stream of revelation up to the several springs whose waters swell the great current. And, just here, I cannot refrain from expressing my gratification that in almost every instance he has gone to original sources for his information, and has given us the original text, either in the body of the book or in copious foot-notes. Nothing new could be said upon this head, for the facts are patent to all; but the disposition and arrangement of the facts, so as to give them their greatest force, is very skillfully made.

Confining his inquiries in the first part of the book to the Old Testament, it becomes of the utmost importance to determine the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures. It were manifestly a waste of time and labor to investigate books which never attained to the dignity of sacred writings among the Jews themselves; and so the sacred writings which have come down to us need sifting before we examine their claim to be the word of God. For this purpose our author travels through every ancient catalogue of the Old Testament-from that of Melito to that of St. Jerome. As the last mentioned catalogue is the one on which he bases the canon of the Old Testament, it may not be regarded as out of place to insert it here:

Of all the fathers of the early Church Jerome was the greatest Hebrew scholar, and the best versed in the literature of the Jews. His testimony as to the canon of the Old Testament is, therefore, very valuable. In the preface to his translation of the two Books of Samuel and of the two Books of Kings he furnishes a catalogue of books of the Old Testament as arranged in the Hebrew Bible, giving both the Hebrew and the Greek or Latin name of each. He gives, first, the five books of Moses, which he says are called TORAH-LAW. The second division, he says, is that of the PROPHETS, and he begins with Joshua the son of Nun. Next comes the Book of Judges, with that of Ruth in the same volume. The third book is that of Samuel, called First and Second Kings with us. The fourth book is that of Kings, contained in the third and fourth volume of Kings; fifth, Isaiah; sixth, Jeremiah; seventh, Ezekiel. Then come the Twelve (Minor) Prophets. The third division, says he, contains the 'Ayioyoaca, HAGIOGRAPHA, (Holy Writings.) The first book is Job; next, Psalms of David, in one volume; three books of Solomon, namely, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Songs; First and Second Chronicles; Ezra; and the ninth, Esther. "Thus the books of the ancient law," says he, "are twenty-two: five of Moses, eight of the Prophets, and nine of the Hagiographa; although some often insert Ruth and the Lamentations in the Hagiographa, . . . and thus the books

of the ancient law would be twenty-four." In this catalogue are all the books that we have in our present canon of the Old Testament, and no others; Nehemiah is included in Ezra, and the Lamentations are included in the prophecy of Jeremiah. Jerome remarks on this catalogue: "Whatever is outside of these must be placed among the Apocrypha. Therefore Wisdom, which is commonly inscribed the Wisdom of Solomon,' and the Book of Jesus the Son of Sirach, and Judith, and Tobias, are not in the canon. The First Book of Maccabees I have found in Hebrew. The Second Book is in Greek." He observes, in his preface to Jeremiah, that "The Book of Baruch has no existence among the Hebrews, and the spurious Epistle of Jeremiah I have determined should be by no means commented upon."-P. 30.

From these Christian authorities he turns to Jewish testimony for confirmatory evidence of the Old Testament canon. It so happens that the writings of Josephus and Philo have preserved for us catalogues more or less perfect of the books held as sacred by the Jews in their day. Another is found incorporated in the prologue of the Greek translation of the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, while the Talmuds furnish a fourth. These are all forced to bear their testimony to the canonicity of the books of our Qld Testament.

Alongside these Jewish and early Christian catalogues he next marshals the ancient manuscripts of the Jewish Scriptures; and after them the many ancient versions-the Septuagint, the Targums, the Peshito, the Itala, the Vulgate, the Egyp tian, the Ethiopic, the Armenian, the Georgian, the Gothic, the Slavonian, and the Arabic-together with the Samaritan Pentateuch. and its versions. Early Christian literature is ransacked for information upon this subject, and every passage found bearing upon the canon of the Scriptures is made to take its place in this book. We are compelled to wade knee-deep among old Hebrew MSS., and through tomes of musty translations in all the languages of the Babel East. The conflict between these early authorities soon eliminates the Apocrypha, and leaves us the Old Testament canon in its integrity as we now have it.

Having thus determined the canon of the Hebrew Scriptures as a whole, our author next resolves the Old Testament into its several components, and regards each book as a separate document for the purpose of making each succeeding author bear testimony to the writings of his predecessor, so as to fix ap

proximately the date of the oldest books of the Bible. In other words, he traces the volume as a whole book to within sight of its latest writer-farther than this it could not be traced, because it did not exist in its integrity-and from this point, taking each sacred author as an independent authority, he climbs, step by step, by means of their testimony, up the stair of evidence to the days of the Exodus and the writing of the Pentateuch.

Paley's argument from quotations and allusions must forever be conclusive.* Any quotation from a book is proof unanswerable that that book was extant at the time the quotation was made. Well, by means of direct quotations from, or clear allusions to, or direct mention of, the Pentateuch, in the several books of the Old Testament, our author follows the Books of Moses back to the days of Joshua, who mentions them as writings well understood and of acknowledged authority among the people at that time. With the testimony of Joshua he closes the evidence from sacred authors, and concludes as follows:

It may be taken for granted that Moses was the great legislator of the Hebrews, since the proof is so strong that it may be said to have hardly ever been questioned. All the writings of the Jews, and their oldest traditions, agree that Moses was their lawgiver; and the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans held the same view. Manetho, an Egyptian priest of Sebennytus, a man of great erudition, who wrote in Greek, about B. C. 300, the Egyptian History from their sacred writings, states that the Israelites left Egypt in the reign of Amenophis, and that their leader, a priest of Heliopolis, by name Osarsiphus-whose name was changed to Moses after he went over to the Israelites-gave them laws, for the most part contrary to the customs of Egypt, enjoining upon them not to worship the gods, nor to abstain from those animals held sacred in Egypt, but to sacrifice and slaughter them all. King Amenophis (Amunoph) is placed by Wilkinson at B. C. 1498-1478. Manetho's History of the Dynasties has been remarkably confirmed by the monuments of Egypt. Strabo, the great Greek geographer, (about B. C. 65,) in speaking of the Jews, remarks: "Moses, one of the Egyptian priests, possessing a part of Lower Egypt, left there, being disgusted with the existing institutions, and many, honoring the Divinity, left with him. For he said and taught that the Egyptians have not just conceptions of the Divine nature in representing it by beasts and cattle; nor have the Lybians; nor have the Greeks, who represent it by human forms. For that only is God which embraces us all, both land and sea.”

The Roman satirist Juvenal (about A.D. 100) speaks of "the

"Evidences of Christianity," p. 134.

"Moses,"

law, all which Moses delivered in the sacred volume." says Tacitus, "gave the Jewish nation new rites, contrary to those of other men."--P. 71.

Having thus established the antiquity and integrity of these books, the question as to their genuineness next arises. In this field Dr. Harman's scythe cuts a broad swath. His intimate acquaintance with the state of ancient learning in all the countries which enter into this question, and his knowledge of the manners, customs, and languages of the peoples concerned, enable him largely to reproduce the state of society which existed in the days of the Exodus. He is not writing a work on the evidences of Christianity, and hence his book is not polemical in tone. He is preparing the way for the study or the holy Scriptures, and therefore contents himself with the task of removing causes of misapprehension, and with restoring, as far as may be, the ancient settings and surroundings of the Bible. He does not aim at dovetailing propositions into syllogisms for the purpose of forcing conclusions. He rather assigns to himself the task of collecting the materials out of which arguments are constructed. His arrangement of these materials is rather in the form of pictures of ancient society than in the shape of demonstrations of formal propositions. Reading his work, before we know it we feel at home among the patriarchs, and the meaning of lawgiver, psalmist, and prophet dawns upon us we know not how. The best possible explanation of an author's meaning is a knowledge of the cir cumstances under which the book was written. Thus (on page 67) he hedges in the Pentateuch :

As a preliminary to the discussion of the genuineness of the Pentateuch, there arises the question of the antiquity of the art of alphabetical writing among the Hebrews: for if it can be shown that the art was well-known among that people in the Mosaic age, the probability that their great lawgiver wrote his laws will be great.

very

Writing in hieroglyphics, which preceded alphabetical writing, was known and practiced in Egypt at a very remote period. The sacred books of Thoth, the Egyptian Mercury or Hermes, were written, in part at least, as early as the time of Suphis, (Cheops,) to whom the books were attributed. This Memphitic king, according to Wilkinson, reigned about B. C. 2450. Numerous commentaries were written on these sacred books of Thoth. "Papyri are of the most remote Pharaonic periods, and the same mode of

writing on them is shown from the sculptures to have been common in the age of Suphis, or Cheops, the builder of the Great Pyramid." "Every thing was done in writing." They had decimal as well as duodecimal calculation, and the reckoning by units, tens, hundreds, and thousands, before the pyramids were built. Alphabetical writing came into use several centuries later. "From the Palestinians the people near the Mediterranean Sea received their alphabet. The sounds of the alphabet itself, as it is known to us, suit well the general lingual characteristics of the Semitics. It corresponds to their peculiarity, for it expresses their inclination to gutturals, and the variety of their hissing or aspirated sounds. We can, therefore, assert with high probability that its inventor was a Semitic." That the Israelites possessed alphabetical writing when they went down into Egypt is quite evident, otherwise they would have adopted the hieroglyphic system of the Egyptians. The Phoenicians, who lived on the borders of Canaan, and whose language was nearly the same as the Hebrew, possessed writing at a very remote period. They attributed the invention of their alphabet to Taut, their world-god. The sacred writings of the Phoenicians, in which their cosmogony, the history of their gods and heroes, natural events, and astronomical, astrological, and psychological doctrines were contained, were called Tant-writings. Antiquity mentions seven such writings.

The existence of alphabetical writing among the Hebrews at the time of the Exodus being thus established, he proceeds to draw a picture of the arts and sciences in general in Egypt in the Mosaic age, to show that the statements of the Pentateuch respecting the arts employed by the Israelites in building the tabernacle, in making its utensils, and in adorning the priests, together with the allusions made to gold and.other ornaments, are natural and credible, unless one can suppose that the Israelites, although dwelling in close proximity to the Egyptians for centuries, never learned any of their arts, and that no Egyptian artist ever appeared among them.

These collateral considerations create a strong presumption both that Moses wrote laws for the Jews and that the Pentateuch contains those, laws. And now our author turns to the evidences of genuineness to be found in the books themselves. Having argued the unity of the Pentateuch from the one plan which pervades it all, showing it to be the work of one mind, he next proceeds to demonstrate its antiquity from the archaisms which it contains. I do not recollect ever to have seen so thorough and exhaustive a presentation of this class of evidence as is found in this book. Indeed, the chap