When this form of criticism has done its part, and careful study has yielded a text which holds together and which represents the very best which scholarship can find for the original, there is still a field more difficult than that, higher in the sense that it demands a larger and broader view of the whole subject.Here one studies the meaning of the whole, the ideas in it, seeks to find how the revelation of God has progressed according to the capacities of men to receive it.Higher criticism is the careful study of the historical and original meanings of Scripture, the effort to determine dates and times and, so far as may be, the author of each writing, analyzing its ideas, the general Greek or Hebrew style, the relation of part to part.That is not a thing to be afraid of.It is a method of study used in every realm.It is true that some of the men who have followed that method have made others afraid of it, because they were afraid of these men themselves.It is possible to claim far too much for such study.But if the result of higher criticism should be to show that the latter half of the prophecy of Isaiah is much later than the earlier half, that is not a destruction of the Word of God.It is not an irreverent result of study.If the result of higher criticism is to show that by reason of its content, and the lessons which it especially urges, the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by the Apostle Paul, as it does not at any point claim to have been, why, that is not irreverent, that is not destructive.There is a destructive form of higher criticism; against that there is reasonto set up bulwarks.But there is a constructive form of it also.Scholarly opinion will tell any one who asks that criticism has not affected the fundamental values of the Bible.In the studies which have just now been made we have not instanced anything in the Bible that is subject to change.No matter what the result of critical study may be, the fundamental democracy of the Scripture remains.It continues to make its persistent moral appeal on any terms.Both those great facts continue.Other great facts abide with them.And on their account it is to our interest to know as much as we can learn about it.The Bible has not been lessened in its value, has not been weakened in itself, by anything that has taken place in critical study.On the other hand, the net result of such studies as archaeology has been the confirmation of much that was once disputed.Sir William Ramsay is authority for saying that the spade of the excavator is to-day digging the grave of many enemies of the Bible.
Take the second question, whether these times have not in them elements that weaken the hold of the Bible.There again we must distinguish between facts and judgments.There are certain things in these times which relax the hold of any authoritative book.There is a general relaxing of the sense of authority.It does not come alone from the intellectual awakening, because so far as that awakening is concerned, it has affected quite as much men who continue loyal to the authority of the Bible as others.No, this relaxing of the sense of authority is the result of the first feeling of democracy which does not know law.Democracy ought to mean that men are left independent of the control of other individuals because they realize and wish to obey the control of God or of the whole equally with their fellows.When, instead, one feels independent of others, and adds to that no sense of a higher control which he must be free to obey, the result is not democracy, but individualism.Democracy involves control; individualism does not.A vast number of people in passing from any sense of the right of another individual to control them have also passed out of the sense of the right of God or of the whole to control them.So that from a good many all sense of authority has passed.It is characteristic of our age.And it is a stage in our progress toward real democracy, toward true human liberty.
Observe that relaxed sense of authority in the common attitude toward law.Most men feel it right to disregard a law of the community which they do not like.It appears in trivial things.If the community requires that ashes be kept in a metal receptacle, citizens approve it in general, but reserve to themselves the right to consider it a foolish law and to do something else if that is not entirely convenient.If the law says that paper must not be thrown on the sidewalk, it means little that it is the law.Those who are inclined to be clean and neat and do not like to see paper lying around will keep the law; those who are otherwise will be indifferent to it.That is at the root of the matter-of- course saying that a law cannot be enforced unless public opinion sustains it.Under any democratic system laws virtually always have the majority opinion back of them; but the minority reserve the right to disregard them if they choose, and the minority will be more aggressive.Rising from those relaxations of law into far more important ones, it appears that men in business life, feeling themselves hampered by legislation, set themselves to find a way to evade it, justifying themselves in doing so.The mere fact that it is the law does not weigh heavily.This is, however, only an inevitable stage in progress from the earliest periods of democracy to later and more substantial periods.It is a stage which will pass.There will come a democracy where the rule of the whole is frankly recognized, and where each man holds himself independent of his fellows only in the sense that he will claim the right to hold such relation to God and his duty as he himself may apprehend.
