Religion

was in the world before Christ came, and it lives to-day in a million souls who have never heard His name.... He gave a new direction to the religious aspirations bursting forth, then as now, and always from the whole world’s heart.... The religious people of (Christ’s) days did nothing with their religion except attend to its observances. Christ reversed all this — tried to reverse it — for He is only now beginning to succeed.” All that we need apparently is, as he says, an aspiration on “behalf of sound definite practical The saintly John Wesley was greater than these; but he clung to an inspired Bible as the fundamental doctrine of the faith. “To give up witchcraft,” he wrote in his Journal of 1768, “is in effect giving up the Bible”; and he added an undoubted truth: “if but one account of the intercourse of men with spirits be admitted.... Deism, Atheism, and Materialism, fall to the ground. Why then suffer this weapon to be taken out of our hands?” A true history of each book, and section, of the Bibles of the world is a prime nece ity before crediting their legends. We must follow a severely historical method, and estimate the culture of each writer separately. The Christian Bible treats of history, and must stand or fall according to the results of historical criticism. Never, before this generation began the work, has this method been brought to bear on the quasi-divine literature. It is therefore only now that the Churches are beginning to see what is the result. We can believe that—as in the Vedas or in Homer—Hebrew traditions and Jaws were known before they were reduced to writing; but modern critics reverse the order of the Old Testament, and we have no longer the “ Law and the Prophets” but the prophets and the laws. ‘Ezra and the priests,” says Dean Perowne, “are the real authors of the so-called Mosaic legislation.” This is much what we ourselves wrote thirty years ago. Dr Adler, the learned and honoured head of the London Synagogue, long ago told his Jewish brethren that “most of Levitic us, Numbers, and Exodus, was written about the time of Ezra, or 1000 years after the supposed time of Moses—an age shrouded in mystery,” and that in fact Monotheism was unknown to the Jews “up to and during the period of the early kings.” All students know that “authorship under false colors was, in ancient times, adopted without any sense of moral or literary dishonesty.” The Rev. P. S. Desprez also said, a generation ago, that “ Wisdom and Ecclesiastes, ignorantly ascribed to Solomon, undoubtedly belong to a date subsequent to the Captivity.” 330