above shown) by the priest-Levites. For most purposes the "teaching" would be addressed to the heads, princes, elders, etc., etc., in audiences more or less select, and would filter through them to the people at large. I quite recognize that some developments may be post-Mosaic. But there would never be a period when priest and prophet might not, if faithful, adequately authorize any such. I thus reach a genesis of Mosaic law which covers all the leading features of fact, and especially that most puzzling one, which has never been yet explained, the gross confusion, viz., which reigns among its elements. Take an instance from PH itself. In Lev. xxiii. 22 we find the law of "the Corner" (see Mishnah, Peah) wedged in between the ritual of "wave-offering" and the Feast of Trumpets. Obviously some Levitical reliquary of MSS. contained two of the three, or perhaps all three, as they stand; and some collector, of period unknown, incorporated them pell-mell. To talk of this as a "code" is an abuse of language; for the first element of codification is order, and the second the avoidance of needless repetitions. As regards this latter take Lev. xx. 10-21, as compared with the "prohibited degrees" of xviii. The addition of penalties is the main feature of difference between them. One scriptorium contained them as mere rules of conduct, the other as penal ordinances of law. The collector took both over, malgré the repetitions involved. And on this view we also reach a real and substantial meaning for such constant headings as "Jehovah said unto Moses, Speak unto the b'ne Israel, saying," etc. They represent facts of the people's life, at any rate initially. Of course if post-Mosaic accretions grew, the headings would become, so far, formulaic only. But these toroth were probably, up to Moses' death and later, scattered everywhere among the priest-Levite houses. They were not at his death in any sense a corpus iuris, as the Exodus Covenant-laws in a limited degree, and those of Deuteronomy more fully, probably were. They grew, by this

diffusion, into the materials of the great amorphous mass of law which the Middle Pentateuch now contains. The starting-point of all I take to be the Goshen judgments of Ex. xxi. 2-xxii. 20. These followed each other perhaps as the cases arose, which now shine through them and depict the life, therefore fortuitously. Their fortuitous sequence seems to have influenced that of the Sinaitic laws proper, to which they stand prefixed; whereas in Deuteronomy some method, although incompletely developed, is traceable. They thus resemble the Roman ius praetorium, grounded on magisterial decisions as they accumulated, before it was sifted and arranged by the great jurists of the imperial period.1 That process the Hebrew law never underwent. Some attempts to arrange, coördinate, and subordinate appear here and there in Leviticus Numbers, but they spend and lose themselves like rivulets in desert sands. The genius of Hebrew prophecy, vast and wondrous in its scope and products, did not include the jurisprudential instincts of an Ulpian or a Gaius; besides which, the long periods of disorder under the judges and early monarchy were adverse to the exercise of such gifts, had they existed. The only long reign of peace was a consolidation of absolutism, and therefore hostile to the study of free institutions. The loss of all independence by the priestly tribe contributed further to weaken the only organ of the national mind which was capable of jurisprudential efforts. Consequently, when that mind turned to examine its original documents, they had become fossilized; and that mind itself had undergone a similar change. Then, their very ataxia had become venerable, and all critical instincts had become petrified into veneration. The human accidents and the divine essence were alike sacred, and were

1 How greatly the classification of crimes under Roman law was influenced by original accidents of grouping, and to what singular anomalies they led, is noticed by Sir H. Maine at the close of his valuable treatise on 'Ancient Law."

taken over in the lump into which they had drifted and frozen. The inadvertencies of an earlier age became the fetiches of the later, and any attempt to alter the haphazard stratification of these deposits would have been sacrilege.

But that disorder, in some respects regrettable, is now the most cogent refutation of attempts to assign the great bulk of it to a comparatively modern date, and is therefore inval uable. Who can seriously think of a priestly committee in Babylon, with all the ample leisure of two generations or more, formulating and bequeathing to posterity such an amorphous mass-rudis indigestaque moles-as that of the Middle Pentateuch which we have been considering? That instinct of order and method which should be paramount in the human mind, would seem to have forsaken it exactly at the crisis which should have evoked it most powerfully. And who again can seriously contemplate such a corpus iuris as the Deuteronomic, as formulated, if not originating,1 in the period of the effeteness and decline of an Asiatic monarchy; when for centuries the national mind had been hardening into instincts and habits the very opposite of its broadly popular basis, its judges and officers chosen by the citizens in "all thy gates," its administration and executive reposing everywhere on the support of spontaneous patriotism, its whole system animated by individuality, and its contemplation of the king as a future insertion in the framework of its polity, with prerogative controlled by law? In short the "Higher Critics" reduce the whole of Deuteronomy to a continuous anachronism and standing absurdity. Surely we may without presumption recognize in this wonderful chapter of seeming accidents the overwatching provi

1 "A prophetic reproduction of an earlier legislation" is the form lately given to the theory of a Deuteronomy which first appeared temp. Manasseh or Josiah. See Dictionary of the Bible, Ed. 2d, s. v. “Deuteronomy," by Professor Driver of Oxford, p. 778 (a), carried out since further in the same writer's "Deuteronomy" in the International Critical Commentary.

dence of the Divine Author, who, as "He makes the wrath of man to praise him," so finds in human carelessness, ignorance, and superstition the means of vindicating his own truth and his great prophet's mission at the end of more than three millenniums.

I assume in the foregoing pages a real Israel, a real Moses, a real sojourn in Goshen with real and peculiar features, a real covenant adopting and adapting older institutions, a real tribe of Levi with a real teaching function-assumptions, I suppose, which will seem to some sufficiently startling. And I venture the suggestion that the more we realize details in fact, the more difficulties tend to vanish,—as, I venture to hope, has now vanished the supreme difficulty of "three codes in forty years."

ARTICLE III.

SCHLEIERMACHER AND THE CHRISTIAN CONSCIOUSNESS.

BY EDWIN STUTELY CARR, A. M., D. b.

EVERY man, however forceful in personality, is to a degree the son of his age and people. In considering Schleiermacher, it will be advantageous to trace the movement of religious thought down to his day.

With the growth of culture in modern Europe, appeared in each country the inevitable attempt of liberated reason to reckon with revealed religion. In each country the liberal movement took a characteristic form; in England deism, in France materialism, in Germany rationalism.

The rationalistic movement originates with Leibnitz. We find in Leibnitz an emphasis of the intellectual, the supremacy of reason, as strong as in any English sensationalist or French materialist; and at the same time Leibnitz is a devout Christian. He indignantly repudiates the insinuation that faith and reason are irreconcilable, and it is his purpose to show that Christianity contains nothing which may not be reasonably believed. Following out this tendency, Wolff developed his famous criteria for testing an alleged revelation,-little thinking that these tests would soon be used not to substantiate, but to destroy, the Christian miracles. Reimarus first applied Wolff's criteria rigidly to traditional Christianity. As his result, the Old Testament history is declared to be "a tissue of utter follies, infamies, deceptions, and cruelties, of which selfishness and ambition were mainly the motives. What is said about supernatural