ment of Rogers's Bible, 1537, and Coverdale's Tindal of 1551, and Tindal's first Testament of 1526, are in English idiom, and they are executed most in conformity with the latest and best Biblical critics. From the whole, with the consulted aid of more than two hundred critical works, including the sources of each translation, I have long been seeking to improve the text of the common version."

AUTHENTICITY AND GENUINENESS OF THE

PENTATEUCH.*

It is certainly not the part of wisdom to introduce to the American public, indiscriminately, the sceptical opinions on morals and religion which prevail in Europe. Some of these opinions will soon perish on the soil that gave them birth. Before they can be confuted, they will cease to exist. Other opinions are so interwoven with habits of thinking peculiar to the people of Continental Europe; they are the product of a state of society, philosophical and religious, so unlike our own; that the attempt on our part to controvert, or even to apprehend them, would be a fruitless labor.

But some of the opinions referred to are not indigenous in France or Germany only. They are by no means exotics in English or American soil. Indeed, not a few of the most destructive theories that prevail in Germany were

* This Essay was originally published in the Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol. II. pp. 356-398, 668-682. It contains the substance of several Lectures delivered before the Junior Class of Andover Theological Seminary.

† F. A. Wolf is said to have remarked, that "what comes forward in Germany with éclat, may be expected, for the most part, to end, after some ten years, shabbily."

transplanted from England. The German sceptic is the lineal descendant of men who once figured in English literature. Doubts or disbelief in respect to the doctrines of revelation, which exist among us, are the spontaneous growth of our own institutions and habits of thought, and have been only reinforced from abroad. It has been obvious, for a number of years, that there has been an increasing tendency in certain quarters to question or reject the divine authority of the Old Testament. This has been manifest in the case of some individuals, who have no special regard for German literature, or who may have even a positive antipathy to it. The origin of their doubts is either within themselves, or it must be ascribed to habits of thinking and acting peculiar to Americans. Foreign scepticism is not specially in fault.

B

While the Old Testament generally is assailed, the Pentateuch is made the subject of special attack. Moses, it is alleged, is the least trustworthy of the Jewish historians, or rather, the genuineness of the Pentateuch is denied altogether, and its authorship unceremoniously thrust down to the Babylonish captivity, or still later. Many of the miraculous events which it describes are regarded as no better than Rabbinic fables or Grecian myths.

It may be well here to inquire, briefly, into some of the grounds of this prevalent scepticism. Why are the Hebrew Scriptures, and the five books of Moses particularly, subjected to these fresh assaults? Some causes may exist which have hitherto been unknown, or comparatively inoperative.

A prominent ground of this sceptical tendency is the injudicious or incorrect method which has been pursued by not a few orthodox interpreters of the Old Testament. They have never distinctly seen the relations which exist between

the Old Testament and the New. They do not, practically at least, recognize the great truth, that God has communicated his revelations gradually. They have looked for the meridian sun in the faint light of the morning. They seem never to have entered into the spirit of the declarations, that Christ brought life and immortality to light, and that the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than the illustrious forerunner of our Lord. In their view, the patriarchs did not see through a glass darkly, but enjoyed almost the perfect vision of the Apostles. A system of types, extending to minute particulars, and to bad men as well as to good, has been forced into the interpretation of the Old Testament, to the detriment of all sound philology, and often of common sense. Men of eminent learning, in our own days, have found in the Mosaic ritual all varieties of allegory and hidden sense, so that, almost literally, every cord has cried out of the tabernacle, and every pin from its timber has answered. In the predictions of the Old Testament, a speciality, or a minute historical reference, has been discovered, alike at variance with the nature of prophecy and the actual events of history. In such circumstances, reasonable men might naturally be deterred, not only from adopting such a method of interpretation, but from placing much confidence in the inspired records themselves. They insensibly learn to question the authenticity of a document which is susceptible of a hundred warring interpretations. Wearied with the incongruities or absurdities of the annotator, they have become distrustful of that on which he has wasted his pains.

Another source of the scepticism in question is the supposed incompatibility of some of the discoveries of modern learning with the records of the Pentateuch. The students

of natural science confidently affirm the indefinite antiquity of our globe, and describe the wonderful operations which were going on in its bosom ages before man was formed upon its surface. Some of these investigators, it must be confessed, proceed as independently as if the Mosaic records did not exist; or if these ancient documents should chance to cross their track, they brush them aside with as little ceremony as they would the cosmogony of Ovid, or the theory of Burnet. On the other hand, some theologians have been unduly sensitive in respect to these conclusions of geology, not remembering that revelation and true science will never be found, ultimately, at variance, and that the period of their apparent discrepancy is generally short. But instead of waiting for time to unfold the mystery, they have denied or denounced, in their zeal for revelation, the unquestionable facts of science. In these circumstances, a third party interpose and cut the knot which they cannot untie. They discern no difficulty in the case, for the book of Genesis is a common history, a mixture of things credible and incredible, or it is a highly seasoned poetical composition. If a discovery of science conflicts with a statement of Moses, then the latter is set aside as having no more authority than an affirmation of Diodorus or Livy. Thus these apparent conflicts between philology and natural science are inconsiderately made the ground of denying the credibility of the written history.

Another cause, which may be mentioned, is the contradictory views which have been entertained in respect to certain usages tolerated or regulated in the Pentateuch, but which a more spiritual dispensation has been supposed to abolish. In relation to these usages, opinions diametrically opposite have been defended. According to one party, the