What is the history of the higher criticism? One would imagine, from the language often used by the opponents of its application to the Bible, that it was an arbitrary method of criticism, invented in these rationalizing times expressly for the purpose of doing away with the divine character of the Bible. But higher criticism has been in use in examining the classics and other (nonscriptural) writings of former ages for fully two hundred years. The first one to state its fundamental principles was Du Pin, in his New History of Ecclesiastical Writers, published in 1694. In 1699 Bentley published his famous examination of the epistles of Phalaris, according to the methods and principles of the higher criticism. There is no better instance of scientific investigation as to authenticity. These epistles had been commonly accepted by scholars as the work of Phalaris, and accounted of great value. Bentley, by his searching examination of them, proved them to be the forgery of a sophist, so conclusively that no scholar worthy of the name has ventured to question the result since. That, I say, was in 1699. The first work in the way of higher criticism of the Bible, Eichhorn's Introduction to the Old Testament, was not published till nearly one hundred years later. But that very modernness of the work brings it with some into disfavor. "If that is the true way of investigating the biblical writings," they say, "why are we so long in finding it out? Why did not the fathers of the Church--mighty, indeed, as many of them were, with keenness of insight into the Bible, with profound knowledge of its characteristics, with substantially the same evidence before them as we have now--why did not they give us the principles of the higher criticism, if those principles are true?" For the very same reason as science in general has not until very lately begun to do its true work. How meager is all the scientific work done in the ages of the past in comparison with that done during the last three hundred years! Men were not up to it; they were only learning the scientific method. So, the scientific method of examining literature, men have not learned till within the past two hundred years. Having all the facts before them which we have now would avail nothing without the knowledge of _how_ to observe, to classify, to deduce, to verify, any more in the field of letters than in the field of Nature; any more in the Bible than in other literary works. Among the immense benefits which science has conferred upon the world, surely this should not be accounted the least, that it has taught us a method by which we may find out with ever-growing certainty the truth concerning the Bible itself.