Is it too much to say that the alternative has come to be this: Was our Lord Himself right or very gravely wrong about the nature of Scripture? Did the Spirit of Pentecost guide the Apostles into all truth, or leave them under a vast illusion in this central matter of their witness? "Do not follow this Book, young men; follow Christ": so said a speaker of high Christian reputation, holding up a Bible, before a great gathering in America, not long ago. But what does this mean? Christ carries the Book in His hand; if you follow Him you must follow it. If you decline to follow the Book, your following Him is a following--so far as at present you agree with Him, and not further.
Meantime, what are some facts of the case, facts not nearly so well remembered now as they should be? One comprehensive fact is that the testimony of nature and of history goes, as a whole, to affirm the veracity of the Scripture records, and to do so more and more pointedly as research advances. In a remarkable recent essay by the Duke of Argyll (_Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891), the growing accumulation of geological evidence for a Great Flood, affecting at least the northern hemisphere, and falling within the human period, is forcibly set out by a master hand. In the same paper is indicated the fast-gathering evidence, now digging up month by month from the soil of Palestine, to the accuracy of the picture of Canaan drawn in the Pentateuch and Joshua. The Ordnance Survey of Sinai has amply shown that the geology of the peninsula confirms down to minute details the record in Exodus.[4] And now the Oxford Arabic Professor is making it, at the least, extremely likely that the Hebrew written two centuries before Christ was more modern by many generations than that presented by the Book of Daniel.[5]
[4] See Sir J. DAWSON: _Modern Science in Bible Lands_, "The Topography of the Exodus."
[5] _See_ MARGOLIOUTH: _The Place of Ecclesiasticus in Semitic Literature_.
I am only indicating and suggesting. Remembering the curiously similar history of New Testament criticism during the recent past, some of its stages running out their course within my own memory, I cannot but think, looking from the merely literary view-point, that the days are not far off when the now powerful theories of revolutionary criticism will seem improbable. And so I ask my younger Brethren at least _to pause_ before going with the strong, deep stream.