Prof. E. J. Wolf, of Gettysburg Theological Seminary, calls attention, in a recent number of the Independent, to a case of literary criticism which illustrates very aptly the reliability of such criticism when applied to the books of the Bible. When President Cleveland's message on Hawaiian affairs was published, the question was raised, whether it was written by him, or by his Secretary of State, Mr. Gresham. Mr. McPherson, editor of the Gettysburg Star and Sentinel, of whom Professor Wolf says, "There is probably no man in this country more conversant with political writers and speakers, and, therefore, more competent to pronounce [94] judgment on the authorship or literary quality of a public document," passed this judgment in his paper: "As a matter of style it is a great improvement on any other of Mr. Cleveland's messages, having evidently been prepared by Mr. Secretary Gresham."

      On the other hand, Mr. Dana, of the New York Sun "whose primacy in literature," says the Professor, "is challenged only by his rank as a political writer and critic, and whose capacity to judge of the literary authorship of an official paper will be questioned by no American," bluntly declares: "Five-sixths of the message is a restatement in Mr. Cleveland's own language of the argument for the policy of infamy."

      On this conflict of opinion between two experts, the Professor comments as follows:

      This flat contradiction of each other by a brace of expert critics is something of a stunner to the simple and plain people who have been taught by the higher critics that even in the writings which were published some two or three thousand years since in a language now dead it is perfectly easy to tell what part Moses wrote, and what part some redactor of Moses; what Psalm is from David, and which ones from the time of Ezra; how much of the Book of Isaiah was written by Isaiah, and where the style changes so unmistakably that obviously another Isaiah must be the author of the later chapters. And, like Messrs. McPherson and Dana, they are all cocksure about it. There can be no mistake. No one having the remotest title to scholarship would dare to dispute these conclusions of higher criticism.

[SEBC 94-95]