56 THE REV. WILLIAM WRIGHT, D.D. 
social stigma of being ignored. They seem also to have been 
in the habit of making themselves known at the most in- 
convenient seasons. ‘hey pressed down on Hegypt, when 
weak and distracted, and carried devastation throughout 
Assyria; but perhaps on no occasion was their presence so un- 
welcome, not even to the weary Syrians, who fled from the 
siege of Samaria when they heard that the Hittites were 
coming, as it was to the historians and students of Hurope 
when they learned that the Hittites claimed a large and abid- 
ing place among the great monarchies and empires of the 
world. 
It was exasperating to think that the historic mosaic, put 
together with such infinite labour, and touched into perfect 
consistency by so many artistic hands, should have to be 
broken up for a horde of barbarians who had no record in 
classic story. It was intolerable, too, when we thought we 
had left the schools and finished our education, to be told 
we must unlearn our history and begin again at the beginning. 
Our historians had not overlooked any of the sources of 
secular history. he Phoenician records of Sanchoniathon 
handed down by Philo of Byblus, and Porphyrius, as well as 
the fragments of Manetho’s Hgyptian history, had been read 
in the pages of Husebius. Scraps and fragments from 
Ctesias, regarding the Syrian monarchy, had been studied in 
Photius and Diodorus Siculus. Dion Cassius, Polybius, 
Josephus, Herodotus, and all the other secular chroniclers of 
the early past, had been searched and sifted, and every grain 
of fact had been separated from the chaff of tradition and 
surmise, and safely garnered. 
In the patient and laborious collection of facts, with a view 
to the building up of history, the Bible was ignored. That 
unique volume, made up of the literature of a unique people, 
contained history, poetry, rhapsody, legislation, civil and 
ecclesiastic,—in fact, the national history of an ancient nation. 
The book professed to be divine, but it was very human. It 
mirrored the people of Israel, for whom it was written, in the 
common details of their lowly lives, and in their relation to the 
people who lay around them. It assumed to be true, and in 
its narration of facts the language bore the stamp of self- 
evidencing simplicity. It referred incidentally to a great 
people (nn 32 or ovnn) called Hittites, who moved on parallel 
lines with Israel from the time of the patriarch Abraham till 
the final captivity. 
When the Semitic tribe, with Abram at their head, 
migrated from Haran to Canaan, the Hittites inhabited the 
land (Genesis xy. 20), and fifty years later Abraham, a 
