duty to one God as the supreme Lord of themselves, they did not deny the reality of other gods.'

The foregoing passage relates only to the historical, objective aspects of the Hebrew situation. The same writer states his theological view of the subject as follows:

Behind that national deity of Israel, and through the obscure and vain imaginations the early nation had of him, there were present the Character and Will of God himself, using the people's low thoughts and symbols to express himself to them, lifting them always a little higher, and finally making himself known as he did through the prophets as the God of the Whole Earth, identical with righteousness and abounding in mercy.❜

This view is the belief and faith of a devout scholar; and it represents the attitude of by far the large majority of those who have approached the problem of the Bible in a scientific way. As a rule, the modern biblical investigator holds that the religion of the Hebrews began on the level of what we commonly call "paganism," or "heathenism." He believes that "Yahweh," the national deity of Israel, was at first regarded as a local god, one of a large number of divinities that populated the mind of the ancient world; that the people's thought about him slowly rose to the height at which we find it in the great prophets and in Jesus; and that this religious evolution was a process guided and controlled by the one true God of the universe, who was gradually raising men's thoughts upward through the medium of their daily experiences. Thus, while the devout scholar does not identify "Yahweh" with the true God, he believes that the true God was using the idea of Yahweh in such a way as to cause that idea more and more to take the character of a worthy symbol of religion. This theological position, as a matter of fact, puts far less strain on the modern intellect than does the older orthodoxy, and makes

1 G. A. Smith, Modern Criticism and the Preaching of the Old Testament (New York, 1901), pp. 128, 129.

2 Biblical World (Chicago, August, 1896), pp. 100, 101.

it possible for men to remain within the church who would otherwise be outside of it. The reverent scholar believes that God uses the history of Israel, and the history of the world, for an ineffable, divine purpose which works out slowly across the ages. He sees that the human spirit works its purpose within the terms of those natural "laws" of physiology, chemistry, and political economy which condition the bodily and social existence of mankind; and he believes that the universe expresses God's personality in the same way that a human life gives expression to human personality.

While it is but just and proper to speak here of the religious and theological beliefs that characterize the body of modern biblical critics, it should be said again that this book is a purely scientific study of the Bible, which undertakes to state the connections between the various facts of Hebrew history and religion. The limitations of our method forbid us to discuss the inner, metaphysical, or theological aspect of the facts. We take for granted that Bible students "must acquire the art of historical construction by which . . . . they may reproduce the history of Israel's religious experience, from those early days when Jehovah [Yahweh] was a tribal God who went out to battle against the gods of other desert tribes." Although the subject may be approached from a variety of standpoints, the plan of this investigation confines our study to one point of view.

Having indicated the road over which biblical investigators are traveling, it is now in order to emphasize that they have not yet reached their destination. This is admitted by the leading exponents of modern biblical research and interpretation. The central feature of the entire problem is, of course, the development of the Yahweh religion. We can see very plainly that the idea of Yahweh in the earlier Old Testament documents is different from what it is in the later documents. Editorial, Biblical World (Chicago, April, 1911), p. 221.

What is the explanation of this difference? How is the religious evolution before us to be understood? In what terms are we to describe it? Professor Wellhausen himself has lately said that we cannot tell why Yahweh of Israel, rather than the god Chemosh of Moab, on the eastern side of the Dead Sea, evolved into the righteous God of the universe.1 President Francis Brown, of Union Theological Seminary, has recently written that the problem of the differentiation of the later Yahweh from the earlier Yahweh, as well as from the gods of other nations, has not been solved." Professor Cook, of the University of Cambridge, writes in a more general way as follows:

While practically all students of the Old Testament agree that a thoroughgoing traditional standpoint is untenable, opinion differs as to the extent to which the results of modern criticism are really assured. The great majority of scholars, however, accept the Wellhausen literary theory, but they differ in regard to its application to the early development of Israel. External evidence, alone, clearly guarantees neither accuracy of inference nor convergence of results, and since Old Testament research is bound not to remain stationary, the conflicting and complex tendencies inspire the belief that the present stage is a transitory one.3

To the same effect, Professor Sanday, of Oxford University, says:

The fashioning of the methods by which the secret of the Old Testament is to be approached and elicited has taken many centuries. We are not yet agreed about it; but I do not think that it is being too sanguine to feel that we are drawing nearer to it.4

In a treatise on the history of Bible-study, Professor George H. Gilbert also speaks of the "partial and imperfect dawn of a

'Wellhausen, “Israelitisch-jüdische Religion," in Kultur der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1909), Teil I, 15.

2 Old Testament and Semitic Studies in Honor of William Rainey Harper (Chicago, 1908), p. xxx.

3 Essays on Some Biblical Questions by Members of the University of Cambridge (London, 1909), p. 54.

4 Sanday, The Oracles of God (London, 1891), p. 120.

new era of interpretation."

This general attitude, we believe,

is that of all candid biblical investigators whose method and standpoint are those of the prevailing school of scientific research. We have compared the modern school to travelers who have not reached their destination; but another figure may also be employed. The scientific view of the Bible is like a house in process of construction. Most opponents of the evolutionary view of Israel's religion make the tactical mistake of assuming that the house is completed; and they criticize it on the basis of that assumption. But while some of the secondhand popularizers of the modern view have committed the same error, no reliable, first-hand authority has ever said anything of the kind; and the attitude of responsible scholarship has always been to the effect of the testimony quoted above. The "house" is in process of construction."

These frank admissions by scientific investigators of the Bible are to be held sharply in mind when examining the opinions of the modern school respecting the development of Hebrew religion. As the result of an inquiry whose details need not be given here, it may be fairly said that such opinions find an average in the proposition that the religious development of Israel is to be explained by the "genius of the great prophets." This way of stating the case is varied by saying

I

1 Gilbert, History of the Interpretation of the Bible (New York, 1908), pp. 291, 292. Cf. Jordan, Comparative Religion (New York, 1905), p. 491.

* The assumption that the modern view is a finished system is one of the mistakes that vitiate the recent volume entitled The Problem of the Old Testament, by Professor James Orr, of the United Free Church College, of Glasgow. While making concessions to the modern school, Professor Orr speaks on behalf of traditionalism. It has been observed with what appears to be great probability, that Orr's work shows signs of having been written many years ago, soon after the publication of Wellhausen's Geschichte, and then retouched here and there. If this deduction is correct, it goes a long way toward explaining the general atmosphere of Professor Orr's book. If it were not composed soon after the publication of Wellhausen's treatise, its author's views were certainly formed at that time, and then taken many years later, by unsuspecting persons, as the "latest conclusions," etc. The present writer has discussed certain phases of Professor Orr's work in a paper in the American Journal of Theology (Chicago, April, 1908), pp. 241-49.

that the creative influence of the prophets is due to "their peculiar experience of God." It is not probable that scholars will continue to state their opinions in this form as the scientific interpretation of the Bible proceeds into stages of greater maturity. It is only with feelings of respect for the modern school, and of gratitude for its indispensable service to the cause of scientific learning, that the writer ventures the opinion that this view of Israel's religious evolution belongs in the realm of theology and metaphysics only, and that it has no standing as a matter of science and history.

Modern scientific investigation of the Bible, after all, is only a special application of methods already employed in examining the literature and history of the world's great nations. Scientific biblical research, therefore, is not a thing in a corner. It is answerable to the progress of method in the study of all human history. The "historical method" took its rise among the ancient Greeks, who were the first to achieve emancipation from the reign of mythology. The beginnings of the process are described by Professor Bury, of Cambridge University, in his Harvard lectures on the ancient Greek historians:

Long before history, in the proper sense of the word, came to be written, the early Greeks possessed a literature which was equivalent to history for them, and was accepted with unreserved credence—their epic poems. The age of the heroes, as described in the epics, was marked by divine interventions, frequent intercourse between gods and men, startling metamorphoses, and all kinds of miracles. . . . . Every self-respecting city sought to connect itself, through its ancient clans, with the Homeric heroes, and this constituted the highest title to prestige in the Greek world. . . .

One of the most serious impediments blocking the way to a scientific examination of early Greece [by the Greek historians themselves] was the orthodox belief in Homer's omniscience and infallibility-a belief which survived the attacks of the Ionian philosophers and the irony of Thucydides. Eratosthenes boldly asserted the principle that the critic, in studying Homer, must remember that the poet's knowledge was limited