This then is the clear note ringing through the Old Testament— Jehovah will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations: the State and its leaders are impotent, Nature is indulgent, God alone remains just and righteous and mighty altogether. Aside from Him there is none to whom Israel must be responsible. Her kings must stand on His side or fall with their subjects in defeat; her priests must be His servants or lead the nation through idolatry to destruction; even her prophets are but the voice of the living God calling her back to the purity of her fathers' devotion.

This truth came to have a reactionary effect upon the people of the remnant; and every calamity that befell the nation was traced back through their own to their fathers' iniquities; every blessing was similarly traced to the faithfulness of Abraham and the patriarchs. Each backward reference must have tended to deepen the idea of heredity and strengthen its ethical power. The preaching of the prophets and the earliest teaching insisted strenuously on the fact of heredity; national experience verified the insistence. But the great host of Israel was callous so that it never was aroused to the enormous significance of the disaster which had befallen it. This was one extreme to which the idea was forced, or rather, by which it was banished, through the hardness of men's hearts. The opposite extreme was only less dangerous, and finally awoke the voice of prophesy against it also. III. We have still to note the extreme to which the idea of heredity was forced by the gradual disintegration of the social consciousness and the appearance of the more strongly individualistic frame of mind in Israel. The immediate cause of this breaking up of the social organism, and the consciousness of it, is most undoubtedly owing very largely to the captivity; although strong indications of the same tendency appeared earlier. The captivity, in turn, was due to idolatry; and hence in a certain real sense individualism in Israel was born of Israel's iniquity. It was the visitation of the sins of the fathers upon the third and fourth generations. It is impossible to imagine what would have been God's method of redemption had Israel con

tinued faithful to her knowledge of the truth. Certain it is that the manner in which He adjusted the redemptive plan to the waywardness of His chosen people is a marvellous act of love and beauty. Through their very adversity the captives were led to look for a deliverer, the Suffering Servant, the reigning Mes siah. In the very chaos of Israel's shattered social-union was set the star of hope which led to the place where the young child lay to the cradle of the founder of the new and everlasting kingdom.

pure

In this social disintegration lurked a danger which was very early discovered by the prophets and gave rise to such teaching as that of Jeremiah: "In those days they shall say no more, the fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. But every one shall die for his own iniquity; every man that eateth the sour grapes his teeth shall be set on edge." So also the eighteenth chapter of Ezekiel with its oft-repeated, "the soul that sinneth it shall die." As men tore themselves, or were torn, from the social body, they interpreted the doctrines which they brought with them, from a widely different point of view. What was a truth preeminently for the social unit becomes a curse applied to the individual. On the throne of united Israel are placed the sins of the fathers-and all ethics, all religion is gone. There is no longer any responsibility; "my fathers” sins have damned me and rule my lot with unyielding scepter." Jehovah is vanquished-Fate is supreme! In social consciousness a God who held in His hand the forces of heredity could possibly sway men's hearts to the truth; for whilst the nation was very largely what its fathers made it, still it was ever reminded that its earliest fathers, the patriarchs, were faithful; their heritage was faithfulness, and with the first fathers was the convenant of God established. The remote heritage was good and from it the mightiest appeals could be made. All the intervening generations of faithlessness were mere interpolations, and the present generation remained the possible heirs of the patriarchs and the certain fathers of subsequent generations.

But when individualism took shape and heredity was partic

ularized, the immediate progenitors became the potent factors of conduct, and men began to push responsibility into the past, and as responsibility vanished, God's grasp on hereditary forces was slackened; no longer was it Jehovah that ruled the destinies of life, but a blind fate superimposed by the iniquities of the past. Then thundered the prophets "The soul that sinneth it shall die," then was the fulness of time-then came the Christ!

We have spoken of the idea of heredity as applied to Israel as a whole. We have failed to note the fact of the division of the kingdom after Solomon's reign, because even after that event there was a real social union upon questions of doctrine and ideas. The one section only anticipated the other in the general disintegration of corporate consciousness. But we must not pass over entirely in silence those allusions to the idea, so frequent through the Old Testament, which refer to sections in Israel; as, e. g., the "throne of David," "the house of Eli," "Shemaiah and his seed." We may say that what was true of the idea as applied to Israel corporate, is true also of these sections in Israel. For these also are social units comprised within the larger general organism. Their fortunes were differentiated from the fortunes of the nation, in degrees not in kind, as in the case of the house of David; or else they were reabsorbed into the general consciousness after having been once thus differentiated, as in the case of Eli and his

sons.

It is scarcely possible to conceive that there should not have been a subordinate individualistic idea of heredity running parallel through the history of Israel with the larger social conception. Undoubtedly it must have been observed that comparatively slight physical modifications were to be found alike in parents and their children; so also frequently the finer mental and emotional traits. Some experienced fact evidently lies behind the statement that Adah bare Jabel, the father of such as dwell in tents and own cattle; his brother Jubal the father of all that handle the harp and pipe, and Zillah who bare Tubalcain the forger of every cutting instrument of brass and iron. Israel too must have observed what the Latins experienced and ex

pressed in the words of Cicero: "If well-tuned pipes should spring out of the olive, would you have the slightest doubt that there was in the olive tree itself some kind of knowledge and skill? or if the plane-tree could produce harmonious lutes, surely you would infer on the same principle that music was contained in the plane-tree. *** If Jupiter and Neptune are Gods can that divinity be denied to their father Saturn ?—if Saturn be a god, so must his father also." But the Scriptural passages regarding such individualistic ideas of heredity in Israel are comThat there were such ideas in her early history paratively rare.

must be supposed from the nature of things rather than proved from the records. Moreover such ideas had no ethical value for Israel in her earlier days, and in the after days they even sapped out the ethical life of other facts as we have already indicated. It was about the social idea that her history clustered; this is the center of her whole career, and when at last her members were torn asunder and flung abroad until there seemed no hope of gathering them together and reuniting them in the ideal Zion for which she longed, in the restored Jerusalem over the ruins of whose first glory she wept her grief away-the God of her fathers established a new center in whose name all nations should be blessed according to the promises-even Jesus Christ, His own Son.

IV.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF BIBLICAL CRITICISM.

BY PROF. GEO. W. RICHARDS.

During the last year Dr. Conwell, of the Baptist church, announced in tones of solemnity, before a convention of Christian Endeavorers, that the higher critics were all dead; yes, they are all dead! He evidently rejoiced in their death as a man would rejoice over the decease of a dangerous foe. About the same time George Adam Smith, of England, declared his conviction that modern criticism, in its conflict with traditional theories of the Old Testament, has gained the victory, and that the unprejudiced and impartial student must feel constrained to accept the results of its work. Dr. Smith, accordingly, looks upon the higher critics, not as defeated foes, but as victorious friends, of truth and righteousness.

The judgment of these men is valuable because it represents the twofold tendency in our generation; the one is hostile, and conscientiously so, to the modern methods of biblical study; the other is friendly to them and welcomes their results. One feels that the points of view, occupied by Dr. Conwell and Dr. Smith, are so different, their mental habits, their conception of Christianity, their theory of the Bible so diverse that they can never reach harmonious conclusions on this question. They may find their chief comfort in announcing each other's death and attending each other's funeral. Considering the undoubted sincerity and Christian character of these men, we may be fully convinced that Christian life is not dependent upon the acceptance, or upon the rejection, of a method of biblical study. The power of Jesus Christ in the world may be hindered by erroneous, and aided by right, methods but is greater than methods, works independent of them, and molds men in spite of them.