CHRIST'S TESTIMONY TO SCRIPTURES

of history and science was not the work the Father had given Him to do." Christ's use of the Book of Isaiah and of the Psalms, and the appropriation of them to Himself, certainly stamps those parts of the Old Testament as inspired prophecy. Still, His sanction of the 10th Psalm does not necessarily imply His approval of the 109th and 137th, nor necessarily settle the question of their authorship. He refers to Moses, but only to traverse the laws of Moses. His allusion to the prophet Jonah presents a difficulty. It is, to my mind, probably explicable in this way: The book had been written as a parable or story intended to raise the thoughts of the Jews to a larger conception of the Divine benignity towards other nations than their own. No one might be more astonished than its author to learn that his narrative should be read as literal fact. Christ's reference to the imprisonment of Jonah in the whale's belly may be no more than might be a reference of our own to the imprisonment of Christian and the Castle of Giant Despair.

Hopeful in

Whatever

importance we attach to Christ's use of the

Old Testament as establishing its canonicity, it is beyond doubt that we have no external authority to assure us that the New Testament Scriptures, each and all of them, are the inspired word of God. In fact, the right of several of them (as the Epistle of St. James, the 2nd of St. Peter, the Hebrews, and the Revelation of St. John) to a place in the New Testament canon has been disputed.

Accepting the Bible as it has come to us as a generally recognised collection of sacred writings, we have still to satisfy ourselves that the large affirmation of the Westminster Confession of Faith of "their entire perfection," "their infallible truth," and "Divine authority' is sustained. As to this I have never been able to understand how the doctrine of plenary inspiration, or verbal exactness, could be held. Let us take for example the two cases of the superscription on the cross and of the Lord's prayer, where accuracy might be held to be imperative. The former is given differently by all the four biographers. Three of them must be wrong, and all four of them may. So also in the latter case. In one of the Gospels what is asked to be forgiven is debts, in another sins,

It

in another trespasses. But not only so, in one the prayer ends with the petition, “And bring us not into temptation," and in another, the doxology follows which now is generally admitted to be the addition of some later transcriber of the original manuscript. needs no "higher criticism" to make the discovery of the contradictions to be found in the Scriptures. They are plain to any intelligent reader. Take one instance only from the Old Testament, to which I have never seen any reference made. In the 20th chapter of Exodus, the 4th Commandment ends with the words, "For in six days, etc.," but in the 5th chapter of Deuteronomy these words are not appended, and, at the end of the enumeration of all the Commandments, it is said, "These words the Lord spake," etc., "and He added When you come to the New Testament, at the very outset you run shock up against the perplexities of the two genealogies. And it is not only that they differ, but that they apply to Joseph, who was the reputed, but not the actual, father of Jesus. Even here, there is the further difficulty that the Apostle John, in the 4th Gospel, speaks of Jesus as the Son

no more."

of Joseph. Of direct contradictions I may give the instances of the two accounts of the death of Judas Iscariot as written by St. Matthew and by St. Luke, and again, the details of what was seen and heard by the companions of St. Paul when Christ appeared to him on his way to Damascus, of which there are three accounts in the Acts of the Apostles. In the vital matter of the resurrection, the discrepancies, or, to say the least, the carelessness of the narratives are conspicuous. St. Matthew says that the early visitors to the tomb were "Mary Magdalene and the other Mary." St. Mark says, "Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome." St. Luke says, "Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, and Mary the mother of James." And St. John mentions Mary Magdalene only. Further, there is the difficulty as to Christ's instructions before His death to His disciples to meet Him in Galilee when the actual place of meeting was immediately close to Jerusalem. Returning to the Old Testament, I feel compelled to say that it contains much from which intelligent assent must be withheld. The early chapters of Genesis are evidently legendary. The account, for example, of the

building of the Tower of Babel is no more than an early attempt to explain the diversities of language, the cause of which was puzzling to the primitive mind. The story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden is not historical, and probably was never intended by its author to be historical, but only a myth embodying a spiritual fact. By the knowledge of God I acquire from science, which in its own proper sphere is equally authoritative with the Bible, I can now believe that the birth of man must be relegated to remote ages, and that the movement of the race has been ascent, not descent. I feel equally free by instinctive conscience to pronounce much of Jewish history to be illustrations of revenge and unjustifiable cruelty which are in no way examples for us. I can unhesitatingly condemn as indecent some of the recorded tales, such as that of Lot and his two daughters, and I feel at liberty to doubt whether some of the Old Testament books, such as the Song of Solomon, should ever have had a place in the Canon. In the New Testament there are many obscurities in the quotations from the Old. Indeed, there appears to be no prediction agreeing with the statement "that it might be