Holy Scripture a:nd Modern Negations 103 ceive us when we think we see it? Or has somebody of a later date invented it, and put it all, inwrought it all, in these earlier records, legends and stories, or whatever you like to call it-skilfully woven into the story until it presents there the appearance of naturalness and truth? I would like to find the mind capable of inventing it, and then the mind capable of putting it in and working it into a history once they got the idea itself. But if not invented, it belongs to the reality and the substance of the history ; it belongs to the facts ; and there fore to the Book that records the facts. And there are internal attestations in that structure of the Bible to the genuineness of its contents that protest against the efforts that are so often made to reduce i t to fragments and shiver up that unity and turn it upside down. "Walk about Zion . . . tell the towers thereof; mark ye well her bulwarkse;" you will find there's something there which the art of man will not avail to overthrow. "Now, that is all very well,'' I hear some one say, "but there are facts on the other side; there are those manifold proofs which our critical friends adduce that the Bible is really a collection of fragments and documents of much later date, and that the history is really quite a different thing from what the Bible represents it to be." Well, are we to sit down and accept their dictum on that subject without evi dence? When I turn to the evidence I do not find them to have that convincing power which our critical friends assign to them. I am not rejecting this kind of critical theory because it goes against my prejudices or traditions ; I reject it simply because it seems to me the evidence does not sustain it, and that the stronger evidence is against it. I cannot go into de tails; but take just the one point that I have mentioned-this post-exilian origin of the Levitical law. I have stated what is said about that matter-that those laws and institutions
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