42 The Fundamentals. tah by the papyrus Anastasia(5S); Moab, for some time past in dispute, I identified beyond further controversy at Luxor in 1908, in an inscription of Rameses II., before the time of the Exodus<59); while Hilprecht at Nippur(0O), Glaser in Arabia(61), Petrie at Maghereh and along the route of the Exodus(62), and Reisner at Samaria have been adding a multitude of geograph ical, ethnographical and historical identifications. The completion of the whole list of identifications is rap idly approaching, and the collocation of these identifications has given us anew, from entirely independent testimony of archaeology, the whole outline of the biblical narrative and its surroundings, at once the necessary material for the his torical imagination and the surest foundation of apologetics. Fancy for a moment that the peoples, places and events of the wanderings of Ulysses should be identified: all the strange route of travel followed; the remarkable lands visited and de scribed, the curious creatures, half human and half monstrous, and even unmistakable traces of strange events, found, all just as the poet imagined, what'a transformation in our views of Homer’s great epic must take place! Henceforth that romance would be history. Let us reverse the process and fancy that the peoples, places, and events of the Bible story were as lit tle known from independent sources as the wanderings of Ulysses; the intellectual temper of this age would unhesitat ingly put the Bible story in the same mythical category in which have always been the romances of Homer. If it were possible to blot out biblical geography, biblical ethnology, and biblical history from the realm of exact knowledge, so would we put out the eyes of faith, henceforth our religion would be blind, stone blind. Thus the value of the rapid progress of identifications appears. It is the. identifications which differentiate history from myth, geography from the “land of nowhere,” the rec ord of events from tales of “never was,” Scripture from folk lore, and the Gospel of the Saviour of the world from the de-
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