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human soul is here revealed in its deepest aspirations. In the immolation of the innocent victim was prefigured the necessity of the shedding of more costly blood. In these misapplied and unauthorized services, some vital doctrines of the Christian system may be faintly shadowed forth. Though embodying a great amount of error, or of perverted truth, yet one would not approach this mythology with profane sarcasm. At all events, he would subject it to a careful and conscientious examination.

So in respect to the Mohammedan Bible. It claims to be a revelation from Heaven. These claims ought to be candidly and fairly met. A system of religious imposture is not to be dismissed with a sneer; much less, if, with its absurdities, it contains some acknowledged and fundamental truths. Every principle of literary justice, not to speak of moral obligation, demands that we should carefully examine, rather than dogmatically decide.

Yet how different has been the treatment to which the Pentateuch has often been subjected. It assumes to be a revelation from the true God, and a history of real events. It appears, in the first aspect of it at least, to be plain prose, not poetry, nor fable, nor allegory. Yet it has often been. treated as though it were, a priori, fictitious, as though it bore the marks of falsehood on its face. A respectable uninspired author has been seldom compelled to submit to such manifest injustice. Multitudes of critics, not a few of them Christian ministers, have regarded it as a mixture of truth and falsehood, or as an interpolated document, and have accordingly tried to sift out some facts from the mass of errors. Where patient investigation would be a too painful process, an innuendo, a covert sneer, or a bold assertion, has been substituted. Decisions have been pro

nounced with that categorical assurance, which would not be respectful in relation to a common historian, which would not be authorized, were the writers contemporaries of the men on whom they sit in judgment. Many of those, who have impugned the authority of the Pentateuch, have betrayed a state of mind, which would not well befit a student even of the Korân or Vedas.

II. HISTORICAL SCEPTICISM LESS PREVALENT NOW THAN

FORMERLY.

It is an important consideration in its bearings on the question under discussion, that the spirit of extreme literary scepticism, which prevailed a few years since, especially in Germany, is giving place to sounder and more conservative views. The day of unlimited suspicion in respect to ancient authors has passed by. A more enlightened criticism has shown, that incredulity may involve as many absurdities as superstition, and that the temper of mind, in which such men as Gibbon looked at certain parts of the records of antiquity, was as truly unphilosophical as that of the most unreflecting enthusiast.

In the latter part of the last century, and during the first twenty years of the present, several causes conspired to give an extraordinary growth to this doubting spirit. Some of these are still more or less operative; the influence of others has disappeared. It may be well to advert to some of the more prominent.

One of these causes is itself a consequence of the intellectual and moral condition of Germany. The number of highly educated men in the German States is very large in proportion to the population, much larger than the intellectual wants of the country demand. The government, having in its

hands nearly all the places of trust and emolument, looks, of course, to the abler and more promising candidates for public favor. This awakens among the thousands annually emerging from the university life, a spirit of rivalry and a strong desire for notoriety. Attention must be aroused, a name must be created, at all events. If the promulgation of correct opinions will not effect the object, paradoxes may. While sound reasoning will fall heavily on the public ear, ingenious, though baseless, hypotheses will be certain to awaken discussion. To attack the credibility of an ancient historian, with great confidence, and with a profusion of learning, may procure an appointment, if it does not accomplish its professed object. Thus the aim often is to make a sensation, rather than to elicit the truth; to show off one's smartness, more than to comprehend a subject in its various bearings and worthily present it. A prurient love of novelty and innovation is fostered. Wellascertained facts in history will go for nothing, if a doubt or a suspicion can be started. The mind is not suffered to dwell on ten degrees of positive testimony, if two of a negative character can by any possibility be imagined. A habit of scepticism is thus formed, which no amount of evidence can satisfy. How else can we account for an attack on the credibility of such a book as that of the Acts of the Apostles, or a denial of the historical character of the Gospels? In these cases, the fault cannot be in the historian, or in the contemporary witnesses. Germany has been overstocked with students. The reapers outnumbered the sheaves to be gathered. Topics for investigation were sought beyond the limit of lawful inquiry, or where the only result would be to unsettle all faith in human testimony. From this unpractical character of the German

mind, and from the crowded condition of certain departments of study, an unrestrained rationalism was inevitable.

Yet there is reason to believe, that this unhealthful state of the intellectual German world has been somewhat meliorated. The physical sciences and the practical arts are exciting a more earnest attention. The orthodox theologians of Germany have been compelled, by the pressure of recent events, to place a much higher value on the historical evidences of Christianity.

Another cause of this scepticism has been a theory, quite prevalent, not only in Germany, but throughout Christendom, which represents the early state of man as savage; in other words, man came a child in knowledge from the hands of his Maker, and very gradually, and with great painstaking, acquired a knowledge of the most necessary arts of life. This theory was the cause, in a measure, of the attack on the integrity of the Homeric poems, and of the postponement to a very late period of the discovery of alphabetic writing. It has led to a representation of the patriarchs and early ancestors of the Hebrews, which would elevate them not much above the herdsmen of the Arabian desert. Accordingly, it were not to be expected that written documents, credible historical records, should exist in this crude and forming state of society. The declaration of Moses, that he committed certain facts to writing, itself betrays, it is said, an author who lived as late as David, or the Babylonish captivity.

Yet profounder investigations into ancient history and monuments are every year undermining this imposing and wide-spread hypothesis. The arts in Egypt, at the remotest point of time to which we can trace them, were in a style of the highest perfection. Some of the sciences ap

pear to have made no inconsiderable progress in Babylon, anterior to the limits of authentic profane history, corroborating the brief allusions in the book of Genesis. So the Phoenicians were engaged in an extensive commerce, implying much progress in some of the arts, before the Homeric poems were composed. They were the medium, says Boeckh, of conveying some of the scientific knowledge of the Chaldeans to the Greeks. The simplicity of manners and habits, which prevailed in those early ages, is to be by no means assumed as an index of barbarism; it is rather an evidence of the contrary. Were we to trace the principal forms of heathenism as far towards their source as we can, there is every reason to believe that we should find no evidence that the earliest ages were the darkest. Rays of divine light, which might have illuminated the first dwellers in Egypt, Babylon, and India, were gradually lost in the deepening gloom.

We may name, as a third cause of the prevalence of this historical unbelief, the habit of transferring the method of interpreting pagan mythology to the Jewish Scriptures. We can hardly open a recent commentary on the Pentateuch, without meeting on almost every page the technical terms which Ottfried Müller and others have sanctioned in relation to Greek mythology. "Sagas and myths," begins one of the latest of these commentators, "everywhere closely linked together in antiquity, form the external limit of the credible history of nations. They magnify the past contests of a nation for independence, narrate the beginnings of one's own people, point out the origin of its customs, portray, often with great copiousness, the family history of ancestors, their services to following generations, and determine their relations to the progenitors of other

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