judgment in a critic is pedantic and hair-splitting. What matter, it may be asked, if the critic does not come up to this standard so long as he brings out valuable truths, and he proves his facts at least to general satisfaction?

I answer that, firstly, true science is nothing if not "meticulous"; and, secondly, that proof to the general satisfaction is not the true criterion; and, thirdly, that the lack of discrimination between the functions of an advocate and those of a judge has led, and must inevitably lead, to the propagation of innumerable and very serious errors.

Literary criticism is divided into two branches, viz., "Textual " criticism and the "Higher" or æsthetic criticism. In both of these branches the above-named qualifications of the critic are essential.

In both, also, scientific criticism proceeds by--

(a) Taking the object to be judged as it is; not according to theories of what it ought to be, or may be supposed to have been.

(b) Careful analysis of the facts as they exist.

(c) The estimation with scrupulous impartiality of the relative weight of the various items of evidence yielded. by the analysis.

(d) The unbiased comparison of the resultants from these relative weights with other known facts relevant to the subject.

(e) The establishment of the truth of the criteria and standards of comparison. These in themselves have to undergo the same process of criticism before they can be accepted as standards.

(f) A cautious expression of opinion, which in many cases must be tentative and provisional, subject to revision on the production of new evidence.

Let us now apply these principles to the criticism of the Bible.

Taking first the textual criticism, it may be urged that here, surely, is the field of the expert. I agree. The field of the expert in criticism, i.e., analysis and judgment, not necessarily that of the Hebraist, the archæologist, the historian and the palæographist. These are the witnesses, not the judges.

The evidence of one or the other, or of all, may prove decisive, but that is for the judge to settle, not the witness nor the pleader.

Here, also, it is to be noted that the textual criticism is not at the disposal of the higher critic for him to accept or reject or to work out at his own convenience. The textual critic has his own laws, which he must obey, and once the text is settled on its own merits, the higher critic, the commentator, and all others have no choice but to take it as the basis of their work. In this respect the term "Higher" criticism, if it implies a plane of action superior to that of the textual, as if the latter were a lower plane, is the reverse of correct. The higher critic receives his orders from the textual critic, not vice versa.

And yet much of the higher criticism of the day is conspicuous for the play made with the text in the interest of theories.

Now there is good reason for believing that the text of the Hebrew Scriptures is extraordinarily free from corruption. There are two things about it which differentiate it from other documents, and which must be borne in mind in the textual criticism: (1) the reasons for the peculiar care with which it was transmitted, and (2) the character of the documents themselves.

(1) It is easy to imagine sleepy, monkish copyists, halfmechanically transcribing from old, crabbed, torn, and damaged manuscripts of a Greek or Latin classic, or an Anglo-Saxon chronicle, mistaking contractions, missing the line and carrying on from a similar word, bringing marginal notes, glosses, and tentative emendations into the text, making corrections of their own, notes of doubtful points, reference marks, etc., which will prove so many traps for successive copyists, and otherwise introducing changes which it is the work of the textual critic to discover.

It sounds plausible. But it is by no means a true account of the Hebrew scribes, who were far from monkish. Nor were the Hebrew MSS. allowed to fall into this corrupt condition before being re-copied for current use.

Accidental errors may have been overlooked in a few cases. But it is inconceivable that it could be the normal procedure. The text of the Bible was on a totally different footing to a Thucydides or an Asser.

(a) It was a sacred book, the standard of religion; the code of laws, civil and ecclesiastical; the ultimate reference in controversies--and none are so keen as religious controversies; the text-book of theologians of different schools; of primary as well as higher education; of the national history and literature; and

of the most zealous preachers and reformers. It was the battleground of endless disputes between parties, the object of the minute study of all earnest seekers after truth, the comfort of the exiled and the oppressed. How could unwarranted readings escape detection ?

(b) We know that from the time of the destruction of the Northern Kingdom there were Israelites scattered in many parts of the world. Wherever there were Jews there must have been copies of some parts, at least, of the Old Testament, and litigants to appeal to them, and captious persons to wrangle over words and doctrines. Indeed, there is no valid reason to think that this was not true of Israel from those early times that the Hebrew records claim for the foundation of the nation, say, the fifteenth century B.C. It is absurd to postulate that Israel could have had no code of law, no national poetry, literature, nor philosophy, and no historical records before the time of Amos. This would mean that the nation which has produced the most remarkable and permanent literature in the world lived in a state of blank illiteracy for seven centuries in the midst of the most highly cultivated civilization, and in the very high-road of traffic at that.

Is it possible that texts could pass through so much "meticulous" and jealous criticism without the errors being observed ? Could a manuscript be accepted in these conditions by all parties. as a standard, if it were in any degree faulty? And is there any evidence of serious faults?

(c) If the apparatus criticus of Ginsburg, for the Old Testament, or of any good critical edition of the New Testament be examined, it will be found that the vast majority of various readings are a mere matter of spelling, nothing worse than misprints. If we admit that errors may have crept into individual copies, unobserved in spite of all this watchfulness, that they should be universal, simultaneous, and identical is simply unthinkable.

(d) Next, it is to be remarked that the text of the Bible has come down to us in more numerous and more ancient and wellpreserved codices than any other literary work. These existed and were re-copied in many different places, and in different countries, from Media, Elam, and Babylon to Elephantiné and Thebes in Upper Egypt. It is inconceivable that identical falsifications should have got into all, or even a few, of these widely scattered codices. Manuscripts might have been sent from one place to another to be copied, or as true copies of a

standard recension. But this would only show that such a standard recension already contained the errors that modern critics pretend to have discovered.

In all the cases where it is supposed that glosses, marginal notes, transpositions and omissions of words and clauses, attempted emendations and harmonistic insertions have found their way into the text, if these changes are present in both the Massoretic Hebrew, the Samaritan-Hebrew, the Samaritan version and the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint, this would prove that all these were derived from one single ancestor which already contained them all. This common ancestor must have contained the whole of the Pentateuch as we now have it, characterized by all these corruptions, and it must date from the time that the Samaritans received their Pentateuch, at latest.

But such a common corrupt ancestor presupposes an ultimate single ancestor in which these corruptions did not exist. It would require some considerable time for all these alterations to find their way into successive re-copyings of this earlier pure recension. For this means that one generation after another of students, commentators and copyists worked on their copies, annotating and correcting and then passing on their texts for others to continue the process, comments, glosses, midrashes, omissions, mistakes, transpositions, conjectural emendations, etc., gradually accumulating with each repetition. It also means that no standard copies of the pure original survived by which to control those in current use. Either a catastrophe that destroyed the pure original, or all its true copies, or a very long time for it to be forgotten, would be necessary to account for the survival of nothing but the "corrupt" recension from which the Massoretic and the Samaritan Hebrew and the Hebrew underlying the Septuagint are all derived.

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And this corrupt recension must have been received, without suspicion of its faults, as authoritative by the Jews in all countries, the Samaritans and the Alexandrians. Thus we have the ancestor of our present texts, already tarnished by all their faults, dated at, and probably before, the time that the Samaritan received their Pentateuch, and the original pure text dating from many generations before that date.

For the date of the Samaritan, I must be content to refer to the work of the Rev. J. Iverach Munro on The Samaritan Pentateuch and Modern Criticism (London: Nisbet, 1911), and the Rev. J. E. Thomson's paper on "The Pentateuch of the Samaritans," in the

Journal of the Victoria Institute, vol. lii (1920). Good reason is shown for believing that the Samaritan text, as we have it, dates from the time of Hezekiah (about 715 B.C.).

I must not be understood as accepting the theory that corruptions had already crept into this common ancestor. I have given my reasons for holding that it was next to impossible. I am merely showing now that such a theory, if it were true, would necessarily require a still earlier date for the pure original.

As a matter of fact, there is practically only one recension of the Hebrew text, and there is no evidence, except that of the Septuagint, which is of little value for the purpose, that any other recension ever existed. Nor is there any record of a universal destruction of texts which did not agree with it. Such attempts as were made to extirpate the sacred Scriptures of the Jews could not have been successful in all parts of the world. And if they had been, it would have caused the total disappearance of the whole Old Testament.

(e) Now, the Septuagint version, of which a good account is given in the Rev. A. H. Finn's The Starting Place of Truth (London: Marshall Bros.), was not made until the third century B.C., and the reasons given above for care in its transmission apply in a much lesser degree. The use of this version was comparatively restricted until it was taken over by the Christian Church, and there was considerable difference of opinion among the Jews as to its value and authority. In fact, rival versions arose to supersede it, such as those of Aquila, Theodotion and Symmachus Christian apologists referred to them, of course, but they do not appear to have been so carefully studied as the New Testament, and we may say that, in general, the Old Testament Greek MSS. were handed down much as were other Greek MSS., and so subject to the same vicissitudes. The Greek text is, therefore, of less value for the control of the original Hebrew documents.

But it is not to be lightly dismissed on that account. The possibilities of genuine ancient readings under apparent corruptions must be borne in mind. Primo Vannutelli has shown in a series of articles on "Les Évangiles Synoptiques," in the Revue Biblique for 1925, that a frequent cause of misunderstanding, both in the Massoretic and the Septuagint, was the inability of the Jews to distinguish between the sounds of the Semitic gutturals and the Semitic sibilants and dentals. This inability existed apparently from very ancient times, perhaps from the time they left Egypt, and has been preserved by the Samaritans.