Scriptures," said our Lord, " for they are they which testify of Me." It was in them that the life and death, the resurrection and the work of Christ were foreshadowed and predicted, and upon this fact He laid His claim to be believed.

Was Christ mistaken?

Well may we ask with the Egyptian scholar, Was our Lord right? or must we hearken to the modern critic when he tells us that the endeavour to find Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, in the sense in which Christ and His Church understood the phrase, is an illusion of the past? We cannot serve two masters; either we must believe that in the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah we have a real far-off portraiture of Christ, or else that Christ was mistaken, and that the portraiture was only read into the chapter in later days. The words of our great lamented teacher Canon Liddon, in reference to the destructive theory of the origin of the Pentateuch, still hold good:

"How is such a supposition reconcilable with the authority of Him Who has so solemnly commended to us the Books of Moses, and whom Christians believe to be too wise to be Himself deceived, and too good to deceive His creatures ?"

DISCUSSION.

Mr. SIDNEY COLLETT criticized the acceptance of the view that there were two Isaiahs, calling attention to John xii, 37-41, where quotations are made from Isaiah vi and liii, both of which are attributed to one and the same Isaiah. He also disagreed with the words "less important," on p. 113, l. 9, and also with the lecturer's giving up the theory of verbal inspiration (see ll. 11 and 12). He pointed out that St. Paul (Galatians iii, 16) based an important argument on a single letter, "seed," not "seeds," and our Lord in Matthew xxii, 32, proved the doctrine of the resurrection from a single tense, not am was."

聊

Chancellor P. V. SMITH said: Every one is at liberty to hold his own views as to the doctrine of verbal inspiration, but I cannot myself believe in it. The suggestion that the contradictions on immaterial points, which undoubtedly exist in the Scriptures, as we have them, are due to errors which have crept in since they were first written, and would not be found in the original documents, can obviously neither be proved nor disproved, but it has no probability in

its favour. Of the two instances quoted by the last speaker, one is irrelevant and the other is rather adverse to the doctrine. He urged, in favour of it, the stress to be laid on the present tense in the declaration "I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," but I believe that the original Hebrew has no verb at all, neither " am nor "was." With regard to the quotation from Galatians iii, 16, "He saith not, and to seeds, as of many," as indicating the inspiration of a single letter, it is observable that, though St. Paul, in that passage, bases his argument on the singular "seed," as referring to one, Christ, yet in Romans iv, 16, 18, and ix, 7, 8, he most distinctly treats the singular "seed" as referring to a multitude, and the singular unquestionably does so in Genesis xiii, 16, which is the original passage. His remark in Galatians iii, 16, can scarcely, therefore, be called an inspired argument or proof. It was merely an illustration or analogy such as is acceptable to the Eastern mind, but does not harmonize with Western modes of thought.

Mr. HOWARD said the difficulty which had arisen was due to the absence of a definition of "verbal inspiration." The fact is, human words are inadequate to express even human thought and infinitely more Divine thought, and these discussions on minutiæ of language are not profitable. The minds of the East and the West though meaning the same things will probably express them quite differently.

Lieut.-Colonel ALVES thought that none of the Higher Critics, indeed no Englishman, and probably very few Jews, possessed that mastery of Hebrew necessary for a literary critic. Such a critic needed not only a knowledge of words and grammar rules, but also of the idiom and genius of the Hebrew mind and language.

Mr. MARTIN L. ROUSE disputed the claim of the Higher Critics that the Book of Deuteronomy resulted from the labours of the Prophets Amos, Hosea, Isaiah, and Micah, by showing that a passage from this Book was quoted a whole generation before the earliest of these prophets, see II Chronicles xxv, 4.

The CHAIRMAN said: We have wandered in our discussion too much into details, and I wish to revert to the broad arguments of the paper. But in passing I would say that the real transgressors in the direction of verbal inspiration are the Higher Critics themselves, who build up their arguments on the verbal accuracy of the Massoretic text. This recoils on the critics themselves, for these

texts, though most valuable, are not perfect nor so old as the LXX, which is older than any of the Hebrew MSS. Mr. H. Wiener urges that the J. and E. passages in the Massoretic text are different in the LXX. He, with great acumen, has discussed these points so effectively that his influence is felt in Germany to-day, and a German pastor, Dahse, in an elaborate examination of all the critical material on the Pentateuch, shows that the original foundations of the J. and E. theory can no longer be depended on. A whole generation has been discussing this question without a proper examination of the text on which it is all founded, and which is now proved to be unreliable. Again, even in 1870, Bishop Harold Browne, in the Speaker's Commentary, had to defend the fact that Moses could write. Now everyone knows that Khammurabi, a contemporary of Abraham, wrote a whole code of laws; but at that time all the scholars in Europe were in the dark about the age when writing was first in force. That all the details of Genesis should have been dictated to Moses would be an incredible miracle, but now that we know that writing, was? common long before his day it is clear that he had written documents to go upon, and therefore his work is brought within the range of the usual methods of inspiration. In the same way, St. Luke under the Spirit of God may have selected documents and put them together in writing his books. Prof. Liddon referred to" the inspiration of selection," and this appears to me the greatest wonder of all.

What was the influence which selected the books of the Bible? They all coalesce to produce a perfect unity. The solution is to be found in the influence of the Divine Spirit. Think of the time of Abraham: why should he have been selected from so many to have his life handed down in such detail for all time? Clearly it was under the inspiration of the Spirit. And so was it in selecting incidents recorded in the Gospels. When we have evidence of inspiration on this vast scale, it is not worth troubling about verbal inspiration. We have not got, for example, the exact words that Jeremiah spoke. But of course in special grand expressions, burning words, embodying divine thoughts, you get verbal inspiration there, and these abound throughout Scripture, but it is unwise to assume that every detail was superintended by the same authority. The Spirit of God himself guards us against this, e.g., we do not know the exact words used by our Lord in instituting the Holy

Communion: we know the substance but not the minute details of the words.

I am grateful to Dr. Sinclair for asserting the value of open criticism. The Bible must stand criticism, it is only reasonable, and we don't object to it at all. What we object to is bad criticism. It is a thoroughly erroneous basis to begin by rejecting all tradition; there is an immense amount of truth in the substance of tradition, and it cannot be discarded. That Ezra imposed on the Jews a false account of their history is perfectly preposterous. Stubbs always held that it was wrong to go against the main lines of tradition, though it might need correction in details.

He concluded with proposing and putting to the meeting a hearty vote of thanks to Dr. Sinclair for his most useful paper.

Archdeacon SINCLAIR, in acknowledging the vote of thanks, thanked also the speakers who had taken part in the discussion, and especially Dean Wace, whose remarks he welcomed as a valuable addition to his paper.

SUBSEQUENT COMMUNICATION.

Dr. IRVING writes: It is to be hoped that the Kaiser's incisive and logical statement of his personal convictions will carry weight with many a serious and open-minded German, as well as among the English-speaking races of the world; and we welcome his earnest emphasis of the great "Messianic hope," which runs as a golden thread right through all that is essentially contained in the moral and religious teaching of the progressive library (rà Bẞría) from the call of Abraham to Christ. The very relapses and regenerations of the inspired race (each time with a larger and higher field of vision) seem to many of us to testify to Providential spiritual leading, in fact to directive evolution in the direction of the realization of a purpose with which is bound up the ultimate destiny of mankind: and on this we base a rational faith in the future, without presumptuously forecasting the form of future development, of that fuller "manifestation of the sons of God" for which "the whole creation painfully waits" (Romans viii).

541ST ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING,

HELD IN THE ROOMS OF THE INSTITUTE ON MONDAY MARCH 3RD, 1913.

DR. THEOPHILUS G. PINCHES OCCUPIED THE CHAIR.

The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read and signed.

The SECRETARY announced the election of Mr. J. T. Burton and Miss J. E. Williams as Associates, and the Rev. D. H. D. Wilkinson as a Missionary Associate.

The CHAIRMAN then called upon Mr. E. J. Sewell, Member of Council, to read his Paper.

POMPEII.

То

Life in the First Century A.D.
SEWELL, Esq.

By E. J.

O most travellers in Southern Italy the uncovered remains of the town of Pompeii are an object of great and striking interest. As one stands in the streets of the town, and sees the ruts worn in the stone pavement by passing vehicles, the last of which travelled there more than 1,800 years ago, or spells out the inscriptions painted on the walls, such, e.g., as one calling on the citizens to vote for Herennius Celsus for ædile at the coming election (an equally long time ago), one realizes with great vividness the busy and varied life that once throbbed in these streets now empty and deserted.

And when one finds in a wine-shop a notice that goods can only be had on cash-payment, or on examining some ivory dice found in a house discovers that they are loaded so as always to throw double-sixes,* it is brought home to one that human nature, in many of its manifestations, was exactly the same in A.D. 70 as it is to-day.

It is true that none of these things are absolutely new discoveries. They might possibly, by diligent students of ancient literature, be found mentioned or be inferred with practical certainty from what we can learn from Roman authors. But Horace has told us

* I have been unable after a good deal of search to find any clear allusion in Latin literature to loaded dice. They are clearly alluded to in Aristotle's Problematica, xvi, 12, and as Pompeii was, historically, so closely connected with Greek writers and Greek customs, this might have enabled us to infer with great probability that loaded dice would be known there. But the finding of the actual dice themselves turns this probability into certainty.