From a recent article I extract the following passage:

      A man tells me that he does not believe that Moses wrote the Pentateuch. He has been compelled to surrender the traditional faith on that question. He believes that there were two Isaiahs, and that a gap of one hundred and fifty years yawns between the thirty-ninth and fortieth chapters of Isaiah's prophecies, so that they could not have been written by one man. He believes that Deuteronomy was written in the eighth century B. C., and that Leviticus did not assume its present form till after the captivity, a thousand years after Moses. What of it? If this man says he can not listen to the old-fashioned traditional preaching that ignores or disputes the findings of the best scholarship of the age, he has missed the nature and purpose of criticism so far as Christian life and duty are concerned. No matter who wrote the Pentateuch or when it was written, whether there were two Isaiahs or four or forty, it is our business, all the same, to follow Christ, and discharge every duty he lays upon us.

      If the man to whose objection this is a response is a man of sense, he will not be put off in this way. He will respond that, in being compelled to surrender the [151] traditional belief that Moses is the author of the Pentateuch, he has been compelled to believe that the Pentateuch contains a very large number of false statements about its own origin, and that the Lord Jesus, together with all of his apostles, believed and taught what was false in regard to it. He will, therefore, demand, as a condition of following Christ, that the author of this article, or some other man who believes as he does, shall show him how to follow a Christ who spoke erroneously on a matter of fact so simple. As to Isaiah, if he has decided that the last twenty-six chapters of that book were not written by Isaiah, but by an unknown man who lived one hundred and fifty years later; he will want to know how he can implicitly follow teachers like Christ and his apostles who quote passages from those chapters, and say that Isaiah wrote them. Can the writer of this article meet these demands? If he can, it would be far better and wiser for him to do so than to indulge in the mere gabble of saying, "No matter who wrote the Pentateuch or when it was written, whether there were two Isaiahs or four or forty, it is our business all the same to follow Christ." I think we have had enough of this kind of loose talk. It is time that some of the men who thus talk were meeting the real issue as to the bearing of their skeptical theories on the Christian faith.

[SEBC 151-152]