Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/312

298 the canon of the Bible, much less on the questions proposed above, there is no such authority residing in the Church, unless we grant the claim sometimes made for her, to infallibility. With those making such a claim we must, within the limits of this paper, decline to argue.

But if not the Church, what other authority can give us the answers we seek? The authority of primitive tradition, or of the opinions of great commentators, or of the great mass of Christian people of modern times? Authority which is so shadowy in other things that might be mentioned would surely count for nothing in a matter as grave as this. Or can particular expressions of the Bible itself be taken to settle the matter once for all? But as to most of those very questions the Bible itself is silent; and if it had spoken, yet the question of competent authority would only be put one step further back. Or, once again, can the answer come from "the spirit which is in man," guided by God's Spirit? But in this, as in the instance mentioned above, that which has been shown to be incompetent in so many other things can not be called competent in this.

There is, there can be, according to the requirement of our minds, only one answer which will satisfy; it is that which is determined by purely scientific method—that is to say, according to the nature of the subject, that method of investigating literary works which reason declares and experience has shown to insure the greatest accuracy in results. That method is known by the name of the "Higher Criticism."

What is the history of the higher criticism? One would imagine, from the language often used by the opponents of its application to the Bible, that it was an arbitrary method of criticism, invented in these rationalizing times expressly for the purpose of doing away with the divine character of the Bible. But higher criticism has been in use in examining the classics and other (nonscriptural) writings of former ages for fully two hundred years. The first one to state its fundamental principles was Du Pin, in his New History of Ecclesiastical Writers, published in 1694. In 1699 Bentley published his famous examination of the epistles of Phalaris, according to the methods and principles of the higher criticism. There is no better instance of scientific investigation as to authenticity. These epistles had been commonly accepted by scholars as the work of Phalaris, and accounted of great value. Bentley, by his searching examination of them, proved them to be the forgery of a sophist, so conclusively that no scholar worthy of the name has ventured to question the result since. That, I say, was in 1699.