Excerpt from The Expositor, Vol. 18 Vol. Xvhi. July, 19 19.such as Robertson Smith's Prophets of Israel. Or if this be too ambitious an undertaking to begin with, there is Dr. Nairne's delightful little volume, The Faith of the Old Testament, which is popular in the best sense of the word and is alive to'the many-sided beauty of the Old Testament as a noble collection of literature, made in the interests Of a living and continuous faith. In this little book the broad positions of Criticism are pressupposed, but no undue space is devoted to the discussion of purely critical problems as such. The author is concerned rather with the larger aspects of the Old Testament literature as a whole, and as the expression of a living religion, which are apt to be lost' sight of when it is regarded as merely a text to be ana lysed. The aim of the book is essentially constructive. It is to show how the Old Testament, with the broad results of, criticism pre-supposed, may be regarded as a progres sive witness to the life of faith. Its [i.e. The Old Testament's] importance, says Dr. Nairne, 18 not artistic or even historical so much as moral. It means that the whole of the Old Testament comes to us from the Jewish Church. It is more than a collection of fragments from those earlier times when ancient Israel was in strife with its own paganism, painfully and vigorously forging a purer faith in the furnace which the divine spirit made white-hot. It is not a book of fragments but an inspired collection. It is not a mere tradition, but an interpretation. 1 The servme which Criticism can and does render is to make the process Of growth clear. But'if it forgets that all the while a continuous living faith was at work, mould ing and selecting the materials for its own purposes - if this primary'fact be forgotten or ignored, Criticism will itself lose its bearings and inevitably go astray. This has some times happened. Take, for instance, the Book of Isaiah. Critical analysis reveals not merely the presence Of' two 1 The Faith of the Old Testament, p. 6. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.