roved, or at least as
extremely probable, that righteous Abel is a myth; that there was
little, if any, monotheism before Abraham; no theophany at Sinai; no
Wilderness-Tabernacle; no record of the conquest of Canaan written till
long generations after the event; not much written record at all till
Samuel; few, if any, Psalms before the age of the Captivity, if not
before the age of the Maccabees; certainly two if not more Isaiahs, and
probably hardly one Daniel; at least, that the book bearing his name
dates from the second century before Christ, and is in fact a
Palestinian story-book which has not, perhaps, even a nucleus of history
within it. It ought to make us stop and think when we are told that
Isaiah did not predict coming events; indeed (for the drift of this
teaching goes very strongly in that direction), that predictive prophecy
is hardly to be recognized anywhere; that it is better out of our
thoughts; that it is but "soothsaying" after all, and that the true work
of the prophet was not to fore-tell but to "_forth_-tell," to proclaim
present and eternal principles, which again were not revealed to him
from above but arrived at by intuitions and meditations within his own
consciousness. It is a grave thing to be asked to believe, as many would
have us do, that such was the lack of feeling for veracity in ancient
Judah that Hilkiah, Jeremiah, and Huldah could arrange for the
"discovery" of a fabricated Deuteronomy, and then (_see the narrative_
in the Second Book of Kings) [xxii. 8-20.] get the prophetess to follow
up the fabrication with awful denunciations--all fulfilled--in the name
of THE LORD Himself. Such theories we are asked to hold in face of our
Master Christ's deliberate, persistent, manifold testimony to the
supernatural character and _authority_ of the Old Testament; to the
solidity of its records of fact, to the reality of its predictive
element--on which He stayed His sacred soul in Gethsemane, and on the
Cross itself. It is no longer a question of details, an inquiry whether
the numerals are invariably authentic and accurate; whether the minute
particulars of a king's death as told in Chronicles tally with the
account in Kings. It is a question whether the Old Testament at large is
not a singularly and flagrantly untrustworthy record. It is a question
whether its literature as a whole is not to be explained, practically,
by "natural causes"; including a causation by deliberate, elaborate, and
in