THE 



POPULAR SCIENCE 

 MONTHLY. 



OCTOBER, 1895. 



NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 



XX. FROM THE DIVINE ORACLES TO THE HIGHER CRITICISM. 



By ANDREW DICKSON WHITE, LL. D. (Yale), Ph. D. (Jena), 



FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF CORNELL UNIVERSITY. 



V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. 



WHILE the struggle for the new truth was going on in vari- 

 ous fields, aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least 

 expected. The great discoveries by Layard and Botta in Assyria 

 were supplemented "by the researches of George Smith, Oppert, 

 Sayce, and others, and thus it was revealed beyond the possibility 

 of doubt that the accounts of the Creation, the tree of life in 

 Eden, the institution of the Sabbath, the deluge, the Tower of 

 Babel, and much else in the Pentateuch were simply an evolution 

 out of earlier myths, legends, and chronicles. So perfect was the 

 proof of this that the most eminent scholars in the foremost 

 Christian seats of learning were obliged freely to acknowledge it. 

 The more general conclusions which were thus given to bibli- 

 cal criticism were all the more impressive from the fact that 

 they had been revealed by various groups of earnest Christian 

 scholars working on different lines, by different methods, and in 

 various parts of the world. Very honorable was the full and 

 frank testimony to these results given in 1885 by the Rev. Fran- 

 cis Brown, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary 

 at New York. In his admirable though brief book on Assyri- 

 ology, starting with the declaration that " it is a great pity to be 

 afraid of facts," he showed how Assyrian research testifies in 

 many ways to the historical value of the Bible record; but at 

 the same time he freely allowed to Babylonian history an an- 



YOL XLYII. 59 



