I am sure that no reader has forgotten what I wrote last week respecting Sir Robert Anderson's book on [420] modern criticism, or the extracts which I made from it. The critics may imagine that while preachers who are sound in faith are withstanding their assaults on the Bible, the rank and file of the people, and men of the various professions who are not well posted in the Scriptures, are being carried with them. They have yet to learn that there are multitudes of lawyers, doctors and other thoughtful men who are capable of detecting sophistry, and who are seeing plainly through their thin disguises. We are not to presume that Sir Robert Anderson is the only eminent lawyer of whom this is true; and even if he were, his example would inevitably arouse the attention of others. I want our readers to see several more specimens of this lawyer's brief in the case.

      The two most pretentious works which have appeared in the English language within the last ten years, in support of "modern scientific criticism," are Hastings' "Bible Dictionary" and Cheyne's "Encyclopædia Biblica." Mr. Anderson has looked into both of them, and he happily points out the difference between them in the following paragraph:

      The difference between the work in question [that of Cheyne] and the more conservative and cautious "Dictionary of the Bible," edited by Dr. James Hastings, to which Professor Driver, of Oxford, has lent his name, is that the one represents the Bible as error and romance mingled with truth, and the other as truth mingled with romance and error. For certain purposes the distinction is a real one, but here it is immaterial. For the question I have raised is, whether the old-fashioned belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures can be maintained; and the main purpose of every work emanating from these writers is, as they would say, to remove the difficulties and dangers which the historic view of inspiration is supposed to create. The one set of writers hand me a purse of coins, with an assurance that the most of them are genuine. The other set of writers hand me a purse of coins with the warning that most of them are counterfeit. But, as I [421] am unable to distinguish between the base coins and the gold, honesty forbids my trading with any of them, and therefore all my seeming wealth is practically useless. In either case, the Bible is like a lottery bag, from which the blanks and prizes must be drawn at random. If the one section of the critics may be trusted, the prizes abound; if the other section be right, the blanks predominate. But in either case, I repeat, faith is impossible, and therefore Christianity is destroyed (14, 15).

      On another page our author gives a striking illustration of the irreverent manner in which this criticism picks to pieces and discredits the Bible:

      I appeal to all intelligent and fair-minded thinkers. The only kind of person I wish to ignore is the fool. We all know the sort of morbidly active-brained child who will pull a valuable watch to pieces, and then tell us with a smile that "there was nothing in it but wheels and things." He has his counterpart in the foreign infidel type of scholar who, albeit as ignorant of man and his needs as a monk, and as ignorant of God and his ways as a monkey, sets himself with a light heart to tear the Bible to pieces (19).

      I have more than once asserted in these columns that all of the attacks now made by so-called evangelical critics upon the historical veracity of the Scriptures were made by avowed infidels long ages ago, and that they have been refuted as often as made. Mr. Anderson expresses himself on this point in the following forcible words:

      We have come within sight of an apostasy unparalleled in the history of Christendom. Every attack which open infidelity has launched against the Bible is now being repeated by men "who profess and call themselves Christians," and who claim to be the apostles of a new movement in defense of the citadel of Christian truth. And just as vice became fashionable in the days of Charles II., so, as Professor Cheyne naively owns, this system of attacking truth in the interests of truth has become "fashionable" in Britain to-day. The appearance of his "Encyclopædia" has checked the movement for the moment; but the scare thus [422] caused will soon subside. It has fluttered the lesser lights of the higher criticism, who have been serving as acolytes in the worship of this new goddess of reason. For they are not clear-headed enough to see that Professor Cheyne has only pressed their own principle to legitimate conclusions (37).

      The publication of the "Polychrome Bible," so far as it was published, was one of the hardest blows that crooked criticism has received, and it is a blow delivered by its own hand, as if suicide was intended. We have heard nothing from it of late. Like an untimely birth, it seems to have died in being delivered. Mr. Anderson has a due appreciation of the abortion, and he incidentally alludes to it while pressing upon our attention the uncertainty as to whether the skeptical criticism of to-morrow will not completely reverse that of to-day. He says:

      What guarantee have we, then, that the vagaries of present-day criticism about the books of Moses, the prophets and the Psalms, will not be dismissed as lightly by the higher critics of the future? I am not referring here to the puerilities of the "Polychrome Bible"--such puerilities offend the common sense of all intelligent people (49).

      When a man occupies a ridiculous position, nothing makes him wince quicker than a little deserved ridicule. If he is above ridicule, as every man is who stands with both feet on the truth, he cares nothing for an attempt to heap it upon him. I am comforted to find this British lawyer looking upon this feature of the critical controversy as I do. On this point he says:

      My answer, then, is clear and unequivocal. As for the manner of it, I am well aware of its faults and imperfections. But one characteristic of it, for which I expect to be taken severely to task, I refuse to regard as a fault at all. At the outset I waived appeal to authority, and therefore I have deliberately abstained from paying the critical scholars the homage to which they are accustomed. To adopt the words of Dr. Pusey, "I have [423] turned against skeptics their own weapons, and used ridicule against the would-be arguments of a false criticism which thought itself free because it made itself free with God's word" (250).

      I remember that once on a time certain brethren who had been supporting the American Christian Missionary Society, having become dissatisfied with the management, called a meeting for the purpose of organizing another society. Isaac Errett remonstrated with them in the columns of the Christian Standard. The leader of the movement indignantly retorted that they were free men and had a right to do as they pleased. "Of course you are free man," responded the editor, "and you can stand on your heads if you choose; but if you do, I am also a free man, and I have the right to criticize your posture."

[SEBC 420-424]