My Experience with Higher Criticism 117 of Marcion, but He is not the God of Israel, not the God and Father of Jesus Christ. “But,” says the critic, “the religious lessons are great and good.” Are they? Can a story or illus tration or parable teach good religious lessons when it is in itself essentially untrue to nature, history and life? To assert such a thing would seem to imply a moral and religious blind ness that is scarcely credible. It is true there are many grave difficulties in the book of Daniel, but are they as great as the moral difficulty implied in the critical view? The foregoing embody my chief reasons for rejecting the position of the Critical School with which I was once in sym pathy. Their positions are not merely vagaries, they are essen tially attempts to undermine revelation, the Bible and evan gelical Christianity. If these views should ultimately prevail, Christianity will be set aside for what is known as the New Religion, which is no religion, but a philosophy. All critics believe that traditional Christianity will largely, if not alto gether, give place to the modern view, as it is called. But we maintain that traditional Christianity has the right of way. It must and will be somewhat modified by the conception of a developing, revelation and the application of the historical method, but must prevail in all its essential features. It has a noble ancestry and a glorious history. The Bible writers are all on its side; the bulk of Jewish scholars of the past are in the procession; it has Jesus, the Son of God, in its ranks, with the apostles, prophets, the martyrs, the reformers, the theologians, the missionaries and the great preachers and evan gelists. The great mass of God’s people are with it. I prefer to belong to that goodly company rather than with the heathen Porphyry, the pantheistic Spinoza, the immoral Astruc, the rationalistic Reuss, Vatke, Graf, Kuenen and Wellhausen, with a multitude of their disciples of all grades. Theirs is a new traditionalism begun by those men and handed down to others in England and America. Most of these disciples owe their religious life and training almost entirely to the tradi-
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