184 REV. JOHN TUCKWELL^ M.R.A.S._, ON MODERN THEORIES 



In his commentary on the Book of Daniel — that last refuge of 

 the Higher Criticism — in the Cambridge Bible as well as in his 

 Introduction, referrino; to the old musical instrument con- 

 troversy he says: "Anyone who has studied Greek history 

 knows what the condition of the Greek world was in the sixth 

 century B.C., and is aware that the arts and inventions of 

 civilized life streamed then into Greece from the East, not 

 from Greece eastwards." Now I venture to say that no one 

 who has studied Greek history " is aware " of anything of the 

 kind. Our histories of Greece tell us that " the sixth century 

 B.C. " was " the most brilliant in the history of Greece." It 

 was the age in which Croesus, the famous King of Lydia in 

 Asia Minor, adopted the Greek language and customs, and 

 Greek sages swarmed " from Greece eastwards " to his Court : 

 it was the age of the building of the first temple of Diana of 

 the Ephesians, reckoned one of the wonders of the world ; it 

 was the age of the philosophers Thales, Anaximander, and 

 Pythagoras ; it was the age of the poets Sappho, Alcseus, and 

 Anacreon ; it was the age of the legislators Solon and 

 Pisistratus. Moreover, it was also one of the most brilliant 

 ages in the history of Babylon. The statement, therefore, that 

 in such an age, one of the most brilliant in her history, Greece 

 had no " arts and inventions of civilized life " to give to Babylon 

 in the East, in one of the most brilliant of hers, displays an 

 obliquity of vision in the application of this historical hypo- 

 thesis as extraordinary as that of his predecessor Eeuss 

 himself. 



Such facts as we know therefore forbid us to suppose that 

 these records, compiled with such precise geographical and 

 historic knowledge, and covering a period of more than a 

 thousand years, could have been hacked out of the records 

 of unknown writers by mere botchers and trimmers, and 

 patched together in the bias of pride or partisanship. 



Finally we may be permitted to ask whether the chief actors 

 in this reconstructed history could by any moral possibility 

 have taken the places assigned to them by this hypothesis. It 

 is quite true, as the late Dean Farrar pointed out, that we miss 

 in the historic records of Kings and Chronicles any definite 

 account of the observance of the Day of Atonement and of the 

 Jubilee Laws. But it must be remembered that for several 

 hundred years after the death of Moses the disorganized state 

 of the nation made the maintenance of these institutions 

 practically impossible. It was struggling for its life and in 

 constant and deadly conflict with powerful and treacherous 



