“THE MISTAKES OF THE CRITICS.”
By Editor
UNDER the above heading in the New York Observer of November 23 the Rev. Reese Murray, D.D., discusses the credulity of those who reject the Bible, and makes the following telling points among others:— When the learned Jesuit Hardouin gravely put forth his assertion that the Greek and Roman classics were the work of monks of the Middle Ages, he was laughed out of his enormous conceit by the whole literary world. Men, with the overwhelming evidences of the existence of these authors before them, could not admit so manifest an absurdity to contain even the semblance of truth. But when, on the other hand, skeptical critics assail the integrity of Scriptures, deny to their authors any part in the composition of their writings, and overturn their statements as false, because the proof of them is not at hand, they expect the world to accept their dictum. Volney made a startling announcement when he declared that Christ Jesus never existed, and Rousseau presented a strange spectacle of mental bewilderment when he contrasted Jesus and Socrates and yet refused to believe in the former. But these gentlemen solicited the public credence in their theories, and would have resented as foolishness the opinions of the common man to whom the Bible is a divine revelation. Similarly Renan speaks of the discourses of the Apostle John as “pieces of theology and rhetoric to which we must not ascribe historical reality, any more than to the discourses which Plato puts into the mouth of his master at the moment of dying.” And others, maintaining that Jesus could not have spoken as the three Gospels represent him, in some of his bold affirmations of the future, declare John’s gospel untrustworthy because it does not reproduce these very features which they reprehend in the Synoptics. This was what passed before us as we thought, and, glancing up, we caught sight of a manuscript where we had collocated a few strange facts concerning those who reject the Book. One was the case of Colonel Olcott, the theosophist, who saw a lad climb a bamboo pole and disappear, then as suddenly reappear dismembered, head, body, arms, and legs, to be restored to life whole as before by placing a cloth over these remains. The other was the case of an infidel lecturer, who said over the bier of his brother that “in the night of death hope sees a star, and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing.” The men who reject miracles, as Herbert Spencer says, because they could not happen, and who do not believe in immortality, have a strange faculty for accepting matters far more obnoxious to reason and the senses, and express themselves in language singularly like that of the word itself. For us its “mistakes” are so minute that they affect no part of revelation, while the inerrancy(?) of those who have found it witnessing against itself, has made us fear to follow in their footsteps. To be in error with the Book—if possible—is to have far more “truth in the inward parts” than to be right with the critics.