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turning out many Pilates with their interrogation points of unbelief, rather than Peters with their periods of faith. The dread of dogmatism is almost hys terical. To believe and assert with the assurance of Peter a t Pentecost is bad intellectual form. It is rather a sign of mental stren g th . to doubt the old tru th , though it may be as clear as the sun in the heavens, while any little flickering taper th a t appears to be new is welcomed. I t is in th e atmosphere th a t we must be friendly to error, how ever damning. III. These myths are moths which eat great holes into the conscientious ness of good men. Some time ago a learned article appeared in a leading magazine over the name of a promi nent higher critic. A professor in a university, after reading th a t article, declared th a t he thought there was only one man in the world who could have written it, for he had given his life to the study of the specialty which it presented. He wrote to this man, asking what part he took in the com position of th a t article. The man re plied th a t he wrote every word of it, and sold it with author’s rights. The professor wrote again, in some aston ishment, th a t he could understand how an author might sell the product of his brain w ithout doing wrong, but what about the ethics of the man who bought it and published it over his own name as the product of his own brain? I have told the story to bring out the answer of this man. He replied, -“That is all right; it is ju st what was done when the different documents were col lected, put into one volume, and the name of Moses signed to them to give them authority, though Moses did not w rite a word of them.” This reveals to us the ethics of the higher criticism. If Hilkiah and his priests had the right to palm this forgery off on the people, why may not a modern literary aspirant do the same thing? And to say th a t Almighty God had a part in this transaction, and that
E 1, J 1, D 1, E 2, J 2, P 1, P 2, P 3, R, R J, J E D, one can hardly help feeling th a t he has gotten into an alge bra or a puzzle book with many un known quantities. If these wild and fanciful specula tions were kept within the brains of scholars or locked in musty books, read only by the learned, it would not be worth our While to write an article on the subject. But they have been popu larized, the magazines and even the daily press are full of them. What are the results? J. These myths are moths which eat away faith in the miraculous, God is driven out of His world, while His servants, natural laws, are deified. He is made the subject of His subjects. God is forbidden to work directly for the accomplishment of His purposes. The miraculous, which is simply an other word for God’s direct active agency in the world, must give way to the slow workings of the pagan theory of evolution. The resurrection of Jesus is in the way of this theory, and must be set aSide. Birth from above must give place to birth only from beneath. I heard a learned higher critic assert th a t Christianity was the evolution, and, to a large extent, the combination of all the pagan religions of the world which existed before the time of Christ. A revolution wrought by the power of God, like the conversion of 3,000 a t Pentecost, must give way to the evolu tion of pagan ideas. Everything and everybody, even Jesus Himself, must be the product of previous ages. The faith th a t wrought wonders through the working of Almighty God, as given in the 11th chapter of Hebrews, is a mere figure of speech. II. These myths are moths which have eaten away the faith of our teachers in higher institutions of learn ing, and have made some of them cen tres of unbelief. The Pilatism which in the presence of Him who is the tru th still asks, What is truth? is preval ent, and as a result our colleges are
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