My Experience with Higher Criticism 105 imagination is the very negation of science, notwithstanding their boast of a scientific method. Their minds seem to be in abject slavery to their theory. No reason is more impervious to facts than one preoccupied with a theory which does not agree with these facts. Their mental attitude being biased and partial, their methods are partial and the results very one sided and untrustworthy. They give more credence to the guesses of some so-called scholar, a clay tablet, a heathen king’s boast, or a rude drawing in stone, than to the Scripture record. They feel instinctively that to accept the Bible state ments would be the ruin of their hypothesis, and what they call their hard-won historical method. In this their instinct is true. The Bible and their hypothesis are irreconcilable. As their theory must not be interfered with, since it is identical with the truth itself, the Bible must stand aside in the interests of truth. For this reason they deny all historicity to Genesis 1-11, the stories of Creation, the Fall, the Flood, etc. No theory of naturalistic evolution can possibly admit the truth of these chapters. Likewise, there is but a substratum of truth in the stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses. Nearly all legislation is denied to the latter, because it represents too rapid an advance, or a stage too advanced. But is such the case? Centuries before Moses, laws, government, civiliza tion, culture, art, education, religion, temples, ritual and priest hood had flourished in Babylonia and Egypt and were a chief factor in the education of Moses. With all this previous devel opment upon which to build, what objections to ascribing these laws to Moses, who, during the forty years under divine guidance, selected, purified, heightened, and adopted such laws as best served the needs of the people. The development of external laws and customs had preceded Moses, and there is no need to suppose a development afterward in the history of the people. That history records the fitful attempts at the assimilation of these laws. To maintain that they were at first
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