as honestly with the
inscriptions which show sundry statements in the book of Daniel to be
unhistorical; candidly making admissions which but a short time before
would have filled orthodoxy with horror.

A few years later came another testimony even more striking. Early in
the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised abroad that
the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most eminent Assyriologist and
Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about to publish a work in which what
is known as the "higher criticism" was to be vigorously and probably
destructively dealt with in the light afforded by recent research among
the monuments of Assyria and Egypt. The book was looked for with eager
expectation by the supporters of the traditional view of Scripture; but,
when it appeared, the exultation of the traditionalists was speedily
changed to dismay. For Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity toward
sundry minor assumptions and assertions of biblical critics, confirmed
all their more important conclusions which properly fell within his
province. While his readers soon realized that these assumptions and
assertions of overzealous critics no more disproved the main results of
biblical criticism than the wild guesses of Kepler disproved the theory
of Copernicus, or the discoveries of Galileo, or even the great laws
which bear Kepler's own name, they found new mines sprung under some
of the most lofty fortresses of the old dogmatic theology. A few of the
statements of this champion of orthodoxy may be noted. He allowed that
the week of seven days and the Sabbath rest are of Babylonian origin;
indeed, that the very word "Sabbath" is Babylonian; that there are two
narratives of Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like
the two leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter were
undoubtedly drawn from the former; that the "garden of Eden" and its
mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldea in pre-Semitic
days; that the beliefs that woman was created out of man, and that
man by sin fell from a state of innocence, are drawn from very ancient
Chaldean-Babylonian texts; that Assyriology confirms the belief that the
book Genesis is a compilation; that portions of it are by no means so
old as the time of Moses; that the expression in our sacred book,
"The Lord smelled a sweet savour" at the sacrifice made by Noah, is
"identical with that of the Babylonian poet"; that "it is impossible to
believe that