pleted Torah in the time of Ezra. The absence of any mention of the law of Moses, or of an accepted body of law (Torah), previous to the days of Ezra, leads Ryle to the conclusion that the Pentateuch was first made Holy Scripture in the days of Ezra.

5. The Prophets, the second third of the Hebrew Bible, and defined at the beginning of this chapter, were all or nearly all in existence at this time, but they were not regarded as having divine authority. There is a tradition that Nehemiah completed the canon; this Ryle overthrows in a very conclusive excursus at the close of his volume. It is, however, probable that Nehemiah was influential in lifting certain books, that later were canonized as Prophets, to the rank of authoritative interpretations of the Law. A history like Judges or Kings illustrates and confirms the laws of Deuteronomy. And the prophets proper were surely recognized as able expounders of the law of Jahveh. In their own days the prophets were often regarded as enthusiasts. They were too far in advance of the masses to meet with much favor. But as the years rolled by, and the people advanced in morals and intellectual perception, they began to see that the law was, after all, a compromise. It was civil rather than ideal. It aimed at what might be rather than what ought to be. So it gradually came to be believed that while the priest was the temporal (civil) interpreter of the law, the prophet was its eternal and inspired vindicator. Not suddenly did this idea come to prevail. No doubt it was opposed and hindered in many circles. But the Book of Ecclesiasticus, chapters xlix.-l. (180 B.C.), speaks of the prophets in such a way as to lead to the conclusion that in the

year 200 B.C. the Hebrew Holy Scriptures consisted of the Law and the Prophets.

6. The name given by the Hebrews themselves to the last division of their Bible is very significant. It is the simple title, Writings. Now, evidently at the time this title was given, the books that went under this name were not regarded as especially holy. We get the picture exactly from the title of the Hebrew Bible that has come down to us. In the year 200 B.C. the Hebrew literature consists of a law, divinely inspired and purporting to come from Moses, of prophets, likewise inspired, consisting of four histories and fifteen prophets, and writings. Of these writings nothing is said. Their divine authority is neither affirmed nor denied. Tacitly, indeed, their inspiration is denied. They are just writings. At the time the New Testament was written they had nearly all been accepted as canonical, but they kept the old name. As a consequence the New Testament speaks of the sacred writings of the Jews as Scriptures. The terms Law and Prophets were also often used in later times to designate the whole Old Testament.

We know that some Psalms are Maccabean; we know that Daniel must come from the days of Antiochus. Esther and Ecclesiastes are undoubtedly very late. With all this agrees their place in the canon. The fact that Daniel does not occur among the prophets is sufficiently explained, if Daniel was not written at the time the prophets were canonized. Chronicles ought to appear with Samuel and Kings, but Chronicles was scarcely written at the time the list of Prophets was closed. The fact that the third canon is composed of

a different class of writings from the others will no longer suffice. It is far from true to the facts, and a better explanation of the threefold division has been found. I have only space to suggest that Ryle's reasons for saying that the third canon was not fully recognized until after the destruction of Jerusalem, seem to me to be conclusive. In New Testament times, and to New Testament writers, there was certainly much diversity of opinion.

II. THE LIBERAL PREACHER AND THE HIGHER-CRITICISM.

I. There is a tendency on the part of some to personify the higher criticism, and make it synonymous with negativism and atheism. Such methods are not complimentary to those who use them. Immature personification has led to untold evil in all branches of learning. The heathen personified their gods and let this pass for a definition of them. The scholastics personified human faculties, virtues, and vices, and carried their evil methods to such extremes that Lord Bacon could speak literally of them as idols; "idols of the market-place, and the theatre." Idols of the sort here referred to are the results of shiftless mental processes, or they are the creations of the child-intellect. The dog, it is said, interprets all movement zoomorphically. The savage, from imperfect knowledge, personifies all natural forces. He knows no movement apart from his own finite life. And so he explains all motion anthropomorphically. This leads the primitive man into countless errors. It wholly unfits him to be a witness to the truth. I can explain

in no other way certain ideas of my contemporaries. Because they have not taken the trouble to inform themselves, they can do nothing but call names. Το them the higher criticism is either a "thing," or it is a "person." Sometimes it is a thing, a tool, used by the intentionally vicious to destroy truth and virtue. To employ a figure of the Autocrat, "sin has many tools for smashing up the Bible, but the higher criticism is the handle which fits them all." More often, however, in extreme Orthodox papers that have recently come to my notice, the higher criticism has assumed the rôle of a person, a morally responsible being. The higher criticism is spoken of as doing certain things, as leading the Church astray, as attacking now this, now that, "impregnable" rock of Scripture, which Scripture, to judge by the wailing, does not wholly establish its impregnability. But the higher criticism, to these primitive types of the Bible student, is morally responsible. It is to be reserved for punishment. It is doomed. Smoke and ashes will alone remain at the last.

This personification, to which I have referred, is not mere rhetoric; it is not rhetoric at all. Capricious coincidence alone gives it that appearance. This being so, it is a mistake to interpret these statements as rhetoric. They are of a piece with other idolatries. Aside from the moral and religious content, the mental processes by which they are reached are the same.

2. The higher criticism of the Bible is merely the employment of scientific methods in Biblical study. Those methods of research which have given us the locomotive, the telegraph, and the electric car, are being used also in the study of the Bible. If we

knew how many useless things Tom Edison does and thinks, every day of his life, we would be amazed. Not one in a thousand of his schemes- I'm mostly guessing ever comes to anything. Some of them are laughable in the extreme to himself as he recalls them. In science these myriads of guesses and blunders and errors never come to light, or, at least, only occasionally. The fittest survive, the others are forgotten. Where, however, trial is necessary, there are cases of misplaced genius, and that without number. Where one useful thing is patented many useless ones are. Is it worth while to personify Invention, and say all manner of evil of it, because more useless tools are patented than good ones? Not by any means; because, in the aggregate, we see unmistakable signs of progress. To one who is half-informed the cases are almost completely parallel. One cannot follow the history of Biblical study for the last one hundred years without being thoroughly convinced of this. A Biblical theory gets out of date now as quick as a bicycle or an electric car. Is this a sign of progress in the one, and of illusion in the other? By no means. Despite aberrations here and there, it has been steady advance from the first application of rational methods to the study of the Scriptures.

In one especial particular it may occur to the reader that progress in mechanical inventions and in Biblical science are not parallel to the degree above specified. It may be said that the one deals with facts, and the other with theories and hypotheses. This is not so to the degree that many suppose. Much of our modern progress in science rests upon assumptions that are