A New Witness for God: History of the Mormon Church and the Book of Mormon. B. H. Roberts

style of criticism not only got rid of the cosmogony of Genesis, but discredited as histories the whole collection of books comprising the Old Testament. The Fall of man, that fact which gives meaning to the atonement of Christ, and without which the scheme of Christian salvation is but an idle fable—was regarded as merely a myth. So, too, were the revelations of God to the patriarchs; his communion with Enoch; his warning to Noah, together with the story of the flood; the building of Babel's tower; the visions of Abraham; the calling of Moses; the splendid display of God's power in the deliverance of Israel from bondage; the law written upon the tables of stone by the finger of God, the ark of the covenant and the visible presence of God with Israel; the visitation of angels to the prophets; their communion with God and the messages of reproof, of warning or of comfort they brought to the people—all, all were myths, distorted legends, uncertain traditions told by ecstatic poets, falsely esteemed prophets! Such was the wreck which this new science of criticism made of the Old Testament.

      There was scarcely a halt between the wrecking of the Old Testament by this new school of critics and their assault upon the New. Their success gave them confidence, and they attacked the Christian documents with more vigor than they had the Old Testament. By research which did not need to be very extensive in order to conduct them to the facts, they discovered that the age which witnessed the rise of the Christian religion was one in which there existed a strong preconception in favor of miracles; that is, the miraculous was universally believed, and it was held by our new school of critics that this pre-conception in favor of miracles influenced the writers of the New Testament to insert them in their narratives.

      Ever present in their New Testament criticism as in that of the Old, was the cardinal principle that miracles never take place—the miraculous is the impossible;¹⁹ hence whenever our anti-miracle critics found accounts of miracles interwoven in the biographies of Jesus, or in the epistles of the apostles, they inexorably relegated them to the sphere of myth or legend.²⁰

      Unhappily for orthodox believers who cling to the gospel narratives as reliable statements of fact, they themselves found it necessary to discard as apocryphal many of the books and writings which sprang into existence in the early Christian centuries; books which pretended to relate incidents in the life of Messiah, especially those which treated of his childhood and youth. The marvelous account of his moulding oxen, asses, birds and other figures out of clay, which at his command would walk or fly away; his power to turn his playmates into kids; his striking dead with a curse the boys who offended him; his stretching a short board to its requisite length; his silencing those who try to teach him²¹—all this, and much more, Christians had to discard as pure fable. But they stopped short with the pruning process at the books of the New Testament as we now have them.

      Our new school of critics, however, infatuated with the chief principle of their new science, went right on with the pruning, and made as sad work of the New Testament as they had with the Old. They rejected the miraculous in the New Testament writings as well as the account of miracles which the Christians themselves rejected in the apocryphal writings. By this step they got rid of the story of the miraculous conception and birth of Christ; of the journey of the vision-led magi; of the dream-led Joseph; of the testimony of the Holy Ghost, and of the Father at Christ's baptism; of converting water into wine; of Christ walking upon the water; of the miraculously fed multitude; of the healing of the sick by a word or with a touch; casting out devils; the raising of the dead; the earthquake; the rending of the vail of the temple; and the miraculous three hours' darkness at the crucifixion; Christ's resurrection from the dead; his appearance after the resurrection; his final ascension into heaven; and the declaration of the two angels that he would come again to the earth as he had left it: in the clouds of heaven and in great glory. The new criticism got rid of all this—all that makes Christ God, or one of the persons of the Godhead, or that ascribes to him powers above those that may be possessed by a man. Christ's divinity is destroyed by this method of criticism, and one instinctively asks what there is left, and is told—"The manifestations of the God concealed in the depths of the human conscience."²² "God-man, eternally incarnate, not an individual but an idea!"²³

      To this then it comes at last, a Christianity without a Christ—that is, without a divine Christ; and a Christ not divine—not God manifest in the flesh, is no Christ. We had trusted that Jesus of Nazareth had been he who would have redeemed not only all Israel, but all the nations of the earth. We and our fathers had believed that he had brought life and immortality to light through the gospel; but alas! it turns out according to our new school of critics, that his "revelations of blissful scenes of existence beyond death and the grave, are but one of the many impostures which time after time have been palmed off on credulous mankind!" Christ but a man, "the moralist and teacher of Capernaum and Gennesaret"—nothing more! On a level with Socrates, or Hillel, or Philo! What a void this new school of criticism makes! A Christianity without the assurance of the resurrection! without the hope of the glorious return of the Messiah, to reward every man according to his works!

      The new school of critics does not question so severely as other critics have done the authenticity of the Christian documents, or the date of their origin. Indeed, one of their chief apostles concedes the authenticity of the gospels and their antiquity.²⁴ But after having admitted the authenticity and antiquity of the Christian documents, they then proceed to mutilate the story they relate—the gospel they teach—as to render it practically valueless to mankind. This is accomplished by regarding the Christian documents as legends,²⁵ from which if we would arrive at historical truth must be excluded all that is miraculous,²⁶ and hence all that makes Christ God. And while to the imagination of the idealist much that is of value and that is beautiful may remain in the attenuated Christianity which the new criticism would leave us, yet for the great body of humanity such a Christianity would be worthless. For however beautiful the moral precepts of the merely human Jesus may be, they will have no perceptible influence on the lives of the multitude unless back of them stands divine authority, accompanied by a conviction of the fact of man's immortality and his accountability to God for his conduct. Shorn of these parts, what remains may be beautiful; but it would be as the beauty of a man from whom the spark of life had fled—the beauty of the dead. Of course the orthodox Christian denies that this style of attack on the Christian religion has had any success. To him it is an "attack" which has "failed." "In spite of all the efforts of an audacious criticism," says one, "as ignorant as bold—the truth of the sacred narrative stands firm, the stronger for the shocks that it has resisted; the boundless store of truth and life which for eighteen centuries has been the ailment of humanity is not (as Rationalism boasts) dissipated. God is not divested of his grace, or man of his dignity—nor is the tie between heaven and earth broken. The foundation of God—the everlasting gospel—still standeth secure—and every effort that is made to overthrow, does but more firmly establish it."²⁷

      Let us examine this matter more nearly, and with less partiality than Rawlinson has done. If for the new school of critics to succeed means that the orthodox view respecting Jesus of Nazareth, and the religion he founded must be entirely overthrown by being driven out of existence, then the new criticism is an "attack" which has "failed," for orthodox Christianity, that is, the Christianity which recognizes Christ as divine—as God, and the New Testament as divinely inspired and stating the substantial facts of Messiah's life—is still with us.

      There are a number of reasons why the orthodox view of Christ has not been entirely overthrown by the new criticism. First, the great body of Christians which constitute the Catholic Church have been preserved in the orthodox faith of Christ by the protecting aegis afforded by the authority of that Church. Recognizing the church as superior to the written word, alike its custodian and interpreter, and accepting the meaning which the church attaches to the Bible as infallible, Catholics, I say, have been preserved from the faith-shattering effects of the New Criticism. Second, the criticism has been conducted, in the main, and especially in the early stages of it, in the German language, and hence has been largely confined to the German nation. Third, the discussion wherever it has taken place has been carried on over the heads of the laity; it has not been within their reach, hence to a large extent it has been without effect upon them—an "attack that has failed." But in each case, let it be remembered, its non-effect is the result of not coming in contact with it. In one case it has been kept away