634 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



events which have happened, exactly as they are declared to have 

 happened in its sacred books ; which are true, that is, in the sense 

 that the statement about the execution of Charles I is true. Fur- 

 ther, it is affirmed that the New Testament presupposes the his- 

 torical exactness of the Old Testament ; that the points of contact 

 of " sacred " and " profane " history are innumerable ; and that 

 the demonstration of the falsity of the Hebrew records, especially 

 in regard to those narratives which are assumed to be true in the 

 New Testament, would be fatal to Christian theology. 



My utmost ingenuity does not enable me to discover a flaw in 

 the argument thus briefly summarized. I am fairly at a loss to 

 comprehend how any one, for a moment, can doubt that Christian 

 theology must stand or fall with the historical trustworthiness of 

 the Jewish Scriptures. The very conception of the Messiah, or 

 Christ, is inextricably interwoven with Jewish history ; the iden- 

 tification of Jesus of Nazareth with that Messiah rests upon the 

 interpretation of passages of the Hebrew Scriptures which have 

 no evidential value unless they possess the historical character 

 assigned to them. If the covenant with Abraham was not made ; 

 if circumcision and sacrifices were not ordained by Jahveh ; if the 

 " ten words " were not written by God's hand on the stone tables ; 

 if Abraham is more or less a mythical hero, such as Theseus ; the 

 story of the deluge a fiction ; that of the fall a legend ; and that 

 of the creation the dream of a seer ; if all these definite and de- 

 tailed narratives of apparently real events have no more value as 

 history than have the stories of the regal period of Rome — what 

 is to be said about the Messianic doctrine, which is so much less 

 clearly enunciated ? And what about the authority of the writers 

 of the books of the New Testament, who, on this theory, have 

 not merely accepted flimsy fictions for ' solid truths, but have 

 built the very foundations of Christian dogma upon legendary 

 quicksands ? 



But these may be said to be merely the carpings of that carnal 

 reason which the profane call common sense ; I hasten, therefore, 

 to bring up the forces of unimpeachable ecclesiastical authority 

 in support of my position. In a sermon preached last December, 

 in St. Paul's Cathedral,* Canon Liddon declares : 



For Christians it will be enough to know that our Lord Jesus Christ set the 

 seal of his infallible sanction on the whole of the Old Testament. He found the 

 Hebrew canon as we have it in our hands to-day, and he treated it as an authority 

 which was above discussion. Nay, more : he went out of his way — if we may 

 reverently speak thus — to sanction not a few portions of it which modern skepti- 

 cism rejects. When he would warn his hearers against the dangers of spiritual 



* The Worth of the Old Testament, a Sermon preached in St. Paul's Cathedral on the 

 Second Sunday in Advent, December. 8, 1889, by H. P. Liddon, D. D., D. C. L., Canon and 

 Chancellor of St. Paul's. Second edition, revised and with a new preface, 1890. 



