ing satisfactorily the fact which he acknowledges must be explained, the deity of Christ? The question thus stated, the reply is easy. He has not satisfactorily explained the deity of Christ because he has furnished no bridge upon which the mind can pass from the facts about Christ which he acknowledges to the affirmation of Christ's deity; and he has himself, accordingly, really denied that deity, since he has substituted for it something which is not deity. He did this by the necessities of logical consistency. He has thus ended by denying that which he began by acknowledging and which he was attempting to explain. The result is a virtual confession that, upon the course which his method marks out, the acknowledged fact of Christ's deity cannot be explained.

When the Christian looks upon Christ and sees in him per-. fect superiority to the world and the perfect revelation of God by means of a character which is perfectly governed by love, does he behold in that vision God, or a godlike man? If his only way of knowing God is through the revelation thus made of him, does the fact that Christ makes that revelation convert him into God? If feelings of pleasure are excited in view of him (Werthurtheile), and he assumes a worth in our eyes, is that worth the worth of God? To ask these questions simply and without sophistication, is to answer them. No! The only thing which can give to Christ the worth of God, and convert the agent of revelation into the source as well as the agent, or show that this being is superior to the world because he is God, is the information from some other quarter, or the well-grounded conclusion from the degree as well as the character of the tokens exhibited in his historic person, that he is God. Whence is that further information? Ritschl denies that there can be any. What is the process of that conclusion, and what the premises upon which it is based? Ritschl fails to give us any. Now, in our view of Christ as God, everything depends upon the fact whether he is God or not. No one could state this point more forcibly than Kaftan

does. Speaking of religious knowledge in general, he says: "It is such that it involves the most powerful interest in its objective truth. I say with deliberation: the most powerful conceivable interest of man. For the question whether it is true or not involves life and salvation. And there is no more

powerful interest among men than this." In another connection he says of propositions in respect to God that they "declare that his essence and will are thus and so and not otherwise in their relation to the world. If this belief ceases, then our inward participation in religion comes to an end.

Who will seek his highest good, his true life, in God, with the surrender of every earthly good, if he is not animated by a firm confidence in his life and his love?" But when the question is put to Ritschl: Is Christ, whom we regard as God, truly God? he replies, No! He is a man. And thus he not only fails to build the bridge upon which the Christian's mind can pass to the affirmation of Christ's deity, but after he has himself affirmed it without the bridge, he proceeds to deny it! If the doctrine of the two natures is, as he declares, totally irrelevant to the subject, his own doctrine is altogether insufficient and without value. But the doctrine of the two natures is not irrelevant. It may be false, but it has the merit of giving a square answer to the inevitable question, Is Christ God? It gives an answer and a reason. It says, He is God, and God by nature. Despised as it is by the Ritschlian school, it may be that the doctrine has more force, and can do more to establish the deity of Christ than Ritschl thought.

ARTICLE IV.

PROFESSOR MOORE'S COMMENTARY ON THE BOOK OF JUDGES.1

THIS is one of the series issued by Charles Scribner's Sons, under the editorship of Drs. Briggs, Driver, and Plummer. It is mechanically well executed, and the proof-reading appears to be noticeably thorough. It has the merit of great condensation, by the use of abbreviations instead of complete titles of works referred to, and by the abundant use of smaller type for the minuter critical notes and remarks. It includes brief grammatical observations on nearly ninety points, and incidentally discusses, more or less, some forty-eight passages outside of Judges, one-third of them in the book of Joshua. It shows extensive scholarship in certain lines, and aims to give a summary of different opinions, many of which are more matters of curiosity than of importance. The views and methods with which the author is most in sympathy are those of the very advanced German school, and he rather summarily disposes of expositions like those of the Speaker's Commentary, Cassel (in Lange), and Keil, as well as of most authorities, e. g. Sayce (pp. 24, 26, 85) and Conder (pp. 47, 212), that are not in accord with his views. At the same time, he admits that Bachmann's unfinished commentary, though "his standpoint is that of Hengstenberg, and he is a staunch opponent of modern criticism of every shade and school," yet. "in range and accuracy of scholarship and exhaustive thoroughness of treatment stands without a rival,"—a somewhat noteworthy fact.

1 Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Judges. By Dr. George Foot Moore, Professor of Hebrew in Andover Theological Seminary.

As to the date of Judges, the author assigns the introductory account, i.-ii. 5, to an editor later than ii. 6-xvii. 31, which last was not written before the beginning of the sixth century B. C., and very likely “some decades later," although partly derived from two older sources, one belonging to the first half of the ninth century, the other (E E2) to the end of the eighth or first half of the seventh; while xvii.-xxi. contains two old "stories" (Micah and the Gibeon outrage), the latter very old, but overlaid with later "versions" or "strata," the "secondary version" being the product of the fourth century B. C.

This, however, is but a general statement of the case; for we encounter in the sequel a multitude of interpolations, glosses, displacements, redactions, harmonizings, changes by "the editor," "a later editor," "a later writer," "addition of a scribe,” “more than one source," etc., indefinitely. In addition to these conveniences, there is found in a note the following noteworthy statement: "J, E, J E, D, R, etc., represent not individual authors whose share in the work can be exactly assigned by the analysis, but stages of the process, in which more than one-perhaps many-successive hands participated, every transcription being to some extent a recension" (p. xxxiii). If any German has asked for an ampler field of circumgyration, his name does not occur to us; so that the stereotype list of letters J, E, J E, D, R, etc., might properly be enlarged by M.

As the basis for this confident assignment of dates to the several parts of Judges, we have the following remarkable. statement: "The author's motive, the lesson he enforces, and the way in which he makes the history teach it, are almost the only data at our command [our italics] to ascertain the age in which he lived" (p. xvi). This statement is immediately followed by another equally remarkable [our italics again]: "Indefinite as such criteria may seem, they are, when the character is sufficiently marked, among the most con

clusive, and in this case they enable us to determine beyond reasonable doubt the period and circle in which the book was written." So again concerning the age of the two alleged sources of chap. ii. 6-xvi. (i. e. fourteen chapters), we read that "almost the only criterion is their relation to their religious development," and "there are no allusions to historical events which might serve us as a clue" (p. xxvii). This, it will be seen, is the Kuenen-Wellhausen theory in full, that certain ideas and principles cannot have appeared before such and such a time.1 In pursuance of this method occurs this statement: "That Jahweh's anger as well as his favor is moral, and that therefore his dealing with his people is to be understood on moral premises, was first distinctly taught in the eighth century" (p. xvii). This in the face of the record of Cain, the Flood, the history of Abraham, and the like. But these obstacles, of course, are easily overcome by bringing down the narrative of these events by similar methods. As part of the same theory we read that "Chemosh is the god of Moab just as Jahweh is the god of Israel" (p. 294), and other things to the same purport (pp. 88, 294, 358).

The detailed arguments in support of the alleged dates are, of course, matters of opinion, largely expressed as conjectures and expectations. It is a noteworthy illustration of much of the reasoning, that in admitting that the "stories" in chap. ii. 6-xvi. must have been taken from older sources, the main reasons assigned for the concluding "therefore" (p. xix) are, that some of them have little or no relation to the purpose of the book, and others of them relate things which must have been offensive to the authors. Having settled the question on this kind of logic, the commentary adds, that "such lifelike and truthful pictures of a state of society that had passed away centuries before" could not have been transmitted by

1 The author is precluded from all appeal to linguistic considerations by his multitude of late additions, editings, and glosses.