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THE REV. CHANCELLOR J. J. LIAS, M.A., ON 



have been sufficiently examined, no satisfactory results can be 

 attained. The comparative faihire, again, of metaphysics as a 

 science is that it so often is made to rest, not on facts, but on 

 hypotheses ; and that its conclusions have not always been tested 

 by a comparison with facts. The science of psychology, wlien 

 sufficiently advanced, will possibly do more to establish the laws 

 of mental phenomena in a few years than lias hitherto been 

 effected in countless centuries. 



Critical investigation, then, as it is not at present thoroughly 

 scientific in its processes, cannot yet be represented as exact in its 

 results. Speaking generally, there is a very wide divergence in 

 the conclusions of historical critics, and a still wider one in 

 those of literary critics. And wdien we approach the criticism 

 of Scripture, the divergences are greater still : first, because the 

 enquirer, who believes himself to be a man of science, persists in 

 ignoring necessary factors in the problem he sets himself to 

 solve ; and also not unfrequently takes extremely wild and 

 arbitrary assumptions as his bases of reasoning. Thus, 

 Wellhausen declares that he alone, in the long list of analytic 

 critics whose researches have come down to us, has arrived at cer- 

 tainty in his results, because " he has added historical to literary 

 criticism." But what does he call historical criticism ? His method 

 consists in a liberal use of the argument e silcntio, and rests on 

 the assumed right of the critic to strike out from the authorities 

 with which he deals every statement which is not reconcileable 

 with his preconceived opinions. His ultimate conclusions are 

 therefore very far from being unassailable. The argument 

 e silentio, for instance, has been used in Archbishop Whately's 

 celebrated y^^^ d' esprit to prove that the Allies never entered 

 Paris in 1814, because no reference to the event is to be found 

 in the Parisian journals of the next day ! The truth is that the 

 more obvious an historical fact, the more often it is passsed over 

 8ub silentio, because its existence is taken for granted. Obviously 

 such methods of investigation w^ould make history impossible. 



A third eccentricity of the so-called scientific investigator is 

 the assertion that the " Priestly Code," though a post-exilic 

 production, is not only a " codification " of laws wdiich had long 

 been in existence, but that it also contains additional laws and 

 ceremonies which were brought into existence after the return 

 of the Jews from captivity. This extraordinary expedient is 

 adopted in order to explain away the mention in the previous 

 history, should it occur, of any laws which it has been found 

 necessary to include in the Priestly Code. But as the critic has, 

 so far, never attempted to tell us which provisions of that Code 



