HISTORICITY OF THE MOSAIC TABERNACLE. 



117 



diction or, because it did not seem to fit in with accepted views, 

 the record of some observations has been rejected. Time and 

 again the written document, sometimes after a hundred years, has 

 vindicated itself, and those who rejected it have suffered in their 

 reputation. 



It would be impossible for an astronomer to stand up before his 

 colleagues and advocate some theory which he was basing upon 

 documents that he was treating in the way in which the Higher 

 Critics habitually and of set purpose treat the documents presented 

 to them in the Bible. I am not speaking now from the point of 

 view of my belief that the Bible is indeed the Word of God, but 

 simply from the point of view that it is an existing document of 

 which we wish to make use. If an astronomer were dealing with a 

 record of observations which he felt that he could treat with the 

 freedom with which the Higher Critics treat the text of Scripture, 

 if he felt himself obliged to dissect, to alter, to eliminate, even to 

 one-hundredth part of the extent that has been done in this critical 

 handling of Scripture, he would feel bound to reject it completely 

 as not worth wasting labour upon ; it would go, the whole of it, 

 into the waste paper basket at once. 



It is, therefore, from the point of view of a practical astronomer, 

 that the methods of the Higher Critics seem to me essentially 

 opposed to the principles of science. 



Mr. Martin Rouse said : I can only testify that I know 

 Dr. Orr as in no sense a Higher Critic, but as a defender of the 

 Pentateuch as a firsthand and faithful record of events. It was in 

 this character that two years ago, during my sojourn in Toronto, 

 he lectured to vast crowds of students and others in the University 

 Theatre and in two of the largest churches in Toronto, not to speak 

 of his series of addresses given there to the scholars of the Bible 

 Training School and their friends. Indeed, in the chief Canadian 

 newspaper {The Toronto Globe) he was termed " a great war horse " of 

 orthodoxy. 



I remember an argument uttered there, to which he alludes in 

 this paper, and by which he upset the theory that the Levitical 

 Code was written upon the return of the Jews from Babylon: the 

 priests who returned were far more numerous than the other 

 Levites who did so — twelve times as numerous, as shown by the 

 muster-rolls. How, in face of such conditions, could Jeshua or Ezra 



