, rejecting these, followed the plain grammatical sense, interpreting difficult and obscure passages by the mind of the Spirit in passages that are plain and undisputed.

We have also described the second critical revival under the lead of Cappellus and Walton, and their conflict with the Protestant scholastics who had reacted from the critical principles of the Reformation into a reliance upon

rabbinical tradition. We have shown that the Puritan divines still held the position of the reformers, and were not in accord with the scholastics. We have now to trace a third critical revival which began toward the close of the eighteenth century in the investigations of the poetic and literary features of the Old Testament by. Bishop Lowth in England and the poet Herder in Germany, and of the structure of Genesis by the Roman Catholic physician Astruc. The first critical revival had been mainly devoted to the canon of Scripture, its authority and interpretation. The second critical revival had been chiefly with regard to the original texts and versions. The third critical revival now gave attention to the investigation of the sacred Scriptures as literature.

I. THE HIGHER CRITICISM IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES.

Little attention had been given to the literary features of the Bible in the sixteenth century. How the reformers would have met these questions we may infer from their freedom with regard to traditional views in the few cases in which they expressed themselves. Luther denied the Apocalypse to John and Ecclesiastes to Solomon. He inaintained that the epistle of James was not an apostolic writing. He regarded Jude as an extract from 2d Peter, and said, What matters it if Moses should not himself have written the Pentateuch ?* He thought the epistle to the Hebrews was written by a disciple of the apostle Paul, who was a learned man, and made the epistle as a sort of a composite piece in which there are some things. hard to be reconciled with the Gospel. Calvin denied the

* See Diestel, Gesch. des Alten Test. in der christlichen Kirche, 1869, p. 250, se7.; and Vorreden in Walch edit. of Luther's Werken, XIV., pp. 35, 146–153 Tischreden, I., p. 28.

Pauline authorship of the epistle to the Hebrews and doubted the Petrine authorship of 2d Peter. He taught that Ezra or some one else edited the Psalter and made the first Psalm an introduction to the collection, not hesitating to oppose the traditional view that David was the author or editor of the entire Psalter. He also regarded Ezra as the author of the prophecy of Malachi -Malachi being his surname. He furthermore constructed, after the model of a harmony of the gospels, a harmony of the pentateuchal legislation about the Ten Commandments as a centre, holding that all the rest of the commandments were mere "appendages, which add not the smallest completeness to the Law."*

Zwingli, Ecolampadius, and other reformers took similar positions. These questions of authorship and date troubled the reformers but little; they had to battle against the Vulgate for the original text and popular versions, and for a simple grammatical exegesis over against traditional authority and the manifold sense. Hence it is that on these literary questions the symbols of the Reformation take no position whatever, except to lay stress upon the sublimity of the style, the unity and harmony of Scripture, and the internal evidence of its inspiration and authority. Calvin sets the example in

"Therefore, God protests that He never enjoined anything with respect to sacrifices; and He pronounces all external rites but vain and trifling if the very least value be assigned to them apart from the Ten Commandments. Whence we more certainly arrive at the conclusion to which I have adverted, viz.: that they are not, to speak correctly, of the substance of the law, nor avail of themselves in the worship of God, nor are required by the Lawgiver himself as necessary, or even as useful, unless they sink into this inferior position. In fine, they are appendages which add not the smallest completeness to the Law, but whose object is to retain the pious in the spiritual worship of God, which consists of Faith and Repentance, of Praises whereby their gratitude is proclaimed, and even of the endurance of the cross" (Preface to Harmony of the Four Last Books of the Pentateuck).

this particular in his Institutes, and is followed by Thomas Cartwright, Archbishop Usher, and other Calvinists.

The Westminster Confession is in entire accord with the other Reformed confessions and the faith of the Reformation. It expresses a devout admiration and profound reverence for the holy majestic character and style of the Divine Word, but does not define the human authors and dates of the various writings. As Prof. A. F. Mitchell, of St. Andrew's, well states:

"Any one who will take the trouble to compare their list of the canonical books with that given in the Belgian Confession or the Irish articles, may satisfy himself that they held with Dr. Jameson that the authority of these books does not depend on the fact whether this prophet or that wrote a particular book or parts of a book whether a certain portion was derived from the Elohist or the Jehovist, whether Moses wrote the close of Deuteronomy, Solomon wat the author of Ecclesiastes, or Paul of the Epistle to the Hebrews but in the fact that a prophet, an inspired man, wrote them, and tha they bear the stamp and impress of a divine origin."*

And Matthew Poole, the great Presbyterian critic of the seventeenth century, quotes with approval the following from Melchior Canus:

"It is not much material to the Catholick Faith that any book was written by this or that author, so long as the Spirit of God is believed to be the author of it; which Gregory delivers and explains : For it matters not with what pen the King writes his letter, if it be true that he writ it." †

Andrew Rivetus, one of the chief Reformed divines

*Minutes of the Sessions of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, Nov 1644-Mch., 1649, edited by A. F. Mitchell and J. Struthers. Edin., 1874, P.

+ Blow at the Root, 4th ed., 1671, p. 228,