slowly, painfully, with many relapses, up and up, through struggles, through vicissitudes, through the hardships of war, the hardships of peace, the hardships of oppression, through the bitter experience of reaping the harvests of their own mistakes and sins, up and up, to the condition which we see at the time of the great prophets, and later at the time of the birth of Christianity. And what is the Bible? It is the outcome of all these thousand years and more of Hebrew history and Hebrew life. It is the literature of this marvellous evolution. It reflects, as it could not but reflect, the thought of the people in all stages of their development. Some of it represents their earlier and lower and cruder religious and moral ideas; some of it, their religious and moral conceptions farther advanced. In Isaiah, and the greater Psalms, but especially in Jesus, the development reaches its height; the evolution is completed.

Do you not see how much more intelligible the Bible becomes in the light of this thought? More important still, do you not see from what a crushing load the Bible is relieved by this thought? Under the old conception, that all parts are alike the equal and perfect word of God, we were obliged to defend as divine inspiration the stories of the swimming axe, the talking ass, and the sun and moon standing still at human bidding, the command of Jehovah to Joshua to slaughter men, women and innocent children, the imprecatory psalms, and everything else found in the Old Testament, no matter how unreasonable, unhistoric or immoral.

Was there no way of relieving the Bible of this burden, too heavy to be borne ? None, except for men to open their minds, as at last, thank God, under the influence of growing knowledge a few are begin. ning to do, to the fact that not all parts of the Bible are equally valuable, that not all parts are binding upon men forever as the word of God, but that some parts come from the child-stage of man's ethical and religious development, and therefore in later time are to be laid aside as outgrown, as manhood always drops the appurtenances of its childhood.

It cannot be overlooked that thus far in its history the Bible has been a book exerting both a good and an evil influence among men. Doubtless its influence for good has been greatest; yet there is no evading the fact that it has been used as

an arsenal of defence for many of the worst evils that have ever cursed the world. It has been estimated that the single scripture text, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" has caused the death of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of innocent human beings. Such books as Joshua, the Judges, and Chronicles, full of the records of cruel and inhuman wars, have been responsible in no small degree for keeping alive that terrible war-spirit which has wrought such havoc in Christendom during nearly every century since Christianity began.

The Bible has been extensively used as a bulwark of slavery. Polygamy has always appealed to the Bible for support. Were not Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Solomon, polygamists? Yet these mea are represented as special favorites of God. Tyrannizers over women have gone to the Bible for texts wherewith to justify their tyranny. So have wine-drinkers for texts to defend their use of wine. The Bible teaching that the insane are possessed of devils caused those poor unfortunates to be treated in the most inhuman ways for centuries. Inquisitions, persecutions and oppressions of all kinds have made their constant appeal to the Bible in support of their crimes against humanity. The Bible has been used as perhaps the most effective of all fetters to bind the human mind. There is hardly a science that has not had its progress blocked seriously by texts from the Bible. These are all facts which have their place in history, and to which we cannot close our eyes.

What is the explanation? Why has it been possible thus to turn the Bible into an instrument of evil in so many ways? The explanation lies largely in the false belief regarding the Bible that has been in everybody's mind in Christendom for so many centuries,-the belief that it is all and in every part the inspired and perfect word of God and therefore an authority binding upon all men for all time. If they could have understood that it is a human book, a record of the experience and growth of a people from very low ethical and religious standards on and up to conditions higher and better, and therefore that much of it has long been passed by and ought to be laid aside, its power for evil would largely have been taken away, while its power for good would have remained.

The principle of growth or Evolution

applied to the Bible, as intelligent scholarship is beginning to apply it, has given us a new Bible, stripped of these evil influences which attached to the old, while retaining all the influences for good that it ever possessed. In its light we see that the low conceptions of God and imperfect morality of certain parts of the Old Testament simply mark the child-stage, ethically and religiously, of the Hebrew people. They show us the beginnings of the develop. ment. They let us see the low moral and religious plane from which the Hebrew people rose to what they afterwards became. The Bible literature is at once the record and the product of that remarkable advance by which the crude polytheism of the slaves of the Exodus at last became, in the great providence of God, the pure and noble religion of the better Psalms, of the Second Isaiah and of the Sermon on the Mount.

Finally, and not less important than anything that I have pointed out, the larger and better Biblical scholarship that is coming to our day, shows us that the Bible is not primarily a book of theology; but that centrally and above everything else it is a book of religion and life.

Here grievous mistakes have been made in the past, and are constantly being made to-day. Men are forever going to the Bible for texts, for texts to prove something, to bolster up some doctrine, to support some theological theory or dogma, as if the book were a theological treatise, or text-book. The truth is, it is at the farthest remove from a theological treatise or text-book. If it had been a collection of texts out of which to build theological speculations and dogmas, the world would never have cared for it, indeed the world would never have heard of it. It has lived and attained its great place among men because it is a book, not of theology but of life, and of that religion which grows out of the deep life of humanity. This is what gives the Bible its permanent interest and its priceless value.

The Bible is full of the experiences of real men, the thoughts and deeds of real men, the hopes and fears of real men, the burdens and discouragements and problems of real men. It shows us the young man in his actual life; the old man in his; the poor man in his; the king in his. On its pages are the smile of joy, the tears of sadness; the mother with her children,

the shepherd with his sheep, the fisherman with his boats and his nets, the farmer sowing and reaping his grain, the woman drawing water from the wells.

It paints the quiet joys and sweet securities of peace, the hurry, the rush, the glory and the horror of war; the laugh of childhood, the idyl of courtship and marriage; the tragedy of death; the poet singing his song, the historian writing his chronicle, the priest ministering at the

altar.

It protrays with wonderful distinctness and power the evil-doer, hardened in his evil-doing, or repenting in shame and sorrow and turning to virtue: the prophet fighting against the wrongs and wickednesses of his time as we have to fight against the evils and wrongs of ours; the lonely soul feeling out after God, and finding the divine hand in the darkness, just as men feel and find today.

This is what the Bible is, a book of life; a truly human and therefore a truly divine book; a book with red blood; a book born out of what was most real and living in the experiences of a people for a thousand years. This is why the Bible lives, and will live; why it finds human hearts, and will continue to find them forever. This is the secret of its undying power.

Now what is needed is a study of the Bible that shall recognize all this, and bring it all all out into clearness. When once we get such a study,-when we stop going to the Bible for dogma, and begin to go to it for life; when the veil falls from our eyes, and, instead of seeing it as a strange, far-away, mysterious book, unlike anything else in the world, thing else in the world, with meanings that elude us, and to be read as we read nothing else, we come to understand it as it is and feel the naturalness of it, the beating heart of it, the genuine humanness of it, then it will no longer repel us; then we shall be drawn to it, as we are drawn to Shakespeare, as we are drawn to Homer, as we are drawn to Burns, only still more strongly; for, while it is as fresh and living as any of these, it is greater than they all, in that it is more many-sided, it occupies an incomparably more central place in the world's history, it deals with the highest concerns of man, the things of the moral and spiritual life, and it speaks to man with a directness, an insight into the human heart, and an inspiring power greater than that

of any other book known to the modern world.

I have now answered as fully as time permits, the two questions with which I set out :-What is the so-called Higher Criticism of the Bible? and how does the Higher Criticism affect the Bible as a book of religion?

• From what has been said readers will now understand what I meant in the beginning when I made the claim that the Biblical scholarship of our time, or what is called the Higher Criticism, is not hostile to the Bible,-that it is not negative or destructive in any sense except that it aims to destroy old false conceptions in order to make way for true, old lower and narrower conceptions in order to make way for higher and larger. Scholars who are giving us new light on the Bible are not iconoclasts, irresponsible men, foes of the Bible. They are its friends. For the most part they are earnest and devout men, as well as scholars. They are men who in other things are trusted and honored. Why should they not be in this? They are men who love and revere the Bible. They are men who are studying and writing in the interest of truth, and who have faith enough in the Bible to feel sure that truth can do it no injury. It follows that to talk of rejecting the higher Biblical criticism is simply to talk of turning our backs on intelligence. Clearly the time for such talk is past. To indulge in it is to show that we belong to a generation that is gone.

That the new, larger and more reasonable view of the Bible which modern Biblical scholarship is giving us will sooner or later find general acceptance among Christian peoples, at least among Protestant peoples, I believe is as certain as any future thing. There are signs of its coming in many quarters. Of course it will have a hard and long battle to fight. Dogmatism is against it. The teachings and prejudices of centuries are against it. It will win only among minds that dare to think. But among such it will win. Truth and reason are on its side. Ethical and spiritual religion welcome it. Already it is accepted by the best scholarship in every Christian land. It is only a question of time when intelligent and thoughtful men generally will follow where scholarship and reason lead.

Does any one fear that this larger and more rational view of the Bible will take

away from the book some of its value? On the contrary it leaves undisturbed every truth that the Bible ever contained, every moral precept, every spiritual principle, every inspiring word, every noble thought about God, or man, or duty, or life,-everything that has power to feed the soul's hunger; every word of comfort or hope or trust; every call to courage; everything that is calculated to lift man up nearer to God, or bring God nearer to man, or draw men nearer to each other as brothers, or make life more divine.

But if the new thought keeps all that is valuable in the Bible it also does more. It opens the way to vast treasures besides. It teaches that God is larger and more than the God of the Christian or of the Christian and the Jew. He is the God of the whole world. Inspiration is not confined to a single people of the ancient time. It is a reality of all time; it is a reality of to-day. God's spirit moves in the hearts and consciences of men in all lands and ages. Revelation is not confined to a single book. This Bible contains revelation, precious revelation of God's truth. But there is other precious revelation also-in the starry heavens, in the blossoming earth, in history, in art, in science, in the mother's love to her child, in the child's answering love as it looks up in the mother's eyes, in all the experiences of the deep heart of man; yes, and in the other great sacred books of the world outside our own, which have been bread of life to so many millions of the human race; and in the great seers, thinkers, poets, teachers of the deep things of the spirit whom God sends to every age, the Platos, the Dantes, the Savonarolas, the Luthers, the Miltons, the Wesleys, the Channings, the Brownings, the Whit tiers, the Emersons, the Buddhas, the Rammohun Roys of the world. Through all these prophet souls God speaks his wordhis word which cannot be bound, his word which cannot be shut up in any one book, his word which is as large as all truth.

The new thought about the Bible thanks God reverently and devoutly for all the precious and uplifting truth which comes to men from David and Isaiah and Paul and Jesus; but it thanks God no less devoutly for that revelation which is larger than the Bible, and for that word of God which is a fountain that can never cease to pour out its living waters for the life of man, so long as man remains on the earth

HE ancient history of Java reveals

T that Java was an integral part of

a Hindu empire and civilization; and that all the islands constituting, at present, the Dutch East Indies in the Oceania group in the south-east corner of the Pacific Ocean, were under the suzerainty of that vast and stupendousonce memorable-Hindu empire. This portion of the earth is a theatre of constant changes and upheavals, due to the abundant and constant activity of volcanoes forming the "Fiery Ring" of the Pacific, as the geologists call it. It is not yet definitely known at what particular era the Hindus established themselves on that side, but this at least we definitely know that the Hindu empire in Java was destroyed by the Arabs in

1478.

The travels of the first Chinese pilgrim Fa-hien (399-414) tell us that the Hindus of Java were then in a very prosperous state, inasmuch as ships owned by single individuals were plying in the Indian as well as the Pacific Oceans for commerce. This famous Buddhist traveller came to India from China by land and returned to China by a circuitous sea-route through the mouths of the Ganges to Ceylon and thence to Java and thence ultimately to China. To own ships individually powerful enough to ply in such boisterous and unknown waters in the absence of joint stock navigation companies as at present, which nevertheless are a regular failure in any form with the Indians, reflects no small credit on the flourishing condition of the Hindus of Java.

As Java became one of the centres of Hindu civilization, all sorts of peoplelearned men, artisans, warriors, etc.flocked there. Buddhism too had its share there. The learned Brahmins took Sanskrit literature with them. References to this fact are given by famous luminaries like Dr. Rajendra* Lala Mitra in connec

* Neetisar by Kamandaka, Trivendrum Sanskrit Series No. 14, preface.

tion with Kamandakas' Neetisar which is found in the island of Bali even to-day.

Though now and then we were given stray information about this Javanese civilization and literature, still it is more or less a closed chapter even to this day. It would be worth while to state here how my attention was drawn accidently to this most interesting subject.

I was in the Colonial Service at Balik Polau, Penang Straits Settlements, for a couple of years or so, from 1908 to 1910. When one goes to a foreign country the temptation of knowing something at least of the past and present history and geography of that place becomes stronger and stronger day by day. This desire of mine was mostly satisfied by the then District Officer Mr. J. N. Nathan, but for whose kindness I would not have been able to do or write anything in the matter of this most interesting and yet closed chapter of Javanese literature. Mr. Nathan is a wellread man and obliged me often by supplying me with many books, whenever I expressed my desire for them. One Sunday while I had been to his quarters on a professional visit, I came across in his book-shelves some four books containing miscellaneous papers relating to IndoChina and the Malay Archipelago. After getting permission to take them home I began to peruse them rather carefully, for some portions of them were interesting.

In one of the volumes I came across an essay entitled "An account of the

island of Bali". As my gcographical knowledge did not put me in mind of anything as to its whereabouts, etc., I felt no interest in the account of that island. So I began to turn pages of that account rather hurriedly. While so doing words like "Ramayana," "the four castes of Hindus," "the Hindus of Bali", etc. attracted my attention, so I began to read the account more carefully and began to feel greater and greater interest, so much so as to devour the contents of that essay extending over nearly 150 pages. The geographical situation of that island was