uncertain, since we do not know that the sacred writer sought
exact uniformity in the three refrains.

9. _General remark_ on the various readings of the sacred text. As a
general rule, the various readings with which textual criticism is
occupied have respect to minor points--for the most part points of a
trivial nature; and even where the variations are of more importance,
they are not of such a character as to obscure, much less change, the
truths of revelation in any essential respect. Biblical critics tell us,
for example, that the Samaritan Pentateuch agrees with the Septuagint
version in more than a thousand places where they differ from the
Masoretic Hebrew text. Chap. 16, No. 7. Yet these three texts all
exhibit the same God, and the same system of doctrines and duties.
Revelation does not lie in letters and syllables and grammatical forms,
but in the deep and pure and strong and broad current of truth "given by
inspiration of God." Reverence for the inspired word makes us anxious to
possess the sacred text in all possible purity. Yet if we cannot attain
to absolute perfection in this respect, we have reasonable assurance
that God, who gave the revelation contained in the Old Testament, has
preserved it to us unchanged in any essential particular. The point on
which most obscurity and uncertainty rests is that of scriptural
chronology; and this is not one that affects Christian faith or
practice.

SECOND DIVISION: PARTICULAR INTRODUCTION.

CHAPTER XVIII.

THE BOOKS OF THE OLD TESTAMENT AS A WHOLE.

1. The province of _Particular Introduction_ is to consider the books of
the Bible separately, in respect to their authorship, date, contents,
and the place which each of them holds in the system of divine truth.
Here it is above all things important that we begin with the idea of the
_unity of divine revelation_--that all the parts of the Bible constitute
a gloriously perfect whole, of which God and not man is the author. No
amount of study devoted to a given book or section of the Old Testament,
with all the help that modern scholarship can furnish, will give a true
comprehension of it, until we understand it in its relations to the rest
of Scripture, We cannot, for example, understand the book of Genesis out
of connection with the four books that follow, nor the book of
Deuteronomy separated from the four that precede. Nor can we fully
understand the Pentateuch as a whole except in the light of