contradictions,1 and impossible stories, attends any claim on behalf of the Pentateuch to historical accuracy and unity, there is the large admixture of legend which, hitherto, has been regarded as divine revelation concerning the creation of the universe, the primitive state of man, and the origin of sin and death in the world, and which is now found to stand in intimate connection with cognate legends in Chaldean records and Persian scriptures, while the serious matters with which it deals receive an altogether different, and either verified or verifiable, explanation from science.

Numberless books have been written in vain to prove that the accounts of the creation in the early parts of Genesis are in agreement with the discoveries of science concerning the origin and succession of life upon the earth; and the six "days" have been made to square with the vast periods demanded by geology, by contending that "days" really mean "ages," quite ignoring the fact that each "day" is said to have had a morning and an evening. But no ingenuity of reconcilers, fertile as that has been, can harmonize the statement in Gen. iii., that agony and death came into the world as the punishment of man's disobedience, with the evidence which the rocks beneath us supply of the existence of pain and struggling and death countless ages before man appeared. And in the ever-accumulating evidence from all quarters of the globe, inhabited once or habitable now, of the primitive condition of man, as one of savagery, the tribes still in that state representing not the degradation to which through the "fall" of a remote ancestor they have sunk,

1 Cf. Gen. xxii. 14 with Exod. vi. 3; Exod. xx. 17 with Deut. v. 22; Numb. xxi. 35 with ib. xxxii. 39; etc.

but the condition out of which all races above them have emerged, there is no harmony possible with the declaration in Genesis that man was created in pristine purity, and placed amidst luxurious surroundings. The abandonment of the statements in scripture as to the position of the earth in space and its recent creation in time did not involve the surrender or negation of any fundamental dogma, but the admission that death raged in the world before man is fatal to the doctrine that it was the result of his disobedience, and with the denial of his "fall" the whole scheme of redemption as formulated in Christian theology is swept away. But in place of the cheerless theory of divine purpose frustrated at the outset of man's career, and, assumed divine intervention notwithstanding, unaccomplished to this day, science gives us in the revelation of the wondrous advance which, despite local checks, man has accomplished, heart and hope to contribute to the realization of what Jesus and like-minded men have meant by the "kingdom of God."

The Pentateuch remained the sole sacred book of the Jews long after its final redaction, for the primary object of the collection of the "prophets" and the "writings" was their preservation; and only by slow degrees did they acquire the divine authority which was accorded to the "law." There was doubtless a fairly general agreement of opinion concerning them, but the nature and contents of certain books, e.g., Ecclesiastes, in which the vanity of human life is asserted, and Esther, which is quite devoid of a religious spirit, led to much discussion as to their admission, and it was not until the end of the first century, A.D., that the canon was settled. This Greek word, meaning a “straight rod" or "bar "—metaphorically, a “rule” or "model of excellence "--was in course of time applied

to the books of the Bible as containing the rule of faith or truth; the "holy library" as Jerome called them.1

Some use has been made in the foregoing pages of a number of uncanonical writings comprised under the general term "apocryphal," meaning "hidden," or 66 secret," given to them as containing hidden things, or as kept secret, or, in a later sense, as spurious. They were formerly inserted between the Old and New Testaments, a position which well indicates the light some of them throw on Jewish history from the period with which the Old Testament concludes, and although they are on the whole inferior to the canonical books, it is a pity that they no longer find a place in our authorized version, and are consequently so little known. They were probably composed during the first and second centuries before Jesus, and are of mixed origin, some being written in Palestine, as the valuable First Book of Maccabees and the Wisdom of Jesus son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus; others in Alexandria, as the Wisdom of Solomon, Second Book of Maccabees, and "the rest of the chapters of the" Book of Esther; while several bear traces of Persian influence, as Baruch the Prophet, the Book of Tobias (or Tobit), the third and fourth books of Esdras (or Ezra), and the Song of the Three Children, etc. The Church of England speaks of them in her Articles of Religion as "read for example of life and instruction of manners, but yet doth it not apply them to establish any doctrine."

1 A convenient summary of the history of the Bible canon is given by Mr. Matthew Arnold in God and the Bible, pp. 167, et seg.

NOTE E.

THE GOSPELS.

The early Christians had no New Testament, and the idea that one day the traditions and stray documents relating to Jesus and certain letters of his apostles would be gathered into a book as a sacred and inspired canon like the Old Testament, never entered their heads.

Confining my remarks to the four gospels, the earliest definite testimony that we have to their existence is from Irenæus, who wrote in the latter part of the second century (about the year 180) to this effect :

"Matthew it was, who among the Hebrews, brought out in their own language (the Aramaic) a written gospel, when Peter and Paul were preaching in Rome, and founding the church. Then, after their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, he too delivered to us in writing what Peter preached, and Luke, moreover, the follower of Paul, set down in a book the gospel preached by Paul. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also lay on his breast, John too published his gospel, living at that time at Ephesus, in Asia."

66

Irenæus then indulges his fancy in finding mystic meanings in this number of four; as there are four zones of the world and four winds, plainly the Church must have four columns and from them must come forth four blasts," etc.

Passing by Justin Martyr, who was born A. D. 89, and lived to the age of seventy-six, and who, although he appears to quote from what he calls "Memoirs of the Apostles," never speaks of the gospels by name, the only

testimony prior to Irenæus is that of Papias, bishop of Hierapolis, who flourished in the first half of the second century, and possibly had known the apostle John. His writings are lost, but Eusebius (third century) after calling him "a man of shallow understanding," quotes him as mentioning two gospels, first, that Mark wrote memorabilia (acts and words) of the life of Jesus, derived from the apostle Peter, and second, that Matthew wrote a collection of sentences (logia) in "the Hebrew tongue," that is, in Aramaic or Syro-Chaldaic, "which each one has translated as he could."

Beyond this slender information concerning the origin of writings on which Christians have for centuries set such store as the "word of God," all is dim with impenetrable mist, rendering futile the ceaseless discussion about the authorship, and as regards the synoptics, the relative order of the gospels, since none doubt that the fourth. gospel was the latest.

The writer of the gospel of Matthew clearly intended his work for Jewish converts, and is ever on the alert to show that the foretellings of Hebrew prophets about a Messiah were fulfilled in detail in Jesus, whom he exhibits as preaching the "good news of the kingdom,” and as proving his divine mission by miracles.

Mark, the shortest, and probably the earliest, of the four lives, was compiled for the use of Gentile Christians, before whom it sets the leading events in the career of Jesus with much detail and small embellishment.

The author of the third gospel admits at the outset that he proposes to make a recension of the many existing memoirs of Jesus, and this he does in a style of much beauty and vividness.

The fourth gospel, over the authorship of which such