ous appeal is requisite to the common sense of thoughtful men-to the calm and clear judgment of mankind, upon the nature of the theory itself, and the essential character of the books thus criticised. Especially does the public need argument which shall bring to view the spiritual worth of the Bible; and test this skeptical scheme by the light which the moral elevation and practical power of the Word of God cast upon it.

This want Prof. Lewis has endeavored to supply. He has constructed an argument which makes its appeal to the intelligence and the judgment of every one who is willing to think on this great subject; and has set forth one aspect of the evidence which possesses great power.

The theory of which we first spoke, which considers the Bible an imposture, he dismisses as unworthy of serious notice. No earnest and candid mind can find any plausible, much less any satisfactory ground, for adopting that. The other view remains to be examined-that which holds the Bible to be a collection of legends and mythical fancies, which the wondering eredulity of later days has honestly taken for truth, and with pious reverence wrought into their present shape. This hypothesis admits not only the general honesty of the biblical writers, but their integrity of purpose in this particular work. They were indeed more than simply honest-they were devout believers in all the marvels which they recorded; and the record itself is the decisive expression and evidence of the state of mind in which it was written. They wrote, in so far as their writings involve any assertions of facts-not only with no intention of falsehood but with extreme simplicity of mind— in devout adoration of God's own presence and immediate power-with a subdued spirit of awe and wonder which magnified and exaggerated ordinary events, but which would not for the world have falsified them-and with a devotion to the spiritual interests of men unsurpassed and unequaled in any other body of men that the world ever saw. Thus much the theory concedes. The prophets and evangelists who have left us these volumes, believed, with the utmost sincerity of faith, all that they have here recorded. The very fact that they saw

the hand of God in all around them, and felt the impulse of his spirit within them-in their own conception of the matterassures us of the simple hearted truthfulness in all that they

wrote.

Now, out of this concession of the honesty of the biblical writers, Prof. Lewis draws an argument for the reality of those supernatural facts which they record. In their own view such phenomena, it is conceded, took place; subjectively, the supernatural was real; but if so, then the very nature of their writings shows that there must have been an objective supernatural also. The one is impossible without the other.

The proof of this position he finds in the remarkably exact and specific character of the language in which all these phenomena of the supernatural are habitually described in the Bible. They are detailed with the utmost minuteness of narration. The time and manner of their occurrence are distinctly marked. The attending circumstances are fully described. Now in the legendary style, to which the Bible is by this hypothesis of its late origin assigned, all this detail of events is impossible. The very nature of the theory supposes that the specific character of the events has been lost in the course of years. The legend has been floating about in the oral communications of admiring disciples till, in the frequent transmission of it from one to another, the minute features of the event have been lost. This is indeed the real and indisputable character of all the legends with which the Bible is compared. The Scandinavian legends do not give day and date for the visit of Thor to the land of the Jötuns; nor do the adventures of Heracles or Prometheus come within the definite and settled chronology of Greece. The very nature of such mythic narratives repels every attempt at historic accuracy of narrative. They are due only to the imaginations of men. They are, in all the circumstances which make them remarkable, the work of excited fancy dwelling upon and transforming utterly, facts which were not otherwise astonishing. It is essential to the honest belief of the marvel that its accompanying details of reality should be left out of view. The Argonautic expedition has none of that minute accuracy which the

chronicle of an eye witness would have possessed. It took place in no definite relation with ascertained historical events. The siege of Troy has no chronological era, nor any definite characteristics of reality in its detail. Some basis of fact there probably was for each of these legends; but the imagination which has given them their drapery, makes no pretence of clothing them with the characteristics of authentic and precise history.

We see at a glance that it were impossible that it should be otherwise. No such historical accuracy of detail is consistent with the wonder-making and imaginative fancy which has given shape to these legends. The imagination, in order to invest them with this aspect of the marvelous and supernatural, must have scope, must not be confined within the exact limits of fact. The writer could no more work within such limits of precise verity than a poet could carry on his poem if he had to describe the process, and prove the possibility, of making his hero invisible, by scientific methods. Hence in all such legendary efforts there is an entire forgetfulness, if not a deliberate avoidance, of the historical style. Such events did not take place in any precise year of a well known reign. The moment you come down to such details, the marvel, the wonder out of which the myth grows, is at an end.

Now the events of the biblical narratives are given to us in an unparalleled combination of astonishing and supernatural occurrences, with minute accuracy of detail; and in the fullest chronological sequence with ascertained historical events. Errors in chronological reckoning of time there may be, though even these do not greatly mislead us; but the whole detail of history is there. Instead of the dim and misty aspect which is characteristic of the mythical and legendary style, we have precise announcements of the period of each great event, and an evident intention in the writer to fix it to the most determinate period which the then existing methods of computation would allow. The visions which the prophet saw were in the reigns of such and such kings of Israel and of Judah. Habitually these writers refer not incidentally alone, but deliberately, and of distinct purpose, to the epochs by which their writings may be identified; and give the full detail, in historical and

chronological form, of almost every one of the miracles which they so reverently record.

These details of time and circumstance furnish to Prof. Lewis a ground of argument which has not before been suggested. He shows that they are utterly inconsistent with the theory of a late and legendary origin. Such details could never have been traditionally handed down. They are at variance irreconcilably, with any theory of such transmission that we can intelligibly form. The sacred books must either have been, therefore, the work of the writers whose names they bear, of authors contemporary with the events which they describe, and writing, with definite knowledge of these particulars, or else these seeming marks of authenticity were deliberately forged. Such specific records of events do not belong to the mythical and legendary style. No man at a period remote from the events themselves, sitting down to gather the floating rumors which his wondering fancy invests with an awful and supernatural character, could either seek, or find, the historic details which are here so abundantly given. If the narrative were then due to a period so materially subsequent to the events themselves as to allow the requisite scope for the mytho-poietic fancy to exalt and exaggerate common events into miracles, and ordinary men into prodigies of wisdom and sanctity, their whole character would of necessity be different. Everything would be vague and indefinite, and so in some keeping with the mystery and distortion of the events themselves. Hence, the only alternative lies between the authenticity of biblical narratives, and their forgery. Any honest and credulous exaggeration is out of the question, amid so many details which must either be absolutely true, or else a designed effort to simulate truth. The hypothesis of myth and legend is excluded as altogether inadmissible.

As an illustration of the method of this argument we extract one or two paragraphs upon this statistical character of the Scriptures:

"In the very beginning of Genesis, in the very frontispiece you may say of the whole Scriptures, we find this statistical character. And Adam lived a hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his image, and called

his name Seth; and all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years and he died." "There is the same character, though carried to a still further degree of graphic minuteness, in the account of the Deluge. We have the exact year, the month, the day of the month, when the great rain commenced upon the earth, and Noah went into the Ark. Were ever the Pictorial and the Statistical combined in so life-like a description."

After quoting and commenting upon the whole narrative of this great event, and referring to the same peculiarity in the account of the subsiding flood, the author continues:

"And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year, in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and behold, the face of the ground was dry; and on the second month, on the seven and twentieth day of the month, was the earth dried."

"How can any serious soul fail to be struck with this strange combination of the minutely familiar and the inexpressibly sublime? To think of a man's deliberately sitting down thus consciously to forge all this numerical exactness, and yet preserving that other awful feature, so inconsistent with the meanness and littleness of known and intended lying! For such, if it be not strictly true, must have been the character of this account when first written, unless thus filled in by our supposed compilers. A willful forger, earlier or later, could not have so described it; he must have betrayed the untruthfulness of his position. A mere wonder-making traditionist could not have given us the story in a manner so different from that of the early Greek logographer, or Hindoo mythopoeist; the legendary would have manifested itself; for that art of fictitious writing, which alone could have kept back its untruthful aspect, was not invented until ages after, and has only in the latest times arrived at perfection. Yet nothing in the most modern times, whether fictitious or real, could surpass it in this air of simple verity. We cannot avoid being struck with the unpretending calmness, the simple majesty, the utter absence of the swelling, the pretentious, the wondershowing, in a narrative that relates such marvels."

This careful and acute examination of the supernatural events of sacred history, Prof. Lewis carries through a great portion of the Bible, appealing with conclusive force to the candid student of the word of God. He shows that these writings bear, unmistakably, an aspect of entire opposition to the demands of any such theory. While the mythopoietic fancy delights in the wonder, dwells upon and exaggerates the extraordinary fact, the biblical writers seem almost oblivions of the marvel, in their anxiety to impress the moral lesson of which it was the vehicle to them. They write to give all the prominence possible not to the grotesque workings of an unrestrained fancy, nor to the impulses of a merely superstitious