promised to obey him. But this great scholar, as Bishop Monk has finely observed, does not appear to have lived under the dominion of Christian principles. To Dr. Arnold belongs the merit of first among English clergymen saying outright, and without the possibility of his judgment being ascribed to religious indifference, that the same tests which on the whole vindicate the genuineness of the larger part of the Prophets, compel us to assign to Daniel a lower chronological rank, which must affect the degree in which history or prediction enter into its contents. It was not Arnold's desire to draw dangerous inferences; though he might not have been able to prevent such from being drawn.

If any such thing can be conceived as a question affecting religion, yet turning upon literary evidence, and opening one course of investigation to all men independently of religious creeds or theories, such was this question of the book of Daniel. So the Church of the Reformation conceived, when, with a noble simplicity, in an age when such questions were already

....

1 "He was so far from being satisfied, that he immediately began to suppose that his disappointment arose from the sacred books of Daniel and the Revelation themselves, and not only from his own, or the Bishop's, misunderstanding them. . . . He pretended also that there had never been a version of Daniel made by the Septuagint.... Nay, when Dr. Bentley was courting his lady, who was a most excellent Christian woman, he had like to have lost her, by stating to her an objection against the book of Daniel, as if its author, in describing Nebuchadnezzar's image of gold (Daniel vi.) to be sixty cubits high and but six cubits broad, knew no better than that men's height were ten times their breadth, whereas it is well known to be not more than six times, which made the good lady weep. He aimed also to pick a quarrel with some small niceties in Daniel's chronology, and supposed the book to have been written after the time of Onias, the high priest ; and that Onias was Daniel's Messiah, and that the slaughter of this Onias at Antioch was the cutting off of the Messiah. In short, he was very anxious to get clear of the authority of the book of Daniel."-1 Whiston's Memoirs, 94-5. The passage oddly suggests the antithesis of "a despotism of professors."

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Equally paradoxical, my lords, and dialectically, as I conceive, suicidal, was the use which the Queen's Advocate made of a passage in St. Augustine. Here,' he says, " are strong views of inspiration, in a passage known to our Reformers.' Now, why did our Reformers, knowing St. Augustine's doctrine of election and grace, insert it in their Articles? Because, I presume, they believed it. Why did the same Reformers, knowing also St. Augustine's doctrine of inspiration, not insert it? Because, I presume, they did not believe it with such a certainty as to think it

stirred, she declared her acceptance of "four Prophets the greater and twelve Prophets the less," but laid no restriction upon investigations as to the interpretation, authorship, and history. Still, if one theory of the book be called Christian, while another is called the Jewish or rationalistic theory, it may be foreseen that hardly one mind in a thousand will compare evidence for the two dispassionately. The comfort which men who practise their religion derive from it, and the awe with which men who do not practise it regard it, are employed to weight the scales; until, paradoxical as it may sound, thousands who know nothing of the literary evidence but what some one, a little less ignorant than themselves has told them, will not only stake their salvation upon a point of literary chronology, but will imagine this to be the only, or the strongest, reason for believing things of an entirely different kind, which their experience has taught them to value, and without which they would have judged the literary matter differently. If God wrote the book of Daniel so that it should contain predictions to prove Christianity, a theory which explains the predictions and destroys the proof, may with no greater extravagance than polemists allow themselves, be said to place us in an attitude of defiance toward the Divine Majesty, taking away from mankind their dearest hopes, or sapping the

proper for legislative imposition. I doubt if any argument on our side better deserves your lordships' attention than this which the Queen's Advocate has generously suggested, for it is often assumed that our Reformers would have rejected with horror any notions of Biblical freedom. Such an assumption always seemed to me a violation of all canons of historical verisimilitude; for our Reformers lived in a country where the free handling of Scripture by Reginald Pecock, Bishop of St. Asaph, was well known, and had shared condemnation with the heresies of Wicliffe-and while the atmosphere was rife with the rationalistic hints of Raleigh and Hariot. Nothing is more certain than that their relations were most friendly with Luther. whose Biblical freedom was such that his criticisms are often identical with those for which the volume of Essays and Reviews is indicted. Yet our Reformers, equally attached to Augustine on one side, and to Luther on the other, and having (we are now told) strict views before them by the side of lax views, deliberately refrained from recording a legislative preference for either, and by this indifference, or rather wisdom, guaranteed, as I trust, our freedom."-Final Reply, before the Judicial Committee.

foundation on which they rest. It is not wonderful that men who have definite duties, and indefinite ideas of what criticism means, should shrink from the appearance of such presumption as is thus ascribed to them. Who are we that the evidence which satisfied Sir Isaac Newton should not content us? Whether he examined the evidence, or what he sometimes said upon it, and whether his doctrinal views in general should be our model, is a different thing. But why should we forfeit one world, and risk another; that, too, one in which any hope of an ending of penalties is itself penal?

Per me si va nella città dolente,

Per me si va tra la perduta gente :

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che 'ntrate.

2. On the other hand, the grave nature of the interests involved in what seemed at first only a question of sacred literature, tends to remove it out of the category of curiosity into that of duty. If there are elements in our faith, practical or speculative, which we are justified in refusing to prove, leaving the burden of argument on whoever assails them, a literary position, especially one considered as an outwork, can claim no such immunity from account; some investigation of the evidence is in this case required by justice to the Jews, whose tradition of the canon has been arraigned; by loyalty to the faith of which we are ministers, whose evidences are supposed to be jeopardied; above all, by reverence for the holy name. of God, which if not righteously invoked, has been wantonly paraded. The strong language which the Oxford Regius Professor of Hebrew has permitted himself to use on this subject might not be too strong, though it would be needless, if the critics against whom he directs it had either falsified their statement of the evidence, or violated a sanctity antecedent and paramount to all evidence. There should be some criterion by which the tone of righteous indignation may be distinguished from the gall of bitterness. Most men have some Rubicon of sacredness in regard to Revelation: with one it has been the

b

Anglican version; with another it has been, in one stage of his life, the voice of the English Episcopate,-surely a criterion short of the highest; with many men it is whatever the Bible shall on due explanation be found to contain; with others it is the religious element in the Bible; with others the spirit of the Bible, the life out of which the book sprang, and which in turn it has tended to generate in the world; with some it is the New Testament, independently of the Old; with others, it is the mind of Christ, to which the New Testament affords the best approximative clue; with others, it is the human conscience, placed sensibly in presence of the heart-searching God; or again, the ultimate evidence, and a great point of sacredness, is the perpetual coincidence between the words of Christ and the voice of our conscience, whenever they are brought fairly into contact: to some, the only trustworthy evidence of revelation seems miracle; to others, Divine illumination enforcing truth or fitness of doctrine, appears, in the midst of undoubted miracles, to be alone capable of implanting the faith that saves, and where miracles are questioned, to be not merely their permitted substitute, but the rightful occupant of their place: again, men of phlegmatic thought, without denying the Divine origin of illumination, think its effects not different from such mental operations as enable us to embrace moral evidence: almost any of these views, or a combination of them, leaves place for the Church, as harmonising the consciences, and embodying the convictions, of the community. Can a reason be given why, on any theory of Revelation or of its evidences, one account of the book of Daniel is to be preferred to another? Must the preference be such, that the one account has its place on the sacred soil, and within the charmed bower, where none may lift a spear? or in this, as in other instances, is the life independent of place and time, permitting us to settle history in whatever way the evidence may suggest? Suppose a person predisposed to believe whatever he ought; take rather one who believes all the articles of the Christian faith, but who doubts

whether a particular account of the book of Daniel has a place among them; one who thinks, perhaps, that Christ would not have his disciples seek such knowledge1 of the times and seasons as one interpretation of the book seems to disclose; yet one, whose faith in the Divine power of inspiration, the historical reality of miracles, and the prescience of prophecy, may give to enquiries on such subjects an interest vital and absorbing. How is such a person to decide between accounts of the book of Daniel so conflicting as the one set forth for English readers in the following treatise, and another which has the benefit of Dr. Pusey's exposition in a more academic form? Can he be certain that his choice may not be fatal to his own soul? Some attempt to answer these questions will be the limited scope of this Introduction; which must not be understood to imply adoption of the more general views of either one of the two expositors.

3. On opening a common Hebrew Bible, we find three great Prophets, followed by the twelve minor Prophets, in familiar order. Only Daniel is wanting, and has to be sought in a subsequent collection of books. Among its neighbours there are, the Song of Songs, an ancient book, but one reckoned by the Jews semi-canonical; Ecclesiastes, whose signs of later origin bring it within about two centuries of the Christian era; Esther, a book unfixed, but falling low in the Persian, if not in the Grecian, period; the books of Chronicles, which are allowed to contain genealogies implying interpolation or compilation subsequent to Alexander the Great ; and the collection of Psalms, which is believed (though not without dispute, yet) for reasons which cannot be lightly set aside, to contain compositions as late as the Maccabaic period. The "foolish man

1 Acts i. 7.

21 Chron. iii. 21-24, where six generations have an appearance of following Zerubbabel (compare Jaddua, in Nehemiah xii. 11).

Dr. Pusey (p. 330) "gives to the section the appearance of an ancient gloss,"— a solution, which the passage, in common with others, may bear; but which its sponsor might have been expected to deplore as rationalism, if not to describe as "mere insolent assumption against Holy Scripture, grounded on unbelief" (p. 346).