To the Editor of the "Norra-@aina Dairy News."
Sir,—I am sorry to trouble you with a second letter on the subject of my address on the Traditional View of Holy Scripture, but the comments on it in Union Church: Notes require, I think, an answer in the interests of truth and sober thinking.
The writer, I regret to say, has allowed his attention to be distracted from tha subject m Tand by imy use of the word "traditional." He has protested, and rightly protested! against the position that any belief carries authority merely because it is traditional.
Certainly no such claim was made in my address. But on the other hand we must not jump to the irrational conclusion that no traditional belief is worthy of credence. My address was intended to be a statement of the traditional belief about the Scriptures, and to point out some of the many solid grounds which exist for holding to it.
Union Church Notes does not say that I misrepresented the traditional view, nor does it meet any of my arguments in its favour. It represents me as saying "authoritatively" that Christians ought to hold the Jewish traditions of the authorship of the various books of the Bible it complains that '"'we are now ex-borted, contrary to N. T. teaching, to go back to the tradition of the elders'; that "it was not so at the Reformation, when Scripture was allowed to give its evidence without bias and; ie stresses. the grave responsibility of pressing any Jewish tradition against the natural reading of Scripture itself."
I certainly did not say that a Christian must hold all Jewish traditions about authorship. 1 said that, according to the tradi-tonal Christian view, the books were authentic, trustworthy and divize. 3 also gave the Jewish account of their origin, and said that ea the face of it it was ¢. coherent and rational account. 3t is all very well.for a Regius Professor of History to say that ''No external evidence worthy of credit exists for the age and authority of the books of the O. T." If he had left out the words "worthy of credit"? he would have made a false statement, for external evidence does exist. He has saved himself by putting in these words, but at the same time he has revealed the entirely subjective character of his judgment. What he means is that no external evidence exists which he deems worthy of credit. Antiquiry on the other hand credited the evidence for the aga and an thority of the books, and so did our Lord and His apostles, and so have the Jewish and Christian Churches hitherto, and so do very many critics to-day.
But when we continue to hold that the books are authentic and trustworthy, we do so chiefly on the. concurrent evidence of the books themselves. The external
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.