relations with them, causing her to be sentenced to die. Youthful Daniel exposes their duplicity by questioning them separately. The elders die, Susanna is spared and Daniel becomes famous. If this actually happened to youthful Daniel, why does it appear as an appendix and why was it first written in Greek, as also were the other two additions to Daniel, when the book itself was written in Hebrew and Aramaic?

The remaining Apocryphal writing to be considered is the Destruction of Bel and the Dragon. In the first half Daniel exposes a hoax practiced by the priests of Bel in eating food set out for Bel and supposedly consumed by the idol. Commanded to worship a live dragon, he causes it to explode by feeding it a concoction made of pitch, fat and hair. For this its devotees have Daniel thrown into the lions’ den. While there an angel takes the prophet Habakkuk, who happens to be far off, by the hair to the den to give Daniel a bowl of porridge. After seven days Daniel is delivered and his enemies are thrown to the lions. Does such a tale recommend itself to our judgment as the Word of God?

As one authority summed up the case against the Apocryphal writings: “They have not had the sanction of the Jewish and the early Christian Church; . . . are wholly wanting in the prophetic spirit. . . ; not only do not claim inspiration but bewail the want of it; are characterized in many passages by an air of romance and mythology alien to the simple grandeur of the Bible; contradict themselves and some well-known facts of secular history; teach doctrines not contained in the Bible. . . ; and appear never to have been quoted as an authority by the Lord or his apostles.”—Dictionary of Religious Knowledge, Abbott, pp. 50, 51.

Truly the Apocrypha is not of God but of men. What a lack of understanding and appreciation to place its writings on the same plane as those of God’s Word, the Bible! Well can Paul’s warning against paying attention to Jewish fables be applied to the Apocrypha.—Titus 1:14.

‘Entirely Contrary to Previous Trend’

In the volume Advance to Barbarism, F. J. P. Veale, an English lawyer, discusses how “the whole character of warfare and of international relations” has been completely transformed since 1914. “What is so remarkable about this development,” he writes, “is that it ran entirely contrary to the previous trend of events. Through the ages, down to 1914, with certain temporary fluctuations, manners generally had become steadily milder and in warfare, in particular, the methods of primitive savagery had become gradually modified by an increasing collection of restrictions and restraints. Compliance with these restrictions and restraints is commonly held to mark the distinction between savage and civilized warfare. . . . A code of conduct was gradually established which became formally recognized by all civilized countries. A history of warfare, written in 1913, would be a simple record of this slow and fluctuating, but on the whole steady, progress. . . . Such a sudden and complete reversal of the process of gradual ameliorating of warfare which had been going on for more than two thousand years surely calls for some explanation. Is not, for once, the overworked description of ‘epoch-making’ merited?”

The explanation for the epochal increase in woes and barbaric behavior since 1914 is, as this journal has often discussed in detail, that we are living in the “last days,” when “critical times hard to deal with will be here.”—2 Tim. 3:1-5.