Fallacies of the Higher Criticism. 53 author in their production. The very keenest critics have sought to separate his part in these plays from the rest, but they confess that the result is uncertainty and dissatisfaction. Coleridge professed to distinguish the passages contributed by Shakespeare by a process of feeling, but Macaulay pronounce this claim to be nonsense, and the entire effort, whether made by the analysis of phraseology and style, or by esthetic percep tions, is an admitted failure. And this in spite of the fact that the style of Shakespeare is one of the most peculiar and inimitable. The Anglican Prayer Book is another composite production which the higher critics have often been invited to analyze and distribute to its various sources. Some of the authors of these sources lived centuries apart. They are now well known from the studies of historians. But the Prayer Book itself does not reveal one of them, though its various vocabularies and styles have been carefully interrogated. Now if the analysis of the Pentateuch can lead to such certainties, why should not the analysis of Shakespeare and the _Prayer Book do as much? How can men accomplish M a foreign lan guage what they cannot accomplish in their own? How can they accomplish in a dead language what they cannot accom plish in a living language ? How can they distinguish ten or eighteen or twenty-two collaborators in a small literary produc tion, when they cannot distinguish two? These questions have been asked many times, but the higher critics have given no answer whatever, preferring the safety of a learned silence; “The oracles are dumb.” 3. Much has been made of differences of vocabulary in the Pentateuch, and elaborate lists of words have been assigned to each of the supposed authors. But these distinctions fadeaway when subjected to careful scrutiny, and Driver admits that the phraseological criteria * * | are slight.” Orr,* who quotes this testimony, adds, “They are slight, in fact, to a degree of tenuity that often makes the recital of them appear like tn- fiing.” *“The Problem of the Old Testament,” page 230.
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