MODKKN1SM AND TRADITIONAL CHRISTIANITY. 



83 



Is it not more than astonishing that intelligent men should 

 give even a cursory attention to such a theory ? Yet some of 

 the Modernists regard it as an assured result of scholarship and 

 contend that our Uhristology must be altered accordingly. If 

 students of Palaeontology were to present us with a fossil-man 

 of the Pleistocene age — such as that exhumed at Piltdown 

 recently — and tell us that from his cranial structure he 

 surpassed the Homo sapiens of to-day, and that Nature had 

 made a vast mistake in not evolving this type instead of that 

 which she had selected, we might, if the proof were strong 

 enough, believe this. If we were asked, however, to regard the 

 condition and environment of the Pleistocene man as the 

 highest) and to adapt our mode of existence to that environ- 

 ment, — it' we could discover it — should we give the proposal a 

 moment's consideration ? And yet we are virtually asked to 

 set aside consistent tradition, the result of a long process of 

 selection and survival under Divine guidance, for a thing of 

 shreds and patches gathered together by modern experts from 

 an alleged independent study of the original documents, and from 

 a new examination of our Lord's temporal environment. Scholar- 

 ship, it is contended, has now become strictly scientific, and its 

 results to be depended on as we depend upon those of scientific 

 experts. Would scientific men accept this contention ? Science 

 can always submit its conclusions to exacting tests. To what 

 tests are we to submit the modern reconstruction of the Gospel 

 records ? 



Church excludes these and the Prayer of Manasses from its Canon, but 

 prints them at the end of the Vulgate, "that they should not be lost, as 

 they are cited by some of the Fathers, and occur in some old Bibles, both 

 printed and MS." (Preface), n Esdras is a Jewish work with certain 

 Christian additions, including the first two chapters. Upon these have 

 been based apparently the " Reproaches " used on Good Friday, and from 

 chapter ii an adaptation of the words, Requiem aeternitatis dabit vobis . . . 

 et Lux perpetua lucebit vobis, used in the Roman Office for the Dead. The 

 work is, therefore, composite, as the Rev. G. H. Box shows in his recent 

 work on the subject, although Dr. Sanday, in his Preface to that work, 

 would regard it as having proceeded from one, and that a Jewish, hand. 

 The work had at one time considerable currency, St. Ambrose, and Gildas 

 the British writer having used it freely. The Eschatological element in 

 it occurs in chaps, ii, 27, 37, and xiii, 32. 



The Apocalypse of Baruch is of a similar character, and with The Ascen- 

 sion of Isaiah, The Book of Jubilees, and the later portions of The 

 Sibylline Oracles were written after our Lord's time. 



It is to The Book of Enoch especially, which has been previously dealt 

 with, that the Eschatologists look. The fragment which has come down 

 to us of The Ascension of Moses was written in Hebrew, but contains no 

 reference to a Messiah, if Joshua is not to be regarded as representing Him. 



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