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Fallacies of the Higher Criticism. tory of literature, is a fallacy, leaving us utterly unable to account for Homer, or Dante, or Shakespeare, the greatest poets of the world, yet all of them writing in the dawn of the great literatures of the world. I t is a fallacy when applied to the history of religion, leaving us utterly unable to account for Abraham and Moses and Christ, and requiring us to deny that they could have been such men as the Bible declares them to have been. The hypothesis is a fallacy when applied to the history of*the human race in general. Our race has made prog ress under the influence of supernatural revelation; but prog ress under the influence of supernatural revelation is one thing, and evolution is another. Buckle* undertook to account for history by a thorough-going application of the hypothesis of evolution to its problems; but no historian today believes that he succeeded in his effort, and his work is universally regarded as a brilliant curiosity. The types of evolution advocated by different higher critics are'widely different from one another, varying from the pure naturalism of Wellhausen to the recog nition of some feeble rays of supernatural revelation, but the hypothesis of evolution in any form, when applied to human history, blinds us and renders us incapable of beholding the glory of God in its more signal manifestations. THIRD FALLACY: THE BIBLE A NATURAL BOOK. III. A third fallacy of the higher critics is the doctrine concerning the Scriptures which they teach. If a consistent hypothesis of evolution is made the basis of our religious thinking, the Bible will be regarded as only a product of human nature working in the field of religious literature. It will be merely a natural book. If there are higher critics who recoil from this application of the hypothesis of evolution and who seek to modify it by recognizing some special evidences of the divine in the Bible, the inspiration of .which they speak rises but little higher than the providential guidance of the writers. ♦‘‘History of Civilization in England.”
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