This voluminous and very popular writer has recently published an essay in the Review of the Churches, in which he defines his position on the results of recent criticism of the Old Testament, and defends it with his customary vehemence. It is by no means a surprise to those who have kept pace with him in his numerous productions to learn that he stands with the advanced column of the higher critics; for although he has been comparatively silent on the subject, and has never before publicly avowed his conclusions, it has been increasingly clear that his views of inspiration were leading, him in that direction. In his earlier days as a writer, he published an essay on "Inspiration," in which, when speaking of the charge that the Biblical writers have fallen into mistakes, he says: "That they did so err, I am not so irreverent as to assert, nor has the widest learning [39] and the acutest ingenuity of skepticism ever pointed out one complete and demonstrable error of fact or doctrine in the Old or New Testament." Since then it seems that he has become "so irreverent" as to charge that they have committed multitudes of errors; and he has either concluded that the old skeptics were more acute than he then thought they were, or he has found the newer skeptics more acute than the old set. He defines, in the terms following, his conception of the way in which revealed truth, if it is right to so style it, came to the sacred writers:

      The revelation came to men through the circumstances and conditions of their lives, which were the voice of God to their own reason and conscience, speaking to them in the course of national events, and the divine education of personal experience, not in breaths of articulated air.

      These statements contain an explicit denial of miraculous inspiration, and they bring the sources of information of the sacred writers down to the level of those which all other writers enjoy. What is it, then, but sheer nonsense, to speak of them as inspired writers? It is worse than nonsense, it is deceit; for by the continued use of this term these men keep up the appearance of believing what is represented by it, of distinguishing the Bible writers from others, when in reality they deny what they seem to affirm. The latter clause of this extract is intended to cast a slur on the current conception of inspiration. "Not in breaths of articulated air." Who has affirmed what is here formally denied? And if no one has so affirmed, why the unfairness of insinuating, for the purpose of ridicule, that they have? It is a rare virtue to correctly represent an opponent's position--a virtue which few, if any, of the destructive critics have learned to appreciate. [40]

      It seems from a personal reminiscence mentioned in the essay that, although Farrar's avowal of belief in the conclusions of advanced critics has been so delayed, the leaven of it has been working in him for a long time; for he tells us that when Colenso was being prosecuted for his infidel work on the Pentateuch and Joshua, about thirty years ago, he and Dean Stanley stood by him. He seems to congratulate himself on having helped to defeat the effort then made to remove from the Church of England the reproach of having a bishop who dared to write such books as Colenso published. If that church had been pure enough at that time to purge herself of such a bishop, it is highly probable that it would not now have within its folds so many canons, professors, archdeacons and bishops who publish sentiments equally destructive of the faith of the people, and equally discreditable to the church which tolerates them.

      While Archdeacon Farrar is certainly one of the most eloquent of living writers and a scholar of exhaustive research on the subjects which engage his pen, he is by no means noted for logical power, and he sometimes indulges in speculations which can scarcely spring from a sober judgment. The readers of his "Early Days of Christianity" will recall, as specimens both of wild speculation and inconclusive reasoning, his positions on the genuineness of 2 Peter and the authorship of Hebrews. His labored attempt to prove that Apollos was the most probable author of the latter Epistle, it will be remembered, was based chiefly on the style of the Epistle; yet there is not a line in existence from the pen of Apollos to give one the remotest idea as to what his style was. As to 2 Peter, he labors at great length to prove that it was not written by the apostle, and yet he comes to the conclusion at last that it may have been written by some [41] one under the immediate direction of the apostle. Such specimens of criticism, based on style, ought to have taught him and others some caution in applying the same method to the Hebrew books of the Old Testament--to a language with which they are less familiar than with the Greek.

      So far as I can gather from the notices of this essay which I have seen, for I have not yet obtained access to the essay itself, there is no attempt in it to make advances on the established method of argumentation, nor to throw any new light on the subject. The author indulges in bold statements in much disparagement of the views which he opposes, and in some predictions after the manner of our own countryman, Professor Briggs. He allows only twenty years till "no one whose intellect has not been absolutely fossilized will be found to question" these conclusions. How many years was it that Voltaire allowed himself to obliterate the memory of Jesus of Nazareth? Predictions are cheap; that is, the kind which modern prophets announce while they are vainly striving to make it appear that the ancient prophets had no inspiration different from their own.

      One of the most surprising things in this essay is the Archdeacon's statement of the first advantage which is gained by the conclusions of the critics whom he follows. It is this: "We gain at once the enormous advantage that ninety-nine hundredths of the assaults and objections of infidels and secularists are at once rendered innocuous." How this can be when ninety-nine hundredths of the objections of infidels are admitted, and their validity insisted upon by the critics, I can not understand. I think that a man must certainly have to become an archdeacon in order to understand how an objection can become innocuous by its validity being [42] admitted. On the other hand, he claims that by these theories "we lose only a useless fetish of human theory; a false, lifeless and impossible dogma, which in these days could only crush to atoms an intelligent faith, if it were regarded as an essential of religion." He refers to the theory of the infallibility of the autograph Scriptures; but here he presents another puzzle; for how is it possible that this theory can now "crush to atoms an intelligent faith"? I have been of the opinion that an intelligent faith is one that can not be crushed to atoms at all. Such a faith, accompanied with belief in the inspiration and truthfulness of the Scriptures, has withstood all the crushers of eighteen centuries, and it is not very likely to be crushed to atoms at this late date. Does the venerable archdeacon mean that his own faith was about to be crushed to atoms when belief in the new criticism came to his relief, and saved him from infidelity? It looks very much that way. Perhaps he found his first relief from a weakening faith when he fell into the advocacy of a second probation, and wrote his book entitled "Eternal Hope."

[SEBC 39-43]