100 YEN. ARCHDEACON WILLIAM SINCLAIR, D.D., ON 



worship to their logical conclusion, and in doing so rested 

 largely upon Ezekiel. The Pentateuch was for the most part 

 complete by the year 444, in which it was accepted as law by 

 the Jews under Ezra and Nehemiah. 



" It is also agreed by the Higher Critics that the prophetic 

 literature is largely composite in character. This is especially 

 true of the Book of Isaiah. It has long been recognized that 

 the last twenty-seven chapters were not written by Isaiah of 

 Jerusalem. They are not even themselves, however, a unity, 

 and the probability is that chapters 40-55 were written in 

 exile, and chapters 56-66 a good while after the return. 



" The popular phrase ' Two Isaiahs ' again rests on the 

 mistaken idea that the first thirty-nine chapters of Isaiah were 

 written by the prophet of that name, and the last twenty-seven 

 by a prophet in the Exile. It is clear, however, that the first 

 thirty-nine chapters are the result of a very complicated 

 literary process, and that very large sections must be attributed 

 to a much later date. In the case of many other prophets, 

 elements of a later date than the main portion of the book 

 are detected by most critics." 



The dominant school of criticism regards the majority of the 

 Psalms as written after the Exile. It places in the same period 

 the Books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes. The Book of 

 Daniel is assigned to the Maccabean period. 



Effect on the Public Mind. 



These views have been so widely promulgated in England, 

 especially at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, that 

 an uncomfortable feeling has grown up in the minds of many, 

 who have not time to examine into these abstruse subjects for 

 themselves, that the Old Testament has been undermined, and 

 rendered generally unworthy of the supreme place which it has 

 held as the record of God's revelation to man, and the prepara- 

 tion for the divine mission of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. 



Two Kinds of Arguments. 



These critics have two kinds of arguments : (1) those which 

 are derived from the language of the books themselves ; 

 (2) those which they consider the necessary results of antecedent 

 probabilities, or principles set up by their own hypotheses. 



I'wo Schools of Critics. 



There are, again, two schools of the Higher Critics: (1) some 

 who are reverent and devout who do not speak of possibilities 



