to ask for this change?" He calls this change a revolution.

But Dr. Strong makes a most surprising announcement in the close of his debate. It is this: "Whenever the majority of women desire admission to the General Conference I would be in favor of granting their request promptly and fully, but only out of courtesy or deference." Then a few sentences on he says: "But mark now: when the women walk in at the front door of the General Conference I, if a member, would prefer to step out. I could not endure to witness, much less be a party to such a personal humiliation, and so flagrant a public scandal." Remember, he first questions the right of the women or their friends to change the order and economy of the Church, because he says it is the "uniform prohibition of nature, the Bible, and all Church history."

I can not think that our venerable brother could have carefully weighed these words sufficiently when he wrote them. He says if a majority of the women desired it, he would promptly and fully vote for their admission out of courtesy and deference, when he positively stated that he conscientiously believes that "it is prohibited by the Word of God, the dictates of nature, and against all wise history and usage in the Church and State in all the past." If I believed all that conscientiously, I could not vote for their admission if they all desired it. But after voting for their admission out of courtesy because they simply desired it, it would be an unusual manifestation of courtesy "to step out of the back door when they entered the front door" by his vote. That would look rather more like revolution than the women asking for admission in a constitutional way, I submit.

THE HIGHER CRITICISM.

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"The Higher Criticism was treated very ably at the Columbia District Ministerial Association by Rev. W. S. Turner, and by request we begin the publication of his paper this week. It will well repay the reading.-Columbia Christian Advocate.

BRETHREN, I do not claim to be an adept in philology and Bible introduction, but I claim to have common sense and a little modesty. I profess to be able to read and understand what the first scholars of the past and present have to say about the genuineness and authenticity of the books of the Bible. I know what the destructive critics claim, and what the mediating critics teach; and I know what the conservatives hold. I have learned that it is safe to take what specialists say cum multis granis salis (or with many grains of salt). They often lack in the judicial qualifications to be safe guides. They are apt to have some pet theories that they are anxious to establish, and being specialists they are more likely to be narrow and self-conceited than men who are not specialists. They easily become hobbyists and enthusiasts. We have noted examples of quackery in medicine. Some man professes that he has made an important discovery, and declares that it will absolutely cure every ailment known to men. Henry George believes that he has solved all the intricate questions of political economy. I have known some professors in Greek and Latin, and some in mathematics, who imagined that scarcely anything else was worthy of attention outside their departments in college. This is the conspicuous tendency and liability with specialists in any department of knowledge. The place of the specialist, then, is not on the judicial bench, but on the witness stand. I am in favor of specialists-their work is very valuable in their fields, but they are not to presume to assert, as they often do, that thoughtful and reading men are not allowed to question their facts, or rather oftener their assumptions and conjectures. I believe to-day that we are warranted in the assertion that there are nine assumptions for every well-established fact that the higher critics have brought against the Bible

record; especially is this true of the destructive critics. It is a very bold and suspicious attitude which the critics of this day occupy, standing as they do some thirty centuries from the date of some of these documents, and passing positive judicial decision on their contents without access to the original source from which the books were compiled, if they were compiled, and I modestly submit that these same specialists have no possible access to those sources to determine that fact, if it be a fact. That is a task so immense that nothing short of the supernatural can compass it; yet these critics have the audacious effrontery to insist that they know more about these facts than Moses, Isaiah, and Daniel, who were contemporary with many of the facts, and had ready access to the sources from whence they wrote those histories. And not only so, but some of these same critics have insinuated that these sacred writers have recorded these events after they transpired, and palmed them off for prophecies, and that many things they wrote were forgeries.

Now, a word respecting the Mediating School of Critics before I proceed. I do not question their honesty in their professed search for the truth of this burning question; still I am compelled to feel that they are standing on untenable and dangerous ground. My reasons for this conviction are these: First, because many of them being scholars of more or less repute, they are liable from the pride of scholarship to be tempted to enter this hazardous field, because so many eminent German rationalistic scholars are found in it. Secondly, they are using some of the same arguments in their apologetics that the Infidel critics are employing for a different purpose. Another reason for this conviction is, that skeptics and those who deny the divinity of Christ and scout the miracles and prophecies of the Bible are greatly delighted at the attitude of the mediating critics.

Now, lest I be suspected of overstating the attitude of the leading destructive critics, I will quote from a lecture of one of the foremost destructive critics lately de

livered in the city of Glasgow, Scotland, Dr. Otto Pfleiderer, of the University of Berlin. Here we have some of his assertions in this lecture:

He said that "all marvelous incidents related of Jesus in the gospel histories are pure inventions, added at a late day; that Paul believed only in the spiritual, and not in the bodily, resurrection of Jesus." He holds that "there has been no supernaturally inspired revelation. All man's religious ideas have been obtained by the efforts of his own reason. The Bible is simply an ancient religious classic, no different in kind from many other books. The gospel records are largely unreliable. As for the Gospel of John, it is in no sense an historical writing, but a didactic treatise, which derived its theological ideas chiefly from Philo and invested them in the form of a life of Jesus, as a sort of religious fiction. Christ was merely an unusual religious genius, a purely human evolution, differing only in degree, if indeed in that, from other religious leaders. Although He had some grand thoughts about God and life, He was, it seems, rather a goodygoody sort of a saint, simple-minded and well-meaning, but considerably deluded. Indeed, He was like the rest of us, not without His faults; He was not spotless, sinless, guiltless. Some things which He is recorded to have claimed for Himself can not possibly have been true. He is not indisputably fit to be a file leader and head of the column in humanity's hopeful march toward a better future. Redemption is an empty dream, atonement an exploded notion, which Paul erroneously held; there is no forgiveness of sins. Jesus did not rise from the tomb, Mary did not meet her Lord in the garden, He did not walk and talk with two disciples on the Emmaus road, nor show His wound prints to Thomas, nor eat with His disciples on the shore; for the Syrian stars look down to-night on His unknown and hopeless grave." This, and more of the same kind of stuff were distinctly stated and inevitably implied in these lectures at Edinburgh, and are now in English print. Though Pfleiderer is Professor of Theology in Berlin University, he has

uttered in these lectures trash that can not be surpassed by Mr. Ingersoll, the apostle of American infidelity.

Before proceeding to the real issue, I wish to say that I shall appear to some disadvantage because of the brief time allowed me on so broad a theme as my subject involves. I will be compelled to give only a few examples of the fallacious arguments of the critics.

They first attack the Pentateuch. Their claim is that it can not be the work of Moses. They think they see evidence in these five books of different authors' styles. They infer that they must be composite. For example, we are told there are in Genesis two accounts of creation, and they must have been written by different authors. Others, that they were compiled from different sources by one editor or redactor. Equally competent judges do not see two distinct accounts, but a simple enlargement of the same account. If there are two separate accounts as held by the critics, their redactor or editor must have been a conspicuous ignoramus not to have noticed this distinction, or else he considered them a continued account of the same fact. The latter is the rational view. This is one of the assumptions that the critics ask us to consider a settled fact. You see how modest they are?

Again, they endeavor to set aside the long-established and cumulative proofs that Moses is the author of Deuteronomy. They insist that Deuteronomy could not have been written by him, because the law was disregarded, and "could not have been in existence" in the time of Moses. Also that he could not have written it, because in it there is an account of his own death. This latter reason has been answered so often that it is strange the critics should urge it again. The last chapter of Deuteronomy undoubtedly belongs to the Book of Joshua, and was not carefully separated therefrom in the arrangement of the books; but the other objection to Moses being its author is frivolous and without foundation; viz., where a law is generally disregarded the inference is that it could not have been a statute law. This view of the critics is the result of a false theory of progress or evo