My scholarly colleague, Professor Deweese, recently handed me an extract from the biography of Gibbon, the historian, which most aptly illustrates the folly of those critics who pretend to distinguish in the Pentateuch and other books of the Bible the hands of a variety of writers by their peculiarities of style. Gibbon speaks of having, in his early career, united with a friend, Deyverdun, in editing a journal under the title, "Literary Memoirs of Great Britain." Writing about it at a later period, he says: "It is not my wish to deny how deeply I was interested in the memoirs, of which I need not surely be ashamed: but at the distance of more than twenty years it would be impossible for me to ascertain the respective shares of the two associates."

      Now, here is a man of acknowledged literary genius who could not look through the pages of that journal [312] after the lapse of twenty years and clearly distinguish between his own compositions and those of his partner. Undoubtedly they differed in style, but by these differences he was unable to clearly distinguish between them. And now the question arises, if this master of English composition could not distinguish his own writings, executed twenty years past in his own native tongue, from those of another, how can German critics, and their English imitators, take up documents written three thousand years ago, written in a dead language, and written by men of an Oriental race, and distinguish by peculiarities of style the hands of four or five different unknown writers? In the light of this illustration from Gibbon, which is but one of many that have been published by scholars, the claim of these critics is absurd; and there is no wonder that these men, with whom literary criticism was once the stronghold of their system, are now admitting that it is their weakest source of evidence. If the rulers of the British Empire were to come out with a proclamation announcing that the British Navy has been found to be the weakest of their national defences, the change would not be more radical.

[SEBC 312-313]