many kinds of literature. History and lyric, the ancient legend, the folk-tale, the parable, the lofty oracles of the prophet, the religious debate, all find a place within its pages. The recognition of diversities of contents and style has fixed attention on the processes by which the books have reached their present form, and driven the student to investigate the materials out of which they have been composed. This has again and again resulted in profound modifications alike of our historic view and our theological beliefs. Theories once ardently cherished have been overthrown. Conceptions that had exerted immense influence for centuries, can no longer be maintained. Some doctrines-such as that of eternal punishment-have been widely abandoned in silence; others, like that of vicarious atonement, have been so transformed even in fifty years as to be hardly recognisable. On the other hand, the true value of the Bible has been enhanced. We have ceased to ask of it what it cannot give us; we cherish all the more highly what it can. Here is the testimony of men who have striven and suffered, men who have believed and hoped; and the power of their faith, their utterance, their character, shines out for us with more illustrious value in the great process of the divine education of the race, when it is compared and contrasted with similar witness from the great nations with which Israel was in turn associated. Babylonia and Egypt are among the teachers of Greece, and through Greece of modern Europe; each represents a religious culture

vastly older than that of Israel; but the immense literatures inscribed on temple and tomb beside the Nile, or buried among the ruined libraries beneath the mounds of Mesopotamia, might have remained for ever unread, and our spiritual life to-day would be no poorer. But we cannot imagine either our history or our religion without the Bible.

This general result is the product of many influences besides the literary enquiries which have been illustrated in the preceding lectures. It must suffice here to name three of the most prominent which have operated with special force during the last century, (1) the progress of science, (2) the discovery of the sources of much of the early story of human things related in the opening chapters of Genesis, and (3) the slow rise into our view of the Greater Bible of the entire race, supported on an enormous mass of primitive speculation concerning the origin of the world and the condition of man.

I.

When the nineteenth century opened, the Church had long come to terms with the Copernican theory of astronomy, and the Biblical view of the position of the earth as the centre of the universe, spread out upon the deep beneath the solid 'firmament' of the sky, had been frankly abandoned. The rising science of geology was exciting eager interest; and the difficulties of reconciling its discoveries with the Mosaic cosmogony had led pious students to suggest

that the fossils which appeared to indicate that the strata containing them had been deposited in the depths of the sea, had been really created in their actual places by a kind of Almighty sport. Theologians like Buckland1 found another way out of the perplexities of the first chapter of Genesis by stretching the Mosaic days' into indeterminate periods of geologic time; or by supposing that a vast amount of creative activity shaping the crust of the earth lay unrecorded in the age preceding the appearance of organic life. The impossibility of harmonising a universal Deluge with the round earth of our knowledge' led to its contraction within the more limited regions open to the view of the Mosaic writer; while the accumulating evidence for the antiquity of man made the pedigree of the whole race from Adam and Eve more and more doubtful. The students of classical antiquity, like Niebuhr, Grote, and Sir George Cornwall Lewis, had 'revolutionised' (to quote the Bampton lecturer of 1859) 'the whole world of profane history

:

'Time was—and that not very long ago-when all the relations of ancient authors were received with a ready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith accepted with equal satisfaction

1 Bridgewater Treatise, Geology and Mineralogy considered with reference to Natural Theology, 1836, chap. ii: 'Consistency of Geological Discoveries with Sacred History.'

"For instance, the entire quantity of moisture in the world, if reduced to water, would not suffice to cover the surface of the globe above the highest mountains,

The Rev. George Rawlinson, The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records, p. 4.

the narrative of the campaigns of Cæsar and of the doings of Romulus, the account of Alexander's marches and of the conquests of Semiramis. We can most of us remember when in this country the whole story of regal Rome, and even the legend of the Trojan settlement in Latium, were seriously placed before boys as history, and discoursed of in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of the Catiline conspiracy or the conquest of Britain . . . .

'But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the birth and growth of a new science-the Science of Historical Criticism. . . . The views of the ancient world formerly entertained have been in ten thousand points either modified or reversed.'

Was this new Science to be applied to the early traditions of Israel? By no means. A nation, it was argued, could easily retain its traditions for five generations. But there were really only five steps between Adam and Moses. Adam was for 243 years contemporary with Methuselah; and Methuselah conversed for a hundred years with Shem. Shem, in his turn, survived till Jacob was fifty; and Jacob probably saw Jochebed, the mother of Moses. It was, then, gravely argued before the University of Oxford less than half a century ago' that thus Moses might, by mere oral tradition, have obtained the history of Abraham and even of the Deluge at third hand; and that of the Temptation and the Fall at fifth hand'; and the conclusion was triumphantly declared that 'we possess in the Pentateuch not only the most authentic account of ancient

1 To teach the little Jacob his letters, said the Rabbis.

2 The learned author only died in 1902. The plea rather resembles the well-known argument of Tertullian that the book of Enoch might have been taught by Noah to his sons in the Ark!

times that has come down to us, but a history absolutely and in every respect true.' 1

1

This plea was somewhat impaired twelve years later by the Bishop of Ely. Writing on Genesis in 1871, Dr. Harold Browne could still believe that the history of Creation in Gen. i.-ii. 3 was very probably the ancient primeval record of the formation of the world.' 'It may even,' he added, 'have been communicated to the first man in his innocence.' But between that communication and the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch he was obliged to reckon an indefinite interval. The five steps so complacently recited by the Bampton lecturer of 1859 were inadequate to the new view of the antiquity of man. But the practice of Scripture elsewhere pointed to a way out. If links were omitted from the genealogies of our Lord in the Gospels, why not from the similar lists in Genesis? An almost unlimited' time might be thus allowed for the dawn of history. The episcopal commentator forgot that by thus stretching his line indefinitely he destroyed his close-knit chain for the transmission of the record. The modern evidence, however, does not support the derivation of the human race from one single pair. But if Adam be no longer regarded as a historical person, what will become (it may be asked) of the arguments of the apostle Paul concerning the effect of his transgression on his descendants, or the parallel

1 The Historical Evidences, etc., pp. 50, 77.

2 Speaker's Commentary, vol. i. p. 27.

3 Ibid. p. 64. One is tempted to ask, why 'almost'?

3