We have now to enquire whether this is a correct view of the history, or only the writer's speculations about an age long removed from his own. We are moved to do this because there are certain facts in this history that do not seem to fit in with the author's view. It is evident at the outset, that the writer, whoever he be, is dealing with subjects concerning which he can have at best only second-hand knowledge. This may have been conveyed to him in documents, or in popular tradition. If the object of the compilation of this history was not so much to produce an accurate and exact history as to interpret the past as a religious lesson for his own age, it cannot be instantly dismissed as improbable that he may have altered some of his material so as to accord more closely with his own religious views. Now scholars say that they can detect the presence of various documents, which have been loosely combined and coloured with the editor's own ideas of what should have taken place. There is hardly any theory which has excited more ridicule from a certain class of Biblical students. The idea is dismissed offhand as utterly unworthy of a sacred writer; and even if he did adopt such a scissors-and-paste method of compiling history, it is denied that anyone could detect the various strata now. No defence of these claims of the critical school need be attempted here, for we are taking their theories as granted, with the idea of seeing what their acceptance as true would mean to our estimate of the Bible and Revelation; but it may be shown that the Evangelist Luke is not ashamed to confess that he used something like this method in compiling his Gospel. From the Table that faces this lecture, it will be seen that the critics give dates for these documents that lie very far apart, and if the dates are even approximately true, it is a fair conclusion that with such wide separation of time, and with the consequent difference both in language and idea, there should be sufficient criteria to detect the different strata. The critics who have attempted the disintegration of the original documents of the Pentateuch have been challenged to show their fitness for such a task by extricating the respective contributions in a joint authorship novel such as "The Chaplain of the Fleet," by Walter Besant and James Rice. Or, again, such claims are discounted on the ground of the known failures of professional literary critics to recognise under pseudonym or anonymity, the style of a well-known author, or even to guess correctly the sex of the writer. The analogy fails because the circumstances are entirely different. It would be on more equal terms to deny that it would be possible to distinguish, say, the personal opinions of the author of an English History from the passages quoted from the Doomsday Book, Chaucer, or an Act of the Long Parliament, if all quotation marks and references were omitted.