"discovery" of a fabricated Deuteronomy, and then (_see the narrative_ in the Second Book of Kings) [xxii. 8-20.] get the prophetess to follow up the fabrication with awful denunciations--all fulfilled--in the name of THE LORD Himself. Such theories we are asked to hold in face of our Master Christ's deliberate, persistent, manifold testimony to the supernatural character and _authority_ of the Old Testament; to the solidity of its records of fact, to the reality of its predictive element--on which He stayed His sacred soul in Gethsemane, and on the Cross itself. It is no longer a question of details, an inquiry whether the numerals are invariably authentic and accurate; whether the minute particulars of a king's death as told in Chronicles tally with the account in Kings. It is a question whether the Old Testament at large is not a singularly and flagrantly untrustworthy record. It is a question whether its literature as a whole is not to be explained, practically, by "natural causes"; including a causation by deliberate, elaborate, and interested untruth. A GRAVE ALTERNATIVE. Is it too much to say that the alternative has come to be this: Was our Lord Himself right or very gravely wrong about the nature of Scripture? Did the Spirit of Pentecost guide the Apostles into all truth, or leave them under a vast illusion in this central matter of their witness? "Do not follow this Book, young men; follow Christ": so said a speaker of high Christian reputation, holding up a Bible, before a great gathering in America, not long ago. But what does this mean? Christ carries the Book in His hand; if you follow Him you must follow it. If you decline to follow the Book, your following Him is a following--so far as at present you agree with Him, and not further. WITNESSES FOR SCRIPTURE. Meantime, what are some facts of the case, facts not nearly so well remembered now as they should be? One comprehensive fact is that the testimony of nature and of history goes, as a whole, to affirm the veracity of the Scripture records, and to do so more and more pointedly as research advances. In a remarkable recent essay by the Duke of Argyll (_Nineteenth Century_, January, 1891), the growing accumulation of geological evidence for a Great Flood, affecting at least the northern hemisphere, and falling within the human period, is forcibly set out by a master hand. In the same paper is indicated the fast-gathering evidence, now digging up month by month from the soil of Palestine, to the accuracy of the picture of Canaan drawn in the Pentateuch and Joshua. The Ordnance Survey of Sinai has amply shown that the geology of the peninsula confirms down to minute details the record in Exodus.[4] And now the Oxford Arabic Professor is making it, at the least, extremely likely that the Hebrew written two centuries before Christ was more modern by many generations than that presented by the Book of Daniel.[5]