The History of the Higher Criticism. 107 equal to that of the Germans. They certainly handle the Old Testament as if it were ordinary literature. And in all their theories they seem like plastic wax in the hands of the rationalistic moulders. But they still claim to believe in Bib lical inspiration. A REVOLUTIONARY THEORY. Their theory of inspiration must be, then, a very different one from that held by the average Christian. In the Bampton Lectures for 1903, Professor Sanday of Oxford, as the exponent of the later and more conservative school of Higher Criticism, came out with a theory which he termed the inductive theory. It is not easy to describe what is fully meant by this, but it appears to mean the presence of what they call “a divine element” in certain parts of the Bible. What that really is he does not accurately declare. The lan guage always vapours off into the vague and indefinite, when ever he speaks of it. In what books it is he does not say. “It is present in different books and parts of books in different degrees.” “In some the Divine element is at the maximum; in others at the minimum.” He is not always sure. He is sure it is not in Esther, in Ecclesiastes, in Daniel. If it is in the historical books, it is there as conveying a religious lesson rather than as a guarantee of historic veracity, rather as inter preting than as narrating. At the same time, if the histories as far as textual construction was concerned were “natural processes carried out naturally,” it is difficult to see where the Divine or supernatural element comes in. It is an inspiration which seems to have been devised as a hypothesis of compro mise. In fact, it is a tenuous, equivocal, and indeterminate something, the amount of which is as indefinite as its quality. (Sanday, pages 100398; cf. Driver, Preface, ix.) But its most serious feature is this: It is a theory of inspiration that completely overturns the old-fashioned ideas of the Bible and its unquestioned standard of authority and
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