Higher Criticism by Harry Matthew Carvill

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Tacoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Jun 15, 1911

Higher Criticism

By Harry Matthew Carvill

HARRY MATTHEW CARVILL

This is an age of enlightenment. We have empiricism in everything,—in medicine, in science, in politics, and even in religion. The empirics, who are the so-called New Theology ministers, and teachers of the theories of Higher Criticism, deal not only in quack medicines and in political legerdemain, but also in the once hallowed tenets of a holy religion. Our modern theologians feast us on New Thought, evolution, Higher Criticism, and Christian Science, to say nothing of a thousand and one other newfangled notions and isms.

While it is well known that there is a movement in the churches called Higher Criticism, or better known as the New Theology, many are unaware of its real nature, and imagine that because it is welcomed by many great theological scholars and noted divines of the present century, it must certainly be of great importance. In this they greatly err; and without examining its history, or even testing its fruit (for “ye shall know them by their fruits”), many, alas, have been blindly led headlong by its teaching to the very brink of infidelity.

The world is filled with infidelity and scoffing, most of which can be easily traced back to its fountainhead,—the teaching of Higher Criticism, which has so mutilated God’s Word that the ministers themselves are slowly but surely losing faith in the divine compass, and thus beginning to preach without either faith or conviction.

These Higher Critics tell us, as an apology for their ever-changing theories, that this is an age of enlightenment and of progress. Is the heaping of absurdity on absurdity, and the adding of vagary to vagary, any evidence of enlightenment or of progress? They also tell us that this is the age of mental liberty and of free and open inquiry in everything,—from things in the most humble walks of life to those in the highest realms of philosophy and religion. Is there, then, no difference between rational liberty, trammeled only by the fetters of sober reason and by the golden bonds of obedience to a divinely constituted and clearly ascertained divine religion, and that licentiousness of intellect which knows and acknowledges no restraint whatever, either human or divine? Must we be the sons of infidelity, and shake off all restraint of every kind, in order to be free and broad-minded? If liberty can be attained only on such conditions, and at such frightful cost to the human soul, then away with liberty.

If one takes the time to listen to one of the exponents of the so-called Higher Criticism speak on the Bible, he finds that these new and up-to-date ministers have absolutely nothing new to say on the subject. And I have often found a curious lack of originality among the so-called freethinkers in the theories of Higher Criticism; in fact, their thoughts can hardly be designated as “free,” or “broad,” when they all run in such narrow grooves of similitude. Their opinions differ scarcely a whit from those of the common infidel.

Nothing but a return to the old paths and the blessed Bible can ever heal the disorders of the present age, and give a wholesome impulse and direction to its tendencies. Higher Criticism has been tried, and it has failed; it has aggravated instead of healing, making infidels instead of saints, and has miserably failed to stop the crying evils of the times.

Globe, Ariz.