which seemed to him to be inadequate, or seeking to adjust a religious
conception to enlarging demands. The biblical writers are commentators
on or interpreters of the truth which they conceive to be essential.

Making most generous allowances, however, for the advantages of the
critical methods, we must use them with considerable care. Results like
those suggested above seem to be well established, but there is always
possibility of the critic's becoming a mere specialist with the purely
technical point of view. Suppose the critic holds so to the passion for
analysis that for him analysis becomes everything. We may then have a
single verse cut into three or four pieces, each assigned to a different
author, the authors separated by long periods. Even if the older
narratives are composite, the process of welding or compression was so
thorough that detailed analyses are now out of the question. Apart from
its broader contentions, the method of the critical school must be used
tentatively and without dogmatism. Moreover, we must always remember
that the critical student comes to his task with assumptions which are
oftentimes more potent with him from his very blindness to their
existence. Assumption in scientific investigation is inevitable. Suppose
a critic to be markedly under the influence of some evolutionary
hypothesis. Suppose him to believe that the formula which makes progress
a movement from the simple to the complex can be traced in detail in the
advance of society. He is prepared to believe that in practically every
case the simple has preceded the complex. He will forthwith untangle the
biblical narrative to get at the ideal evolutionary arrangement,
ignoring the truth that except in the most general fashion progress
cannot thus be traced. In the actual life of societies the progress,
especially of ideas, is often from the complex to the simple. Many
evolutionists maintain that movement is now forward, now backward, now
diagonal, and now by a "short cut"; but if the evolutionary critic