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for Christian teaching tells us that "the law was weak through the flesh," and that until Christ came to show us the very ideal of human perfection, and until He gave that Holy Spirit which is the only true and effectual source of purity, and until His atonement removed the obstructive sense of guilt, men could not rise nearer to God. Yes, our life is hid with Christ in God"-there is the ideal, there the vital power, there the ultimate perfection of that moral and spiritual life of redeemed man, of which it is written, “It doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is."

ON THE CORROBORATIVE EVIDENCE

OF

OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY

FROM THE

EGYPTIAN AND ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS.

BY

W. R. COOPER, Esq.,

SECRETARY OF THE SOCIETY OF BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY.

ON

THE CORROBORATIVE EVIDENCE OF

OLD TESTAMENT HISTORY

FROM THE

EGYPTIAN AND ASSYRIAN MONUMENTS.

EFORE directly entering upon the topic with

BER

which your Committee have favoured me, the corroborative evidence of the historical truth of the Bible from the Egyptian and Assyrian monuments, it will a little simplify the investigation of the subject if it be first considered what class of evidences may be reasonably looked for, and what not. Among general readers, and Bible-quoting people, the most extravagant expectations are awakened, and the strangest kinds of relics are believed to remain somewhere or other, beneath the ruins of ages, and the tumuli of deserted cities. A bas-relief of the whale ingesting Jonah, or Nebuchadnezzar eating grass, the yoke of Jeremiah, or the reed of Ezekiel, are stil! with them among the expectanda and desiderata in Assyrian archæology.

Among the antiquities of Egypt, others again have great hope to find the rod of Moses, or the wheels of Pharaoh's chariot—a jar containing the water which was turned into blood, or a mural painting representing Joseph and his brethren before Pharaoh-à la Gustave Doré. Others, not less sanguine, subscribe to the Palestine Exploration Fund, believing that still beneath the Haram-es-Shereef lies the ark of Jehovah, and the Tables of the Law-the Golden Candlestick and the mystic Ephod. Nay, so nearly do the extremes of ignorance and superstition meet, that in the nineteenth century any tolerably crafty impostor who could bring from Mount Ararat a rib of Noah's ark, or from the Moabitis an autograph memorandum of Moses, from the salt moraines of the Bahr Lut (or Dead Sea) a fragment of the skeleton of Lot's wife, or from the deserts of Beer Sheba the pitcher which Hagar carried, with "Agar" in modern Hebrew inscribed upon it, a cast from Solomon's seal, or the necklace of the Queen of Sheba, his success would now be as great, and the credulity of faith as manifest, as when in the twelfth century diseases were cured by scrapings from the cave of Elijah, and the Crusaders defeated an army by the grace of the shift of the Virgin Mary and a less delicate relic attributed to our Lord.

Now therefore at the outset let this truth be borne in mind such classes of miraculous relics may not

be reasonably expected; and further, that the expec

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