from the Mosaic narratives is an effect as well as a cause. Parts of the Christian records have before been violently impugned. Doubts had been thrown upon the authenticity of no inconsiderable portion of the New Testament. In opposition to the best critical authorities, suspicions were cast on various passages. If the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and the Epistle to the Hebrews, are obnoxious to attack, a book composed sixteen hundred years earlier, and consequently supported by much less external testimony, would hardly escape. If parts of the New Testament are seriously menaced, the whole of the Old would seem to totter on its foundations.

For these and other reasons which might be named, it is proposed to discuss several topics that have relation to the authenticity and genuineness of the Pentateuch. New light is constantly thrown upon the interpretation of this part of the Bible by the studies of eminent scholars and the discoveries of archæologists and travellers. A somewhat extended range of observation and of reference to authorities may be allowed, from the bearing of such remarks and references on a number of points which may be subsequently considered.

What has been already stated may suggest, not unnaturally, the first topic for consideration.

§ 1. The Importance of Caution in an Inquiry of this Nature.

Nothing can be more out of place than dogmatic assertion, or that cavalier tone which is sometimes assumed. After the most laborious inquiries, we are necessarily left in ignorance on some points; while on others, we can only approximate towards the truth.

In the first place, the Pentateuch professes to stand altogether by itself. There is no contemporary literature. Not a fragment of any record besides has floated down the stream of time. The lapse of ages has buried up every other chronicle. Centuries elapsed after the Exodus of Israel before Hesiod or Homer wrote. The monuments of Egypt are silent on the first twenty centuries of the history in Genesis. We have nothing, therefore, with which to compare the Pentateuch. We are left to judge of its credibility by its own independent testimony.

Again, a state of civil and religious society, manners and customs, useful arts and domestic institutions are delineated or alluded to, with which we have little analogous. The principles of human nature are, indeed, the same. Man's heart beats alike under an oriental or a western sky. But the whole external contour is widely diverse. Even the development of Asiatic character

and morals often seems to us very anomalous. We are tempted to look with perfect incredulity on incidents or narratives, which, to an oriental, have the clearest verisimilitude. We often set up European taste as a standard for Asiatic manners, and wonder at the oddity of patriarchal usages, while an Arab or a Syrian would look with equal incredulity or contempt upon many things which have become as a second nature to us. From this dissimilarity or contrariety of manners and customs, the inquirer must needs be cautious in coming to his conclusions. He may pronounce that to be a myth or a saga which is veritable history.

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Furthermore, it is to be remembered, that the Pentateuch lays claim to divine inspiration. Moses is the organ of the will of God. The five books profess to be a record of immediate revelations from heaven. This demands at least an external respect, a show of decency. Even portions of the mythology of Greece and Rome cannot be contemplated with levity. there was nothing acceptable to the Deity in the countless sacrifices which were offered on Roman altars, yet the 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 unauthorised services, some vital doctrines of the Christian system may be faintly shadowed forth.

So in respect to the Mahometan Bible. It claims to be a revelation from heaven. These claims ought to be candidly and fairly met. A system even 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, or fable, or allegory. Yet it has often been treated, as though it were, à priori, fictitious, as though it bore the marks of falsehood on its face. A respectable uninspired author has seldom been compelled to submit to such manifest injustice. Multitudes of critics, not a few of them [professedly] 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 inuendo, a covert sneer, or a bold assertion, have been substituted. Decisions have been pronounced with that categorical assurance,

which would not be respectful in relation to a common historian, which would not be authorised, 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 Koran or Vedas.

§ 2. 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 enthu

siast.

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 favour. 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. Well ascertained 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 sceptisism 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 appear to have made no inconsiderable progress in Babylon, anterior to the limits of authentic profane history, corroborating the brief al

lusions 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 Böckh, 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, "every where 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 tribes. In short, every thing which a nation in its activity lays claim to becomes an object in the circle of myths and sagas. Now, this system may answer very well in the interpretation of Indian or Chinese antiquity. Nothing may be more beautiful or coherent than such a theory applied to the early Roman legends. In that case, a historical fact may be embellished with a thousand fabulous ornaments, or a mere conception of the mind may have clothed itself in the form of history. But is it right to transfer this ingenious exegesis to the narratives of Moses? Do not the numerous pagan legends presuppose one system which was true, and of which they are, more or less, perversions or anomalous excrescences? And are not the earliest remains of Hebrew antiquity essentially dif ferent, in certain marks of trustworthiness, from those of pagan origin? Yet, however diverse the Greek mythology is from the Hebrew patriarchal narratives, one and the same system of interpretation has been employed in both. The cosmogony of Moses and the flood of Noah have been judged by the same principles as have been applied to the theory of the creation

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