“If this light came to me now for the first time in all its fulness, I am not sure whether I should be startled and almost blinded by it, or whether I should, at first at least, altogether fail to appreciate it. But you have been giving it to me gradually as it came to you, and so I have been in a position to become adjusted to it, and also to test its illumining quality. I find that it is not transitory, but permanent, not a flash but a steady light, in which the great objects of our Christian faith stand clearly revealed.
“I sincerely congratulate you upon the completion of such an important and illuminating work.”
Just as the final pages of this volume are going to press, a valued communication concerning them is received from Professor Cheyne, of Oxford University. Professor Cheyne is Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture at Oxford, and Canon of Rochester. He is well known on both sides of the Atlantic as a prominent English representative of the school of modern “higher criticism,” or “historical criticism.” He was a member of the Old Testament Revision Company, and he contributed many important articles on biblical subjects to the ninth edition of the “Encyclopædia Britannica.” In 1889 he delivered the Bampton Lectures on “The Historical Origin and Religious Ideas of the Psalter,” and his various works on Old Testament literature, including Job, the Psalms, Solomon, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, have made him familiar to English readers the world over. The kindly, frank, and courteous comments of Professor Cheyne on “The Threshold Covenant” are the more highly valued in view of the fact that he has had occasion to suppose that the author’s standpoint of biblical criticism was not quite the same as his own. He says:
“I am delighted to have been able to make early acquaintance with a book so full of facts which really illuminate the dark places of primitive times. That the explanation of the Hebrew Scriptures profits much by it, is clear. Thank you for having devoted so much patient and thoughtful care to the accumulation and interpretation of the facts. I have never doubted your singular capacity for archeological work, and have only regretted that there has not been greater fellow-feeling with the critics (in the popular sense,–for you, too, are critical, though not quite in the right sense and to the extent required, if I may personally say this).