CONCERNING THE COMPOSITION OF HOLY SCEIPTURE. 189 



But when you have the historic Christ, you find yourself in 

 possession of the Old Testament, which was always recognized by 

 Christ and His followers as the basis of their mission, and you 

 cannot avoid it. Thus you are compelled, as soon as you have 

 accepted Christ, to push back your inquiry into the books that 

 precede our Lord's time, and you soon find yourself back in the 

 age of Xeheniiah, about 400 years B.C., the age in which the Old 

 Testament drew near to its conclusion and completeness ; and about 

 the books so completed Josephus says, that all the witings are the 

 work of prophets, and there are none after the age of Artaxerxes. 

 You next start back from Xehemiah and push your investigation 

 up to the age of Moses, or Abraham. But you have this difficulty, 

 that you have no contemporary literature before Nehemiah, so that 

 you are cut off from the natural materials for discussing your 

 subject. 



What have you got, then 1 you have got the books themselves — 

 those wonderful books of the Old Testament. You speedily find 

 that they are of diff"erent kinds and materials in many ways. They 

 are not isolated, and it is in this way that you work back from the 

 age of Nehemiah to Moses. Take Ezra and Nehemiah, what books 

 did they possess 1 You find they had, to a large extent, the books 

 that compose the Old Testament. Then you go back to the days 

 of David's Bible again, and to the days of Joshua, and you ask, 

 was there a pre- Joshua Bible 1 And you find there was. Moreover 

 the whole of the Exodus was carried out by God because of certain 

 promises made to man which constituted his Magna Charta. And so 

 you find your way back to Genesis, and if you believe in what 

 Christ believed you believe in the mission of Moses, and when you 

 use your own Bible you have a strong literary argument upon 

 which you can rely. 



The third argument is archaeological. The German Emperor has 

 rushed into the conflict where professors might fear to tread, 

 perhaps, but I would recommend you to invest sixpence in a little 

 book just published by the Christian Knowledge Society entitled 

 Babylonian Excavations and Early Bible History, by Professor Kittel, 

 of Leipzic. It is a good thing if you can correct one German pro- 

 fessor by another, and it is curious that Dr. Kittel discusses nearly 

 all the points that Mr. Tuckwell has gone into. In this matter there 

 appears to be an Anglo-German Alliance for truth. But I will not 



