the criticism I have described, and which he, orthodox and conservative, accepts almost entire. But it is certain that the makers of the Pentateuch, as we have it, did not accord to it a special inspiration and authority. Speaking of the eighth-century fusion of different documents, Renan says, "It is not possible to hack about so freely a text admitted to be inspired." Of the more elaborate fusion of the fifth century the same holds good. The belief in special inspiration and authority was the production of a later time, and there is nothing in the process of its growth that commends it to an intelligent mind, nor to any one who is not bound to stultify himself at any cost. But it is not only the character of God that is redeemed by the criticism of Deuteronomy: it is also the character of the Hebrew people, whose slaughter of the Canaanites, for which such miserable apologies have been made and which has often furnished terrible instructions to fanatical religionists, this criticism has remanded to an ideal sphere. It was a fancy picture, painted to encourage an exclusive and intolerant spirit, which for a time it did, and then followed a reaction. Another incidental gain is in the matter of Isaiah. The criticism which makes chapters xl.-lxvi. a separate prophecy, two centuries later than the rest, leaves to the prophet Isaiah all that he needs for his imperishable fame. The whole would be too much. The later portion gives us another prophet of equal, if not greater, power; and, as a voice of the Captivity, it acquires a pathos and a passion which it could not have in its old place. The book of Daniel makes a similar gain by its transference from the sixth century B.C. to the second, where it becomes the expression of that passion of revolt against the tyranny of Antiochus Epiphanes which raised the standard of the heroic Maccabees, and carried it to victory. Is it not a very real gain to the Psalms that even a criticism so conservative as that of Canon Driver cannot confidently ascribe to David a single Psalm? Would it help the Book of Common Prayer to know that Henry VIII., the much-married, the cruel, the murderous, had written half

of it? Had he been its reputed author, would it not help it to discover that he had no part in it, to be forever rid of that evil association, soiling at every touch? David, take him all around and with due allowance for his time, was not a better man or king than Henry VIII.; and the criticism which denies the Psalms to his traditional claim does them a real service. As much as ever they contain

"Words that have drunk transcendent meanings up
From the best passion of all bygone time,

Steeped through with tears of triumph and remorse,
Sweet with all sainthood, cleansed with martyr fires,"

though not unmixed with baser elements, to which David would be welcome if they were his by critical right. Henceforth they are the spiritual autobiography of Israel for eight hundred years, with here and there an accent so purely personal that we feel as if we ought to veil our faces from the contrition and the agony of a troubled soul. As the name of David attracted to itself the hymns and spiritual songs of Israel, so the name of Solomon attracted its proverbial wisdom, and perhaps the name of Job the long debate concerning the misfortunes and the sufferings of righteous men. In either case the gain is large which makes the individual wither, while the race is more and more. In the case of Job it sounds a truce to all the vain attempts to reconcile the speech of Elihu and the Epilogue with the remaining parts. How grandly, too, the Higher Criticism has rescued the book of Jonah and the Song of Songs from the contempt of the vulgar and the qualms of prurient prudes, and no less from the stuff and nonsense of the allegorical interpretation, and set them both on high as worthy of all honor, the one for its catholic sympathy with alien peoples, and the other for its praise of simple, faithful love, so radiantly beautiful and so passionately pure!

But these incidental gains must not detain us from that larger synthesis which is involved in the literary evolution of the Hexateuch and the books that answer to the succes

sive stages of its growth. The constructive achievement, par excellence, of the Higher Criticism within the Old Testament limits is the history of a national religious evolution from the deification of natural objects, trees, and stones to the worship of one God, not of and for Israel alone, but of the universe, and, if through Israel, for all mankind. From an original fetich worship, safely conjectured from the survivals of a later time, Israel in Egypt went forward to the worship of great natural forms and forces, and principally of a dreadful god of fire, much like the Ammonitish Molech and the Moabitish Chemosh, whose worship was with human sacrifices and other cruel rites. This god would seem to have been worshipped under different names, one of them Yahweh; or there were different gods from which the one so named came uppermost in time. "Moses His Choice," was the title of an ancient book in which I used to read to please my grandmother, and did not please myself. I have forgotten everything except the title; but the history we are considering teaches us that his choice was Yahweh, perhaps because he was his tribal god. The name mattered little. What did matter was that he connected his worship with morality in the Ten Commandments,— not as we have them now, for Moses was no monotheist and did not object to the idolatrous worship of Yahweh. From his time to Hosea's, five hundred years, Monolatry, the worship of one god, without denying the existence or the power of other gods, was Israel's loftiest ideal, too lofty for habitual realization. The worship of other gods with him was commoner than the exclusive worship of Yahweh. Witness the Baal worship of the Northern tribes, and the motley worship of Solomon, Ahaz, and Manasseh. In the eighth century B.C. Israel for the first time, under the leadership of such great prophets as Isaiah and Micah, arrived at the purely monotheistic idea, that there was only one God, that he was the creator of the universe, that he was to be worshipped without any image, that he was a righteous God, and was best worshipped with the sacrifices of righteousness. Only a small minority were

ready for so high a truth. A century later there was a compromise, the details of which are found in the book of Deuteronomy. It was substantially that the true worship of Yahweh consisted of sacrifices and righteousness. Only the sacrifices must be offered in Jerusalem, and there only. The violent revolution by which this compromise was forced upon the nation was soon followed by the Captivity, a period of intense literary and religious activity, whose most signal fruit was the Priests' Code, the levitical law of Numbers and Leviticus. Not amid the thunders of Sinai, but amid the thunders of Babylon, was the law delivered; and not to Moses, but to some daring innovator, whose fame would have been fatal to his work. The compromise of Deuteronomy had come full circle. There the priests had the best of it: here they had everything their own way. But the religious evolution still went on. A loftier spirituality, a more inward righteousness, is witnessed by the later Psalms and other writings of the centuries that bring us forward to the threshold of the Christian era.

This meagre outline is almost a travesty of that history of Israel's religious evolution which the Higher Criticism has achieved. Can these dry bones live? They can and do under the great master critics' magic spell. They are clothed with palpitating flesh. Their blood is warm with human love and hate and hope and fear and joy. And the history so made alive, as compared with the mechanical, traditional scheme of Israel's general decadence from, and spasmodic efforts to regain, the heights of an original revelation is full of a superb reality and an incalculable interest and inspiration.

In the traditional chronology of the Bible there is a gulf of four hundred and fifty years between the last chapters of the Old Testament and the first chapters of the New. One of the most significant achievements of the Higher Criticism has been to bridge this gulf, partly with material brought forward from the Old Testament, partly with material taken from the Apocrypha, in many instances approving the wis

dom of the Roman Church in making it canonical, and partly with material from sources wholly external to the Bible and Apocrypha, that it might be fulfilled as it was written by the poet :

"Filled up as 'twere the gaps of centuries,
Leaving that beautiful which had been so,
And making that which was not, till the place
Became religion, and the heart ran o'er
With silent worship of the great of old,

The dead but sceptred sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from their urns."

The beauty of this passage has not tempted me to an unlawful use of it. It expresses just exactly what the Higher Criticism has done for the centuries between Malachi and Matthew. These centuries, which have been generally regarded as centuries of decadence, and of that only, it has shown to have been a period of religious growth, of deepening spirituality, of ever-heightening anticipation of "the mind that was in Christ." Increasing formalism there was no doubt, but increasing inwardness and spirituality even more notably. One incident of this fresh reading of the last pre-Christian centuries has been that certain books of the Apocrypha have been shown to be much more inspired than some which the Old Testament includes, if, indeed, the most inspired is that which is the most inspiring.

It must be confessed that in many instances the representatives of the Higher Criticism have not dealt with the New Testament with the same sincerity and courage they have manifested in their dealings with the Old. "The reason is of course obvious," says one of the authors of "Lux Mundi.” "Why, what can be admitted in the Old Testament could not, without results disastrous to the Christian creed, be admitted in the New." To some it is by no means obvious, for it has been given them to see that the value of evidence is not affected by the magnitude of the issues at stake. Whatever happens to the Christian creed, the Higher Criti