President Harper has an editorial in the Biblical World, beginning in the April number, and continued in the May number, showing how one class of men array themselves in favor of old truth and another class in favor of new truth; and how they often denounce each the position of the other. He deprecates this denunciation, and the purpose of the article is to dissuade men from it. It is easy to see what led him into this train of thought. He regards himself, in his advocacy of the new criticism, as a lover of new truth, and he wishes to silence those who speak of him as an [145] advocate of dangerous error. He is willing, if the opposition will consent, to enter into a kind of compromise, by which he will concede to his opponents the title of advocates for old truth, provided they will call him and his party the friends of new truth.

      The device is too thin. The issue is such that if either party is right, the other is wrong. This will appear very clearly if we consider one of his own illustrations. It is an antithetical statement which he quotes from some one, "The Bible is inspired of God according to Paul, but it is the work of ignorant and unskillful redactors according to Wellhausen." Here, according to our editor, instead of an antithesis between a truth and an untruth; we have something quite different; that is, two statements that are complementary to one another. He makes out the case in the following words:

      Paul looks at the finished product and at the work which it has accomplished in the world, at the spirit which breathes forth from it, at the destiny which awaits it. The critical scholar studies it from the scientific point of view, its beginnings, its form, the characteristics and knowledge of the men who were the instruments of its production, the phenomena of the periods in which its particular books were produced, the various processes through which it has passed. And when we realize all that is involved in the latter, need we feel that the argument for the former is weakened?

      What does all this parade of words and clauses amount to? Nothing but an attempt to show that when a man says with Paul that the Bible is inspired of God, he is uttering an old truth, and that when Wellhausen says it is the work of ignorant and unskillful redactors, this is a new truth; and that there is no antagonism between the two. Wellhausen himself would repudiate the attempt with scorn. That which he means by his statement of the origin of the Bible excludes divine [146] inspiration, as he is frank enough to tell us; so if he is right, his new truth stands in direct opposition to Paul's old error. Wellhausen is not a trimmer like President Harper. I suppose that, according to the latter, when I say that the Pentateuch came from Moses, and he says that it was composed a thousand years after the death of Moses, the difference is only this, that I am contending for an old truth, and he for a new one; that is, it is an old truth that it did come from Moses, and it is a new truth that it did not. A great deal of the President's recent writing is of this character; and for my part, I admire him more when he comes right out, as in his lectures on Genesis than when he blows hot and cold with the same breath. "I would that ye were either hot or cold."

[SEBC 145-147]