of the trade. We discovered that no two of these doctors agreed
among themselves, that the line of argument they followed would disprove
the authorship of any page ever written, that decisions from difference
of style, wise as they might be, philologically, were, rationally and
logically, nonsensical; for Burns, no doubt, wrote his _letters_ as well
as his _poems_, and Shakspeare's 'Sonnets' were written by the hand that
wrote 'King Lear,' although, according to these wise doctors, it is
assumed to be utterly impossible that the same man can use two styles,
or that a man at seventy will write otherwise than he did at thirty. In
short, we discovered that there is nothing more arbitrary, more
opinionated, and more unphilosophical than this 'philological
criticism.' Applied, as these wonderful German doctors apply it, to any
book ever penned, and it can be shown, 'as the result of high critical
ability,' that no author ever wrote his own book. It is the easiest
thing in the world to prove that Shakspeare never wrote 'Shakspeare,'
that Milton never wrote 'Paradise Lost,' that 'Johnson's Dictionary'
just 'growed' like Topsey, and was never made at all, and, to name small
things with great, that M. Renan never wrote the 'Life of Jesus.'

When we read, then, that 'it is certain that Isaiah never wrote this
chapter,' that 'St. John could not possibly have written the fourth
Gospel,' that 'this book is composed, undoubtedly, of fragments of
earlier writings,' or that 'this' other 'is the growth of a certain
school,' we advise simple Christians to take it easy. They are to
understand that the world goes on much as usual, and that their family
Bibles still contain the old Table of Contents. There has been no
wonderful discovery made, no ancient book catalogues have come to light,
no files of ancient documents have been dug up. There are still just the
old facts and the old evidence on which Christians made up their minds
sixteen or seventeen hundred years ago. The amount of all this talk is
only that 'the great Doctor Teufelsdroeck' or 'the learned Professor Von
Baum' has hazarded a guess, and made an assertion, which every other
'great doctor' and 'learned professor' will contradict, and displace
with another guess just as probable, in three months' time. There are
men just as learned and just as honest who have examined their guesses,
and find them poor inventions indeed. And we have a right to deny point
blank the assertions so