do they agree as to how old the oldest is, some bringing the earliest
composition down to a recent period; but on the main question that the
literature is composite they are at one. The closeness of their
agreement is shown by Professor Ladd in a series of tables [Footnote:
_The Doctrine of Sacred Scripture_, Part II. chap. vii.] in which
he displays to the eye the results of the analysis of four independent
investigators, Knobel, Schrader, Dillmann, and Wellhausen. He goes
through the whole of the Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua,--the
Hexateuch, as it is now called,--and picks out of every chapter those
verses assigned by these several authorities to that ancient writing
which we have been calling the Elohistic narrative, and arranges them in
parallel columns. You can see at a glance when they agree in this
analysis, and when they disagree. I think that you would be astonished
to find that the agreements are so many and the disagreements so few. So
much unity of judgment would be impossible if the lines of cleavage
between these old documents were not marked with considerable
distinctness. "The only satisfactory explanation," says Professor Ladd,
"of the possibility of accomplishing such a work of analysis is the fact
that the analysis is substantially correct." [Footnote: _What is the
Bible?_ p. 311.]

Professor C. A. Briggs, of the Union (Presbyterian) Theological Seminary
in New York, bore this testimony three years ago in the "Presbyterian
Review:" "The critical analysis of the Hexateuch is the result of more
than a century of profound study of the documents by the greatest
critics of the age. There has been a steady advance until the present
position of agreement has been reached, in which Jew and Christian,
Roman Catholic and Protestant, Rationalistic and Evangelical scholars,
Reformed and Lutheran, Presbyterian and Episcopal, Unitarian, Methodist,
and Baptist all concur. The analysis or the Hexateuch into several