This is a question of broad as well as of minute criticism—of the interpretation of the whole as well as of particulars. Are these Scriptures to be regarded as containing the religion and the history, limited to the point of view of the religion, of one of the smallest of all people, or as containing the whole primæval history of man, in such a sense that nothing but what appears to be in harmony with what has come to be their popular interpretation, can be taken into consideration? It was for many ages an unavoidable mistake to entertain respecting them the latter assumption. (That some of the elements of Hebrew religious thought were subsequently taken up into the religious thought of a very considerable portion of mankind does not affect the question immediately before us.) It maybe, precisely, the attempt to maintain this misconception of their nature which is now causing so much confusion of thought and ill-feeling. If regarded in their true light, no documents of the old world are more precious to us historically (I am not speaking of them in any other sense now); for, to refer to that which is the chief concern of man, if the great lesson of history is to teach us that it has itself no meaning, purpose, or value, excepting so far as it is the story of the intellectual and moral growth of the race, and that this double growth is the paramount object of national and of individual life, then how precious and how luminous a portion of history do these documents become! But this value is very much lessened, and this light obscured, by the determination to find in them, not a part, but the whole of primæval history. The civilization of Egypt, which reaches back into so remote a past that the Pyramids were monuments of hoar antiquity when Abraham saw them, and the civilization—perhaps contemporary with the date of the Pyramids—which existed on the banks of the Euphrates, the Ganges, and the Yankse Kiang, must be made harmoniously to find a place by the side of what is recorded in the Hebrew Scriptures. So must the mythology, and the moral and intellectual aptitudes of the Aryan race of man. So must also the knowledge to which we have attained of the history of our globe itself, and of the succession of life upon it. This process has already been passed through with respect to the discoveries of astronomy. Against them there was a long and fierce struggle. At last everybody admitted both that what astronomers taught might be believed, and that the Hebrew Scriptures did not teach astronomy. There is no reason for confining to astronomy the rule that was established in its favour. It must be extended so as to include our knowledge of the greatness and the remoteness of Egyptian civilization, and every other kind of knowledge. We need not, and we must not, so interpret the Hebrew Scriptures as to reject on their authority, or even to feel repugnance to accept, any clearly-established facts. To make this use of them is to wrest them to a