But admitting this, I do not see how any candid man, who is at all acquainted with the results of modern science and of historical criticism, can doubt that the materials with which this edifice was gradually built up, consist, to a great extent, of myths, legends, and traditions of rude and unscientific ages which have no pretension to be true statements, or real history. After all this is only applying to the Old, the same principles of interpretation as are applied to the New Testament. If the theory of literal inspiration requires us to accept the manifest impossibilities of Noah's Deluge, why does it not equally compel us to believe that there really was a certain rich man who fared sumptuously every day, a beggar named Lazarus, and definite localities of a Heaven and Hell within speaking distance of one another, though separated by an impassable gulf. The assertion is made positively and without any reservation. There _was_ a rich man; Lazarus _died, and was carried to Abraham's bosom_; and Dives _cried_ to Abraham, who _answered him in a detailed colloquy_. But common sense steps in and says, all this never actually occurred, but was invented to illustrate by a parable the moral truth that it is wrong for the selfish rich to neglect the suffering poor. Why should not common sense equally step in, and say of the narrative of the Garden of Eden with its trees of Knowledge and of Life, that here is an obvious allegory, stating the problem which has perplexed so many generations of men, of the origin of evil, man's dual nature, and how to reconcile the _fact_ of the existence of sin and suffering with the _theory_ of a benevolent and omnipotent Creator? Or again, why hesitate to admit that the story of the Deluge is not literal history, but a version of a chapter of an old Chaldæan solar epic, revised in a monotheistic sense, and used for the purpose of impressing the lesson that the ways of sin are ways of destruction, and that righteousness is the true path of safety? This is in effect what continental critics have long recognized, and what the most liberal and learned Anglican Divines of the present day are beginning to recognize; and we find men like Canon Driver, Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, and Canon Cheyne, insisting on "the fundamental importance of disengaging the religious from the critical and historical problems of the Old Testament." We hear a great deal about the "higher criticism," and those who dislike its conclusions try to represent it as something very obscure and unintelligible, spun from the inner consciousness of German pedants. But really there is nothing obscure about it. It is simply the criticism of common sense applied from a higher point of view, which embraces, not the immediate subject only, but all branches of human knowledge which are related to it. This new criticism bears the same relation to the old, as Mommsen's _History of Rome_ does to the school-boy manuals which