It is the ‘higher critics’ themselves, and not the ancient writers whom they criticise, that are careless or contemptuous in their use of evidence. In the preface to my _Higher Criticism and the Verdict of the Monuments_ I have referred to a flagrant example of their attempt to explain away unwelcome testimony. Here it was the inscription on an early Israelitish weight, which was first pronounced to be a forgery, then to have been misread, and finally to have been engraved by different persons at different times! The weight is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to which it was presented by Dr. Chaplin, and the critics have conveniently forgotten the dogmatic assertions that were made about it. They have, in fact, been busy elsewhere. Cuneiform tablets have been found relating to Chedorlaomer and the other kings of the East mentioned in the fourteenth chapter of Genesis, while in the Tel el-Amarna correspondence the King of Jerusalem declares that he had been raised to the throne by the ‘arm’ of his god, and was therefore, like Melchizedek, a priest-king. But Chedorlaomer and Melchizedek had long ago been banished to mythland, and criticism could not admit that archæological discovery had restored them to actual history. Writers, accordingly, in complacent ignorance of the cuneiform texts, told the Assyriologists that their translations and interpretations were alike erroneous, that they had misread the names of Chedorlaomer and his allies, and that the ‘arm of the Mighty King,’ in the letters of Ebed-Tob, meant the Pharaoh of Egypt. Unfortunately, the infallibility of the ‘critical’ consciousness can be better tested in the case of Assyriology than in that of the old Hebrew records, and the Assyriologist may therefore be pardoned if he finds in such displays of ignorance merely a proof of the worthlessness of the ‘critical’ method. A method which leads its advocates to deny the facts stated by experts when these run counter to their own prepossessions cannot be of much value. At all events, it is a method with which the archæologist and the historian can have nothing to do.