A volume of "Critical and Historical Essays" has just been published by Charles Scribner's Sons, written by members of the "Biblical and Semitic Faculty" of Yale University. The Outlook, in a brief notice of it, says:

      The conclusions reached here in Old Testament literature are less conservative than in the New. While the love of Isaac and Rebecca will live in literature, it lives nowhere else, for their union was in fact the coalescence of two tribes bearing these names. The patriarchs of Genesis can not, in general, be regarded as real persons.

      These gentlemen are lost in the fog of their own conceit. The love of Isaac and Rebekah will live as a reality in the minds and hearts of many millions of believers, when the names of these professors shall have been forgotten by their own posterity. And as for Adam, Noah, Jacob and Joseph, they are known and honored as real persons by millions of people to a single one who has ever heard of these professors, or ever will hear of them. "Lord, give us a good conceit of ourselves," is a prayer not needed by our "modern scientific critics" of the Old Testament.

[SEBC 380]