cases out of ten it is useless to help a man to emigrate unless he has saved at least half his passage-money himself. Nor do the new countries invite them to settle. Those which take active steps to attract colonists, by assisted passages or vigorous canvassing, look for a very different type of man. They state plainly and specifically that they want settlers who have already proved their capacity as producers in their own country. The United States have gone further, and decline to receive for the future either criminals or paupers, in short, any of those who are euphemistically said to leave their country for their country's good.' So, then, it is the valuable element of our population which is ready to go, and which the colonies are ready to receive; and we are face to face with the fact that every year sees a heavy drain on our most industrious workers, whilst the lazy, the aimless, and the vicious are left to increase and multiply. Such a prospect cannot but be seriously alarming. The strain of competition, as we saw, is likely soon to become more severe than ever in the industrial world, and how are we to take a successful part in it if, for a series of years, we have been gradually losing our best energy and strength? The question is one which may well occupy the attention of legislators. Professor Rogers is probably right when he says that prohibition is not to be seriously thought of; it is rather the motives of emigrants which must be scanned if a remedy is to be found. The motive which acts most strongly on an emigrant is the desire to better himself. Is it not possible that legislation might do more to bring the realisation of that desire within his reach at home? The life of a labourer, whether in the country or in a town, is wanting in attraction, and hence a roving spirit among the labouring class. Countrymen move into towns largely because they find the country dull; artisans emigrate because they think the conditions of life elsewhere more attractive than they are at home. Can nothing be done to equalise the two, and so to retain within our border that most useful, nay, indispensable, part of the community which now leaves our shores in such large numbers to seek elsewhere a happiness and prosperity which, rightly or wrongly, it conceives to be denied to it here? ART. VII.-1. Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament. By Canon DRIVER. Third edition. Edinburgh: 1892. 2. The Canon of the Old Testament. By Professor RYLE. London: 1892. 3. The Old Testament in the Jewish Church. By Professor ROBERTSON SMITH. Second edition. Edinburgh: 1892. SACRED ACRED books that will not bear critical investigation can hardly be regarded as worthy of serious notice. They belong to the class of charms, amulets, phylacteries, and remedies against the evil eye. Lections from them-especially if chanted in an unknown tongue-are little better than incantations, and the priests who thus use them are not much superior, from an intellectual point of view, to medicine-men among the Sioux or the Cheroukees. But while documents like The Book of the Dead' in ancient Egypt, or the Book of Mormon' in modern America, are, for different reasons, equally beneath criticism, it is contended by all intelligent Christians that their sacred book, the Bible, positively invites criticism. For it has always been held that its obvious difficulties were purposely left there by Divine Providence in order to stimulate inquiry. So far, therefore, from injuring the influence exercised by the book, or from abating the reverence felt for it, inquiry (it is confidently believed) enhances both reverence and influence. And no honest criticism need be feared nor any serious investigation be deprecated. Are Christians justified in this somewhat jubilant faith? To this question it is hoped that the following pages may supply an answer. And It is round the Old Testament that difficulties and objections, at the present moment, mainly swarm. To this part of the Bible, therefore, we shall confine our attention. as this Journal makes no pretension to offer itself as a battle-field for experts of various prepossessions, the remarks we shall offer will be purposely made as broad, clear, and intelligible as possible, in order to supply one of the most urgent needs of the present day-viz. a popular reply to these three questions: (1) What has British criticism effected in the way of minute literary analysis of the Old Testament? (2) What results has it attained on the wider and more historical field of inquiry about the gradual formation of the Canon ? (3) How may the truths reached, thus far, by criticism in both these fields of investigation be safely VOL. CLXXVI. NO. CCCLXII. H H appropriated and practically used by the clergy and others engaged in teaching? (1) With the doings of Continental critics we do not at present propose to concern ourselves. The brilliant achievements of the Dutch and German Schools are well known, and some of their shortcomings we have, in a recent article, sufficiently exposed. It is to the British school of Old Testament criticism that we now invite our readers' attention. There many of the most glaring faults of foreign critics are happily absent. Foreign theology is far too apt to allow itself to become an arena for elaborately trained and furnished gladiators; and the multitudinous universities of the Fatherland only too readily send forth from their gates whole troops of rival professors, who sit round and form 'a 'mighty cloud of witnesses,' thoroughly enjoying the controversy and stimulating, with their habet' or with inverted thumb, the buoyant energy of the combatants. These tremendous exertions of combative learning are happily unknown here. In our mother-country-for, to begin with, we have a more tender and soothing designation for our native soil-professors' take on at once a more human and domestic temper. By some sweet fraternal instinct, which is kindred in no distant degree to Christian charity, they seem to address themselves spontaneously to that which is popular and common among us, and to avoid (so far as is possible) that which is esoteric and peculiar to their own. class. In short, they appeal in great measure to common sense. If something is lost by the reserve and self-control engendered by this practice of popular appeal, it may fairly be contended that a great deal is also gained. For not only is the great mass of the nation interested hereby in these Biblical controversies, and not only does their massiveness lend (as in politics) a vast momentum to everything that is done, but the controversialists themselves are precluded from many of the wild extravagances which characterise Continental theology, and feel compelled to conform to the healthy sensus communis of mingled loyalty and freedom amid which they live. There is, accordingly, not the slightest occasion in our country for any of those agitated outeries which we sometimes hear against the steady onward march of Biblical study. We can afford a good-natured smile when thirty-eight divines roundly protest, and can safely promise ourselves that their leaders will, ere long, exchange their courageous prudence for a far more prudent courage. We can easily pardon the excellent Spurgeon for his animated caricatures of the downgrade' theology, and can read with great equanimity a shriek from a monthly magazine, Higher criticism, indeed! It is really a criti'cism of the scissors, and fit only for the dust-bin of learning ' without sense!' For we know-to borrow the words of Bishop Creighton-that though it may be pleasant [for a church] to be free from the demands of reform, it is as'suredly dangerous. . . . The time is, indeed, out of joint which has no heart-searchings, no difficulties for solution.'* And, as Professor Kirkpatrick well reminds us, 'the spirit ' in which these questions are approached is more important 'than an immediate solution of them. It is idle to invoke 'dogma to defeat critical and historical research.'† Returning, then, with renewed courage to our Biblical studies, we desire to point out that if anyone would see for himself how, in the British school of criticism, the most perfect freedom of thought and speech is compatible with careful consideration for others, and with a genuine reverence for holy things and persons, he could not do better than give a few days to the perusal of Canon Driver's 'Introduction to the Old Testament.' He begins by clearly defining the scope of his work, and says: 'It is not an introduction to the theology, or to the history, or even to the study of the Old Testament. In any of these cases the treatment and contents would both have been different. It is an introduction to the literature of the Old Testament; and what I conceived this to include was an account of the contents and structure of the several books, together with such an indication of their general character and aim as I could find room for in the space at my disposal.' (P. 10.) In the prosecution of this scheme, after a very brief account of what is reported by Jewish writers as to the gradual, and certainly very late, settlement of the Old Testament Canon, Dr. Driver takes all the books of the Canon seriatim and discusses them as forming the sacred literature of the Hebrew people. But the English reader must be prepared for what may seem, at first sight, a partial dislocation of the accustomed order of these books. It is not, however, a dislocation at all, but a return to the true order, as it appears in the Hebrew Bibles to this day, and as it was sanctioned by our Lord. For He recognises, in a wellknown passage (Luke xxiv. 44), the triple strata of the Old Creighton, 'History of the Papacy' (1887), iv. 235. Testament collection, naming them respectively the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Following this sacred authority, then, our author devotes his first 150 pages to the Law-or, rather, to the Pentateuch in conjunction with its kindred Book of Joshua. He then gives 186 pages to the Prophets that is, (a) to their historical remains in Judges, Samuel, and Kings; (b) to their orations, as preserved under the titles of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and the twelve minor prophets. Lastly, in 184 pages, he deals with the Hagiographa, headed by the Psalms, and including (among other books) Ruth, Esther, Daniel, and Chronicles. It is in dealing with the Law' that the difference is mainly felt between the traditional and the critical method of handling the sacred books. Yet readers not merely of the Hebrew, but even of the English, Bible are easily able to perceive, when their attention is drawn to the point, that these six books form a unity, indeed, but a highly composite unity-in other words, that they have been edited." Let anyone, for instance, begin to read from Genesis ii. 4 onwards, and he cannot help perceiving that he has here in his hands a second account of the creation of all things. It not only announces itself as such by the opening words, These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth,' and not only is marked as a fresh document by a fresh designation of the Creator as Jehovah; but it breathes throughout a different spirit, with a more poetical lingering over details and a more thoroughgoing fearless anthropomorphism, far bolder than that which characterises the first chapter. But if this be so we have already, in the first two chapters of the Bible, two ancient documents which have become embedded side by side there in some third work, and have thus been edited by a Redactor.' Once concede this and the concession is quite inevitable--and then the labours of the (so-called) higher criticism* become at once not only justifiable, but positively indispensable. For we want to know, if possible, both what the embedded documents are, and where they come from, and when the Redactor lived who took so much trouble to make these heirlooms of the past serve the needs of Israel at a later period of their history. Such criticism, of course, is fallible, as the critics *It should be remembered that this phrase has no presumptuous meaning. It is simply a technical expression, denoting a literary and historical, as distinguished from a textual, investigation. †The Hebrew historiographer, as we know him, is essentially a |