does not aim to give us an expurgated edition. It may indeed say of certain portions of the Book of Isaiah that they do not belong to the genuine discourses of that prophet, but were written in the exilic or post-exilic age. But it does not say that they are spurious and unwarranted additions to the ancient Scriptures, and are to be violently thrust out. It retains all that it finds in the Canonical books of the Old Testament; only it gives to much a different historical setting. But this new setting cannot, in the least degree, destroy the inspiration of any part. Nothing whatever is lost. And what moves us so powerfully now in its present unhistorical position, will move us no less powerfully when known to belong to another stage of Biblical history. What is divinely true in Scripture is independent of questions of human authorship or date of composition.

The fact is that the criticism of to-day is nothing, if not positive and constructive. Prior to the last three decades, indeed, criticism occupied itself chiefly with discovering and marking off the literary sources of the Hexateuch. That work was indispensable to the fulfilment of its proper task, and has consequently lost nothing of its value. But the older criticism did not appreciate the importance of its results, and so failed to make full use of them for the reconstruction of the history of Israel, especially the history of the religion of Israel. It was necessary to take a step forward. The liter ary critic had to become a critical historian. Having after long and careful investigation recovered the documentary sources of the Old Testament, it falls to him now to trace the development of the religious beliefs, the worship and the moral life of Israel. For a quarter of a century he has been engaged on this task. Let us see with what success.

When we ask, what conception did Israel have of Jahveh and his relation to man, we find that the traditional answer differs widely from that given by criticism. The common opinion is that Jahveh was at all times believed, if not indeed by the populace, yet by the representative minds in Israel, to

be the one, only true God, excluding all other gods as figments of the imagination-the Creator of heaven and earth-invisible to mortal eyes, spiritual in nature, ethical in character, revealing himself to his people through Moses and the prophets -transcending the world, dwelling in heaven, yet exercising universal dominion over nature and history-a righteous governor, making all things subserve the interests of his chosen. people-absolutely unique, exalted in holiness above all created being, as well as all moral evil inaccessible except at one sanctuary, through a graded priesthood and an elaborate rit

ual.

Such was the conception of Jahveh prevalent at the close of Israel's religious development. Did it exist in its completeness already at the very beginning? Did it undergo no purifying and spiritualizing process, no advance from lower and cruder ideas to higher and more refined? Was it always the same from the days of Moses throughout the centuries? So the traditional theory, based on the Priests' Code, holds. It was all given by Moses-the Law and this conception of Jahveh implied by the Law. The prophets had only to expound and apply it to the needs of the people, who, in general, could not rise to the height of so spiritual an idea of their God and remained on a low level of the religious life. From Moses onward throughout the whole preëxilic period, Israel evinced an almost unconquerable tendency to lapse from the higher and purer religion instituted by the founder, into the heathenism of the surrounding nations, or, at least, to mingle heathen elements with the worship divinely prescribed by the Law. It was a tendency that not even the long, earnest, strenuous efforts of the prophets could wholly overcome. Its complete eradication required nothing less than the drastic measure of the Exile. Yet in spite of the ignorance of the people generally, the Old Testament religion with its ethical monotheism was complete from the beginning, and never failed, even in the pre-prophetic age, to find worthy exponents in such noble minds, as Samuel, David and Elijah.

This is the traditional answer to the question, How did Israel conceive of Jahveh. And it would seem as if the first chapter of the Book of Genesis proves its correctness. The God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth is a truly spiritual God. The representation of his creative activity is free from all mythological ideas. Anthropomorphisms are singularly absent. He does not appear in visible outward form, or fashion the universe in a mechanical way. He simply speaks and the world comes into being. His mere Word is an omnipotent power. Nothing can exceed the sublimity of his effective utterance: "Let there be light"; with the following response: "And there was light." He himself is concealed from our gaze; we only hear his voice, as creation unfolds itself to our view in successive stages from lower to higher, till it reaches its crown in man, made in the image of God and endowed with dominion over the world.

But now, when we pass beyond the fourth verse of the second chapter, we at once enter a different world of religious thought. The God we meet in this second section (2:5-3: 24) is not the same God as in the first section. He is a very human God-human in form and action, in needs and passions. His home is on the earth. He takes his evening walk in the cool of the day. He appears visibly to Adam and his wife, and holds conversation with them, as a man with men. Like a human sculptor, he first fashions man out of the dust of the ground, and then breathes into his nostrils the breath of life. When the man needs a suitable companion, he takes a rib from Adam's side and out of it makes a woman, closing up the rent with flesh. Later he makes coats of skins to clothe the nakedness of the fallen pair. His knowledge is limited. When the man and the woman hide themselves in guilty fear behind the trees, he must inquire where they are. He even experiments in creating, and forms the animals to see, whether among them all there can be found a helpmeet for the man. Strangely enough, he fears that, because man has come to know good and evil, he may become altogether too

godlike, and by eating of the fruit of the tree of life may attain to immortality; so in jealousy of his rights he thrusts. him out of the garden. Such a conception is crudely anthropomorphic and anthropopathic. It cannot be made to harmonize with the lofty conception given immediately before. Or will it be said that the language of the first section is literal, while that of the second section is figurative or symbolical, and is to be interpreted allegorically? Such a suggestion would never arise, if the two representations were met, side by side, elsewhere than in the Bible. It is made only to escape a difficulty created by language so perilously like the language of classical mythology.

And now, what has the higher criticism to say? It tells us that the purer conception of God, with which the Book of Genesis opens, belongs to the very latest of the Hexateuchal documents—the Priests' Code, designated by the letter P, whereas the gross anthropomorphic conception belongs to the earliest document, the Jahvistic, designated by the letter J; and that between them there is a wide interval of not less than four centuries. If this be true, we need no longer feel surprise at these broadly divergent representations of God. For religious knowledge, like all other knowledge, grows with time, advancing from lower to higher, from coarser to more refined ideas. And what progress would be made in the course of the four hundred years during which all the great prophets of Israel, before and after the exile, lived and taught.

From this one instance we may see how the higher critic proceeds in his constructive work. After having by analysis discovered the literary sources from which the material of the Old Testament is drawn, and assigned those sources to the several periods to which they belong, he is in a position to study them successively in the order of time, marking every change in religious belief and the gradual progress of religious truth. Such is his historical method, which, rightly employed, will enable him, if there be no lack of literary sources at any stage, to sketch the entire development of the religion

of Zeme from its origin to its close. And this is the task on the Cld Testament theologian, working on the basis the figher criticism, is now more especially engaged. All ondar, and subservient to this. Space will allow time, however, only to touch very lightly on a few Bars Pairing to the development of the conception of Jahveh me marien to Israel.

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