The “Higher Criticism” Tested
By L. A. S.
The “higher criticism” professes to test the reliability of the claim of the Bible to be the word of God, and to discover many instances in which its statements are misleading and erroneous; but how fares the “higher criticism” itself when its own reliability is put to the test? On this point the following illustrations are given by the Rev. T. T. Eaton, editor of the Western Recorder (Baptist), who is a stanch upholder of the conception of Bible infallibility that prevailed before the “higher critics” arose:— At the Baptist congress in Detroit (1894), Dr. Howard Osgood, the greatest Hebrew scholar in America, in the presence of men who were well informed on the subject, and who were quite favorable to the alleged “results of higher criticism,” stated what those “results” are as told by their advocates. He asked to be corrected if in any particular he erred; but no correction was offered. From slips of paper he read statements of these “results,” and when all present had assented to the correctness of the presentation, Dr. Osgood startled them by saying that all his quotations were from Thomas Morgan, a deist of the early part of the eighteenth century, and from Tom Paine, the well-known infidel of the latter part of that century. This shows the character of “higher criticism” as revealed by its fruits; and the following illustration touches the point of its accuracy:— Not long ago two leading ministers in the North united in writing an account of a great religious gathering, and they sent their combined article to a number of “higher critics,” requesting that they separate it into the two documents, giving to each of the two authors his portion. Their failures were most egregious, and no two of them agreed, because they worked independently. And yet these men, utterly unable to resolve an article, avowedly written by two men, in plain English, and written in their own time and country, into its original documents,—these men are sure they can correctly divide a book written in Hebrew thousands of years ago, with no evidence of composite authorship, so as to give each supposed author his exact portion! And they claim to do this so accurately that they divide a single sentence among three authors, with perfect confidence! One more test is made by Mr. Eaton; he calls upon the “higher critics” to furnish the world with an up-to-date Bible. In view of the statements they put forth that “God has by no means confined His inspiration to those who wrote the Bible,” but has “inspired men in all ages as truly as He inspired the prophets and apostles,” and that the old Bible, while of great spiritual value, is to a great extent invalidated by the defects of the thinking and beliefs of the men of the times in which it was produced, Mr. Eaton says:— If these things be true, it necessarily follows that we ought not to be dependent for our Bible on men that lived between 800 B. C. and 100 A. D. In all these eighteen hundred years, with the wonderful progress man has made along all lines, with the correction of so many crude and erroneous ideas held in the long ago, surely a better Bible can be gathered from the words of great leaders about the problems of religion, during the past eighteen hundred years, than was gathered for the nine hundred years previous. To admit that the thoughts of the leaders in regard to religion between B. C. 800 and A. D. 100 are superior to the thoughts of the leaders in these last days is to surrender the whole case of this modern school of theologians. And just as editors and redactors gathered (according to this modern theory) the good things about religion in the literature of their times, so as to give the world our Bible, so let this modern school furnish some editors and redactors who will gather the good things about religion in modern literature, and give us a bible that shall be up to date. This new bible ought to be as much better than the one we now use, as our times are more enlightened than the times of the prophets and apostles. This is sound logic, and those to whom it is applied should have the consistency to hold their peace until they have produced at least some portion of the better up-to-date bible. L. A. S.