THE

LONDON REVIEW.

APRIL, 1861.

ART. I.-1. The Historical Evidences of the Truth of the Scripture Records Stated Anew, with Special Reference to the Doubts and Discoveries of Modern Times. In Eight Lectures delivered in the Oxford University Pulpit, at the Bampton Lecture for 1859. By GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College. Second Edition. Murray. 1860. 2. The Persian Cuneiform Inscription at Behistun, Decyphered and Translated. With a Memoir on Persian Cuneiform Inscriptions in general, and on that of Behistun in particular. By MAJOR H. C. RAWLINSON, C.B., &c. J. W. Parker. 1846. 3. A Commentary on the Cuneiform Inscriptions of Babylonia and Assyria, &c. By MAJOR H. C. RAWLINSON. J. W. Parker. 1850.

4. Outlines of Assyrian History, collected from the Cuneiform Inscriptions. By LIEUT.-COLONEL RAWLINSON, C.B. J. W. Parker. 1852.

5. Notes on the Early History of Babylonia.

By COLONEL

RAWLINSON, C.B. J. W. Parker and Son. 1854. 6. Memoir on the Babylonian and Assyrian Inscriptions. By COLONEL RAWLINSON, C.B. J. W. Parker and Son. 1854. 7. Inscription of Tiglath-Pileser I., King of Assyria, B.C. 1150, as Translated by SIR HENRY RAWLINSON, FOX TALBOT, ESQ., DR. HINCKS, and DR. OPPERT. Published by the Royal Asiatic Society. J. W. Parker and Son. 1857.

8. Nineveh and its Remains, &c: By AUSTEN HENRY LAYARD, Esq., D.C.L. Two Volumes. Fifth Edition. Murray. 1850.

9. Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, &c. By AUSTEN H. LAYARD, M.P. Murray. 1853.

10. The History of Herodotus. A new English Version, with Copious Notes and Appendices, &c. By GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A., late Fellow and Tutor of Exeter College, Oxford. Assisted by COLONEL SIR HENRY RAWLINSON, K.C.B., and SIR J. G. WILKINSON, F.R.S. In Four Volumes. Murray. 1858.

11. Eléments de la Grammaire Assyrienne. Par M. JULES OPPERT. Paris: Imprimerie Impériale. 1860.

12. Essays and Reviews. Second Edition. J. W. Parker and Son. 1860.

Ir is becoming the fashion to laugh at the historical evidences of revelation as threadbare and obsolete. They are as much out of date with our modern religious Illuminists as the pike and cross-bow with our soldiers. Not only are their relations to Christian thought and life changed. Not only have the progress of knowledge and new intellectual tendencies brought them into associations, which render them less conspicuous than of old. They have lost their significance. Their authority is gone. They clutch a powerless sword in a dead hand. Such are the sentiments of what we fear we must believe to be the large and growing theological school, whose confession of faith the world has just received in the Oxford Essays and Reviews, a work which will long remain a marvel of hazy dogmatics, of subtle argumentation, of bewitching eloquence, and of gross polemical unfairness. It is matter of surprise to one of the contributors to this book, that Baron Bunsen-now, alas! the late Baron Bunsen-' should add to his moral and metaphysical basis of prophecy a notion of foresight by vision of particulars; ' and he pathetically expresses the hope, that he might have intended only the power of seeing the ideal in the actual, or of tracing the Divine government in the movements of men.' 'Fresh from the services of Christmas,' indeed, we may imagine we find Christ in the 53rd of Isaiah and the Messianic Psalms: '—but let the charm of the season pass away; and, if all that Germany has discovered the last fifty years be not lost upon us, we shall confess, that nothing but the dreams of Church fathers and the declamation of modern rhetoric can make prophecy miraculous. So much for one of the outer supports of the faith. And in regard to the other, a second of these same writers tells us, that the enlarged critical and inductive study of the natural world cannot but tend powerfully to evince the inconceivableness of imagined interruptions of natural order, or supposed suspensions of the

Historic Truth of the Scriptures Impugned.

3

laws of matter.' To suppose, that is to say, that Naaman's leprosy was cured by dipping in the Jordan, or that Lazarus rose from the dead at the bidding of Christ, is not compatible with our present scientific enlightenment. Miracles are relative to man's belief. They are what the religious sentiment makes them. The phenomena, which the men who saw them, and the ages that believed in them, supposed to be the supernatural workings of almighty power, we now know to be as strictly the effects of a necessary physical causation as the growth of a fungus or the eruption of a volcano. Indeed, the whole historical foundation of Christianity is rotten, and must be abandoned. It is idle any longer to treat the Bible as a record of facts. Geology forbids it. Ethnology, philology, chronology, geography, all forbid it. You must make Moses square with Lyell and Manetho; you must prove that the Ojibway and the Maori languages have been developed alike within a few thousand years from the same primitive type; Joshua and Copernicus, Daniel and Herodotus, St. Luke and Josephus, must be brought into agreement, before a philosophical criticism can allow the historical truth of Scripture. The sacred writers did not intend to deceive us, when they put legend and myth in place of realities. They were themselves deceived. They were wise in their generation; but they did not escape the contagion of the prejudice and error amidst which they lived. Undesignedly, it may be, but most certainly they have delivered to us as the word of God what God never spake, what our understanding and moral instincts unite to thrust from us as utterly irreconcileable with the constitution of things and the perfections of the Divine nature. With respect to Him, indeed, whose teaching is paramount in the Bible, we wish our Essayists had been less reserved than they are. They do not say that Christ Himself must be included in their general doctrine of the ignorance and fallibility, which go hand in hand with inspiration. But they ought to have said this. For the sake of their candour, we regret their omitting to do so. With scarcely an exception, such is their meaning, if they mean any thing at all, as many broad hints make only too painfully manifest. Now we do not deny, that the historical argument for revelation has been sometimes stated without due discrimination, and that the importance of other parts of the evidence has been too frequently lost sight of or undervalued. Neither do we deny, that the doctrine of the inspiration of the Scriptures, as it has been sometimes held among orthodox Christians, has taken forms which would hardly bear the tests of reason and fact. Much less do we deny, that the march of knowledge may not require the Church to revise herinter

pretation of certain portions of the word of God. She has done this before; and it may be incumbent upon her to do it again. Possibly we could lay our finger on certain commonly received views of particular Scriptures, which, if scrutinized under the lights of a genuine Christian criticism, would be seen to be as untenable-we dare not say as absurd-as Dr. Temple's idealistic man, or Dr. Williams's theory, that the fierce ritual of Syria, with the awe of a Divine voice, bade Abraham slay his son,' or as the amazing assumptions of Mr. Goodwin, another of our Essayists, in his paper on the 'Mosaic Cosmogony,' or Professor Jowett's affirmation,-only one example, we grieve to think, of a large number of similar affirmations,-that it is not suitable for us to wash one another's feet, as Christ commanded us, 'because the customs of society do not admit of it.' But, allowing all this, we protest alike against the principles and the logic of this modern biblical scepticism. The picture which it draws of the belief of intelligent orthodoxy is for the most part a discreditable caricature. Take for instance the representation of Mr. Goodwin, in the Essay just referred to, where he assumes that Moses is understood as teaching, that the birds of the air, as well as the fish and marine animals, were brought forth by the waters on the fifth day. It propounds as indisputable fact whatever in science or literature opposes the letter of Scripture, and with an uncritical and supercilious dogmatism which would be amusing, were its consequences only less serious. Cardinal Wiseman does not create history with greater assurance in his Fabiola than do our Rationalists vouch for the historical character of the dynasties of Manetho, or the certainty of the conclusions they draw as to the antiquity of the human race from Mr. Horner's borings in the Nile mud on the site of Memphis. It taunts the popular faith in the Bible with inconsistency, at the very time that its most distinguished representatives stand in direct antagonism to each other. We have a notable example of this in the case of the Book of Daniel. With one class of our sceptics the book is so true to history, that it cannot but have been written after the events related in it: with another it is a pretended prophecy, which will not bear for a moment to be confronted with the events it professes to foreshow. Last of all, it habitually ignores or treats with affected contempt a great mass of arguments, on which the received views of the authority and contents of the Bible ground themselves, and which it is bound to dispose of before it can main. tain its own positions. Butler and Paley are not to be got rid of with a sneer. Nor have their reasonings, we are bold to say, a whit the less value, because Ewald and Strauss have

no

Orthodoxy on its Defence.

5

put a new face upon the documents of our faith. Is there alternative between receiving Murchison and rejecting Moses? Must relative truth of necessity be absolute falsehood? Do we lie, when we say the sun sets and rises? Or, if this be not our clue, is cutting knots the philosophical way of escaping from difficulties? Suppose we were to wait awhile for the resolution of some of them! We have done so before with eminent advantage both to Scripture and science. To affirm that the Exodus is no miracle to us, though it was to the Jews, is simply to put an end to all knowledge by making the phenomenal world dependent on the mental, and by confounding the objects of thought with the thinking principle itself. And in regard to the inspiration of the Bible, which Rationalism reduces to a shadow, let sober men content themselves, as they may very well do, with the moral certainty-a certainty resting on a sure historical and argumentative basis, not the creature merely of tradition, or prejudice, or whim-that the Scriptures, as we have them in our ordinary versions, to say nothing of the original texts, are the word of God to man, true, authoritative, and immutable. What this inspiration is, we may be unable precisely to define; we doubt the wisdom of attempting a rigid definition of it. And to endeavour, as has often been done, to draw a line between the supernatural and the human element in revelation, we hold to be equally unphilosophical and irreverent. They are crystallized together, and no mechanics or chemistry of criticism can possibly sunder them. We agree with Professor Jowett, that the nature of inspiration can only be known from the examination of Scripture,' and that we have no right to assume some imaginary doctrine' in place of that idea of Scripture, which we gather from the knowledge of it.' We desire nothing more, than that the question should be brought to this issue. And it is the systematic violation of this great principle, of which we complain so strongly both in himself, and in the school of which he is a member. We suppose we belong to those 'ill-instructed quarters,' of which 'Christianus' spoke so compassionately when apologizing in The Times a while since for the Essays and Reviews; but so far as the generally recognised foundations of Christianity are concerned, we do not see that the modern Rationalism has succeeded in stirring a single stone of them.

It is not a little remarkable, that, at the very period at which the historical truth of the Bible is so eagerly assailed, Divine Providence has raised up new and unexceptionable vouchers to its authenticity. One of the most striking signs of our times, perhaps, is the unearthing and resurrection of the old world,