METHODS OF BIBLICAL CELTICISM. 



115 



Scriptures," said our Lord, " for they are they which testify of 

 Me." It was in them that the life and death, the resurrection 

 and the work of Christ were foreshadowed and predicted, and 

 upon this fact He laid His claim to be believed. 



Was Christ mistaken ? 



Well may we ask with the Egyptian scholar. Was our Lord 

 rio^ht ? or must we hearken to the modern critic when he tells 

 us tliat the endeavour to find Messianic prophecies in the Old 

 Testament, in the sense in which Christ and His Church under- 

 stood the phrase, is an ilhision of the past ? We cannot serve 

 two masters ; either we must believe that in the fifty-third 

 chapter of Isaiah we have a real far-off portraiture of Christ, or 

 else that Christ was mistaken, and that the portraiture was 

 only read into the chapter in later days. The words of our 

 great lamented teacher Canon Liddon, in reference to the 

 destructive theory of the origin of the Pentateuch, still hold 

 good : 



" How is such a supposition reconcilable with the authority of 

 Him AVho has so solemnly commended to us the Books of Moses, 

 and whom Christians believe to be too wise to be liimself deceived, 

 and too good to deceive His creatures ? " 



Discussion. 



Mr. Sidney Collett criticized the acceptance of the view that 

 there were two Isaiahs, calhng attention to John xii, 37-41, 

 where quotations are made from Isaiah vi and liii, both of which are 

 attributed to one and the same Isaiah. He also disagreed with the 

 words "less important," on p. 113, 1. 9, and also with the lecturer's 

 giving up the theory of verbal inspiration (see 11. 11 and 12). He 

 pointed out that St. Paul (Galatians iii, 16) based an important 

 argument on a single letter, "seed," not "seeds," and our Lord in 

 Matthew xxii, 32, proved the doctrine of the resurrection from a 

 single tense, "am " not "was." 



Chancellor P. Y. Smith said : Every one is at liberty to hold his 

 own views as to the doctrine of verbal inspiration, but I cannot 

 myself believe in it. The suggestion that the contradictions on 

 immaterial points, which undoubtedly exist in the Scriptures, as we 

 have them, are due to errors which have crept in since they were 

 first written, and would not be found in the original documents, can 

 obviously neither be proved nor disproved, but it has no probability in 



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