The Book of Daniel 89 by their compeers. But outside of their learned circles a con- siderable number of writers and professors in schools, anxious to be in the forefront, have taken the German theories for proven facts, and by saying “all scholars are agreed,” etc., have spread an opinion that the Book of Daniel is a pious fraud. There is another class of impugners of Daniel—good men, who do not deny the ability of God to interpose in human affairs and foretell to His servants what shall be hereafter. These men, accepting as true what they hear asserted as the judgment of “all scholars” and regretfully supposing that Daniel is a fiction, have endeavored to save something from the wreck of a book which has been the stay of suffering saints through the ages, by expatiating on its moral and re- ligious teaching. It is probable that these apologists—victims themselves of a delusion which they did not create but which they have hastily and foolishly accepted—h ave done more harm than the mistaken scholars or the hasty copyists, for they have fostered the notion that a frand may be used for holy ends, and that a forger is a proper teacher of religious truth, and that the Son of God approved a lie. The scholars find that in chapter 8 of Daniel, under the figure of a very little horn, Antiochus Epiphanes is predicted as doing much hurt to the Jews. The vision is of the ram and he-goat which represent Persia and Greece, so specified by name. A notable horn of the he-goat, Alexander the Great, was broken, and in its place came four horns, the four king- doms into which the Greek empire was divided. From one of these four sprang the little horn. That this refers pri- marily to Antiochus Epiphanes there is no doubt. He died about 163 B. C. The theory of the rationalistic critics is that some “pious and learned Jew” wrote the Book of Daniel at that time to encourage the Maccabees in their revolt against this bad king; that the book pretends to have been written in Babylon, 370 years before, in order to make; it pass current as a revelation from God. This theory has been supported
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