When, however, we come to examine the philological evidence upon which we are asked to accept this new reading of ancient Hebrew history, we find that it is wofully defective. We are asked to believe that a European scholar of the nineteenth century can analyse with mathematical precision a work composed centuries ago in the East for Eastern readers in a language that is long since dead, can dissolve it verse by verse, and even word by word, into its several elements, and fix the approximate date and relation of each. The accomplishment of such a feat is an impossibility, and to attempt it is to sin as much against common sense as against the laws of science. Science teaches us that we can attain to truth only by the help of comparison; we can know things scientifically only in so far as they can be compared and measured one with another. Where there is no comparison there can be no scientific result. Even the logicians of the Middle Ages taught that no conclusion can be drawn from what they termed a single instance. It is just this, however, that the Hexateuchal critics have essayed to do. The Pentateuch and its history have been compared with nothing except themselves, and the results have been derived not from the method of comparison, but from the so-called ‘tact’ and arbitrary judgment of the individual scholar. Certain postulates have been assumed, the consequences of which have been gradually evolved, one after another, while the coherence and credibility of the general hypothesis has been supported by the invention of further subordinate hypotheses as the need for them arose. The ‘critical’ theory of the origin and character of the Hexateuch closely resembles the Ptolemaic theory of the universe; like the latter, it is highly complicated and elaborate, coherent in itself, and perfect on paper, but unfortunately baseless in reality. Its very complication condemns it. It is too ingenious to be true. Had the Hexateuch been pieced together as we are told it was, it would have required a special revelation to discover the fact. We may lay it down as a general rule in science that the more simple a theory is, the more likely it is to be correct. It is the complicated theories, which demand all kinds of subsidiary qualifications and assistant hypotheses, that are put aside by the progress of science. The wit of man may be great, but it needs a mass of material before even a simple theory can be established with any pretence to scientific value.