intended by this title is a mystery. For of the whole "generations of Isaac" he has supplied but fifty-five verses, and of those fifty-five, twenty-one are in chapter xxxiv., and thirteen in chapter xxxv. The other ten form a "dispersion"! P is responsible for both "generations of Esau," titles and contents, and for the title of "the generations of Jacob." But, excepting chapter xli. 46, xlvi. 6-27, xlvii. 5, 6, 7–11, 1⁄2 27, 28, xlviii. 3–7, xlix. 1, 28, and 29-33, and 1. 12, 13, we are left to our unaided wisdom to conjecture what P's notion of the contents of the "generations of Jacob" was, until he happily fell in with J and E. Before this, he had but forty-six verses of the entire story of Joseph!

It is difficult to treat this kind of analysis seriously. I suppose the wildest story could be made to go if one could only set it upon its legs. But this one requires a great deal of setting.

And it must be borne in mind that P is not only a plan of Genesis, but contains the

bulk of the statistical and legal part of the remaining books until we come to Deuteronomy. If the "generations" scheme is the original scheme of Genesis, P is responsible for it. But where did he get the scheme? He was a writer of the date of the Babylonish captivity, was he not? What in all the previous books already existing induced him to frame a scheme for Genesis which required for its "beginning" a title which will not fit its contents at all, and to repeat this title ten times over without any sequel to make sense of it, or even to explain its meaning? Then who can be named as having brought the distinct document J and E from nobody knows where, and divining, somehow, the unexplained intention of P with his sterile generation-titles, put together the beautiful and complete volume called the Book of Genesis? No "fortuitous concourse of atoms" ever produced such a cosmos out of "the casual eclecticism of miscellaneous mixture" since Dr. Hort's famous description of the chief

sources of the Textus Receptus of the Greek Testament.1

1 I may as well quote Dr. Hort's entire sentence, only remarking that it was not written to describe Professor Driver's theory of the composition of Genesis :

"This is the natural result of the casual eclecticism of miscellaneous mixture, which tends to disguise the simplicity of the primitive relations of text under a superficial complexity of existing attestation."

It comes from the introductory chapter to Westcott and Hort's "New Testament in Greek," vol. i. p. 556.

ALLEGATION XIII

Professor Driver has erred in representing the Law given from God by Moses as a result of development and evolution in the history of Israel.

THE last objection I have to make to Professor Driver's theory of the Law of Moses is that he makes it an elaboration of some ten centuries of Israelitish training, instead of a revelation from God at Sinai. I have shown already that the Scriptural account of the matter is clear, both in the Old and New Testament. "The Law was given by Moses," "430 years after Abraham," ordained by the ministry of angels, "added because of transgressions" to the promises which preceded it.

The basis of the opposite theory, that the Law must have been a gradual evolution, is apparently regarded as an axiom by the disciples of Driver to-day. So much so, that when they are invited to

R

"read the other side" before committing themselves to what they regard as the "assured results of the Higher Criticism," they reply, in effect, There is no other side. It is not that books are not written contravening its positions and pointing out particular objections to them. It is rather that the evolution principle, as applied to the Bible, is held to be like the law of gravitation in mechanics and astronomy, or the spherical shape of the globe. Whatever difficulties of detail in the way of accepting either of them may occur to individuals, the general position is so entirely and thoroughly established that it is waste of time to read the objections. They may be left on one side, and will doubtless vanish with time.

A greater mistake could not well be made. The evolution of the Jewish nation, or of Judaism as it was at the time of our Lord, is one thing. The evolution of the Holy Scriptures, or of Divine Revelation as given to us in the Old Testament, is quite another. And law, as a principle