148 



EEV. CHANCELLOR LIAS, M.A., ON 



its pages, ever growing in moral and spiritual intensity, until 

 He came, in Whom it all centres. Neither can we fail to see 

 that there is a marked difference between the Bible and all the 

 other religious books of the world. Even now, its contents 

 strike in quite unique fashion the heart of all who are striving to 

 " find out God,'' as the records of the Bible Society prove to 

 this very hour. In spite of the mistakes of Christian believers, 

 in spite of the bitterness of religious controversy, the influence 

 of the Bible is still growing, its empire wider than ever. The 

 German critic, unlike David, goes out with his weapons unproved. 

 He has never tested his powers of dividing his authors into 

 " sources,'' by inquiring whether his canons will work when 

 applied, for instance, to Beaumont and Fletcher, Shakespeare and 

 Fletcher, Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Erckmann and Chatrian. 

 The Baconian theory of Shakesperean authorship, though run on 

 German lines, has broken down. For German methods are 

 essentially one-sided, and have to be revised according to the 

 object the critic proposes to himself.* All the learned and honest 

 treatises on the Evidences of Religion and the genuineness of 

 the Scriptures are flung aside by the Germans as mere trash, 

 and all the interesting, and to most minds convincing, arguments 

 from undesigned coincidences are similarly treated. The argu- 

 ment from prophecy, especially unfulfilled prophecy — far more 

 irresistible still — is never confuted, is not even approached. 

 It is thought sufficient to treat with contempt the astounding 

 correspondence between prophecy and fulfilment. Yet the 

 manifold attempts of the German school to attach any rational 

 meaning to the passages which, from Genesis iii to Malachi, 

 have testified throughout the ages to the Promised Redeemer, 

 are not worth the paper on which they are written. f ^ 



And what is the result ? The entire disappearance from 

 Germany, not only of belief in revealed religion, but of the most 

 elementary morality of Western nations. Crimes so atrocious 

 that not only Christian but heathen nations have emphatically 

 condemned them, are systematically practised, without the 



* Thus, when the Priestly Code (P) becomes the latest instead of the 

 earliest of the ** sources," all Knobel's careful and ingenious division of 

 Deuteronomy between " JE " and " p " has to be thoroughly revised. 



t Germanized Oxford has published text-books in which the whole 

 argument from prophecy sanctioned by the Lord and His Apostles has 

 been systematically ignored. 



