by a process of accretion, in such manner that the books of the Bible outside of the Law were arranged in general in the order of their composition. A very different plan was pursued by the Alexandrian Jews, who used as their Bible the translations into Greek made for the library of the Ptolemies, including that considerable mass of material which we ordinarily designate as Apocrypha. Influenced by contact with the logical and critical-minded Greeks, they sought to arrange these books according to some scientific and critical method, as men counted scientific and critical in those days. The Law was treated as a whole, and left untouched, so far as the arrangement of the books was concerned, but the books were furnished with new titles, descriptive of their contents, and the supposed authorship was noted in the further titles -first, second, etc., book of Moses.

The Prophets and Writings were combined and rearranged in what was regarded as a rational manner. The method adopted was in general this: Those books which were regarded as historical were placed first in what was supposed to be their chronological order, so as to give a continuous history of the Jews. After these followed the non-historical books, arranged partly according to their subjects, partly according to the dates of their supposed authors. It ought to be said, however, that, so far as we know, no arrangement achieved such general agreement as to be accepted in all its details. The famous Vatican Codex, known as B, which is regarded as representing the best text, has this arrangement of the books: From Genesis to Second Esdras, which latter includes, along with much that we count apocryphal, our Book of Nehemiah, are in the order to which we are accustomed in the English Bibles; then follow Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, Job, Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom of the son of Sirach, Esther, Judith, Tobit, the Minor Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, Epistle of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel. The Codex Alexandrinus, in the British Museum, arranges the books in three volumes, as follows: In the first volume Genesis to Chronicles inclusive, in the order to which we are accustomed

in our English Bibles. In the second volume the Minor Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Baruch, Lamentations, the Epistle of Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Esther, Tobit, Judith, First and Second Esdras, and the four books of the Maccabees. The third volume contains the Psalter, together with the canticles used in the services of the Church-such as Exodus xv., the Magnificat, etc.-Job, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, Wisdom of Solomon, and Wisdom of the son of Sirach. The Psalter of Solomon is added after the New Testament at the end of the fourth volume. But these are not the only arrangements of the books of the Old Testament which we can trace to the scholars of the Alexandrian school. Another arrangement, which is represented by Tischendorf, in his edition of the Septuagint, is as follows: Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, four books of Kings (two of them being what we know as First and Second Samuel), two books of Chronicles, two books of Esdras (the second including our Nehemiah), Tobit, Judith, Esther, in which, as it is found in the Septuagint, there is a considerable portion which we count apocryphal. At this point end the books counted as historical. Then follow Job, supposed to have been written by Moses; Psalms, ascribed to David; Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Canticles, and Wisdom of Solomon, supposed to have been written by Solomon; Ecclesiasticus, placed immediately after the writings of Solomon, not because of its antiquity, but because of the similarity of style and subject; the twelve Minor Prophets, the date of the earliest of which was earlier than the date of Isaiah; Isaiah; Jeremiah; Lamentations, called in the Septuagint Lamentations of Jeremiah, and attributed to that prophet as their author; the Epistle of Jeremiah; Ezekiel; Daniel, including of course the apocryphal portions; and the books of the Maccabees, which seem to have received their position apart from all the other historical books at the close of the entire canon on account of their late date. Another interesting and curious arrangement, which grew out of the methods of the Alexandrian school, is found in the Syriac Bible, viz. Pentateuch, Job, as written by Moses, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesi

astes, Ruth, Canticles, Esther, Ezra, Nehemiah, Isaiah, the twelve Minor Prophets, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel.

All these various arrangements are meant, as will be seen, to be scientific, as over against the haphazard chronological order of the Hebrew. In certain points, also, all agree, as for instance in the arrangement of a section of historical books in such a manner as to carry the history of the Jews along in an orderly manner. But that I may not become tedious, I pass on to an arrangement adopted or adapted from the Alexandrian schools, which we find in the Latin Vulgate, and which is of especial interest to us and deserving of special study, because it is the arrangement adopted by the translators of the English Bible. This arrangement, as we find it in the Vulgate, is as follows: Pentateuch, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, the four books of Kings, Chronicles, four books of Esdras, the second of which is our Book of Nehemiah, Tobit, Judith, Esther. Here ended the historical section. The remaining books were arranged in the supposed order of their composition: Job, supposed to have been written by Moses, the Psalter, ascribed to David, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs and Wisdom of Solomon, attributed to Solomon, Ecclesiasticus, placed here because of the similarity of its subject and treatment to the books immediately preceding, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Baruch, Ezekiel, Daniel, and the twelve Minor Prophets in the usual order, which is that of the Hebrew, and which remained unchanged in the Greek translations, because the Twelve were considered as comprising together one book, and were therefore treated as inseparable. The three books of the Maccabees were placed at the end of the whole collection and not after the historical books, to which they would seem naturally to have belonged, because the consciousness of their late date was still strong. It will be observed that the Latin Vulgate followed the Alexandrian school, not only in arranging the books in a critical and scientific manner, but also in adopting into the canon a considerable number of books which were not found in the canon of the Palestinian Jews.

It is, as already stated, the arrangement of the Latin Vulgate

which was adopted by our translators, and has now become to the mass of our people part of the Bible itself. For, while at the time of the Reformation a sharp distinction was drawn between those books which were to be found in the original Hebrew and those which existed only in the Greek translations, the Hebrew being appealed to as the original Old Testament, the order of arrangement of the Latin Bible was accepted practically without question both by the continental reformers and by the English. Those books and portions of books which were not to be found in the original Hebrew were culled out and placed by themselves as the Apocrypha, forming in our Bibles a collection intervening between the Old and the New Testaments, but further than this no attempt was made to change the order of the books adopted in the Latin Vulgate, much less to return to the original arrangement of the Hebrew Bible. It should be noticed, by the way, that the additions to the canon in the Alexandrian school belong entirely to that section of the canon which in Hebrew was known as the Writings. To several of the books of this canon, notably Esther and Daniel, large sections were added which are not to be found in the Hebrew. Besides this, entire books were added, such as Tobit and Judith, which, like Esther, naturally belong to the canon known to the Hebrews as the Writings. On the other hand, it should be noticed that the Prophets, particularly Jeremiah, are shorter in the Greek translation than in the Hebrew, a fact which bears upon the date of the composition of the canon of the Prophets.

The English Bible, then, is a translation of the original Hebrew grafted upon the form of the Latin Vulgate. It is, in other words, neither a translation of the original Hebrew, nor of the Latin Vulgate, but a compromise between the two. It has taken its words, with some exceptions, from the one, and its arrangement of the books and doctrine about those books from the other. The English Bible has distinctly incorporated into itself, as though they were part of the inspired record, the critical theories regarding the date and authorship of the books which were meant to be expressed in the

arrangement of the Latin Vulgate, the result of the higher criticism of the Alexandrian schools. Further than this, it has adopted certain titles of books, also intended to express critical views. We have seen that the Hebrew Bible designated the first five books of the Old Testament as the Law, regarding the five as one, and designating each of the five sections merely by the first word of that section. Alexandrian scholars gave to the Law the title of Pentateuch, or "five parts," and to each part a Greek name, setting it apart as a separate book, namely, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. The Jewish tradition regarding the authorship of these books, that they were written by Moses, which had, however, in the stricter Palestinian treatment of the Bible been treated as tradition and not permitted to invade the sacredly guarded realm of the text, became in the Alexandrian schools an inherent part of the books themselves, so that they were designated as the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth books of Moses, and these titles were adopted into the Vulgate. The same titles and the same statement of authorship are embodied with the books in our English translations, although not found in the original Hebrew from which our English Bibles profess to be translated. Similarly the Song of Songs received the title Song of Solomon, which is not in the original Hebrew. In other words, in these regards, as in the question of the arrangement of the books of the Old Testament, the higher criticism of the ancient Alexandrian schools has actually been incorporated in the text of the Bible of English-speaking Christians. It is a curious illustration of the manner in which the liberalism and even free-thinking of one age become the stiffest orthodoxy of some succeeding age.

It is not my intention to discuss the unfortunate results which have flowed from this confusion of critical views with the actual text of the Bible. The same sort of thing was done when Archbishop Usher's chronology was printed as a part of the Bible at the head of the pages. Every one is familiar with the mental confusion which resulted from this well-meant attempt to elucidate the Bible, and you will still find godly :