298 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the canon of the Bible, much less on the questions proposed above, 

 there is no such authority residing in the Church, unless we grant 

 the claim sometimes made for her, to infallibility. With those mak- 

 ing such a claim we must, within the limits of this paper, decline to 

 argue. 



But if not the Church, what other authority can give us the an- 

 swers we seek? The authority of primitive tradition, or of the 

 opinions of great commentators, or of the great mass of Christian 

 people of modern times? Authority which is so shadowy in other 

 things that might be mentioned would surely count for nothing in 

 a matter as grave as this. Or can particular expressions of the 

 Bible itself be taken to settle the matter once for all? But as to 

 most of those very questions the Bible itself is silent; and if it had 

 spoken, yet the question of competent authority would only be put 

 one step further back. Or, once again, can the answer come from 

 " the spirit which is in man," guided by God's Spirit? But in this, 

 as in the instance mentioned above, that which has been shown to 

 be incompetent in so many other things can not be called competent 

 in this. 



There is, there can be, according to the requirement of our minds, 

 only one answer which will satisfy; it is that which is determined 

 by purely scientific method that is to say, according to the nature 

 of the subject, that method of investigating literary works which 

 reason declares and experience has shown to insure the greatest ac- 

 curacy in results. That method is known by the name of the 

 " Higher Criticism." 



What is the history of the higher criticism? One would im- 

 agine, from the language often used by the opponents of its applica- 

 tion to the Bible, that it was an arbitrary method of criticism, in- 

 vented in these rationalizing times expressly for the purpose of doing 

 away with the divine character of the Bible. But higher criti- 

 cism has been in use in examining the classics and other (nonscrip- 

 tural) writings of former ages for fully two hundred years. The 

 first one to state its fundamental principles was Du Pin, in his New 

 History of Ecclesiastical Writers, published in 1694. In 1699 

 Bentley published his famous examination of the epistles of Phalaris, 

 according to the methods and principles of the higher criticism. 

 There is no better instance of scientific investigation as to authen- 

 ticity. These epistles had been commonly accepted by scholars as 

 the work of Phalaris, and accounted of great value. Bentley, by 

 his searching examination of them, proved them to be the forgery 

 of a sophist, so conclusively that no scholar worthy of the name 

 has ventured to question the result since. That, I say, was 

 in 1699. 



