directly anti-sacrificial language. And it might be urged on the side of Kuenen, that neither would the early prophets have used such language—at any rate in the literary version of their discourses if they had foreseen the canonical character which this would assume, and the immense importance of a sacrificial system in the post-Exile period. (3) The theory that the law involves an injurious condescension is by no means compulsory upon advocates of the new hypothesis. Concessions to popular taste have, indeed, as we know but too well, often almost extinguished the native spirit of a religion; but the fact that some at least of the most spiritual psalms are acknowledged to be post-Exile ought to make us all, critics and non-critics alike, slow to draw too sharp a distinction between the legal and the evangelical. That the law was misused by some, and in course of time became spiritually almost obsolete, would not justify us in depreciating it, even if we thought that the lesser and not the greater Moses, the scribe and not the prophet, was mainly responsible for its promulgation. Finally, the rash statement of Lagarde has been virtually answered by the reference of another radical critic (Keim) to the well-attested words of Christ at the institution of the Eucharist (Matt. xxvi. 28).
I have spoken thus much on the assumption that the hypothesis of Kuenen and Wellhausen may be true. That it will ever become universally prevalent is improbable—the truth may turn out to lie between the two extremes—but that it will go on for some time gaining ground among the younger generation of scholars is, I think, almost certain. No one who has once studied this or any other Old Testament controversy from the inside and with a full view of the evidence can doubt that the traditional accounts of many of the disputed books rest on a very weak basis, and those who crave for definite solutions, and cannot bear to live in twilight, will naturally hail such clear-cut hypotheses as those of Kuenen and Wellhausen, and credit them with an undue finality. Let us be patient with these too sanguine critics, and not think them bad Churchmen, as long as they abstain from drawing those dangerous and unnecessary inferences of which I have
