MODERNISM. 



227 



-criticism was reached, I suppose, in the Encyclopaedia BibUca, 

 especially in those articles in which Dr. Schmiedel practically 

 repudiated every passage and verse of the four Gospels, except 

 half-a-dozen expressions which happened to coincide with his own 

 arbitrary conception of our Lord's Personality. 



In my estimate of this wild literary criticism I do not profess 

 to speak as a theologian ; I speak as a scholar. It has been my 

 fortune during many years to be concerned with classical scholar- 

 ship ; and I say there is not among classical scholars in Great 

 Britain, if there is to-day even in Germany, one who would pretend 

 to solve the problems of Greek and Eoman literature upon the 

 principles — if, indeed, they deserve to be called principles — of 

 the higher criticism as apphed to the Old and the New Testament 

 Nobody, except perhaps Father Hardouin, the Jesuit, who dis- 

 believed in the authenticity of all or nearly all the writings which 

 have come down to the modern world since the Renaissance under 

 the names of the well-known Greek and Roman authors, has 

 rivalled the audacity of the Modernists. It is easy to show, and 

 in some essays which I wrote a good many years ago I think I did 

 show, that the evidence for the books, at least of the New Testa- 

 ment, is considerably stronger than the evidence for the books 

 of classical antiquity. But in the study of the Bible I was brought 

 up at the feet of men, honoured and revered, who were far 

 removed from the spirit of the higher criticism, men like West- 

 cott and Lightfoot and Hort ; and from them I learned that 

 the office of true critics is not to indulge their fancies in specula- 

 tion upon the words which a person living many centuries ago 

 would have been likely to use, not to accept some of his recorded 

 words and to reject others according to the canons of personal 

 taste, but to search and weigh the evidence for his words and to 

 accept or not accept them according as the evidence is sufficient or 

 insufficient, and then to put upon the words so accredited the 

 interpretation naturally suggested by common sense. External 

 evidence, not subjective impression, was the law of literary 

 criticism as those great masters enforced it. And, indeed, if 

 subjective criticism once usurps control in literature, where will 

 be the end? One critic, who can know little of human nature, 

 will tell you that the same Psalmist could not experience the 

 alternating moods of enthusiasm and depression or even of joy 

 and sadness, as if the poet Cowper had not written both The 

 Strange Adventure of John Gilpin and The Castaway. Other 

 critics will tell you that our Lord could not have spoken of the 

 Church or have ordained Baptism in the name of the sacred 

 Trinity, or that He could not have uttered His ©schatological 

 prophecies, nay, that He could not have spoken the parable of 

 the Prodigal Son. I say, and I say advisedly, that, if subjective 

 criticism is a sound principle of Biblical exegesis, the Gospels 



