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known to men, who can give them ordi nances and rites o f worship, and reward or punish them as they obey or disobey. I f there be not such a God, making known His truth to those whom He chooses, and inspiring them to teach others, the Bible is a record o f what could not possibly have taken place. Its Jehovah is a being who does not exist, and all its accounts o f His dealings with men are idle fictions. QUIZZING TH E CR IT IC - When, therefore, a critic sits in judg ment on the Bible, we ask him, first of all, what he believes respecting God and His relations to men. Can these relations, as presented in it, be true? I f his con ception o f God be such that he starts with the assumption o f the necessary, untruth fulness o f most important points o f the biblical record, it is idle to consider his criticism in detail; if, indeed, that can be called criticism which assumes the neces sary falsity o f the statements criticised. Foot noté— (In Jewish history, as pre sented by the pantheistic .critics, we have not the dealings of God with the Jews, but the evolution o f their conception of God. T h e.historical statements have value chiefly as illustrative of the growth o f spiritual ideas. God is not a Person mak ing known to them in gradual revelation a purpose in which He calls them the workers'together with Him, but an imper sonal spiritual Principle developing itself in them. It is on thi^ ground that such histories of the Jews as given by Kuenen, Reuss, Renan, f, Menzies, and others, although they may have value for the criti cal student, tend to weaken the faith o f the general reader in the Biblical history. If this does not conform to the historian’s philosophy o f God and o f man’s religious^ development, the conclusion is foregone that the events could not have taken place as narrated). W e may then exclude from the class of true biblical critics all thoSe who, denying a personal God, make thereby the funda mental statements o f the Scriptures, dog matic and historical, impossible. And the
agnostic must also be excluded, since his affirmation o f the unknowability o f God is, in substance, a positive assertion that the Bible, as a revelation o f His character and will, cannot be true. O f its essential falsity ' to the atheist, it is not necessary to speak. The critics o f these several classes are thus set free from any inquiry as to the reality o f the great facts on which biblical history rests—the creation, the relation o f Adam to the race, the fall,, the redemption, the Incarnation. Its found ation truths denied in advance, the Bible ceases to be a sacred and authoritative book, and has' an interest for the critic only as the sacred books o f other peoples have, that he may show its origin, its grad ual growth, how its statements came to be believed, and what influence they have had in moulding modern religious belief. Its study ,is mainly a matter o f antiquarian research, and its chief value is as an illus tration o f one conspicuous form o f relig ious development. W H Y SO PERSISTENT ?' It may seem strange that pantheists, agnostics, and atheists should think it worth while to employ themselves upon such a work o f supererogation as to attack the Bible in detail, when they have already condemned it in the gross; but many books o f this kind o f pseudo-criticism are .yearly written. W e may take as an eminent example Strauss in his “Life o f Jesus.” With his pantheistic conception o f God and o f His relations to men, he could not accept the Gospels as possibly true. Such a man as the Incarnate Son, the Christ of the Church, could never have lived. Undoubtedly there lived the man Jesus, a super-eminent religious genius, ^yet in nature a man like other men, without super natural powers, a son o f His age; and the work of criticism is to separate the nucleus o f historical truth in the gospel narratives from the encrustations that have grown up around it. The reader, knowing his philosophical starting point, knows from the first ^to what conclusion Strauss will come; and that, even if there were abso-
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