MODERN STUDY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT AND INSPIRATION.
Modern Stray of the Old Testament and Inspiration. By F. U. Sprott, M.A. (Cambridge University Press. 3s. net.)—Mr. Sprott traces for us in this volume what seems a very reasonable and safe via media between a destructive modernism and the unreasoning temper which opposes itself to all movement of thought. The reader will find a special value in his statement of revelation and inspiration. They do not mean, he holds, anything like dictation or inerrancy ; they do mean a divine working in the minds of psalmists and prophets. After all, this is the great thing; if we believe that God was declaring Himself by the chosen spirits of the Hebrew race, we have surely the root of the matter. We cannot follow Mr. Sprott: in all that he says about the imprecatory Psalms. He holds that they are not "individual and personal utterances." This is probably true to a large extent. We may assign them to such crises as the fall of Jerusalem before the Babylonian invaders-- and the tyrannical Antiochus Epiphanes ; but some of them seem to have a strongly personal note. The explanation is adequate on the whole, but it does not cover everything. Nor is his defence of their modes of expression satisfactory. "We should be vastly more Christian if the forces of personal resent- ment burned less fiercely within -us, while the fires of righteous indignation against the enemies of God and man glowed with intenser flame." Very good; but what does he make of such an imprecation as "Let them fall from one wickedness to another" ? It fa too much to say that "of deliberate tampering with the text of the Bible for dogmatic purposes there is little or no trace." What about the text of the Three Witnesses ?
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