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Show THE ENEMlliS OF THE. BIBLE. New York Sim. The opponents of the higher criticism of the Bible, It is called, tatv the advantage ei'criu defenders tiiai they are clear and consistent, honest and straightforward. They do not heat about the bush ami dodge the oaosnquencea of their argument I as the. others do, juggle w ith word, and pretend that unbelief is only a larger and H more enlightened belief. They eay exactly what they mean in terms which canuot be B mistaken. Everybody understands them. H The others, apparently, do not want to be Hi understood by anybody, or, perhaps we should say more eharaitbly, they dare not HV themselves fjeo the consequences of their HW methods and principles of Biblical interpre ts tatiou. They try to make themselves and Hj other people belivc that they are only put- H ting the authority of the Bible on a more W rational nasi,, when in truth they are de- W slroying it utterly, and along with it the supernatural basis of all theology and re- ligion. As Prof. Green of Princeton said last Sunday, there is nothing novel in attacks upon the genuineness and truth of the books of the Bible by scholars who have no faith in the supernatural; but these assaults as-saults aro new because they are made by "Christian scholars who claim to be evangelical evan-gelical in their creed, and to be reverent students of the Word of God." Dr. Brlggs, for instance, professes to believe in the "Ittaplratlou" of the Bible, but it is a sort of Inspiration which would he admtted rc.idily by those who deny the supernatural origin and Divine authority of the Scriptures. It is not inspiration, to use the words of Prof. Green, "In Its proper and universally accepted sense, as such a Divine control over the writers of Scriptures as secured their Infallibility and guarded them from error." its theory assumes that they were as liable to error as other men, and it accumulates proofs to show their inconsis- teneles, contradictions, and oiscrepaneies ; or, as Dr.Yan Dyke put it in his letter in The Sun on monday, to exhibit the face that they were conditioned, by their " national na-tional and personal peculiarities" and their "natural faculties, intellectual and moral, freely exercised In their production." I'n-doudlcdly I'n-doudlcdly Col. Ingersoll himself would be ready to accept inspiration so defined. Prof. Green, therefor, stated the issue between the new and the old theories of Inspiration eoreetly when he said that it concerned " the historical truth and Divine authority of the Old Testament from beginning begin-ning t.0 end and consequently the authority author-ity of the New Testament also, for therein what is assumed by these critics as error is accepted and confirmed as indisputable truth. They deny that Moses was the an. thor of the Pentateuch, and say that some of Its writer:, were Hot earlier than 751) B. G. though "our Lord and the inspired writers of the new testament abundantly confirm the claim of the Pentateuch to be regarded ns the Word of God, tor in so doing they uniformly attaeli to it the name of Moses.1' "If Jesus and his disciples were deceived as to Hun point, how can they be beleived as infallible in any respect? They also must have been limited b their "nut ural faculties, intellectual and moral." Dr. Van Dyke may call that " old-fash-foiled logic." "purely inductive instead of deductive;" but is it not common sense? So also is the logic of Prof. Green when he says that if in ordinary affa.rs a legal In etrumeiit or a piece of commercial paper, for instance, "is not from the source it claims to lie, and the signature attached to It is false, it is not worth the paper It is written upon." If Hoaei did not write the Pentateuch, and its authorship is purely conjectural, con-jectural, some of it obviously having been produced thousands of years after this time a-, a record of Jewish traditions by un known writers and for the purposes of priestcraft, what remains of the authority of those books or of any part of the Bible ai t tic Word of God? If its statements of facts arc contradictory and distinct events nre confounded, if it is a mere compilation and not nn original orig-inal document, wherein consists ils Inspiration) if the Bible thus be. gins with false pretences, what else in it Can be accepted as genuine troth from Hod any more than the doctrines and specula Hons of any other book? If the "natural faculties, Intellectual and moral," of the compiler.- of the Pentateuch led them to palm olT ni the work of Moses four distinct documents which were not hi-, and which contain duplicate and discrepant discre-pant statements, and whose diversity of style and matter show they could not have been written by any one man or st any single period, what sort of reliance can be placed on such faculties exercised ex-ercised by oilier writers of Scripture w hom we have been taught to beleive inspired and Infallible? As Prof, (ircen says, what crodrt would be attached to the Qoapelt if Instead of being written by Hcll known Ri.-isth's and cvanL'clists who were con. temporaries of Jesus eyewitnesses of tie- lads and events they describe, they were compossd many centuries after His lime by writers whose identity was undis. fovcru'ble or purelj conjectural? vVo commend to Dr. Van Dyke the careful, care-ful, the prayerful consideration of the argil-incut argil-incut of I'rof. Green, by which the pastor nf UlQ Brick Presbyterian Church is shown I" conclusively to be at enmity with tho belief be-lief in the Ilihle as "the only infallible rule of faitli and practice" which he professes and preaches. Bat perhaps by some pro. 0P.SS of "deductive ogte" he means that the Hil.le is infallible only in the sense that as there is no infallibility, it is as proper for him to distinguish (bus the Scriptures as to Binirle out any other book for the distinction distinc-tion Homer or Shakespeare, for instance. He tuny use tat term relatively only, as we say of a piece of art that it is prfecte, though, of course, absolute perfection is Impossible for any work of man. |