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COMMEMORATION MEETING. 



thoughts and language of the writers of Holy Scripture may 

 have erred, and yet that these contain invaluable Divine truth. 

 Men now feel that they must use their intellects and 

 consciences in discovering truth, instead of subordinating their 

 intelligence to the hard and cruel dominance of the verbal 

 infallibility doctrine, whether of scripture, creed, or Church. 

 And it is an immense boon to be enabled to supply honest and 

 straightforward explanations of difficulties, which, without the 

 aid of criticism, were impossible honestly to explain, e.g. } why 

 the father-in-law of Moses is sometimes called Jethro, some- 

 times Hobab, sometimes Beuel. Why the Sabbath is said in 

 one place to have been instituted because God rested on that 

 day from the work of creation ; in another (Deuteronomy v, 15), 

 because the Lord God delivered the Israelites from the land of 

 Egypt, and that " therefore He commanded them to keep the 

 Sabbath day." 



It explains such passages as Genesis xii, 6, where Abraham 

 is said to have passed into Sichem, adding, " and the Canaanite 

 was then in the land," from which we naturally infer that 

 when this passage was written, the Canaanite was not in 

 the land. 



It explains the great differences in the accounts of Genesis i 

 and Genesis ii and iii about the creation of the world, and 

 the similar divergencies in the accounts of the Flood. "We 

 ought to be grateful for these things, and to recognize the boon 

 of making the Scriptures so much easier to be understood. 



Once more, archaeology has done much to reveal God's truth, 

 or at least to make it more plain. It has shown that the same 

 conceptions which found expression in our scriptures had been 

 current among Sumerians and Semites in earlier times. That 

 these conceptions were a crude way in which the unscientific 

 intelligence of the world expressed deep thoughts about God. 

 We have learned now that the story of the making of man out 

 of clay, and breathing life into him, was a Babylonian and 

 Egyptian story as well as a Jewish one ; that the important 

 element in it was the Divine agency at work, and not the 

 particulars of the way in which it worked. Archaeology tells 

 us that the Flood story and the Creation story were current in 

 Babylon in very early times ; that the code of Hammurabi was 

 reported to have been given to him by Shamash, as that of 

 Moses to him by Jehovah. Becent research tells us that 

 Jehovah was known as a God among the Babylonians, as is 

 made more clear in a recent book by Dr. Pinches, as early as 

 2000 B.C. : consequently that we may believe that at first he 



