The History of the Higher Criticism.
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A GREAT MISTAKE. There is a widespread idea also among the younger stu dents that because Graf and Wellhausen and Driver and Cheyne are experts in Hebrew that, therefore, their deduc tions as experts in language must be received. This, too, is a mistake. There is no such difference in the Hebrew of the so-called original sources of the Hexateuch as some suppose. The argument from language, says Professor Bissell ( “Intro duction to Genesis in Colors,” page vii), requires extreme care for obvious reasons. There is no visible cleavage line among the supposed sources. Any man of ordinary intelli gence can see at once the vast difference between the English of Tennyson and Shakespeare, and Chaucer and Sir John de Mandeville. But no scholar in the world ever has or ever will be able to tell the dates of each and every book in the Bible by the style of the Hebrew. (See Sayce, “Early His tory of the Hebrews,” page 109.) The unchanging Orient knows nothing of the swift lingual variations of the Occi dent. Pusey, with his masterly scholarship, has shown how even the Book of Daniel, from the standpoint of philology, cannot possibly be a product of the time of the Maccabees. (“On Daniel,” pages 23-59.) The late Professor of Hebrew in the University of Toronto, Professor Hirschfelder, in his very learned work on Genesis, says: “We would search in vain for any peculiarity either in the language or the sense that woud indicate a two-fold authorship.” As far as the language of the original goes, “the most fastidious critic could not possibly detect the slightest peculiarity that would indi cate it to be derived from two sources” (page 72). Dr. Emil Reich also, in his “Bankruptcy of the Higher Criticism,” in the Contemporary Review, April, 1905, says the same thing. NOT ALL ON ONE SIDE. A third objection remains, a most serious one. It is that all the scholarship is on one side. The old-fashioned conserva-
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