192 EEV. JOHN TUCKWELL^ M.R.A.S., ON MODERN THEORIES 



miDistry. And true it is that " He shall not fail nor be dis- 

 couraged till He have set judgment in the earth ; and the isles 

 shall wait for His law." A little later on, in the 53rd chapter, 

 we get the rejection and vicarious sufferings of Christ. The just 

 preceding words are, " So shall He sprinkle " [Revised Version, " or 

 startle "] " many nations ; kings shall shut their mouths at Him ; 

 for that which had not been told them shall they see"; which 

 describe the final triumph of His kingdom. 



We are told that the Old Testament develops spiritual doctrine 

 up to the New, not, as we might well think, that there was a 

 fuller revelation of God in the New Testament, but that, somehow 

 or other, there was an evolution in men's minds of their estimate of 

 the character of God. We are daringly told that Abraham and 

 Jephthah, in their days, thought it quite right to offer human 

 sacrifices. I would say that this theory is quite incompatible with 

 the theory which places these old books as being written after the 

 Babylonian Captivity. If they were written after the Babylonian 

 Captivity, how can they show the earlier stages of development in 

 religious thought That, of course, is an absurdity. 



Dr. Theo. Pinches. — I feel that I cannot speak very closely to the 

 subject. It is true that I have written a book concerning the Old 

 Testament and the cuneiform records; but I have written it on 

 parallel lines, and not with reference to the higher criticism at all, 

 trying to illustrate the Old Testament, as far as possible, from what 

 I have read in the inscriptions I have studied so long. 



It is needless to say that I quite agree with what Mr. Tuckwell 

 has said with regard to the existence among other nations, before 

 the Jews, of a great deal of enlightenment, such as we might call, in 

 fact, knowledge of divine truth, and one cannot help coming to that 

 conclusion. All of us have read, no doubt of Professor Delitzsch's 

 recent lectures on " Babylon and the Bible," and there is one point 

 he touches on therein, viz., the monotheism of the Babylonians. 

 That, I may remark, is one of the subjects referred to in a lecture 

 that I gave before this Society, and I referred to it rather promi- 

 nently."^ He says he has always insisted on the polytheism of the 

 Babylonians, and I would say the same thing ; but there must have 



* The Religious Ideas of the Babylonians, read on the 16th of April, 

 1894. (See the Journal of Transactions, xxviii, pp. 1-38.) 



