tionnl acts ot worship were performed, and for perfectly adequate reasons, while abundant evidence exists that, notwithstanding all the t11rhulent disorder of th" period, "the law of Moses formed the basia of the religious, civil, and political life of the nation." And thus we are conducted to the days of Joshua, in the history of which, as it lies recorded in the Book of Josl111a, the references to the Pentate11ch, which besides it ofton styles" the Book of the Law of Moses" (eh. i. 7, B; viii. 31, 84; xxiii. 6; xxiv. 6), are so numerous that the opponents of the Mosaic authorship oC the Pentateuch have only been able to escape from its overpowering testimony by the ingenious device of first adding it to the five books of Moses, so as to form not a Pentateucb, but a Hexatoucb, and then relegating it for an author to the days i=e- diately before or after the Babylonish exile. 4. THE MOBAIOAUTHORSHIPOF THE PENTATEUCH IB EXPRESSLY CERTIFIED BY CHnIST AND BIB • APOSTLES. The force of this remark it has been usual to t11m aside by observing that Christ and bis disciples only shared in the popular belief of their age, and not only made no pretensions to instruct their countrymen in Biblical criticism, but were themselves wholly unacquainted with even the first principles of the science. But it is simply incredible that Obrist should have spoken as he dJd (Matt. m. 7: Mark xii. 19 ; Luke xvi. 31 ; John v. 46, 47), or allowed his apostles to speak and write as they did (John i. 45 Acts xv. 25; Rom. L 5; Heh. xiii. 12, 13), if bt knew that the Pentateuch was only a literary fiction, the production of a late age, th:r~ had been floated into puolic acceptance by being falsely imputed to the Hebrew law- giver; while if he did not understand this, though in reality it was so, then it is clear he was not so wise as many learned critics of the nineteenth century, and it will come to be a question whether one who could be imposed upon by so impudent a forgery was entitled to claim the homage of mankind, saying, " I am the Light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness ; " "I am the Truth ; " "Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me. n 5. A VARIETY OF SUBORDINATE CONSIDERATIONS MAY HERE BE GROUPED TOGETHER WHICH TEND TO CORROBORATE, OR ARE SUPPOSED TO CORROBORATE, THE MOSAIC AUTHOR· SHIP OF THE PENTATEUCH. First, the Samaritan Pentateuch, which was known to Cyril of Alexandria, Eusebius, Jeron1e, and other early Christian writers, and which, after having been lost to the Christ:an Church for upwards of 1000 years, was in 1616 obtained from the Samaritans in Damascus by Pietro della Valle, accords in almost every point except dates with the Jewish Pentateuch; and since the Samaritans accepted no other books of the He brew Scriptures except this, and since their hostility to the Jews was so great that it is almost certain they would not have accepted this unless they had regarded it as the work of Moses, and since, moreover, it is written in the ancient Hebre'9' character, which is older than the Samaritan square character introduced by the Jews at the time of the Captivity, or at the latest by Ezra, it has been argued that it must have been in existence prior to the division of the kingdom, i. e. as early as the time of Solomon. But these arguments do not now appear to the defenders of the genuineness of the Pentateuch to be possessed of the weight they were once believed to have, and Hengstenberg accordingly (' On the Genuineness of the Pentateuch,' vol. i. p. 106) has given them up. The uncertainty, therefore, of the date when this copy of the Pentateuch was adopted by the Samaritans, whether about 409 B. o., when the Jewish priest Manasseh betook himself to the Samaritans (Neb. xiii. 2B), or in the time of Josiah, whose reformation extended beyond Judah (2 Chron. xxxiv. 9), or earlier yet, in the days of Hoshea, when the king of Assyria sent an lsraelitish priest to instruct the colonists whom he had settled in Samaria (2 Kings xvii. 28), renders it comparativell useless as an argument either on one side PENTATEUCH. h xviii THE AOTHORSHIP OF THE PENTATEUCil.
or the other. Secondly, of much greater value is the sufficiently accredited Btatement thnt 1111 the Jewish sects 11nd parties-Pharisees, Sadducee!, and Essenes, Palestinian and Alexandrian Jews-have been unanimous in accepting the Hebrew Pentateuch as the work of Moses, while the chief opposition to its g·enuinenese hns arisen within the bosom of the Christian Church. Thon, thirdly, the difficulty of explaining the uprise, development, and consnmmntion of Mosaism as a relig·ious system without the initial impulse that is implied in the MoRaic composition of the Pentateuch muet not be overlooked. The modern theory of evolution as applied to religion will not account for ancient Judaism any more than for modern Christianity. As the New Test.ament Church is inconceivable without the incarnation and the apostolic Gospels, flO neither was the Old Testament Church possible without a Sinaitic revelation and n Mosaic Pentateuch. And lastly, the advocates of the Mosaic authorsl1ip may fairly appeal to the hopeless confusion into which the supporters of the opposite theory are thrown whenever they ar& asked to condescend upon the individual, or even upon the age, to which it should be assigned-one thinking it should be given to the period immediately after the Conquest, and another to the oge of Solomon, a third to the times of Josiah, and a fourth to the era after the Captivity. The conclusion then to which we are conducted is that though the Pentateuch may have been partly compiled from written sources, and subsequently revised by Ezra, there is not sufficient ground for challenging its substantial Mosaic authorship, and still less for the tone of confident assertion which is assumed by the so-called higher criticism in proclaiming its late origin; while there is good cause for such as belong to the conservative side in this important controversy adopting_ a somewhat less apologetic style than they have hitherto done in maintaining the ancient faith of both the Jewish and Christian Churches, that the Pentateuchal books proceeded frora tl,e pen of Moses, the man of God, THE BOOK OF GENESIS. - INTRODUCTION.