Page:Palestine Exploration Fund - Quarterly Statement for 1894.djvu/315

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nineteenth century, now near its close, has been remarkable for extraordinary activity in two widely different but immensely important lines of research. While, on the one hand, scientists have explored the arcana of nature with glorious success, so on the other hand, there has not been wanting a band of earnest and diligent inquirers, who, uniting profound scholarship with untiring enthusiasm, have achieved splendid results in the attempt to solve the problems and to illumine the mysterious darkness of the past.

Thus the scientific genius of this era which has given birth to railway locomotion, to electric illumination, and which (far outstripping the wildest flights of fancy of the "Bard of Avon," that would mi a girdle round the earth in forty minutes) has enabled far-distant continents to hold instantaneous converse with each other, has, in the domain of archaeology, paralleled these results by the discovery of a key to the hieroglyphs of Egypt and the arrow-headed writing of Mesopotamia, by the rescue of whole libraries of long-forgotten literature, and the ideal reconstruction of the great civilisations of remotest Oriental antiquity.

These results of exploration and archæological research, which throw great light on the path of every reader of ancient history, are especially interesting and valuable to the earnest student of Holy Scripture, whose faith is strengthened and whose intelligence is brightened by the study of sacred history and prophecy in the clear light of contemporary evidence.

The outcome of recent Biblical study, as set forth in the works of the great scholars of Germany and England, has been to a large extent an opinion that the historical books of the Old Testament are in great part untrustworthy. But where is the proof of this outside the pages of these writers?

The great value of the work carried out by the Palestine Exploration Fund lies in this—that it has given impetus to the study of the Bible in a more excellent way. Old sites have been re-discovered, a multitude of names and facts occurring in the Biblical writings have been verified by comparison with contemporary monuments of other nations, and our whole knowledge of the manners, customs, and characteristics of the ancient peoples of Bible lands has been immensely increased, while Jew and Syrian, Moabite and Hittite, have been made to live again in the lively and picturesque pages of the Fund's publications.

The more indeed we study the results of the recent scientific