THE KING’S BUSINESS 69 demons who are worshiped as gods. The fact is that Moses seems to have had a truer conception of the beings whom the heathen worship than the writer of these lessons. That Moses did not regard the other “ gods” as God in the sense in which Jehovah was God is evident from Deuteronomy 6 :4 , 5, where he says, “Hear, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah: And thou shalt love Jehovah, thy God, with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” The writer on page 15 makes the patriarchs out to have been nature worshipers. He finds proof of this in the oak of Moreh (Gen. 12 :6 ) and the oaks or terribinths o f Mamre (Gen. 13:18; 14: 13; 18 :1 ) and also in the account of Beersheba (Gen. 26 :25 ) and the stone which Jacob set up for a pillar (Gen. 28:11-22). It is hardly necessary to go into this. If anybody will study the passages in question he will see it is the sheerest imagination and nonsense. About Beersheba he says, “ Beersheba, the well or spring of the seven (spirits) or of the oath, either translation being permsisible.” Now either translation is not permissible. There would be no sense in “ the well of the seven” unless were meant spirits as the writer puts in brackets, but there is no “ spirits” in the Hebrew either stated or implied. The writer supplies it out of his own head. It was “ the well of the oath/’ : and why so called is evi dent from various passages of Scripture (Gen. 21 :30, 31). The calling it “ the ■well of the seven spirits” is simply the substituting (in order to prove a theory) of the fantastic imagination of the writer for the Scripture record. The writer seems to favor, though he does it with some caution, the theory that “ Jehovah was the God of the Kenite clan into which Moses married. His marriage into the clan involved the acceptance of its God as his own” (page 22, note context). This is pure nonsense and dangerous nonsense at that. On page 34 the writer says, “ Later Jewish theory regarded ,the entire He brew legal system as having been communicated to Moses on Mt. Sinai, by him to Joshua and the elders and so on. . . , and secondly, we have the strange phenomenon of a nation apparently having had not a single addition to or change in her laws for more than a thousand years.” Evidently, the writer does not accept this later Jewish theory that the entire Hebrew legal system came through Moses. He does not say it right out, but he is insid iously trying to introduce the composite theory o f the Pentateuch, a theory that has been tried and found utterly wanting. It was not merely “ the later Jewish theory” that attributed the entire Hebrew legal system to Moses, it was our Lord Jesus Christ Himself. He says explicitly in John 7:19, “Did not Moses give you the law?” Over and over again our Lord Jesus attributed the law to Moses. Probably the writer of these lessons thinks our Lord was mis taken. The real Christian, however, will have more confidence in the teach ing of Jesus than of any German school of criticism. The man who accepts the Graf-Wellhausen theory about the Pentateuch wholly or substantially is not up to date, and these lessons with their great parade of pretended scholarship are really not up to date. Furthermore, they are not only devoid of any real value, they are positively pernicious. With all the criticism that could be justly made upon details of the International Lessons, they are immeasurably better than such graded systems as this. We cannot but believe that the great majority of ministers and teachers in the Baptist denomination are thor oughly sound still, but why they submit to this sort of things that is being foisted upon their Sunday Schools by the American Baptist Publication So ciety is more than we can understand. The same thing might be said of some other “ graded systems” of lessons.
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