suggestion that a legal claim of the child is an infraction of the authority of the parent belongs to the same school of thought. People are disposed nowadays to think that enough has been said and written of the duties of children to their parents. The world is too weary to rate highly the questionable benefit of existence, and modern laws do well to intervene for the protection of those who are but too often the issue of selfish thoughtlessness. Some of a father's duties to his children, the State, with that awakened eye to its interests at large already spoken of, has found it expedient to enforce. He who has it in his power must provide aliment for his children in his lifetime. On what principle do we impose burdens upon his resources during his life and remove them when expenditure is a tax upon him no longer? Indeed, it may well be asked upon what grade of relative importance the interests of the parent country of the empire stand. Children legitimate in our colonies are yet illegitimate in England; the tenant-farmer of India secures the fruits of his labours, in England much of them may be wrested from him; and by a recent law, the children of India can claim those rights from their parents which the children who will be their rulers are yet denied.

It is said by some that excessive subdivision of property results in general pauperization. The general pauperization which England has to fear is pauperization resulting from excessive accumulation. The greater the accumulation, the greater the proportion of wealth devoted to unproductive expenditure, and the less in proportion the employment for the workmen. A family which can afford to saunter half the year abroad, embarrassed by its possessions and prodigal upon foreign objects of vertu, is of no more economical value to the country than a middle-class family of home-dwellers-is of far less economical value than ten such families whom its superfluous income might maintain. If things go on as they are, with shiftless, restless younger children multiplying yearly, continental Socialism may receive some unlooked-for allies, for our present law of bequest is a consecration of that social atomism against which Socialism is a protest. "The power of testamentary disposition implies the greatest latitude ever given in the history of the world to the volition or caprice of the individual.” * But the time has passed for the autocracy of individualism. Comtism is but one sign among many that the philosopher king may one day reign again. And nowhere has the point of view from which legislation should approach this subject been more clearly laid down, for all time, than by Plato for his ideal commonwealth. "Now I, as the legislator, regard you and your possessions, not as belonging to yourselves, but as belonging to

* Sir H. Maine, "Village Communities," p. 42.

your whole family, both past and future; and yet more do I regard both family and possessions as belonging to the State; wherefore I will legislate with an eye to the whole, considering what is best both for the State and for the family, esteeming, as I ought, the feelings of an individual at a lower rate." The right of free bequest was established to fit a doctrine of ephemeral social utility; it is economically injurious to the State, repugnant to the moral sense, and against the common consent of mankind.

I. S. LEADAM.

THE AGE OF THE PENTATEUCH.

I

do not propose in this article to take any part in the controversy between Dr. R. S. Poole and Dr. W. Robertson Smith, as to the date of the Pentateuch, I wish to proceed on different lines and on altogether independent grounds. I do not start with a theory. I do not feel bound either to accept the traditional view of the antiquity of the six Books, which stand at the beginning of our Bibles, or to cast in my lot with the critics who have assailed it, and to whose learning and ability I yield the amplest tribute of admiration, even when I am unable to accept their conclusions. My object is rather to examine the latest theory of the construction of the Hexateuch-the name which now must be substituted for the Pentateuch, the Book of Joshua being held to be an integral part of the work-and to test it in certain salient particulars. Ever since Jean Astruc, the French physician, by his famous discovery that in the Book of Genesis, and the first six chapters of Exodus, there were different documents characterized respectively by the use of the Divine names, Elohim and Jehovah, laid the foundations for a criticism of the Pentateuch, scholars have been unwearied in their efforts to arrive at some satisfactory result as to the composition of the work, and the dates of the various documents which have been here fused and welded together. In the whole history of literary criticism no question has excited more interest than this. Even the interest awakened by the controversy respecting the Homeric poems has been feeble and transient, compared with the interest which has gathered about the Five Books which go by the name of Moses. During the last half-century in particular, the investigation of the various problems which these books suggest has been carried on with an ardour and a thoroughness and a subtlety of literary discrmination, to which

it would not be easy to find a parallel. And, although the newest school of criticism professes as its last achievement to have solved the problem, and to have succeeded not merely in disentangling the several authors who have contributed in turn to the formation of the Hexateuch, but also in establishing the dates of the several portions and the final redaction of the whole, still there is no reason to suppose that criticism has said its last word upon the subject. The school now dominant has some formidable opponents. The arguments of Kuenen and Wellhausen, notwithstanding the ability with which they have been arrayed, have not convinced scholars like Dillmann and Delitzsch; and the only points on which it can be said that there is a general consensus, are: (1) that the Six Books are a composite work; and (2) that portions of it are later than Moses or Joshua.

It must in all frankness be admitted that there is much to be said for the theory of which Wellhausen is the coryphaeus. He it is who has brought it to its present perfection. Not that he is the sole parent of the theory, which, in point of fact, has many fathers. Several scholars, labouring independently, have arrived practically at the same results, though no one had presented those results with the same masterly combination of the various lines of argument, or with anything like the same literary skill. But that so many critics, working without concert and along different lines and by different methods of investigation, should have come to conclusions which, at least in their main outlines, are precisely similar, is, to say the least of it, evidence of the plausibility of such conclusions, if not evidence of their truth.

The history of the formation of the modern hypothesis is not without interest. Its birth dates from the publication of Graf's work, "die Geschichtlichen Bücher des A. T." in 1865. Graf, however, was in part, at least, the exponent of a theory which he had heard propounded thirty years before in Reuss's Lecture-room at Strasburg. The theses which Reuss had laid down, though he had not then given them to the world, were these:

(1) The historical element in the Pentateuch must and ought to be examined by itself, and not be confounded with the legal elements. (2) Both the one and the other might have existed without being reduced to writing. The mention in ancient writers of certain Patriarchal or Mosaic traditions does not prove the existence of the Pentateuch; and a nation may have a law based on custom without any written code. (3) The traditions of the Israelites are of greater antiquity than the laws of the Pentateuch, and were earlier committed to writing. (4) The chief interest of the historian must attach to the date of the laws, because here he is more likely to attain to certain results: hence the witnesses must be examined. 5) The history, as told in the Books of Judges and Samuel, and in

(8) Deuteronomy (iv. 45— professed to have found in This code is the oldest part

some measure also in Kings, is in direct contradiction with the socalled Mosaic Laws; consequently they were unknown when these Books were written; à fortiori they did not exist in the times from which they profess to date. (6) The prophets of the 8th and 7th centuries know nothing of the Mosaic Code. (7) Jeremiah is the first Prophet who knows anything of a written law, and his citations are exclusively from Deuteronomy. Xxviii. 69) is the Book which the priests the temple in the reign of King Josiah. of the legislation comprised in the Pentateuch, in the form in which we possess it. (9) The history of the Israelites, so far as the national development was determined by written laws, must be divided into two periods, before and after Josiah. (10) Ezekiel is anterior to the redaction of the Ritual Code, and the laws which gave a definite organization to the hierarchy. (11) The Book of Joshua is very far from being the most recent part of the entire work [the Hexateuch]. (12) The editor of the Pentateuch is very certainly not Moses."

It is due to the veteran Professor to say that he has modified his views on some of these points; he admits that he has learnt much from his own pupils, and in particular that he was mistaken in accepting the then current, and indeed unquestioned, view, that the basis of the Pentateuch was the work of the Elohistic historian, completed by the Jehovistic historian, and that he had not considered sufficiently how the legal element with which he had exclusively concerned himself came to be joined to the historical.

Graf, like his master, confined his attention to the legislative element, as furnishing the most solid ground for his investigation. He recognised that a true analysis of the Pentateuch must begin with Deuteronomy, the publication of which, shortly before the year 622, he considers, is sufficiently established by the narrative in the Second Book of Kings. The code comprised in chapters v.-xxviii. (at least with the exception of chapter xxvii.) of the Book of Deuteronomy and preceded by a special title, chapter iv. 45-49, is a separate and distinct work; the true kernel of the Mosaic legislation, the oldest attempt at codification on a grand scale to be found in the Pentateuch. There were no doubt earlier laws, but in the final redaction which we possess of them, there are only some chapters of Exodus (xx.-xxiii., xiii. 1–16, xxxiv. 10-27) which represent these earlier laws, and it can be shown that the authors of the new code were acquainted with them, and had even modified them. Other laws, far more numerous, are posterior to these, and date either from the Exile or from a still later epoch. To this category belong considerable portions of Exodus, the greatest part of the Book of Numbers and the whole of Leviticus. In Leviticus, indeed, there is a series of chapters (xviii.-xxii., xxv., xxvi.) which in all probability were written by the prophet Ezekiel.