Specimen of "Higher Criticism."
ARCHBISHOP WHATELY once wrote a lengthy argument to prove that no such person as Napoleon Bonaparte ever lived. It was a burlesque on those who try to show that the history of the Bible is not reliable. The "higher criticism" of the present day is forcibly caricatured in the following brief article from the St. Paul Pioneer Press. It appeared under the head of "Sitting Bull Myth, Explained by the Archæologists of the Twenty-first Century." It is no more forced or preposterous than some "learned" comments on the meaning of the Scriptures:— Among the yarns with which this twenty-first century will be obliged to close, will be the record of a certain alleged visit of one Sitting Bull, supposed to have been an eminent savage and hair-lifter of his day, to St. Paul and Minneapolis in the year of grace 1884. In nineteenth-century-folk lore this Paladin is represented as having broken a treaty with the United States, massacred a detachment of its army, been captured, and, later, brought to St. Paul, one of its largest cities, entertained at a famous hostelrie, presented with the freedom of that city in a gold box studded with brilliants, worshiped by the aldermen, feted by the common council, shown the public schools, theaters, fire department, etc., of that city, which decorously went through their paces for his distinguished approval. It will remain for the twenty-first century archæologist to explode all this. He will be called upon to demonstrate that this Sitting Bull was only a prominent solar myth; that his massacre of the pale-faces is a beautiful allegory, expressive of the surrender, at sunset, of Day to Night, wherein the pale-faces who succumb represent the departing light, and the ascendancy of the dusky warriors the coming on of Darkness. The archæologist will notice how slight a typographical error had metamorphosed "setting" into "sitting," and the carelessness, which by misprinting "Boreas" (i. e., the North Wind—Blizzardum Americanum) "Bull," has actually misled three centuries. "What could be more exquisite," will cry our mythologist, "than the allegory of returning Spring—expressed in the legend that on the 19th of March, 1884 (that is, about the date where the ides of March are surrendering to the kalends of April), Sitting Bull visits Gen. Terry at Fort Snelling!" Here we have Sitting Bull (the Sun, accompanied by the gentle and invigorating Blizzard) visiting the Earth (Terra—Terry) the general or universal mother. The visit occurs in the lapse or old age (Senillæ—Snelling) of strong (Fort) winter. Mark how the pictorial nineteenth cycle speech here expresses the truth that when the glorious sun pours its rays upon an awakening earth, the gentle and invigorating Blizzard of April begins to get around, and everything teems with life, and joy, and springtime!