the psychical man," "the divine voice," the consciousness of which Socrates felt as the "summit of the knowledge of the true wisdom by the Greek spirit." Hence the development of the doctrine of sin with its technical terms, and of holiness with its new ideas and language. How infinitely deeper and higher than the Greek are these conceptions of the New Testament language, as the person of Christ, presented by the omnipotent Spirit, convicts the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment.2 The Word as tabernacled among us, with glory as of an only begotten from a Father, full of grace and faithfulness, 3 assumes the place not only of the heroic ideal man of the Greeks, but even of the unapproachable holy Yahweh of the Hebrews. Hence the elevation of the graces of meekness, patience, long-suffering, self-sacrifice; and their union with the Greek virtues of strength, beauty, bravery, manhood, organize a new ethical ideal. And so in all departments of Christian thought there was a corresponding elevation and degradation of terms and conceptions. We need only mention regeneration, redemption, reconciliation, justification, sanctification, life and death, heaven and hell, the Church, the Kingdom of God, repentance, faith, Christian love, baptism, the Lord's supper, the Lord's day, the advent, the judgment, the new Jerusalem, everlasting glory. Truly a new world was disclosed by the Greek language, and the literature of the New Testament, as the Hebrew and the Aramaic and the Greek combined their energies and capacities in the grasp of the divine creating and shaping Spirit, who transformed the Greek language and created a new and holy Greek literature just as He makes the earth heave and subside into new forms and shapes under the energy of the great forces of its advancing epochs.

The especial literary development of the New Testament is the sermon and the theological tract. We trace these from the first beginning on the day of Pentecost through the dis

1 Zezschwitz, in l.c., pp. 55–57, Hatch, in l.c., pp. 94 seq. 2 John 168.

3 John 114.

4 Bleek, Einleitung, p. 71; Immer, Hermeneutik, p. 105; Am. ed., Andover, 1877, pp. 129-131; Cremer, Bib. Theol. Wörterbuch der Neu. Testament. Gräcität; and Trench, New Testament Synonyms, under the respective words.

courses of the book of Acts into the epistles. Looking at the sermons, we observe that they are no longer on the Aramaic and Hebraic model, as are the discourses of our Lord, but we see the Greek orator in place of the Aramaic rabbin. So with the epistles, especially these of Saint Paul ; although he reminds us of the rabbinical schools in his use of the halacha and haggada methods,1 yet he exhibits also the dialectic methods of the Greek philosopher. Thus the Greek orator and philosopher prepared the language and style of Saint Paul, the preacher and theologian, no less than the Hebrew prophet and wise man gave him the fundamental principles of his wisdom and experience. And although the Greek literature of the New Testament has no Demosthenes' On the Crown, or Plato's Republic, as it has no Iliad or Prometheus, yet it lays the foundation of the sermon and the tract, which have been the literary means of a world-transforming power, as, from the pulpit and the chair, Christian ministers have stirred the hearts and minds of mankind, and lead the van of progress in the Christian world for the sermon combines the prophetic message of the Hebrew with the oratorical force of the Greek, as it fires the heart, strives in the council-chamber of the intellect, and pleads at the bar of the conscience; while the epistle combines the sententious wisdom of the Hebrew with the dialectic philosophy of the Greek, in order to mould and fashion the souls of men and of nations, by the great vital and comprehensive principles which constitute the invincible forces of Christian history.

1 Gal. 422 seq.; Rom. 31 seq., etc. See pp. 444 seq.

CHAPTER IV

HOLY SCRIPTURE AND CRITICISM

HOLY SCRIPTURE is composed of a great variety of writings of holy men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, in a long series extending through many centuries, preserved to us in three different original languages, the Hebrew, the Aramaic, and the Greek, besides numerous versions. These languages were themselves the products of three different civilizations, which having accomplished their purpose passed away, the languages no longer being used as living speech, but preserved only in written documents. They present to us a great variety of literature, as the various literary styles and the various literary forms of these three languages have combined in this one sacred book of the Christian Church, making it as remarkable for its literary variety as for its religious unity.

The Bible is the sacred canon of the Israel of God, the infallible authority in all matters of worship, faith, and conduct. From this point of view it has been studied for centuries by Jew and Christian. Pious men in all ages have faithfully endeavoured to learn from it the holy will of God and to apply it to their daily life. They have used all the resources at the disposal of man to gather the sacred material, and employ it in the construction of sacred institutions and the formation of systems of doctrine and morals. The inevitable tendency has been, not only to discern the divine authority in Holy Scripture and to recognize the divine teaching therein, but also so to exalt the divine element as to underrate or ignore the human element in the Bible. The Church in its official utterance has kept itself to the normal line of truth; but many of the theologians have unduly extended their doctrine of inspiration so as

to cover the external letter, the literary form and style, in the theory of verbal inspiration, and even to include the method of the delivery of the revelation to the sacred writers by the theories of divine dictation and the overpowering ecstatic control of the Divine Spirit; and they have so extended the infallible teaching as to make it include the incidental words of weak, ignorant, and wicked men, and even of Satan himself.

The fact has been too often overlooked, that it has not seemed best to God to create a holy language for the exclusive vehicle of His Word, or to constitute peculiar literary forms and styles for the expression of His revelation, or to commit the keeping of the text of this Word to infallible guardians. But on the other hand, as He employed men rather than angels as the channels of His revelation, so He used three human languages with all the varieties of literature that had been developed in the various nations using these languages, in order that He might approach mankind in a more familiar way in the human forms with which they were acquainted and which they could readily understand; and He permitted the sacred text to depend for its accuracy upon the attention and care of the successive generations of His people. Hence the necessity of Biblical Criticism to determine the true canon, the correct text, and the position and character of the various writings.

Holy Scripture comes down to us through the centuries enveloped in numberless traditional theories and interpretations which are too often confounded with Scripture itself. Sometimes these traditions are expressed in the arrangement of the books, the titles given to them, the headings of chapters and sections, and other similar editorial work upon the writings themselves. But more frequently they envelop the writings like a mist of pious sentiment, or a cloud of traditional opinion, sometimes in current literature, but oftener in the language of the synagogue, the church, and the school; which is transmitted from father to son, or from master to pupil as the genuine orthodox opinion. In all those centuries in which religious opinion was chiefly traditional, depending on the teaching of the Fathers, it is a matter of congratulation that none of these traditional theories about the Bible ever received the official

endorsement of any section of the Christian Church. And the diversity of opinion in the several layers of the Talmud and among ancient Jewish rabbis shows that liberty of opinion on these matters has ever been a heritage of Israel.

At the revival of learning, when Christian scholars began to study the original Hebrew text of the Old Testament, under the guidance of the most learned Hebrew scholars of their age, it became inevitable that, in course of time, if the spirit of the Reformation was to endure, all the traditional theories about the Bible would eventually have to be tested.

The free-born spirit of the Reformation was repressed in the age of Protestant scholasticism, which built up the systems of Protestant dogmatics and ecclesiasticism over against Roman Catholic dogmatics and ecclesiasticism. But a terrible retribution came upon unfaithful Protestantism in the outbreak of free thought in Deism, Atheism, and Rationalism, which laid violent hands upon everything that was deemed sacred in Christianity, and forced Protestantism from a dogmatic into an apologetic position. It was the serious conflicts in this age of apologetics which brought to birth the age of modern scientific criticism. Criticism sprang forth a youthful giant to solve the problems of the modern age of the world.

All traditions must be tested. Certainty must in some way be attained. How can it be attained in the opinion of any man save by an intuition of God, or by an infallible decision of the Church, or by the most exact, painstaking, comprehensive, and thorough-going investigation? We cannot look for an intuition from God in matters of traditional opinion. There is nothing to warrant it. To those who would rest upon the infallible authority of the Church, we may say, there has been no decision of the Church in matters of Biblical Criticism, and, in the divided condition of Christianity at the present time, what church can speak with sufficient authority to decide these questions? If the reformers would not submit to the decision of the Council of Trent in the all-important question of the Canon of Scripture, what council could now speak a decisive word as to matters of Biblical Criticism?

It is manifest, therefore, that the only pathway to certainty