miracles in the New Testament are not surprising because of their abundance, but because of the moderateness of their number. So patent is this fact, that no candid student can help seeing that the writers of the Gospel histories were under that kind of restraint which surrounds an honest man when attempting to tell "the whole truth and nothing but the truth." So evident is this that no amount of reasoning upon a priori considerations can materially diminish our confidence in the mass of the miracles connected with Christ's ministry, so long as we believe in his resurrection and in its purported significance with reference to the salvation of the world. These minor miracles accord with the whole circumstances of the case. He whose repugnance to the miraculous has been so far overcome that he can believe in the reality of Christ's resurrection will not find it difficult to believe in the whole cluster of miracles connected both with Christ's own ministry and with that of his chosen apostles and of their associates. The Old Testament stands in a similar relation to this central work of Christ. Its history was regarded by Christ and his apostles as preparatory to that of the New Testament. The New Testament does not stand by itself, nor is it suspended from the heavens in mid-air. It rests upon the broad foundation of the patriarchal promises, of the Mosaic institutions, of the prophetic instructions, and of the providential history recorded in the Old Testament. Independently of the light thrown back upon it from the New Testament, the miraculous history of the Old would be difficult of belief. But to him who has accepted Christ as he is revealed in the New Testament, there is no more reason for rejecting the miracles of the Old Testament than there is for discrediting the mass of supernatural facts connected with Christ's ministry. We are not compelled to establish the truth of each specific miraculous account by itself, but the unity of the revelation and the congruity of the whole system are such that the burden of proof is thrown upon him who would discard any Old Testament miracle. The foregoing principles do not by any means close the door against critical investigations; but they should restrain inquirers from reckless treatment of the Old Testament documents. The presumptions they involve have in themselves strong evidential force. The Old Testament history cannot be treated in entire independence of the New, or of what is said about it in the New. The Old Testament is the paved way leading to the temple of the new Jerusalem. A due sense of our limited capacity for criticising the ways of God, will lead us to be cautious about discarding those preparatory stages of revelation which have been so fully endorsed by the writers of the New Testament. Many seem in undue haste to strengthen their defences of the Christian system by voluntarily surrendering all the outposts, and shutting themselves up in the citadel. From an apologetic as well as from a military point of view, this would seem to be a confession of weakness and a precursor of disaster. If miracles are altogether out of harmony with the preliminary stages of the Christian system, it will be difficult to look upon them as credible at the con summation of that system. The difficulty with an army which has retreated to the garrison is that it has so limited the area from which to draw subsistence that it is now in imminent danger of starvation. So will it be with the Christian church when it abandons the broad fields of historical facts which constitute the earlier stages of revelation, and endeavors to support itself upon a bare faith in the realities of the spiritual world unsustained by the history of miraculous intervention. Old Testament history is certainly an important support to Christianity but only by virtue of its supposed truth and reality. In view of the relation of its history to the New Testament, nothing is gained, and much is lost, even from an apologetic point of view, by surrendering our faith in any clear and well-attested miraculous account in the Old Testament. If one is to derive spiritual comfort from believing in the miracle of Christ's resurrection, of what advantage is it to cultivate incredulity respecting those miracles that prepared the way for the introduction and reception of Christianity? This apologetic position permits, and indeed provides for, due consideration of the documentary and literary evidence upon which dependence must be had for determining what is really described in the Old Testament as miraculous. For example: it leaves one open to question just what phenomenon is referred to in the sun's standing still while Joshua completed the destruction of his enemies. It permits of the distinction between mediate and immediate miracles which has so long been in vogue. It allows us to challenge the correctness of the text in the story of the descent of the angel to trouble the water in the Pool of Siloam. But in considering the evidence, the natural presumption against the occurrence of miracles is so far removed by their connection with the Christian system that there is no necessity for extraordinary proof. There is no occasion to make any higher demand for evidence to support the testimony than that which is involved in the somewhat indefinite but valuable legal caution to consider if the point is proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." The view one entertains concerning the greatness of the central miracle of Christianity and the closeness of the connection between the Old Testament and the New will largely determine when a reported fact either in the Old Testament or in the preliminary stages of the New is regarded as proved beyond reasonable doubt. Among the miraculous elements of the Old Testament are to be classed certain phases of the prophetic function. It is difficult, for example, to read the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, with its marvellous forecast of the Saviour's character, work, and suffering, without feeling that there is here prediction entirely surpassing the capabilities of the human author, however much he may emphasize the interpretative character of the prophetic office. It is not possible to exclude in all cases such a distinct foretelling of events as constitutes a true miracle. We may therefore well distrust the conclusions of any biblical critic who approaches the Old Testament with a manifest disinclination to be satisfied with ordinary evidence in support of its miraculous facts. Hence, when we find a critic laying it down as a principle that "a prophet's prescience must be limited to deductions from patent facts taken in connection with real or supposed truth," we may rightly conclude that he is not in a proper frame of mind to weigh the evidence concerning the authorship of the latter part of Isaiah. In approaching the study of Old Testament history, the first duty of us all, and of biblical critics in particular, is to free the mind from unreasonable prejudice against the miraculous.character of its history. G. F. W. III. ADJUSTMENTS BETWEEN THE BIBLE AND SCIENCE. MODERN Science may be said to begin with the discovery that the earth is round and revolves about the sun. The shock which these discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo gave to the religious world was more serious than any which has been given by any subsequent scientific discoveries. The fact that Christianity has not only survived this rude shock, but has flourished more abundantly than ever since then, should serve to dissipate the fears and strengthen the confidence of any who are alarmed at the present aspect of affairs. If we remember that an oak tree has withstood the onset of a tornado we shall be less concerned about it when we see its branches swaying in a storm of moderate violence. It is well, however, to bear in mind that the opposition of the ecclesiastical authorities to Galileo in his time was based both upon the supposed teachings of Scripture and upon ideas of the constitution of the universe inveterately associated with the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies, and that in both cases the interpreters were mistaken. The sun does indeed seem to move around the earth every year, and the whole heavens seem to do so every day. But the appearance is deceptive. Yet nature is not untrue, for it is not essential that she should cheaply surrender her secrets to the superficial observer, when closer inspection and more careful comparison of facts will reveal the simpler truths of modern astronomy. In this case nature has not necessarily deceived us, but men had deceived themselves by forming a conclusion before the facts were all in, and before they had given the proper amount of attention to the collection and comparison of the facts. It was just so in the interpretation of the astronomical references in the Bible. The Bible does indeed speak of the "four corners of the earth," and of its "immovability," and of the "windows of heaven," and of the "rising and setting" of the sun, and of the sun, going forth, rejoicing as "a strong man to run a race," and of the sun and moon and stars as having been appointed for marking the seasons of the day, the month, and the year. But, before the days of Galileo, the interpreters of the Bible had misunderstood this language just as they had misinterpreted the corresponding facts of nature. The language expresses the apparent truth of the phenomena, and is the same language used to express those very thoughts 154 Critical Notes. The at the present day. We still speak of the four quarters of the globe, of the immovability of the earth, and of the rising and setting of the sun. language of the Bible is the language of everyday life, and not the technical language of science. In this case there has been progress in interpreting the Bible, just as there has been in interpreting the apparent movements of the heavenly bodies. The second great shock which the Christian public received from the hands of science had its origin in a similar misconception of the language of Scripture, the fault being not in the Bible, but in the interpreters. The language of the Bible with reference to the creation was adapted to the state The word"day," of knowledge in the world at any particular time; in this respect being exactly like the astronomical language already alluded to. used in describing the progress of creation, has so wide a range of signification, that all interpreters should have been on their guard against limiting it to a period of twenty-four hours; as some of the earliest, like Augustine, were. Furthermore, the statement concerning the original creation is in the most general terms possible. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." In this language there is no warrant for placing this beginning immediately before the creation of man, whose chronology is professedly short. In those words, "in the beginning,” an indefinite vista is opened up to our vision, and the geologist is permitted to look backward through the corridors of geologic time without any uncomfortable restraint from theological critics. Upon two questions the Christian public is, at the present time, passing The first of these relates to through serious trial in the adjustment of its interpretation of the Bible to the prevailing sentiment of the scientific world. the doctrine of the origin of species and the mode of the creation of man. Without venturing a positive opinion as to the final word of science upon this intricate question, it is proper, in view of past experience, to call attention to the remarkable flexibility of the language of Scripture relating to these points, and to the ease with which modern doctrines of science may be I am confident that in such an examination we shall find that adjusted to it. same wise forecast, which I can attribute to nothing but divine inspiration itself, which has elsewhere prevented all possibility of collision with science, and has opened to religious scientific men as free a field for investigation as The language of Genesis may properly be reanybody can rightfully claim. garded as the language of theistic evolution. "God said, Let the earth bring and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass. forth grass, . . And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature we are fully at liberty to inquire how he made them. Likewise, when it says that God made man out of the dust of the earth, we can easily see that it is no perversion of the language to refer it to dust that had already been incorporated into some lower form of organization. The essential thing in the creation of man is the inbreathing into him of the divine image. God is a spirit. The image of God in man is spiritual, not material. The second disturbing question now in process of settlement between science and the Bible relates to the length of time during which man has been in the world. According to the ordinary interpretation of the Bible, that period is limited to about six thousand years. In the most of our Bibles B. C. 4004 stands at the head of the column in the first chapter of Genesis. But a variety of investigations seems to indicate that the origin of man must be placed considerably farther back than this. The monuments of Egypt contain inscriptions indicating a high civilization in the valley of the Nile at a period supposed by most authorities to be earlier than the date assigned in our Bibles to the creation of Adam, and by all to be earlier than the ordinary date assigned to the Flood. In the valley of the Euphrates the marks of civilization run back nearly as far. So high is this civilization, that in the natural course of things one or two thousand years must be allowed for its growth and development, while already, at the dawn of this civilization, the languages of these nations had become fixed, which is another process requiring, in the ordinary course of events, a considerable lapse of time. The geologist, also, brings forward supporting evidence of the existence of man at a much earlier period than that assigned to him by the ordinary interpretation of the Bible. But while these facts indicate an antiquity considerably greater than that generally assigned to the flood of Noah, or even to the creation of Adam, I believe they also show that the extreme antiquity claimed by some is far from being proved, and that the scientific evidence of man's antiquity indicates such limits to the chronology of the human race that it can be easily adjusted to a reasonable interpretation of the Bible itself. In this whole investigation it is well to move slowly, and counsel together freely. This the Bibliotheca Sacra has done, on the biblical side, in the article prepared for its pages by Professor W. H. Green, and published in the number for April, 1890. In this it would seem that he had shown, to every thoughtful student who peruses it, that the genealogical tables of the Bible were not prepared for chronological purposes, and that little can properly be inferred from them concerning the antiquity of man. In a word, the conclusion of Professor Green is that, as, when in David's time Shebuel is said to be the son of Gershom, the son of Moses, we infer that the phrase "son of" is used in a loose sense, meaning merely descendant of, so, when in the fifth chapter of Genesis we meet the phrase "Seth lived one hundred and five years and begat Enos," we may understand it to mean simply that Enos was a descendant of Seth through the line which branched off at the 105th year of the patriarch's life. As we had to interpolate a number of generations between Shebuel and Gershom, so we may interpolate any number of |