appointed a committee, whose names are given in the Bible, to present a report on this newly-found book. What did the committee do? Did it study the book? Did it invite native and foreign scholars to pronounce upon it? Did it encourage the noblest, bravest, most truthful men and women in the world to express their free opinion about it, or to cross-examine the high priest? Indeed not! The committee took the book and went to a medium. They believed that the prophetess Huldah, the medium, or the witch, was the sole person capable of passing upon the genuineness of inspired documents. No thinker, no conscientious student, patiently collecting facts, and fearlessly exposing error, could compare with the witch Huldah in inspiration. She was to the Jewish nation, at this time, what Plato and Aristotle were to the heathen Greeks. Huldah, the medium, represented the highest culture of the country and its people. She was the one light in Jerusalem. The confidence of Minot, Savage, Heber, Newton and publisher Funk, in Mrs. Piper, is not a circumstance to the faith of King Josiah's committee in prophetess Huldah. And she did not require time to study the book, or to make investigations. What kind of a prophetess would she have been if she could not answer any questions offhand?

Of course, Huldah's opinion was the Lord's opinion, because she began her decision with the words, "Thus saith the Lord." And although, like all mediums, she is very careful not to commit herself, she seems to have satisfied the delegation from the King that the priest, Hilkiah, had found the lost book of the law. For some reason which we are unable to divine the book was not put back into the Ark. Perhaps they had found a safer place.

How do Christian scholars explain this Hilkiah episode? Let us quote from the Encyclopedia Biblica, one of the best known commentaries on the Bible:—"What led Hilkiah to say that he had found the Book of the Law is not recorded." Perhaps it was not convenient to do so: "He may merely have meant," adds the commentator, feeling fearfully the strain of his orthodoxy, "Here is the best and fullest law-book, about which thou hast been asking." Is not this ingenious? "I have found the Book of the Law," may only have meant, according to this clergyman's interpretation, "Here is the best and fullest law-book about which thou hast been asking." But why should Hilkiah have meant one thing and said another? And what about the fact that Solomon failed to find the Book of the Law in the Ark, and that for three hundred and fifty years there is silence about this same book? And why did they go to medium Huldah, if everybody knew what the book was? But the explanations of the orthodox scholars which I have quoted prove what I said about the believer being compelled to twist and cramp his conscience even worse than the reputed authors of the Scriptures have done, in order to smooth over the offenses against truth and honor in the Bible.

The authors of the Encyclopedia Biblica are among the most scholarly and progressive of the Christian clergy, and their answer to questions about the High Priest Hilkiah is as good as can be expected, under the circumstances. But we know of a safer answer than that—silence.

There is a concluding chapter in the history of the Bible. It appears that when Jerusalem fell into the hands of the Persians, the city was pillaged, the temple destroyed, and the Book of the Law which Hilkiah had discovered, was burned. Once more, Israel is without a book. Driven into captivity, the Jews lived among the heathen without a temple and without a bible. Then Cyrus, the King of Persia, is represented in the book of Ezra, as issuing a proclamation to the Jews to return to their country and rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. At this time, Cyrus, graciously delivered to the Jews "the vessels of the house of the Lord, which Nebuchadnezzar had brought out of Jerusalem, and had put them in the house of his gods." Among the articles restored to the Temple, no mention is made of the Book of the Law. But Ezra, who is called "a scribe of the words of the commandment of the Lord," appears to have not only rebuilt the temple, but also to have restored the burned Book of the Law. In forty days, by the help of forty associates, everything that was ever reported to have been done of the Lord was put to writing and read aloud to the congregation which kept standing as Ezra read to them. Such is the story in the Book of Esdras.

That Ezra was the restorer of the destroyed law seems to have been the opinion of almost all the early church Fathers. "Whether you choose to call Moses the author of the Pentateuch, or Ezra the restorer of the same book, I make no objection," wrote St. Jerome. Clement, of Alexandria, another church Father, writes, that, "The writings having been destroyed, Ezra, the Levite, having become inspired, prophesied, restoring again all the old writings." Eusebius and Irenaeus seem to be of the same opinion, and the famous Tertullian, a pillar of the church, gives his testimony that, "Jerusalem having been destroyed by the Babylonian siege, it appears that every instrument of Jewish literature was restored by Esdras."

If Esdras, indeed, restored the burned book, which Hilkiah had found in the Temple after it had been lost for three hundred and fifty years, then, the question whether Moses was inspired or not,—a question which has vexed the world so much—loses all its importance. Was Ezra inspired? That is the crucial question? If he was not, how can Moses' inspiration help us since his writings were burned by the Persians, even if they were not stolen from the ark and revised by Hilkiah? The inventor of the Old Testament was Ezra, "a scribe of the words of the commandment of the Lord," that is to say, the clerk or amanuensis of God, a title which aptly describes not the interpreter, but the author of the Book of the Law. What kind of a man was this compiler or inventor of the Book of the Law? What does Christian Scholarship think of his character? Let us hear the doctors of divinity on Ezra.

The authors of the Encyclopedia Biblica whom we nave already quoted, admit that the man who bears the name of Ezra manipulated, if he did not invent, the narrative which he tells in the Bible:—"He partly mutilates it by removing a portion, partly makes it almost unintelligible by placing it in a connection to which it does not belong, and by making interpolations, etc." Could we ask for a stronger proof that the Bible is the work of men—and not of honest men, at that? But is it fair to include the whole Bible in this accusation? I wish I could feel that some portions of the Bible are free from suspicion, but I cannot. Alas! it is impossible to point to a single book in the Bible of the authorship of which we may speak with assurance. The marks of political and theological imposture in the Bible are like leopard's spots, they cannot be removed.

Well! It must not be thought that we have now disarmed the bibliolaters. They have still a powerful weapon left with which to defend the Bible: Suppose Ezra did compose or compile the Book! Is it not, nevertheless, true that the Bible teaches righteousness? The argument is something like this: The Bible may not be true, but it is very moral. In our opinion, however, it is even less moral than it is true. A book which commands murder, plunder, persecution for opinion sake, slavery and credulity of the most abject kind, can not very well be recommended as a moral text-book. Of course, there are in the Bible, as also in the Vedas or the Koran, splendid passages of truth and beauty, but by selecting only one set of passages and ignoring the rest any book could be made pure.

Matthew Arnold professes to have discovered in the Old Bible "the Eternal, not ourselves, making for Righteousness," one of his proofs being Ps. 50:23: "To him that