326 
strangely preserved ; how can we account for it ? If we 
admit that they are sacred, the difficulty vanishes at once. 
They have been considered holy, because they are holy. The 
same Deity who caused them to be written, has caused them 
to be accepted, and has insured their preservation. There 
has been a special protection and a special barrier round them, 
like the shield of Pallas in the hand of Perseus, at once a 
light and a defence, a buckler to protect from harm, and a 
mirror to show the truth. There can be no credulity in 
acknowledging that these books are Divine, because they are 
not only such as we might look for, but also in the same con- 
dition in which we might expect them to be. The sceptic, 
however, prefers to hold that these books are not what they 
claim to be ; that they are either pure inventions, or contain 
a grain of God-sent truth hidden under a bushel of humanly- 
devised fable. He prefers to believe that thinking men and 
unthinking men have joined together in accepting and re- 
taining such false claimants of the honour of coming from 
above. He prefers to maintain that accident, not Providence, 
has preserved them ; that men have been so inconsistent or 
so infatuated as to reverence without reason enactments 
which they did not like, and doctrines which reproved and 
abased, instead of flattering and exalting, the glory of man's 
intellect, the pride of humanity. In short, he declines to 
admit the more probable, and embraces the less probable. 
He refuses to attribute the phenomena he beholds, and the 
real facts which he cannot help admitting, respecting the 
books of the Bible, to a cause which will easily explain them ; 
and does explain them in a manner at once inadequate and 
improbable. 
But I have been speaking of the Bible generally, and as a 
whole. Nothing can be more certain, says the sceptic, than 
that it has no right to be considered or treated as a whole. 
It has no coherence. It consists of a number of books, 
fortuitously bound up together, because erroneously supposed 
to treat of the same subject, in the same manner, and upon 
the same principles. Even in the individual books themselves, 
traces may be recognized of one or two, or many, inde- 
pendent and incongruous sources, from which they are com- 
piled. I regret that I cannot enter upon an answer to these 
propositions. It would give me sincere pleasure to endeavour 
to point out to you how the Jehovistic and Elohistic theory 
of Astruc was the theory, not of a sceptic, but of a good 
Christian, and how all good Christians are quite prepared 
to allow that Moses was directed by the Supreme Intelli- 
gence to make use of certain early records preserved in the 
