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Christ and Criticism.
CRITICAL PROFANITY. But to return to Moses. According to “the critical hypoth esis,” the books of the Pentateuch are literary forgeries of the Exilic Era, the work of the Jerusalem priests of those evil days. From the Book of Jeremiah we know that those men were profane apostates; and if “the critical hypothesis be true, they were infinitely worse than even the prophet’s inspired de nunciations of them indicate. For no eighteenth century athe ist ever sank to a lower depth of profanity than is displayed by their use of the Sacred Name. In the preface to his “Dark ness and Dawn,” Dean Farrar claims that he “never touches the early preachers of Christianity with the finger of fiction.” When his story makes Apostles speak, he has “confined their words to the words of a revelation.” But ex. hyp-, the authors of the Pentateuch “touched with the finger of fiction” not only the holy men of the ancient days, but their Jehovah God. “Je hovah spake unto Moses, saying.” This and kindred formulas are repeated times without number in the Mosaic books. If this be romance, a lower type of profanity is inconceivable,/' unless it be that of the man who fails to be shocked and re volted by it. But no; facts prove that this judgment is unjust. For men of unfeigned piety and deep reverence for divine things can be so blinded by the superstitions of “religion’f that the im primatur of the church enables them to regard these discred ited books as Holy Scripture. As critics they brand the Pen tateuch as a tissue of myth and legend and fraud, but as re ligionists they assure us that this “implies no denial of its in spiration or disparagement of its Contents.”* ERRORS REFUTED BY FACTS. In controversy it is of the greatest importance to allow op ponents to state their position in their own words; and here *“The Higher Criticism: Three Papers,” by Professors Driver and Kirkpatrick.
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