us, but they have left us not a hint or an indication by which we could discover what manner of men they were. Even where the name of a writer has been preserved to us, it is often rather by some accident altogether independent of the book, and which in no way alters its anonymous character. We happen to know, on what seems to be good authority, that Laò-tsè composed the Taò-te-king, but assuredly there is not a syllable in the work itself which indicates its author. We happen to know beyond a doubt that Mahomet composed the Koran; but the theory of the book is that it had no human author at all, and it was put forth, not as the prophet's composition, but as the literal reproduction of revelations made to him from heaven. The most noteworthy exceptions are the prophets of the Old Testament and the Pauline, Petrine and Johannine Epistles of the New. But of the prophets, though their names are indeed given, the great majority are little more than a mere name to us; while large portions of the prophecies, attributed in the Jewish Canon to some celebrated prophet, are in reality the work of unknown writers. This is notoriously the case with the whole of the latter part of our Isaiah; it is the case with parts of Jeremiah; it is the case with Malachi (whose real name is not preserved); it is the case with Daniel.
The Pauline Epistles offer indeed a marked exception to the rule; and some of them are of doubtful authenticity. The Epistles of Peter, of John, of James and Jude, even if their authorship be correctly assigned, are of too limited extent to constitute an exception of any importance. The rest of the Christian Bible follows the rule. Like the Vedic hymns, like the Sutras of Buddhism, like the records of the life and doctrines of Khung-tsé, like the Avesta, all the larger books of the Bible—except the prophets—are anonymous. The whole of the historical portion of the Old Testament, the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistle to the Hebrews, are—whatever names tradition may have associated with them—strictly the production of unknown authors. This characteristic is one of very high importance, because it indicates—along with another which I am about to mention—the spirit in which these works were written. They were written as it were unconsciously and undesignedly; not of course without a knowledge on the writer's
