MODERN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP. 



221 



method of treating scripture whicli Eiclihorn, one of its earliest 

 advocates, called the " Higher Criticism." The term in a 

 narrower sense is sometimes used in contradistinction to the 

 term " lower" or " textual criticism." It would be a mistake to 

 suppose, however, that even in its wider sense it represents 

 a form of scholarship or spheres of investigation entirely new. 

 The older scholarship included in its enquiries such subjects 

 as the authorship, the languages, the human element, the 

 diversities of style, the uses of metaphors, parables, similes, 

 and various other figurative forms of speech found in Scripture. 

 It welcomed all the light it could obtain from comparative 

 philology, from such science as was available and from all known 

 history. It is not here that any difference exists. Much more 

 light has come in modern times both to and from some of these 

 sources, and this light has compelled the opponents of super- 

 natural religion to change their polemical tactics. Such a work 

 as Volney's Ruins of Empires, thought to be brilliant and trium- 

 phant in its own time, would be as out of date now as the bows 

 and arrows of the ancient Babylonians. It is in those particu- 

 lars, in which the German theologians have made compromises 

 with the older Deism, that the divergence has arisen, and it is to 

 mark that divergence that the term " higher criticism " is 

 generally employed. Among these particulars may be included 

 the attitude of mind in which the study of Scripture is 

 approached ; the too exclusively philological and literary basis 

 of enquiry into the origin and composition of its various books ; 

 the excessive application of subjective tests in judgment of the 

 value and trustworthiness of the records ; the adhesion to 

 obsolete ideas concerning the beginnings of human and of 

 Israelitish history ; the substitution of hypothetical evolutionary 

 processes for inspiration and revelation in dealing with the 

 contents and order of the historical records ; the too hasty 

 rejection of the historicity and truthfulness of those records 

 and the general discredit cast upon the supernatural element in 

 the whole volume and the consequent weakening of its Divine 

 authority. It will not be possible in this brief paper to deal 

 adequately with all these particulars, I shall confine myself for 

 the most part to those of them upon which the modern 

 discoveries of Archaeology have a special message to convey. 



Upon the general question of the relation of this method of 

 dealing with Scripture to the older Deism, I shall not, I hope, be 

 accused of making a partisan appeal to prejudice if in justifica- 

 tion of Canon Cheyne's admission and my own contention I 

 refer to the " Twentieth Century " Edition of The Age of Reason. 



