spoken. It is the want of an equally intelligent interest which makes the Old Testament a dead letter to so many highly orthodox theologians. If the advanced critics succeed in awakening such an interest more generally, it will be no slight compensation for that 'unsettlement of views' which is so often the temporary consequence of reading their books.
One large part, however, of Kuenen and Wellhausen's critical system is not peculiar to them, but accepted by the great majority of professed Old Testament critics. It is this part which has perhaps a still stronger claim to be considered in its relation to Christian truth, because there is every appearance that it will, in course of time, become traditional among those who have given up the still current traditions of the synagogue. I refer (1) to the analysis of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua into several documents, (2) to the view that many of the laws contained in the Pentateuch arose gradually, according to the needs of the people, and that Ezra, or at least contemporaries of Ezra, took a leading part in the revision and completion of the law book, and (3) to the dating of the original documents or compilations at various periods, mostly long subsequent to the time of Moses. Time forbids me to enter into the grounds for the confident assertion that if either exegesis or the Church's representation of religious truth is to make any decided progress, the results of the literary analysis of the Pentateuch must be accepted as facts, and that theologians must in future recognise at least three different sections, and as many different conceptions of Israel's religious development, within the Pentateuch, just as they have long recognised at least three different types of teaching in the Old Testament as a whole. On the question as to the date of these sections, and as to the Mosaic origin of any considerable part of them, the opinions of special scholars within the Church will, for a long time yet, be more or less divided. There is, I know, a belief growing up among us, that Assyrian and Egyptian discoveries are altogether favourable to the ordinary English view of the dates of the historical books, including the Pentateuch. May I be pardoned for expressing the slowly formed convic-
