e guidance of his
Spirit, would not affect in the least the substance of the Pentateuch.
It would still remain in every practical sense the work of Moses, and be
so regarded in the New Testament.

Whether there are, or are not, in the Pentateuch, such clauses
added by a later hand, and not affecting either its essential
contents or its Mosaic authorship, is an open question to be
determined by impartial criticism. At the present day editors
carefully indicate their explanatory notes; but this was not the
usage of high antiquity. At the close of the book of
Deuteronomy, for example, there is immediately added, without
any explanatory remark, a notice of Moses' death. We are at
liberty to assume, if we have cogent reasons for so doing, that
brief explanatory clauses were sometimes interwoven into the
Mosaic text; as, for example, the remark in Gen. 36:31, which is
repeated in 1 Chron. 1:43, a book ascribed to Ezra; Exod. 16:35,
36, etc.

4. Going back now to the days of the _Restoration_ under Zerubbabel and
his associates, about 536 B.C., we find that the very first act of the
restored captives was to set up "the altar of the God of Israel, to
offer burnt-offerings thereon, as it is written in the law of Moses the
man of God." The narrative goes on to specify that "they offered
burnt-offerings thereon unto the Lord, even burnt-offerings morning and
evening. They kept also the feast of tabernacles, as it is written, and
offered the daily burnt-offerings by number, according to the custom, as
the duty of every day required; and afterwards offered the continual
burnt-offering, both of the new moons, and of all the set feasts of the
Lord that were consecrated, and of every one that willingly offered a
free-will offering unto the Lord." Ezra 3:1-5. About ninety years
afterwards, upon the completion of the walls of Jerusalem under
Nehemiah, about 445 B.C., we find Ezra the priest--"a ready scribe in
the law of Moses, which the Lord God of Israel had given," Ezra 7:6--on
the occasion of the feast of tabernacles bringing forth "the book of the
law of Moses, which the Lord had commanded to Israel," and reading in it
"from the morning unto midday, before the men and the women, and those
that could understand." In this work he was assisted by a body of men,
who "caused the people to understand the law;" and the reading was
continued through the seven days of the feast: "day by d