I have been greatly delighted the last few days in reading a work on modern criticism by an eminent English lawyer, Sir Robert Anderson. It was loaned to me [413] by Professor Loos, who had read it with great interest. It is fresh from the press of Hodder & Stoughton, London, and it bears the title, "The Bible and Modern Criticism." The little book, "Daniel in the Critics' Den," reviewed in these columns last summer by Professor Deweese, is an earlier publication by the same author. The preface was written by Professor Moule, now Lord Bishop of Durham, and in it he says of the book:

      It is the free and (to use the word in its best sense) popular presentation of the results of an independent study of the new criticism, as actually put before us in representative works, done by a student entirely free from professional bias, and trained in a severe school of legal and judicial investigation to sift witnesses and weigh evidence. It is an example of exactly the sort of work which, in my opinion, the church needs in an eminent degree, and which is, I fear, lamentably rare to-day--the careful study of religious problems by laymen at once open-minded and devout. In the best specimens of such study there is often, to my thinking, a quite peculiar value; a fresh and bracing air of thought all their own; a faculty for throwing some light upon subjects tangled by the overhandling of experts. Experts, as Sir Robert Anderson often pertinently reminds us, are by no means, as such, good judges. At the bar we sometimes find a man's logic swamped by his learning; and so it is in theology.

      If I were to attempt an improvement on this last remark, I would say that we sometimes, and often, find men with vast acquirements in knowledge, but almost void of logic. They are men of industry, and of tenacious memory, but scarcely capable of distinguishing between a sound argument and an unsound one. Such men are easily led astray by their own theorizings or by the cunning of other men.

      The author sets forth correctly the well-known effect on the public mind of the criticism under discussion, by his opening paragraph, which reads as follows:

      In these days of unrest many Christians are distressed by [414] doubts whether the Bible may be received with the settled and simple faith accorded to it in the past. They have been corrupted and disturbed by the Christianized skepticism which prevails; and, to use an apt illustration, their anchor has dragged, and they are drifting. It may be, therefore, that one who has known similar experiences, and is no stranger to such doubts, may be able in some measure to help others who are thus troubled.

      Here he clearly indicates the effect upon his own mind of this "Christianized skepticism" before he commenced the serious study of the subject, and perhaps during the earlier stages of that study. He recurs again and again to his experience in this respect. At the opening of another chapter (p. 129) he says:

      More than a quarter of a century ago, when I first came definitely under the influence of the higher criticism, doubts began to undermine my faith in the Holy Scriptures. I then knew but little either of the history or the aims of the movement, and a taste for critical inquiries, combined with impatience of mere "orthodoxy," created in my mind a prejudice in its favor. At the same time, I had a sufficient acquaintance with the general scheme of revelation, and especially with the typology and prophecy of Scripture, to prevent me from being misled by the teaching of the critics about the Pentateuch, or by their theory that the priestly code, as they call it, was later than the prophets.

      Suppose, now, that this lay lawyer, like the great majority of lawyers in America, had not been thus acquainted with the Scriptures, how could he have prevented being misled, and have guarded his faith from being undermined? Unfortunately, this unguarded state of faith, unguarded by Scripture knowledge, is precisely the state of faith experienced by the thousands of young men who, with minds alert in other particulars, are annually brought under the influence of "Christianized skepticism" in our colleges and universities, and even in many pulpits, magazines and daily newspapers. The [415] result, the inevitable result, is "these days of unrest;" and the men who are causing it shall give account therefor in the day of judgment.

      As Bishop Moule intimates in his preface, there is a freshness and vigor in this book which often stirs a man's blood and opens his eyes. Nothing that I have read since Baxter's review of Wellhausen has so much of this quality.

[SEBC 413-416]