terested untruth.

A GRAVE ALTERNATIVE.

Is it too much to say that the alternative has come to be this: Was our
Lord Himself right or very gravely wrong about the nature of Scripture?
Did the Spirit of Pentecost guide the Apostles into all truth, or leave
them under a vast illusion in this central matter of their witness? "Do
not follow this Book, young men; follow Christ": so said a speaker of
high Christian reputation, holding up a Bible, before a great gathering
in America, not long ago. But what does this mean? Christ carries the
Book in His hand; if you follow Him you must follow it. If you decline
to follow the Book, your following Him is a following--so far as at
present you agree with Him, and not further.

WITNESSES FOR SCRIPTURE.

Meantime, what are some facts of the case, facts not nearly so well
remembered now as they should be? One comprehensive fact is that the
testimony of nature and of history goes, as a whole, to affirm the
veracity of the Scripture records, and to do so more and more pointedly
as research advances. In a remarkable recent essay by the Duke of Argyll
(_Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891), the growing accumulation of
geological evidence for a Great Flood, affecting at least the northern
hemisphere, and falling within the human period, is forcibly set out by
a master hand. In the same paper is indicated the fast-gathering
evidence, now digging up month by month from the soil of Palestine, to
the accuracy of the picture of Canaan drawn in the Pentateuch and
Joshua. The Ordnance Survey of Sinai has amply shown that the geology of
the peninsula confirms down to minute details the record in Exodus.[4]
And now the Oxford Arabic Professor is making it, at the least,
extremely likely that the Hebrew written two centuries before Christ was
more modern by many generations than that presented by the Book of
Daniel.[5]

[4] See Sir J. DAWSON: _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, "The Topography
of the Exodus."

[5] _See_ MARGOLIOUTH: _The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic
Literature_.

I am only indicating and suggesting. Remembering the curiously similar
history of New Testament criticism during the recent past, some of its
stages running out their course within my own memory, I cannot but
think, looking from the merely literary view-point, that the days are
not far off when the now powerful theories of revolutionary criticism
will seem improbable. And so I ask my younger Brethren at least _t