The working of these and other laws governing the evolution of sacred

literature is very clearly seen in the great rabbinical schools which

flourished at Jerusalem, Tiberias, and elsewhere, after the return of

the Jews from the Babylonian captivity, and especially as we approach

the time of Christ. These schools developed a subtlety in the study of

the Old Testament which seems almost preternatural. The resultant system

was mainly a jugglery with words, phrases, and numbers, which finally

became a "sacred science," with various recognised departments, in which

interpretation was carried on sometimes by attaching a numerical

value to letters; sometimes by interchange of letters from differently

arranged alphabets; sometimes by the making of new texts out of the

initial letters of the old; and with ever-increasing subtlety.

Such efforts as these culminated fitly in the rabbinical declaration

that each passage in the law has seventy distinct meanings, and that God

himself gives three hours every day to their study.

After this the Jewish world was prepared for anything, and it does not

surprise us to find such discoveries in the domain of ethical culture as

the doctrine that, for inflicting the forty stripes save one upon those

who broke the law, the lash should be braided of ox-hide and ass-hide;

and, as warrant for this construction of the lash, the text, "The ox

knoweth his owner, and the ass his master's crib, but Israel doth not

know"; and, as the logic connecting text and lash, the statement that

Jehovah evidently intended to command that "the men who know not shall

be beaten by those animals whose knowledge shames them."

By such methods also were revealed such historical treasures as that Og,

King of Bashan, escaped the deluge by wading after Noah's ark.

There were, indeed, noble exceptions to this kind of teaching. It can

not be forgotten that Rabbi Hillel formulated the golden rule, which

had before him been given to the extreme Orient by Confucius, and which

afterward received a yet more beautiful and positive emphasis from Jesus

of Nazareth; but the seven rules of interpretation laid down by Hillel

were multiplied and refined by men like Rabbi Ismael and Rabbi Eleazar

until they justified every absurd subtlety.(462)

(462) For a multitude of amusing examples of rabbinical interpretations,

see an article in Blackwood's Magazine for November, 1882. For a more

general discussion, see Archdeacon Farrar's History of Interpretation,

lect. i and ii, and Rev. Prof. H. P. Smith's Inspiration and Inerrancy,

Cincinnati, 1893, especially chap. iv; also Reuss, History of the New

Testament, English translation, pp. 527, 528.

An eminent scholar has said that while the letter of Scripture became

ossified in Palestine, it became volatilized at Alexandria; and the

truth of this remark was proved by the Alexandrian Jewish theologians

just before the beginning of our era.

This, too, was in obedience to a law of development, which is, that

when literal interpretation clashes with increasing knowledge or with

progress in moral feeling, theologians take refuge in mystic meanings--a

law which we see working in all great religions, from the Brahmans

finding hidden senses in the Vedas, to Plato and the Stoics finding

them in the Greek myths; and from the Sofi reading new meanings into the

Koran, to eminent Christian divines of the nineteenth century giving a

non-natural sense to some of the plainest statements in the Bible.

Nothing is more natural than all this. When naive statements of sacred

writers, in accord with the ethics of early ages, make Brahma perform

atrocities which would disgrace a pirate; and Jupiter take part in

adventures worthy of Don Juan; and Jahveh practise trickery, cruelty,

and high-handed injustice which would bring any civilized mortal into

the criminal courts, the invention of allegory is the one means of

saving the divine authority as soon as men reach higher planes of

civilization.

The great early master in this evolution of allegory, for the

satisfaction of Jews and Christians, was Philo: by him its use came in

as never before. The four streams of the garden of Eden thus become the

four virtues; Abraham's country and kindred, from which he was commanded

to depart, the human body and its members; the five cities of Sodom,

the five senses; the Euphrates, correction of manners. By Philo and

his compeers even the most insignificant words and phrases, and those

especially, were held to conceal the most precious meanings.

A perfectly natural and logical result of this view was reached when

Philo, saturated as he was with Greek culture and nourished on pious

traditions of the utterances at Delphi and Dodona, spoke reverently of

the Jewish Scriptures as "oracles". Oracles they became: as oracles they

appeared in the early history of the Christian Church; and oracles they

remained for centuries: eternal life or death, infinite happiness or

agony, as well as ordinary justice in this world, being made to depend

on shifting interpretations of a long series of dark and doubtful

utterances--interpretations frequently given by men who might have been

prophets and apostles, but who had become simply oracle-mongers.

Pressing these oracles into the service of science, Philo became the

forerunner of that long series of theologians who, from Augustine and

Cosmas to Mr. Gladstone, have attempted to extract from scriptural myth

and legend profound contributions to natural science. Thus he taught

that the golden candlesticks in the tabernacle symbolized the planets,

the high priest's robe the universe, and the bells upon it the harmony

of earth and water--whatever that may mean. So Cosmas taught, a thousand

years later, that the table of shewbread in the tabernacle showed forth

the form and construction of the world; and Mr. Gladstone hinted,

more than a thousand years later still, that Neptune's trident had a

mysterious connection with the Christian doctrine of the Trinity.(463)

(463) For Philo Judaeus, see Yonge's translation, Bohn's edition; see

also Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 78-85. For admirable general remarks on

this period in history of exegesis, see Bartlett, Bampton Lectures,

1888, p. 29. For efforts in general to save the credit of myths by

allegorical interpretation, and for those of Philo in particular, see

Drummond, Philo Judaeus, London, 1888, vol. i, pp. 18, 19, and notes.

For interesting examples of Alexandrian exegesis and for Philo's

application of the term "oracle" to the Jewish Scriptures, see Farrar,

History of Interpretation, p. 147 and note. For his discovery of symbols

of the universe in the furniture of the tabernacle, see Drummond, as

above, pp. 269 et seq. For the general subject, admirably discussed

from a historical point of view, see the Rev. Edwin Hatch, D. D., The

Influence of Greek Ideas and Usages upon the Christian Church, Hibbert

Lectures for 1888, chap. iii. For Cosmas, see my chapters on Geography

and Astronomy. For Mr. Gladstone's view of the connection between

Neptune's trident and the doctrine of the Trinity, see his Juventus

Mundi.

These methods, as applied to the Old Testament, had appeared at times

in the New; in spite of the resistance of Tertullian and Irenaeus, they

were transmitted to the Church; and in the works of the early fathers

they bloomed forth luxuriantly.

Justin Martyr and Clement of Alexandria vigorously extended them.

Typical of Justin's method is his finding, in a very simple reference by

Isaiah to Damascus, Samaria, and Assyria, a clear prophecy of the three

wise men of the East who brought gifts to the infant Saviour; and in the

bells on the priest's robe a prefiguration of the twelve apostles.

Any difficulty arising from the fact that the number of bells is not

specified in Scripture, Justin overcame by insisting that David referred

to this prefiguration in the nineteenth Psalm: "Their sound is gone out

through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."

Working in this vein, Clement of Alexandria found in the form,

dimensions, and colour of the Jewish tabernacle a whole wealth of

interpretation--the altar of incense representing the earth placed at

the centre of the universe; the high priest's robe the visible world;

the jewels on the priest's robe the zodiac; and Abraham's three days'

journey to Mount Moriah the three stages of the soul in its progress

toward the knowledge of God. Interpreting the New Testament, he lessened

any difficulties involved in the miracle of the barley loaves and fishes

by suggesting that what it really means is that Jesus gave mankind a

preparatory training for the gospel by means of the law and philosophy;

because, as he says, barley, like the law, ripens sooner than wheat,

which represents the gospel; and because, just as fishes grow in the

waves of the ocean, so philosophy grew in the waves of the Gentile

world.

Out of reasonings like these, those who followed, especially Cosmas,

developed, as we have seen, a complete theological science of geography

and astronomy.(464)

(464) For Justin, see the Dialogue with Trypho, chaps. xlii, lxxvi, and

lxxxiii. For Clement of Alexandria, see his Miscellanies, book v,

chaps. vi and xi, and book vii, chap. xvi, and especially Hatch, Hibbert

Lectures, as above, pp. 76, 77. As to the loose views of the canon held

by these two fathers and others of their time, see Ladd, Doctrine of

the Sacred Scriptures, vol. ii, pp. 86, 88; also Diestel, Geschichte des

alten Testaments.

But the instrument in exegesis which was used with most cogent force was

the occult significance of certain numbers. The Chaldean and Egyptian

researches of our own time have revealed the main source of this line of

thought; the speculations of Plato upon it are well known; but among

the Jews and in the early Church it grew into something far beyond the

wildest imaginings of the priests of Memphis and Babylon.

Philo had found for the elucidation of Scripture especially deep

meanings in the numbers four, six, and seven; but other interpreters

soon surpassed him. At the very outset this occult power was used in

ascertaining the canonical books of Scripture. Josephus argued that,

since there were twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet, there

must be twenty-two sacred books in the Old Testament; other Jewish

authorities thought that there should be twenty-four books, on account

of the twenty-four watches in the temple. St. Jerome wavered between the

argument based upon the twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet and

that suggested by the twenty-four elders in the Apocalypse. Hilary of

Poitiers argued that there must be twenty-four books, on account of the

twenty-four letters in the Greek alphabet. Origen found an argument

for the existence of exactly four gospels in the existence of just four

elements. Irenaeus insisted that there could be neither more nor fewer

than four gospels, since the earth has four quarters, the air four

winds, and the cherubim four faces; and he denounced those who declined

to accept this reasoning as "vain, ignorant, and audacious."(465)

(465) For Jerome and Origen, see notes on pages following. For Irenaeus,

see Irenaeus, Adversus Hoeres., lib. iii, cap. xi, S 8. For the general

subject, see Sanday, Inspiration, p. 115; also Farrar and H. P. Smith

as above. For a recent very full and very curious statement from a Roman

Catholic authority regarding views cherished in the older Church as to

the symbolism of numbers, see Detzel, Christliche Iconographie, Freiburg

in Bresigau, Band i, Einleitung, p. 4.

But during the first half of the third century came one who exercised

a still stronger influence in this direction--a great man who, while

rendering precious services, did more than any other to fasten upon the

Church a system which has been one of its heaviest burdens for more than

sixteen hundred years: this was Origen. Yet his purpose was noble

and his work based on profound thought. He had to meet the leading

philosophers of the pagan world, to reply to their arguments against the

Old Testament, and especially to break the force of their taunts against

its imputation of human form, limitations, passions, weaknesses, and

even immoralities to the Almighty.

Starting with a mistaken translation of a verse in the book of Proverbs,

Origen presented as a basis for his main structure the idea of

a threefold sense of Scripture: the literal, the moral, and the

mystic--corresponding to the Platonic conception of the threefold nature

of man. As results of this we have such masterpieces as his proof, from

the fifth verse of chapter xxv of Job, that the stars are living beings,

and from the well-known passage in the nineteenth chapter of St. Matthew

his warrant for self-mutilation. But his great triumphs were in the

allegorical method. By its use the Bible was speedily made an oracle

indeed, or, rather, a book of riddles. A list of kings in the Old

Testament thus becomes an enumeration of sins; the waterpots of stone,

"containing two or three firkins apiece," at the marriage of Cana,

signify the literal, moral, and spiritual sense of Scripture; the

ass upon which the Saviour rode on his triumphal entry into Jerusalem

becomes the Old Testament, the foal the New Testament, and the two

apostles who went to loose them the moral and mystical senses; blind

Bartimeus throwing off his coat while hastening to Jesus, opens a whole

treasury of oracular meanings.

The genius and power of Origen made a great impression on the strong

thinkers who followed him. St. Jerome called him "the greatest master in

the Church since the apostles," and Athanasius was hardly less emphatic.

The structure thus begun was continued by leading theologians during

the centuries following: St. Hilary of Poitiers--"the Athanasius of

Gaul"--produced some wonderful results of this method; but St. Jerome,

inspired by the example of the man whom he so greatly admired, went

beyond him. A triumph of his exegesis is seen in his statement that

the Shunamite damsel who was selected to cherish David in his old age

signified heavenly wisdom.

The great mind of St. Augustine was drawn largely into this kind of

creation, and nothing marks more clearly the vast change which had come

over the world than the fact that this greatest of the early Christian

thinkers turned from the broader paths opened by Plato and Aristotle

into that opened by Clement of Alexandria.

In the mystic power of numbers to reveal the sense of Scripture

Augustine found especial delight. He tells us that there is deep meaning

in sundry scriptural uses of the number forty, and especially as the

number of days required for fasting. Forty, he reminds us, is four times

ten. Now, four, he says, is the number especially representing time, the

day and the year being each divided into four parts; while ten, being

made up of three and seven, represents knowledge of the Creator and

creature, three referring to the three persons in the triune Creator,

and seven referring to the three elements, heart, soul, and mind, taken

in connection with the four elements, fire, air, earth, and water, which

go to make up the creature. Therefore this number ten, representing

knowledge, being multiplied by four, representing time, admonishes us

to live during time according to knowledge--that is, to fast for forty

days. Referring to such misty methods as these, which lead the reader to

ask himself whether he is sleeping or waking, St. Augustine remarks

that "ignorance of numbers prevents us from understanding such things

in Scripture." But perhaps the most amazing example is to be seen in his

notes on the hundred and fifty and three fishes which, according to St.

John's Gospel, were caught by St. Peter and the other apostles. Some

points in his long development of this subject may be selected to show

what the older theological method could be made to do for a great

mind. He tells us that the hundred and fifty and three fishes embody

a mystery; that the number ten, evidently as the number of the

commandments, indicates the law; but, as the law without the spirit only

kills, we must add the seven gifts of the spirit, and we thus have the

number seventeen, which signifies the old and new dispensations; then,

if we add together every several number which seventeen contains from

one to seventeen inclusive, the result is a hundred and fifty and

three--the number of the fishes. With this sort of reasoning he finds

profound meanings in the number of furlongs mentioned in he sixth

chapter of St. John. Referring to the fact that the disciples had rowed

about "twenty-five or thirty furlongs," he declares that "twenty-five

typifies the law, because it is five times five, but the law was

imperfect before the gospel came; now perfection is comprised in six,

since God in six days perfected the world, hence five is multiplied by

six that the law may be perfected by the gospel, and six times five is

thirty."

But Augustine's exploits in exegesis were not all based on numerals; he

is sometimes equally profound in other modes. Thus he tells us that the

condemnation of the serpent to eat dust typifies the sin of curiosity,

since in eating dust he "penetrates the obscure and shadowy"; and that

Noah's ark was "pitched within and without with pitch" to show the

safety of the Church from the leaking in of heresy.

Still another exploit--one at which the Church might well have stood

aghast--was his statement that the drunkenness of Noah prefigured the

suffering and death of Christ. It is but just to say that he was not

the original author of this interpretation: it had been presented long

before by St. Cyprian. But this was far from Augustine's worst. Perhaps

no interpretation of Scripture has ever led to more cruel and persistent

oppression, torture, and bloodshed than his reading into one of the most

beautiful parables of Jesus of Nazareth--into the words "Compel them

to come in"--a warrant for religious persecution: of all unintended

blasphemies since the world began, possibly the most appalling. Another

strong man follows to fasten these methods on the Church: St. Gregory

the Great. In his renowned work on the book of Job, the Magna Moralia,

given to the world at the end of the sixth century, he lays great stress

on the deep mystical meanings of the statement that Job had seven sons.

He thinks the seven sons typify the twelve apostles, for "the apostles

were selected through the sevenfold grace of the Spirit; moreover,

twelve is produced from seven--that is, the two parts of seven, four

and three, when multiplied together give twelve." He also finds deep

significance in the number of the apostles; this number being evidently

determined by a multiplication of the number of persons in the Trinity

by the number of quarters of the globe. Still, to do him justice, it

must be said that in some parts of his exegesis the strong sense which

was one of his most striking characteristics crops out in a way very

refreshing. Thus, referring to a passage in the first chapter of Job,

regarding the oxen which were ploughing and the asses which were feeding

beside them, he tells us pithily that these typify two classes of

Christians: the oxen, the energetic Christians who do the work of the

Church; the asses, the lazy Christians who merely feed.(466)

(466) For Origen, see the De Principiis, book iv, chaps. i-vii et seq.,

Crombie's translation; also the Contra Celsum, vol. vi, p. 70; vol.

vii, p. 20, etc.; also various citations in Farrar. For Hilary, see his

Tractatus super Psalmos, cap. ix, li, etc. in Migne, vol. ix, and De

Trinitate, lib. ii, cap. ii. For Jerome's interpretation of the text

relating to the Shunamite woman, see Epist. lii, in Migne, vol. xxii,

pp. 527, 528. For Augustine's use of numbers, see the De Doctrina

Christiana, lib. ii, cap. xvi; and for the explanation of the draught of

fishes, see Augustine in, In Johan. Evangel., tractat. cxxii; and on the

twenty-five to thirty furlongs, ibid., tract. xxv, cap. 6; and for the

significance of the serpent eating dust, De Gen., lib. ii, c. 18. or the

view that the drunkenness of Noah prefigured the suffering of Christ, as

held by SS. Cyprian and Augustine, see Farrar, as above, pp. 181, 238.

For St. Gregory, see the Magna Moralia, lib. i, cap. xiv.

Thus began the vast theological structure of oracular interpretation

applied to the Bible. As we have seen, the men who prepared the

ground for it were the rabbis of Palestine and the Hellenized Jews of

Alexandria; and the four great men who laid its foundation courses were

Origen, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Gregory.

During the ten centuries following the last of these men this structure

continued to rise steadily above the plain meanings of Scripture. The

Christian world rejoiced in it, and the few great thinkers who dared

bring the truth to bear upon it were rejected. It did indeed seem at one

period in the early Church that a better system might be developed. The

School of Antioch, especially as represented by Chrysostom, appeared

likely to lead in this better way, but the dominant forces were too

strong; the passion for myth and marvel prevailed over the love of

real knowledge, and the reasonings of Chrysostom and his compeers were

neglected.(467)

(467) For the work of the School of Antioch, and especially of

Chrysostom, see the eloquent tribute to it by Farrar, as above.

In the ninth century came another effort to present the claims of right

reason. The first man prominent in this was St. Agobard, Bishop of

Lyons, whom an eminent historian has well called the clearest head

of his time. With the same insight which penetrated the fallacies and

follies of image worship, belief in witchcraft persecution, the ordeal,

and the judicial duel, he saw the futility of this vast fabric of

interpretation, protested against the idea that the Divine Spirit

extended its inspiration to the mere words of Scripture, and asked a

question which has resounded through every generation since: "If you

once begin such a system, who can measure the absurdity which will

follow?"

During the same century another opponent of this dominant system

appeared: John Scotus Erigena. He contended that "reason and authority

come alike from the one source of Divine Wisdom"; that the fathers,

great as their authority is, often contradict each other; and that, in

last resort, reason must be called in to decide between them.

But the evolution of unreason continued: Agobard was unheeded, and

Erigena placed under the ban by two councils--his work being condemned

by a synod as a "Commentum Diaboli." Four centuries later Honorius

III ordered it to be burned, as "teeming with the venom of hereditary

depravity"; and finally, after eight centuries, Pope Gregory XIII placed

it on the Index, where, with so many other works which have done good

service to humanity, it remains to this day. Nor did Abelard, who, three

centuries after Agobard and Erigena, made an attempt in some respects

like theirs, have any better success: his fate at the hands of St.

Bernard and the Council of Sens the world knows by heart. Far more

consonant with the spirit of the universal Church was the teaching in

the twelfth century of the great Hugo of St. Victor, conveyed in these

ominous words, "Learn first what is to be believed" (Disce primo quod

credendum est), meaning thereby that one should first accept doctrines,

and then find texts to confirm them.

These principles being dominant, the accretions to the enormous fabric

of interpretation went steadily on. Typical is the fact that the

Venerable Bede contributed to it the doctrine that, in the text

mentioning Elkanah and his two wives, Elkanah means Christ and the two

wives the Synagogue and the Church. Even such men as Alfred the Great

and St. Thomas Aquinas were added to the forces at work in building

above the sacred books this prodigious structure of sophistry.

Perhaps nothing shows more clearly the tenacity of the old system of

interpretation than the sermons of Savonarola. During the last decade of

the fifteenth century, just at the close of the medieval period, he was

engaged in a life-and-death struggle at Florence. No man ever preached

more powerfully the gospel of righteousness; none ever laid more stress

on conduct; even Luther was not more zealous for reform or more careless

of tradition; and yet we find the great Florentine apostle and martyr

absolutely tied fast to the old system of allegorical interpretation.

The autograph notes of his sermons, still preserved in his cell at San

Marco, show this abundantly. Thus we find him attaching to the creation

of grasses and plants on the third day an allegorical connection with

the "multitude of the elect" and with the "sound doctrines of the

Church," and to the creation of land animals on the sixth day a similar

relation to "the Jewish people" and to "Christians given up to things

earthly."(468)

(468) For Agobard, see the Liber adversus Fredigisum, cap. xii; also

Reuter's Relig. Aufklarung im Mittelalter, vol. i, p. 24; also Poole,

Illustrations of the History of Medieval Thought, London, 1884, pp. 38

et seq. For Erigena, see his De Divisione Naturae, lib. iv, cap. v; also

i, cap. lxvi-lxxi; and for general account, see Ueberweg, History

of Philosophy, New York, 1871, vol. i, pp. 358 et seq.; and for the

treatment of his work by the Church, see the edition of the Index under

Leo XIII, 1881. For Abelard, see the Sic et Non, Prologue, Migne, vol.

iii, pp. 371-377. For Hugo of St. Victor, see Erudit. Didask., lib. vii,

vi, 4, in Migne, clxxvi. For Savonarola's interpretations, see various

references to his preaching in Villari's life of Savonarola, English

translation, London, 1890, and especially the exceedingly interesting

table in the appendix to vol. i, chap. vii.

The revival of learning in the fifteenth century seemed likely to

undermine this older structure.

Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical research,

for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By truly scientific

methods he proved the famous "Letter of Christ to Abgarus" a forgery;

the "Donation of Constantine," one of the great foundations of the

ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a fraud; and the "Apostles'

Creed" a creation which post-dated the apostles by several centuries.

Of even more permanent influence was his work upon the New Testament,

in which he initiated the modern method of comparing manuscripts to find

what the sacred text really is. At an earlier or later period he would

doubtless have paid for his temerity with his life; fortunately, just

at that time the ruling pontiff and his Contemporaries cared much for

literature and little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid

defiance to the Inquisition.

While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a much

greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe. Erasmus, with

his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great

stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to

undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic

interpretation.

Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to

encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may stimulate

reflection. He had found, what some others had found before him, that

the famous verse in the fifth chapter of the First Epistle General of

St. John, regarding the "three witnesses," was an interpolation. Careful

research through all the really important early manuscripts showed that

it appeared in none of them. Even after the Bible had been corrected,

in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, by Lanfranc, Archbishop of

Canterbury, and by Nicholas, cardinal and librarian of the Roman Church,

"in accordance with the orthodox faith," the passage was still wanting

in the more authoritative Latin manuscripts. There was not the slightest

tenable ground for believing in the authenticity of the text; on the

contrary, it has been demonstrated that, after a universal silence

of the orthodox fathers of the Church, of the ancient versions of the

Scriptures, and of all really important manuscripts, the verse first

appeared in a Confession of Faith drawn up by an obscure zealot toward

the end of the fifth century. In a very mild exercise, then, of critical

judgment, Erasmus omitted this text from the first two editions of

his Greek Testament as evidently spurious. A storm arose at once. In

England, Lee, afterward Archbishop of York; in Spain, Stunica, one of

the editors of the Complutensian Polyglot; and in France, Bude, Syndic

of the Sorbonne, together with a vast army of monks in England and

on the Continent, attacked him ferociously. He was condemned by the

University of Paris, and various propositions of his were declared to

be heretical and impious. Fortunately, the worst persecutors could not

reach him; otherwise they might have treated him as they treated his

disciple, Berquin, whom in 1529 they burned at Paris.

The fate of this spurious text throws light into the workings of human

nature in its relations to sacred literature. Although Luther omitted it

from his translation of the New Testament, and kept it out of every copy

published during his lifetime, and although at a later period the most

eminent Christian scholars showed that it had no right to a place in the

Bible, it was, after Luther's death, replaced in the German translation,

and has been incorporated into all important editions of it, save one,

since the beginning of the seventeenth century. So essential was it

found in maintaining the dominant theology that, despite the fact that

Sir Isaac Newton, Richard Porson, the nineteenth-century revisers, and

all other eminent authorities have rejected it, the Anglican Church

still retains it in its Lectionary, and the Scotch Church continues to

use it in the Westminster Catechism, as a main support of the doctrine

of the Trinity.

Nor were other new truths presented by Erasmus better received. His

statement that "some of the epistles ascribed to St. Paul are certainly

not his," which is to-day universally acknowledged as a truism, also

aroused a storm. For generations, then, his work seemed vain.

On the coming in of the Reformation the great structure of belief in the

literal and historical correctness of every statement in the Scriptures,

in the profound allegorical meanings of the simplest texts, and even

in the divine origin of the vowel punctuation, towered more loftily and

grew more rapidly than ever before. The Reformers, having cast off the

authority of the Pope and of the universal Church, fell back all the

more upon the infallibility of the sacred books. The attitude of Luther

toward this great subject was characteristic. As a rule, he adhered

tenaciously to the literal interpretation of the Scriptures; his

argument against Copernicus is a fair example of his reasoning in this

respect; but, with the strong good sense which characterized him, he

from time to time broke away from the received belief. Thus, he took

the liberty of understanding certain passages in the Old Testament in a

different sense from that given them by the New Testament, and declared

St. Paul's allegorical use of the story of Sarah and Hagar "too unsound

to stand the test." He also emphatically denied that the Epistle to the

Hebrews was written by St. Paul, and he did this in the exercise of

a critical judgment upon internal evidence. His utterance as to the

Epistle of St. James became famous. He announced to the Church: "I do

not esteem this an apostolic, epistle; I will not have it in my

Bible among the canonical books," and he summed up his opinion in his

well-known allusion to it as "an epistle of straw."

Emboldened by him, the gentle spirit of Melanchthon, while usually

taking the Bible very literally, at times revolted; but this was not due

to any want of loyalty to the old method of interpretation: whenever the

wildest and most absurd system of exegesis seemed necessary to support

any part of the reformed doctrine, Luther and Melanchthon unflinchingly

developed it. Both of them held firmly to the old dictum of Hugo of St.

Victor, which, as we have seen, was virtually that one must first accept

the doctrine, and then find scriptural warrant for it. Very striking

examples of this were afforded in the interpretation by Luther and

Melanchthon of certain alleged marvels of their time, and one out of

several of these may be taken as typical of their methods.

In 1523 Luther and Melanchthon jointly published a work under the title

Der Papstesel--interpreting the significance of a strange, ass-like

monster which, according to a popular story, had been found floating

in the Tiber some time before. This book was illustrated by startling

pictures, and both text and pictures were devoted to proving that this

monster was "a sign from God," indicating the doom of the papacy. This

treatise by the two great founders of German Protestantism pointed out

that the ass's head signified the Pope himself; "for," said they, "as

well as an ass's head is suited to a human body, so well is the Pope

suited to be head over the Church." This argument was clinched by a

reference to Exodus. The right hand of the monster, said to be like an

elephant's foot, they made to signify the spiritual rule of the Pope,

since "with it he tramples upon all the weak": this they proved from

the book of Daniel and the Second Epistle to Timothy. The monster's left

hand, which was like the hand of a man, they declared to mean the Pope's

secular rule, and they found passages to support this view in Daniel

and St. Luke. The right foot, which was like the foot of an ox, they

declared to typify the servants of the spiritual power; and proved this

by a citation from St. Matthew. The left foot, like a griffin's claw,

they made to typify the servants of the temporal power of the Pope,

and the highly developed breasts and various other members, cardinals,

bishops, priests, and monks, "whose life is eating, drinking, and

unchastity": to prove this they cited passages from Second Timothy and

Philippians. The alleged fish-scales on the arms, legs, and neck of the

monster they made to typify secular princes and lords; "since," as they

said, "in St. Matthew and Job the sea typifies the world, and fishes

men." The old man's head at the base of the monster's spine they

interpreted to mean "the abolition and end of the papacy," and proved

this from Hebrews and Daniel. The dragon which opens his mouth in the

rear and vomits fire, "refers to the terrible, virulent bulls and books

which the Pope and his minions are now vomiting forth into the world."

The two great Reformers then went on to insist that, since this monster

was found at Rome, it could refer to no person but the Pope; "for,"

they said, "God always sends his signs in the places where their meaning

applies." Finally, they assured the world that the monster in general

clearly signified that the papacy was then near its end. To this

development of interpretation Luther and Melanchthon especially devoted

themselves; the latter by revising this exposition of the prodigy, and

the former by making additions to a new edition. Such was the success of

this kind of interpretation that Luther, hearing that a monstrous calf

had been found at Freiburg, published a treatise upon it--showing, by

citations from the books of Exodus, Kings, the Psalms, Isaiah, Daniel,

and the Gospel of St. John, that this new monster was the especial work

of the devil, but full of meaning in regard to the questions at issue

between the Reformers and the older Church.

The other main branch of the Reformed Church appeared for a time to

establish a better system. Calvin's strong logic seemed at one period

likely to tear his adherents away from the older method; but the

evolution of scholasticism continued, and the influence of the German

reformers prevailed. At every theological centre came an amazing

development of interpretation.

Eminent Lutheran divines in the seventeenth century, like Gerhard,

Calovius, Coccerus, and multitudes of others, wrote scores of quartos

to further this system, and the other branch of the Protestant Church

emulated their example. The pregnant dictum of St. Augustine--"Greater

is the authority of Scripture than all human capacity"--was steadily

insisted upon, and, toward the close of the seventeenth century,

Voetius, the renowned professor at Utrecht, declared, "Not a word is

contained in the Holy Scriptures which is not in the strictest sense

inspired, the very punctuation not excepted"; and this declaration was

echoed back from multitudes of pulpits, theological chairs, synods,

and councils. Unfortunately, it was very difficult to find what the

"authority of Scripture" really was. To the greater number of Protestant

ecclesiastics it meant the authority of any meaning in the text which

they had the wit to invent and the power to enforce.

To increase this vast confusion, came, in the older branch of the

Church, the idea of the divine inspiration of the Latin translation

of the Bible ascribed to St. Jerome--the Vulgate. It was insisted by

leading Catholic authorities that this was as completely a product

of divine inspiration as was the Hebrew original. Strong men arose to

insist even that, where the Hebrew and the Latin differed, the Hebrew

should be altered to fit Jerome's mistranslation, as the latter, having

been made under the new dispensation, must be better than that made

under the old. Even so great a man as Cardinal Bellarmine exerted

himself in vain against this new tide of unreason.(469)

(469) For Valla, see various sources already named; and for an

especially interesting account, Symond's Renaissance in Italy, the

Revival of Learning, pp. 260-269; and for the opinion of the best

contemporary judge, see Erasmus, Opera, Leyden, 1703, tom. iii, p. 98.

For Erasmus and his opponents, see Life of Erasmus, by Butler, London,

1825, pp. 179-182; but especially, for the general subject, Bishop

Creighton's History of the Papacy during the Reformation. For the attack

by Bude and the Sorbonne and the burning of Berquin, see Drummond, Life

and character of Erasmus, vol. ii, pp. 220-223; also pp. 230-239. As

to the text of the Three Witnesses, see Gibbon, Decline and Fall of

the Roman Empire, chap. xxxvi, notes 116-118; also Dean Milman's note

thereupon. For a full and learned statement of the evidence against

the verse, see Porson's Letters to Travis, London, 1790, in which an

elaborate discussion of all the MSS. is given. See also Jowett in Essays

and Reviews, p. 307. For a very full and impartial history of the long

controversy over this passage, see Charles Butler's Horae Biblicae,

reprinted in Jared Sparks's Theological Essays and Tracts, vol. ii. For

Luther's ideas of interpretation, see his Sammtliche Schriften, Walch

edition, vol. i, p. 1199, vol. ii, p. 1758, vol. viii, p. 2140; for some

of his more free views, vol. xiv, p. 472, vol. vi, p. 121, vol. xi, p.

1448, vol. xii, p. 830; also Tholuck, Doctrine of Inspiration, Boston,

1867, citing the Colloquia, Frankfort, 1571, vol. ii, p. 102; also

the Vorreden zu der deutschen Bibelubersetzung, in Walch's edition, as

above, vol. xiv, especially pp. 94, 98, and 146-150. As to Melanchthon,

see especially his Loci Communes, 1521; and as to the enormous growth

of commentaries in the generations immediately following, see Charles

Beard, Hibbert Lectures for 1883, on the Reformation, especially the

admirable chapter on Protestant Scholasticism; also Archdeacon Farrar,

history of Interpretation. For the Papstesel, etc., see Luther's

Sammtliche Schriften, edit. Walch, vol. xiv, pp. 2403 et seq.; also

Melanchthon's Opera, edit. Bretschneider, vol. xx, pp. 665 et seq.

In the White Library of Cornell University will be found an original

edition of the book, with engravings of the monster. For the Monchkalb,

see Luther's works as above, vol. xix, pp. 2416 et seq. For the spirit

of Calvin in interpretation, see Farrar, ans especially H. P. Smith, D.

D., Inspiration and Inerrancy, chap. iv, and the very brilliant essay

forming chap. iii of the same work, by L. J. Evans, pp. 66 and 67,

note. For the attitude of the older Church toward the Vulgate, see

Pallavicini, Histoire du Concile de Trente, Montrouge, 1844, tome i, pp

19,20; but especially Symonds, The Catholic Reaction, vol. i, pp. 226 et

seq. As to a demand for the revision of the Hebrew Bible to correct its

differences from the Vulgate, see Emanuel Deutsch's Literary Remains,

New York, 1874, p. 9. For the work and spirit of Calovius and other

commentators immediately following the Reformation, see Farrar, as

above; also Beard, Schaff, and Hertzog, Geschichte des alten Testaments

in der christlichen Kirche, pp. 527 et seq. As to extreme views of

Voetius and others, see Tholuck, as above. For the Formula Concensus

Helvetica, which in 1675 affirmed the inspiration of the vowel points,

see Schaff, Creeds.

Nor was a fanatical adhesion to the mere letter of the sacred text

confined to western Europe. About the middle of the seventeenth century,

in the reign of Alexis, father of Peter the Great, Nikon, Patriarch of

the Russian Greek Church, attempted to correct the Slavonic Scriptures

and service-books. They were full of interpolations due to ignorance,

carelessness, or zeal, and in order to remedy this state of the texts

Nikon procured a number of the best Greek and Slavonic manuscripts, set

the leading and most devout scholars he could find at work upon them,

and caused Russian Church councils in 1655 and 1666 to promulgate the

books thus corrected.

But the same feelings which have wrought so strongly against our

nineteenth-century revision of the Bible acted even more forcibly

against that revision in the seventeenth century. Straightway great

masses of the people, led by monks and parish priests, rose in revolt.

The fact that the revisers had written in the New Testament the name of

Jesus correctly, instead of following the old wrong orthography, aroused

the wildest fanaticism. The monks of the great convent of Solovetsk,

when the new books were sent them, cried in terror: "Woe, woe! what

have you done with the Son of God?" They then shut their gates, defying

patriarch, council, and Czar, until, after a struggle lasting seven

years, their monastery was besieged and taken by an imperial army. Hence

arose the great sect of the "Old Believers," lasting to this day, and

fanatically devoted to the corrupt readings of the old text.(470)

(470) The present writer, visiting Moscow in the spring of 1894,

was presented by Count Leo Tolstoi to one of the most eminent and

influential members of the sect of "Old Believers," which dates from

the reform of Nikon. Nothing could exceed the fervor with which this

venerable man, standing in the chapel of his superb villa, expatiated on

the horrors of making the sign of the cross with three fingers instead

of two. His argument was that the TWO fingers, as used by the "Old

Believers," typify the divine and human nature of our Lord, and hence

that the use of them is strictly correct; whereas signing with THREE

fingers, representing the blessed Trinity, is "virtually to crucify all

three persons of the Godhead afresh." Not less cogent were his arguments

regarding the immense value of the old text of Scripture as compared

with the new. For the revolt against Nikon and his reforms, see Rambaud,

History of Russia, vol. i, pp. 414-416; also Wallace, Russia, vol. ii,

pp. 307-309; also Leroy-Beaulieu, L'Empire des Tsars, vol. iii, livre

iii.

Strange to say, on the development of Scripture interpretation, largely

in accordance with the old methods, wrought, about the beginning of the

eighteenth century, Sir Isaac Newton.

It is hard to believe that from the mind which produced the Principia,

and which broke through the many time-honoured beliefs regarding the

dates and formation of scriptural books, could have come his discussions

regarding the prophecies; still, at various points even in this work,

his power appears. From internal evidence he not only discarded the text

of the Three Witnesses, but he decided that the Pentateuch must have

been made up from several books; that Genesis was not written until

the reign of Saul; that the books of Kings and Chronicles were probably

collected by Ezra; and, in a curious anticipation of modern criticism,

that the book of Psalms and the prophecies of Isaiah and Daniel were

each written by various authors at various dates. But the old belief in

prophecy as prediction was too strong for him, and we find him applying

his great powers to the relation of the details given by the prophets

and in the Apocalypse to the history of mankind since unrolled,

and tracing from every statement in prophetic literature its exact

fulfilment even in the most minute particulars.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century the structure of scriptural

interpretation had become enormous. It seemed destined to hide forever

the real character of our sacred literature and to obscure the great

light which Christianity had brought into the world. The Church, Eastern

and Western, Catholic and Protestant, was content to sit in its shadow,

and the great divines of all branches of the Church reared every sort

of fantastic buttress to strengthen or adorn it. It seemed to be founded

for eternity; and yet, at this very time when it appeared the strongest,

a current of thought was rapidly dissolving away its foundations, and

preparing that wreck and ruin of the whole fabric which is now, at the

close of the nineteenth century, going on so rapidly.

The account of the movement thus begun is next to be given.(471)

(471) For Newton's boldness in textual criticism, compared with his

credulity as to the literal fulfilment of prophecy, see his Observations

upon the Prophesies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, in his

works, edited by Horsley, London, 1785, vol. v, pp. 297-491.

II. BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.

At the base of the vast structure of the older scriptural interpretation

were certain ideas regarding the first five books of the Old Testament.

It was taken for granted that they had been dictated by the Almighty

to Moses about fifteen hundred years before our era; that some parts of

them, indeed, had been written by the corporeal finger of Jehovah, and

that all parts gave not merely his thoughts but his exact phraseology.

It was also held, virtually by the universal Church, that while

every narrative or statement in these books is a precise statement of

historical or scientific fact, yet that the entire text contains

vast hidden meanings. Such was the rule: the exceptions made by a few

interpreters here and there only confirmed it. Even the indifference

of St. Jerome to the doctrine of Mosaic authorship did not prevent its

ripening into a dogma.

The book of Genesis was universally held to be an account, not only

divinely comprehensive but miraculously exact, of the creation and of

the beginnings of life on the earth; an account to which all discoveries

in every branch of science must, under pains and penalties, be made to

conform. In English-speaking lands this has lasted until our own time:

the most eminent of recent English biologists has told us how in every

path of natural science he has, at some stage in his career, come across

a barrier labelled "No thoroughfare Moses."

A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the perfection of the

Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a record of the past,

but as a revelation of the future.

The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the Pansophia

Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general superintendent, or bishop, in

northern Germany, near the beginning of the seventeenth century. He

declared that the text of Genesis "must be received strictly"; that "it

contains all knowledge, human and divine"; that "twenty-eight articles

of the Augsburg Confession are to be found in it"; that "it is an

arsenal of arguments against all sects and sorts of atheists, pagans,

Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Calvinists, Socinians, and Baptists";

"the source of all sciences and arts, including law, medicine,

philosophy, and rhetoric"; "the source and essence of all histories and

of all professions, trades, and works"; "an exhibition of all virtues

and vices"; "the origin of all consolation."

This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit, growing

in strength and volume, until a century later it was echoed back by

Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of France. He cited a hundred

authors, sacred and profane, to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch;

and not only this, but that from the Jewish lawgiver came the heathen

theology--that Moses was, in fact, nearly the whole pagan pantheon

rolled into one, and really the being worshipped under such names as

Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.(472)

(472) For the passage from Huxley regarding Mosaic barriers to modern

thought, see his Essays, recently published. For Pfeiffer, see Zoeckler,

Theologie und Naturwissenschaft, vol. i, pp. 688, 689. For St. Jerome's

indifference as to the Mosaic authorship, see the first of the excellent

Sketches of the Pentateuch Criticism, by the Rev. S. J. Curtiss, in the

Bibliotheca Sacra for January, 1884. For Huet, see also Curtiss, ibid.

About the middle of the twelfth century came, so far as the world now

knows, the first gainsayer of this general theory. Then it was that Aben

Ezra, the greatest biblical scholar of the Middle Ages, ventured

very discreetly to call attention to certain points in the Pentateuch

incompatible with the belief that the whole of it had been written by

Moses and handed down in its original form. His opinion was based upon

the well-known texts which have turned all really eminent biblical

scholars in the nineteenth century from the old view by showing the

Mosaic authorship of the five books in their present form to be clearly

disproved by the books themselves; and, among these texts, accounts

of Moses' own death and burial, as well as statements based on names,

events, and conditions which only came into being ages after the time of

Moses.

But Aben Ezra had evidently no aspirations for martyrdom; he fathered

the idea upon a rabbi of a previous generation, and, having veiled his

statement in an enigma, added the caution, "Let him who understands hold

his tongue."(473)

(473) For the texts referred to by Aben Ezra as incompatible with the

Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese,

vol. i, pp. 85-88; and for a pithy short account, Moore's introduction

to The Genesis of Genesis, by B. W. Bacon, Hartford, 1893, p. 23; also

Curtiss, as above. For a full exhibition of the absolute incompatibility

of these texts with the Mosaic authorship, etc., see The Higher

Criticism of the Pentateuch, by C. A. Briggs, D. D., New York, 1893,

especially chap. iv; also Robertson Smith, art. Bible, in Encycl. Brit.

For about four centuries the learned world followed the prudent rabbi's

advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other

a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted

that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the

other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now

offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra,

and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and

phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt

with promptly: Carlstadt was, for this and other troublesome ideas,

suppressed with the applause of the Protestant Church; and the book of

Maes was placed by the older Church on the Index.

But as we now look back over the Revival of Learning, the Age of

Discovery, and the Reformation, we can see clearly that powerful as the

older Church then was, and powerful as the Reformed Church was to be,

there was at work something far more mighty than either or than both;

and this was a great law of nature--the law of evolution through

differentiation. Obedient to this law there now began to arise, both

within the Church and without it, a new body of scholars--not so much

theologians as searchers for truth by scientific methods. Some, like

Cusa, were ecclesiastics; some, like Valla, Erasmus, and the Scaligers,

were not such in any real sense; but whether in holy orders, really,

nominally, or not at all, they were, first of all, literary and

scientific investigators.

During the sixteenth century a strong impulse was given to more thorough

research by several very remarkable triumphs of the critical method

as developed by this new class of men, and two of these ought here to

receive attention on account of their influence upon the whole after

course of human thought.

For many centuries the Decretals bearing the great name of Isidore had

been cherished as among the most valued muniments of the Church. They

contained what claimed to be a mass of canons, letters of popes, decrees

of councils, and the like, from the days of the apostles down to the

eighth century--all supporting at important points the doctrine, the

discipline, the ceremonial, and various high claims of the Church and

its hierarchy.

But in the fifteenth century that sturdy German thinker, Cardinal

Nicholas of Cusa, insisted on examining these documents and on applying

to them the same thorough research and patient thought which led him,

even before Copernicus, to detect the error of the Ptolemaic astronomy.

As a result, he avowed his scepticism regarding this pious literature;

other close thinkers followed him in investigating it, and it was

soon found a tissue of absurd anachronisms, with endless clashing and

confusion of events and persons.

For a time heroic attempts were made by Church authorities to cover up

these facts. Scholars revealing them were frowned upon, even persecuted,

and their works placed upon the Index; scholars explaining them

away--the "apologists" or "reconcilers" of that day--were rewarded with

Church preferment, one of them securing for a very feeble treatise

a cardinal's hat. But all in vain; these writings were at length

acknowledged by all scholars of note, Catholic and Protestant, to be

mainly a mass of devoutly cunning forgeries.

While the eyes of scholars were thus opened as never before to the skill

of early Church zealots in forging documents useful to ecclesiasticism,

another discovery revealed their equal skill in forging documents useful

to theology.

For more than a thousand years great stress had been laid by theologians

upon the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian

convert of St. Paul. Claiming to come from one so near the great

apostle, they were prized as a most precious supplement to Holy Writ.

A belief was developed that when St. Paul had returned to earth,

after having been "caught up to the third heaven," he had revealed to

Dionysius the things he had seen. Hence it was that the varied pictures

given in these writings of the heavenly hierarchy and the angelic

ministers of the Almighty took strong hold upon the imagination of the

universal Church: their theological statements sank deeply into

the hearts and minds of the Mystics of the twelfth century and the

Platonists of the fifteenth; and the ten epistles they contained,

addressed to St. John, to Titus, to Polycarp, and others of the earliest

period, were considered treasures of sacred history. An Emperor of

the East had sent these writings to an Emperor of the West as the most

precious of imperial gifts. Scotus Erigena had translated them; St.

Thomas Aquinas had expounded them; Dante had glorified them; Albert

the Great had claimed that they were virtually given by St. Paul and

inspired by the Holy Ghost. Their authenticity was taken for granted by

fathers, doctors, popes, councils, and the universal Church.

But now, in the glow of the Renascence, all this treasure was found to

be but dross. Investigators in the old Church and in the new joined in

proving that the great mass of it was spurious.

To say nothing of other evidences, it failed to stand the simplest of

all tests, for these writings constantly presupposed institutions and

referred to events of much later date than the time of Dionysius; they

were at length acknowledged by all authorities worthy of the name,

Catholic as well as Protestant, to be simply--like the Isidorian

Decretals--pious frauds.

Thus arose an atmosphere of criticism very different from the atmosphere

of literary docility and acquiescence of the "Ages of Faith"; thus it

came that great scholars in all parts of Europe began to realize, as

never before, the part which theological skill and ecclesiastical zeal

had taken in the development of spurious sacred literature; thus was

stimulated a new energy in research into all ancient documents, no

matter what their claims. To strengthen this feeling and to intensify

the stimulating qualities of this new atmosphere came, as we have seen,

the researches and revelations of Valla regarding the forged Letter of

Christ to Abgarus, the fraudulent Donation of Constantine, and the late

date of the Apostles' Creed; and, to give this feeling direction toward

the Hebrew and Christian sacred books, came the example of Erasmus.(474)

(474) For very fair statements regarding the great forged documents of

the Middle Ages, see Addis and Arnold, Catholic Dictionary, articles

Dionysius the Areopagite and False Decretals, and in the latter the

curious acknowledgment that the mass of pseudo-Isidorian Decretals "is

what we now call a forgery."

For the derivation of Dionysius's ideas from St. Paul, and for the idea

of inspiration attributed to him, see Albertus Magnus, Opera Omnia, vol.

xiii, early chapters and chap. vi. For very interesting details on this

general subject, see Dollinger, Das Papstthum, chap. ii; also his Fables

respecting the Popes of the Middle Ages, translated by Plummer and H. B.

Smith, part i, chap. v. Of the exposure of these works, see Farrar, as

above, pp. 254, 255; also Beard, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 4, 354. For the

False Decretals, see Milman, History of Latin Christianity, vol. ii, pp.

373 et seq. For the great work of the pseudo-Dionysius, see ibid., vol.

iii, p. 352, and vol. vi, pp. 402 et seq., and Canon Westcott's article

on Dionysius the Areopagite in vol. v of the Contemporary Review; also

the chapters on Astronomy in this work.

Naturally, then, in this new atmosphere the bolder scholars of Europe

soon began to push more vigorously the researches begun centuries before

by Aben Ezra, and the next efforts of these men were seen about the

middle of the seventeenth century, when Hobbes, in his Leviathan, and

La Pevrere, in his Preadamites, took them up and developed them still

further. The result came speedily. Hobbes, for this and other sins, was

put under the ban, even by the political party which sorely needed him,

and was regarded generally as an outcast; while La Peyrere, for this and

other heresies, was thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of Mechlin,

and kept there until he fully retracted: his book was refuted by seven

theologians within a year after its appearance, and within a generation

thirty-six elaborate answers to it had appeared: the Parliament of Paris

ordered it to be burned by the hangman.

In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far greater

than any of these--the Tractatus Thrologico-Politicus of Spinoza.

Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into the subject.

Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he summed up all with

judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could not have been the author

of the Pentateuch in the form then existing; that there had been glosses

and revisions; that the biblical books had grown up as a literature;

that, though great truths are to be found in them, and they are to be

regarded as a divine revelation, the old claims of inerrancy for them

can not be maintained; that in studying them men had been misled by

mistaking human conceptions for divine meanings; that, while prophets

have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of the

Jewish people alone; that to look for exact knowledge of natural and

spiritual phenomena in the sacred books is an utter mistake; and that

the narratives of the Old and New Testaments, while they surpass those

of profane history, differ among themselves not only in literary merit,

but in the value of the doctrines they inculcate. As to the authorship

of the Pentateuch, he arrived at the conclusion that it was written long

after Moses, but that Moses may have written some books from which

it was compiled--as, for example, those which are mentioned in the

Scriptures, the Book of the Wars of God, the Book of the Covenant,

and the like--and that the many repetitions and contradictions in the

various books show a lack of careful editing as well as a variety of

original sources. Spinoza then went on to throw light into some other

books of the Old and New Testaments, and added two general statements

which have proved exceedingly serviceable, for they contain the germs of

all modern broad churchmanship; and the first of them gave the formula

which was destined in our own time to save to the Anglican Church a

large number of her noblest sons: this was, that "sacred Scripture

CONTAINS the Word of God, and in so far as it contains it is

incorruptible"; the second was, that "error in speculative doctrine is

not impious."

Though published in various editions, the book seemed to produce little

effect upon the world at that time; but its result to Spinoza himself

was none the less serious. Though so deeply religious that Novalis

spoke of him as "a God-intoxicated man," and Schleiermacher called him a

"saint," he had been, for the earlier expression of some of the opinions

it contained, abhorred as a heretic both by Jews and Christians: from

the synagogue he was cut off by a public curse, and by the Church he was

now regarded as in some sort a forerunner of Antichrist. For all this,

he showed no resentment, but devoted himself quietly to his studies, and

to the simple manual labour by which he supported himself; declined

all proffered honours, among them a professorship at Heidelberg; found

pleasure only in the society of a few friends as gentle and affectionate

as himself; and died contentedly, without seeing any widespread effect

of his doctrine other than the prevailing abhorrence of himself.

Perhaps in all the seventeenth century there was no man whom Jesus of

Nazareth would have more deeply loved, and no life which he would have

more warmly approved; yet down to a very recent period this hatred for

Spinoza has continued. When, about 1880, it was proposed to erect a

monument to him at Amsterdam, discourses were given in churches and

synagogues prophesying the wrath of Heaven upon the city for such a

profanation; and when the monument was finished, the police were obliged

to exert themselves to prevent injury to the statue and to the eminent

scholars who unveiled it.

But the ideas of Spinoza at last secured recognition. They had sunk

deeply into the hearts and minds of various leaders of thought, and,

most important of all, into the heart and mind of Lessing; he brought

them to bear in his treatise on the Education of the World, as well as

in his drama, Nathan the Wise, and both these works have spoken with

power to every generation since.

In France, also, came the same healthful evolution of thought. For

generations scholars had known that multitudes of errors had crept into

the sacred text. Robert Stephens had found over two thousand variations

in the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament, and in 1633 Jean Morin,

a priest of the Oratory, pointed out clearly many of the most glaring

of these. Seventeen years later, in spite of the most earnest Protestant

efforts to suppress his work, Cappellus gave forth his Critica Sacra,

demonstrating not only that the vowel pointing of Scripture was not

divinely inspired, but that the Hebrew text itself, from which

the modern translations were made, is full of errors due to the

carelessness, ignorance, and doctrinal zeal of early scribes, and that

there had clearly been no miraculous preservation of the "original

autographs" of the sacred books.

While orthodox France was under the uneasiness and alarm thus caused,

appeared a Critical History of the Old Testament by Richard Simon, a

priest of the Oratory. He was a thoroughly religious man and an acute

scholar, whose whole purpose was to develop truths which he believed

healthful to the Church and to mankind. But he denied that Moses was the

author of the Pentateuch, and exhibited the internal evidence, now so

well known, that the books were composed much later by various persons,

and edited later still. He also showed that other parts of the Old

Testament had been compiled from older sources, and attacked the

time-honoured theory that Hebrew was the primitive language of mankind.

The whole character of his book was such that in these days it would

pass, on the whole, as conservative and orthodox; it had been approved

by the censor in 1678, and printed, when the table of contents and

a page of the preface were shown to Bossuet. The great bishop and

theologian was instantly aroused; he pronounced the work "a mass of

impieties and a bulwark of irreligion"; his biographer tells us that,

although it was Holy Thursday, the bishop, in spite of the solemnity of

the day, hastened at once to the Chancellor Le Tellier, and secured an

order to stop the publication of the book and to burn the whole edition

of it. Fortunately, a few copies were rescued, and a few years later

the work found a new publisher in Holland; yet not until there had been

attached to it, evidently by some Protestant divine of authority, an

essay warning the reader against its dangerous doctrines. Two years

later a translation was published in England.

This first work of Simon was followed by others, in which he sought, in

the interest of scriptural truth, to throw a new and purer light upon

our sacred literature; but Bossuet proved implacable. Although unable

to suppress all of Simon's works, he was able to drive him from the

Oratory, and to bring him into disrepute among the very men who ought to

have been proud of him as Frenchmen and thankful to him as Christians.

But other scholars of eminence were now working in this field, and chief

among them Le Clerc. Virtually driven out of Geneva, he took refuge

at Amsterdam, and there published a series of works upon the Hebrew

language, the interpretation of Scripture, and the like. In these

he combated the prevalent idea that Hebrew was the primitive tongue,

expressed the opinion that in the plural form of the word used in

Genesis for God, "Elohim," there is a trace of Chaldean polytheism, and,

in his discussion on the serpent who tempted Eve, curiously anticipated

modern geological and zoological ideas by quietly confessing his

inability to see how depriving the serpent of feet and compelling him to

go on his belly could be punishment--since all this was natural to the

animal. He also ventured quasi-scientific explanations of the confusion

of tongues at Babel, the destruction of Sodom, the conversion of Lot's

wife into a pillar of salt, and the dividing of the Red Sea. As to

the Pentateuch in general, he completely rejected the idea that it was

written by Moses. But his most permanent gift to the thinking world was

his answer to those who insisted upon the reference by Christ and his

apostles to Moses as the author of the Pentateuch. The answer became a

formula which has proved effective from his day to ours: "Our Lord and

his apostles did not come into this world to teach criticism to the

Jews, and hence spoke according to the common opinion."

Against all these scholars came a theological storm, but it raged most

pitilessly against Le Clerc. Such renowned theologians as Carpzov in

Germany, Witsius in Holland, and Huet in France berated him unmercifully

and overwhelmed him with assertions which still fill us with wonder.

That of Huet, attributing the origin of pagan as well as Christian

theology to Moses, we have already seen; but Carpzov showed that

Protestantism could not be outdone by Catholicism when he declared, in

the face of all modern knowledge, that not only the matter but the exact

form and words of the Bible had been divinely transmitted to the modern

world free from all error.

At this Le Clerc stood aghast, and finally stammered out a sort of half

recantation.(475)

(475) For Carlstadt, and Luther's dealings with him on various accounts,

see Meyer, Geschichte der exegese, vol. ii, pp. 373, 397. As to the

value of Maes's work in general, see Meyer, vol. ii, p. 125; and as

to the sort of work in question, ibid., vol. iii, p. 425, note. For

Carlstadt, see also Farrar, History of Interpretation, and Moore's

introduction, as above. For Hobbes's view that the Pentateuch was

written long after Moses's day, see the Leviathan, vol. iii, p. 33. For

La Peyrere's view, see especially his Prae-Adamitae, lib. iv, chap. ii,

also lib. ii, passim; also Lecky, Rationalism in Europe, vol. i, p. 294;

also interesting points in Bayle's Dictionary. For Spinoza's view,

see the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, chaps. ii and iii, and for

the persecution, see the various biographies. Details regarding the

demonstration against the unveiling of his statue were given to the

present writer at the time by Berthold Auerbach, who took part in the

ceremony. For Morinus and Cappellus, see Farrar, as above, p. 387

and note. For Richard Simon, see his Histoire Critique de l'Ancien

Testament, liv. i, chaps. ii, iii, iv, v, and xiii. For his denial

of the prevailing theory regarding Hebrew, see liv. i, chap. iv. For

Morinus (Morin) and his work, see the Biog. Univ. and Nouvelle Biog.

Generale; also Curtiss. For Bousset's opposition to Simon, see the

Histoire de Bousser in the Oeuvres de Bousset, Paris, 1846, tome xii,

pp. 330, 331; also t. x, p. 378; also sundry attacks in various volumes.

It is interesting to note that among the chief instigators of the

persecution were the Port-Royalists, upon whose persecution afterward by

the Jesuits so much sympathy has been lavished by the Protestant world.

For Le Clerc, see especially his Pentateuchus, Prolegom, dissertat.

i; also Com. in Genes., cap. vi-viii. For a translation of selected

passages on the points noted, see Twelve Dissertations out of Monsieur

LeClerc's Genesis, done out of Latin by Mr. Brown, London, 1696; also Le

Clerc's Sentiments de Quelques Theologiens de Hollande, passim; also his

work on Inspiration, English translation, Boston, 1820, pp. 47-50,

also 57-67. For Witsius and Carpzov, see Curtiss, as above. For some

subordinate points in the earlier growth of the opinion at present

dominant, see Briggs, The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch, New York,

1893, chap. iv.

During the eighteenth century constant additions were made to the

enormous structure of orthodox scriptural interpretation, some of them

gaining the applause of the Christian world then, though nearly all

are utterly discredited now. But in 1753 appeared two contributions

of permanent influence, though differing vastly in value. In the

comparative estimate of these two works the world has seen a remarkable

reversal of public opinion.

The first of these was Bishop Lowth's Prelections upon the Sacred Poetry

of the Hebrews. In this was well brought out that characteristic of

Hebrew poetry to which it owes so much of its peculiar charm--its

parallelism.

The second of these books was Astruc's Conjectures on the Original

Memoirs which Moses used in composing the Book of Genesis. In this

was for the first time clearly revealed the fact that, amid various

fragments of old writings, at least two main narratives enter into the

composition of Genesis; that in the first of these is generally used as

an appellation of the Almighty the word "Elohim," and in the second the

word "Yahveh" (Jehovah); that each narrative has characteristics of its

own, in thought and expression, which distinguish it from the other;

that, by separating these, two clear and distinct narratives may be

obtained, each consistent with itself, and that thus, and thus alone,

can be explained the repetitions, discrepancies, and contradictions in

Genesis which so long baffled the ingenuity of commentators, especially

the two accounts of the creation, so utterly inconsistent with each

other.

Interesting as was Lowth's book, this work by Astruc was, as the

thinking world now acknowledges, infinitely more important; it was,

indeed, the most valuable single contribution ever made to biblical

study. But such was not the judgment of the world THEN. While Lowth's

book was covered with honour and its author promoted from the bishopric

of St. David's to that of London, and even offered the primacy,

Astruc and his book were covered with reproach. Though, as an orthodox

Catholic, he had mainly desired to reassert the authorship of Moses

against the argument of Spinoza, he received no thanks on that account.

Theologians of all creeds sneered at him as a doctor of medicine who had

blundered beyond his province; his fellow-Catholics in France bitterly

denounced him as a heretic; and in Germany the great Protestant

theologian, Michaelis, who had edited and exalted Lowth's work, poured

contempt over Astruc as an ignoramus.

The case of Astruc is one of the many which show the wonderful power of

the older theological reasoning to close the strongest minds against

the clearest truths. The fact which he discovered is now as definitely

established as any in the whole range of literature or science. It has

become as clear as the day, and yet for two thousand years the minds of

professional theologians, Jewish and Christian, were unable to detect

it. Not until this eminent physician applied to the subject a mind

trained in making scientific distinctions was it given to the world.

It was, of course, not possible even for so eminent a scholar as

Michaelis to pooh-pooh down a discovery so pregnant; and, curiously

enough, it was one of Michaelis's own scholars, Eichhorn, who did the

main work in bringing the new truth to bear upon the world. He, with

others, developed out of it the theory that Genesis, and indeed the

Pentateuch, is made up entirely of fragments of old writings, mainly

disjointed. But they did far more than this: they impressed upon the

thinking part of Christendom the fact that the Bible is not a BOOK, but

a LITERATURE; that the style is not supernatural and unique, but simply

the Oriental style of the lands and times in which its various parts

were written; and that these must be studied in the light of the modes

of thought and statement and the literary habits generally of Oriental

peoples. From Eichhorn's time the process which, by historical,

philological, and textual research, brings out the truth regarding this

literature has been known as "the higher criticism."

He was a deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his efforts was the

desire to bring back to the Church the educated classes, who had been

repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy; but this only increased

hostility to him. Opposition met him in Germany at every turn; and in

England, Lloyd, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, who sought

patronage for a translation of Eichhorn's work, was met generally with

contempt and frequently with insult.

Throughout Catholic Germany it was even worse. In 1774 Isenbiehl, a

priest at Mayence who had distinguished himself as a Greek and Hebrew

scholar, happened to question the usual interpretation of the passage in

Isaiah which refers to the virgin-born Immanuel, and showed then--what

every competent critic knows now--that it had reference to events looked

for in older Jewish history. The censorship and faculty of theology

attacked him at once and brought him before the elector. Luckily, this

potentate was one of the old easy-going prince-bishops, and contented

himself with telling the priest that, though his contention was perhaps

true, he "must remain in the old paths, and avoid everything likely to

make trouble."

But at the elector's death, soon afterward, the theologians renewed the

attack, threw Isenbiehl out of his professorship and degraded him. One

insult deserves mention for its ingenuity. It was declared that

he--the successful and brilliant professor--showed by the obnoxious

interpretation that he had not yet rightly learned the Scriptures; he

was therefore sent back to the benches of the theological school, and

made to take his seat among the ingenuous youth who were conning the

rudiments of theology. At this he made a new statement, so carefully

guarded that it disarmed many of his enemies, and his high scholarship

soon won for him a new professorship of Greek--the condition being that

he should cease writing upon Scripture. But a crafty bookseller having

republished his former book, and having protected himself by keeping the

place and date of publication secret, a new storm fell upon the author;

he was again removed from his professorship and thrown into prison; his

book was forbidden, and all copies of it in that part of Germany were

confiscated. In 1778, having escaped from prison, he sought refuge with

another of the minor rulers who in blissful unconsciousness were doing

their worst while awaiting the French Revolution, but was at once

delivered up to the Mayence authorities and again thrown into prison.

The Pope, Pius VI, now intervened with a brief on Isenbiehl's book,

declaring it "horrible, false, perverse, destructive, tainted with

heresy," and excommunicating all who should read it. At this, Isenbiehl,

declaring that he had written it in the hope of doing a service to the

Church, recanted, and vegetated in obscurity until his death in 1818.

But, despite theological faculties, prince-bishops, and even popes, the

new current of thought increased in strength and volume, and into it at

the end of the eighteenth century came important contributions from two

sources widely separated and most dissimilar.

The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was the

work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had anticipated some of

those ideas of an evolutionary process in nature and in literature which

first gained full recognition nearly three quarters of a century after

him; but his greatest service in the field of biblical study was his

work, at once profound and brilliant, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In

this field he eclipsed Bishop Lowth. Among other things of importance,

he showed that the Psalms were by different authors and of different

periods--the bloom of a great poetic literature.

Until his time no one had so clearly done justice to their sublimity and

beauty; but most striking of all was his discussion of Solomon's Song.

For over twenty centuries it had been customary to attribute to it

mystical meanings. If here and there some man saw the truth, he was

careful, like Aben Ezra, to speak with bated breath.

The penalty for any more honest interpretation was seen, among

Protestants, when Calvin and Beza persecuted Castellio, covered him with

obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for throwing

light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and among Catholics

it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and gifted Luis de Leon,

for a similar offence, to be thrown into a dungeon of the Inquisition

and kept there for five years, until his health was utterly shattered

and his spirit so broken that he consented to publish a new commentary

on the song, "as theological and obscure as the most orthodox could

desire."

Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older biblical

theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying the weaker.

Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two thousand years for a

physician to reveal the simplest fact regarding its structure, so the

Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its

beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it;

St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters;

Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and

Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from

Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated

it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among

scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent the

love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church; the

praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the body;

sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history from the

Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute Protestant

divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany

and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how

really competent reasoners could thus argue without laughing in each

other's faces, after the manner of Cicero's augurs. Herder showed

Solomon's Song to be what the whole thinking world now knows it to

be--simply an Oriental love-poem.

But his frankness brought him into trouble: he was bitterly assailed.

Neither his noble character nor his genius availed him. Obliged to flee

from one pastorate to another, he at last found a happy refuge at

Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean Paul, and thence he

exercised a powerful influence in removing noxious and parasitic growths

from religious thought.

It would hardly be possible to imagine a man more different from

Herder than was the other of the two who most influenced biblical

interpretation at the end of the eighteenth century. This was Alexander

Geddes--a Roman Catholic priest and a Scotchman. Having at an early

period attracted much attention by his scholarship, and having received

the very rare distinction, for a Catholic, of a doctorate from the

University of Aberdeen, he began publishing in 1792 a new translation of

the Old Testament, and followed this in 1800 with a volume of critical

remarks. In these he supported mainly three views: first, that the

Pentateuch in its present form could not have been written by Moses;

secondly, that it was the work of various hands; and, thirdly, that it

could not have been written before the time of David. Although there

was a fringe of doubtful theories about them, these main conclusions,

supported as they were by deep research and cogent reasoning, are now

recognised as of great value. But such was not the orthodox opinion

then. Though a man of sincere piety, who throughout his entire life

remained firm in the faith of his fathers, he and his work were at

once condemned: he was suspended by the Catholic authorities as a

misbeliever, denounced by Protestants as an infidel, and taunted by both

as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost." Of course, by this

taunt was meant nothing more than that he dissented from sundry ideas

inherited from less enlightened times by the men who just then happened

to wield ecclesiastical power.

But not all the opposition to him could check the evolution of his

thought. A line of great men followed in these paths opened by Astruc

and Eichhorn, and broadened by Herder and Geddes. Of these was De Wette,

whose various works, especially his Introduction to the Old Testament,

gave a new impulse early in the nineteenth century to fruitful thought

throughout Christendom. In these writings, while showing how largely

myths and legends had entered into the Hebrew sacred books, he threw

especial light into the books Deuteronomy and Chronicles. The former

he showed to be, in the main, a late priestly summary of law, and the

latter a very late priestly recast of early history. He had, indeed, to

pay a penalty for thus aiding the world in its march toward more truth,

for he was driven out of Germany, and obliged to take refuge in a

Swiss professorship; while Theodore Parker, who published an English

translation of his work, was, for this and similar sins, virtually

rejected by what claimed to be the most liberal of all Christian bodies

in the United States.

But contributions to the new thought continued from quarters whence

least was expected. Gesenius, by his Hebrew Grammar, and Ewald, by his

historical studies, greatly advanced it.

To them and to all like them during the middle years of the nineteenth

century was sturdily opposed the colossus of orthodoxy--Hengstenberg. In

him was combined the haughtiness of a Prussian drill-sergeant, the zeal

of a Spanish inquisitor, and the flippant brutality of a French orthodox

journalist. Behind him stood the gifted but erratic Frederick William

IV--a man admirably fitted for a professorship of aesthetics, but whom

an inscrutable fate had made King of Prussia. Both these rulers in the

German Israel arrayed all possible opposition against the great scholars

labouring in the new paths; but this opposition was vain: the succession

of acute and honest scholars continued: Vatke, Bleek, Reuss, Graf,

Kayser, Hupfeld, Delitzsch, Kuenen, and others wrought on in Germany and

Holland, steadily developing the new truth.

Especially to be mentioned among these is Hupfeld, who published in 1853

his treatise on The Sources of Genesis. Accepting the Conjectures which

Astruc had published just a hundred years before, he established what

has ever since been recognised by the leading biblical commentators as

the true basis of work upon the Pentateuch--the fact that THREE true

documents are combined in Genesis, each with its own characteristics.

He, too, had to pay a price for letting more light upon the world. A

determined attempt was made to punish him. Though deeply religious in

his nature and aspirations, he was denounced in 1865 to the Prussian

Government as guilty of irreverence; but, to the credit of his noble and

true colleagues who trod in the more orthodox paths--men like Tholuck

and Julius Muller--the theological faculty of the University of Halle

protested against this persecuting effort, and it was brought to naught.

The demonstrations of Hupfeld gave new life to biblical scholarship in

all lands. More and more clear became the evidence that throughout the

Pentateuch, and indeed in other parts of our sacred books, there had

been a fusion of various ideas, a confounding of various epochs, and a

compilation of various documents. Thus was opened a new field of thought

and work: in sifting out this literature; in rearranging it; and in

bringing it into proper connection with the history of the Jewish race

and of humanity.

Astruc and Hupfeld having thus found a key to the true character of the

"Mosaic" Scriptures, a second key was found which opened the way to the

secret of order in all this chaos. For many generations one thing had

especially puzzled commentators and given rise to masses of futile

"reconciliation": this was the patent fact that such men as Samuel,

David, Elijah, Isaiah, and indeed the whole Jewish people down to the

Exile, showed in all their utterances and actions that they were utterly

ignorant of that vast system of ceremonial law which, according to the

accounts attributed to Moses and other parts of our sacred books, was in

full force during their time and during nearly a thousand years before

the Exile. It was held "always, everywhere, and by all," that in the

Old Testament the chronological order of revelation was: first, the

law; secondly, the Psalms; thirdly, the prophets. This belief continued

unchallenged during more than two thousand years, and until after the

middle of the nineteenth century.

Yet, as far back as 1835, Vatke at Berlin had, in his Religion of the

Old Testament, expressed his conviction that this belief was unfounded.

Reasoning that Jewish thought must have been subject to the laws of

development which govern other systems, he arrived at the conclusion

that the legislation ascribed to Moses, and especially the elaborate

paraphernalia and composite ceremonies of the ritual, could not have

come into being at a period so rude as that depicted in the "Mosaic"

accounts.

Although Vatke wrapped this statement in a mist of Hegelian metaphysics,

a sufficient number of watchmen on the walls of the Prussian Zion saw

its meaning, and an alarm was given. The chroniclers tell us that "fear

of failing in the examinations, through knowing too much, kept students

away from Vatke's lectures." Naturally, while Hengstenberg and Frederick

William IV were commanding the forces of orthodoxy, Vatke thought it

wise to be silent.

Still, the new idea was in the air; indeed, it had been divined about a

year earlier, on the other side of the Rhine, by a scholar well known

as acute and thoughtful--Reuss, of Strasburg. Unfortunately, he too was

overawed, and he refrained from publishing his thought during more

than forty years. But his ideas were caught by some of his most gifted

scholars; and, of these, Graf and Kayser developed them and had the

courage to publish them.

At the same period this new master key was found and applied by a

greater man than any of these--by Kuenen, of Holland; and thus it was

that three eminent scholars, working in different parts of Europe and on

different lines, in spite of all obstacles, joined in enforcing upon the

thinking world the conviction that the complete Levitical law had

been established not at the beginning, but at the end, of the Jewish

nation--mainly, indeed, after the Jewish nation as an independent

political body had ceased to exist; that this code had not been revealed

in the childhood of Israel, but that it had come into being in a

perfectly natural way during Israel's final decay--during the period

when heroes and prophets had been succeeded by priests. Thus was the

historical and psychological evolution of Jewish institutions brought

into harmony with the natural development of human thought; elaborate

ceremonial institutions being shown to have come after the ruder

beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came

a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older

theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, yielded on all

sides.

The lead in the new epoch thus opened was taken by Kuenen. Starting

with strong prepossessions in favour of the older thought, and even with

violent utterances against some of the supporters of the new view, he

was borne on by his love of truth, until his great work, The Religion of

Israel, published in 1869, attracted the attention of thinking scholars

throughout the world by its arguments in favour of the upward movement.

From him now came a third master key to the mystery; for he showed that

the true opening point for research into the history and literature of

Israel is to be found in the utterances of the great prophets of the

eighth century before our era. Starting from these, he opened new paths

into the periods preceding and following them. Recognising the fact

that the religion of Israel was, like other great world religions, a

development of higher ideas out of lower, he led men to bring deeper

thinking and wider research into the great problem. With ample learning

and irresistible logic he proved that Old Testament history is largely

mingled with myth and legend; that not only were the laws attributed

to Moses in the main a far later development, but that much of their

historical setting was an afterthought; also that Old Testament prophecy

was never supernaturally predictive, and least of all predictive of

events recorded in the New Testament. Thus it was that his genius gave

to the thinking world a new point of view, and a masterly exhibition of

the true method of study. Justly has one of the most eminent divines

of the contemporary Anglican Church indorsed the statement of another

eminent scholar, that "Kuenen stood upon his watch-tower, as it were

the conscience of Old Testament science"; that his work is characterized

"not merely by fine scholarship, critical insight, historical sense, and

a religious nature, but also by an incorruptible conscientiousness, and

a majestic devotion to the quest of truth."

Thus was established the science of biblical criticism. And now the

question was, whether the Church of northern Germany would accept

this great gift--the fruit of centuries of devoted toil and

self-sacrifice--and take the lead of Christendom in and by it.

The great curse of Theology and Ecclesiasticism has always been their

tendency to sacrifice large interests to small--Charity to Creed, Unity

to Uniformity, Fact to Tradition, Ethics to Dogma. And now there were

symptoms throughout the governing bodies of the Reformed churches

indicating a determination to sacrifice leadership in this new thought

to ease in orthodoxy. Every revelation of new knowledge encountered

outcry, opposition, and repression; and, what was worse, the ill-judged

declarations of some unwise workers in the critical field were seized

upon and used to discredit all fruitful research. Fortunately, a man now

appeared who both met all this opposition successfully, and put aside

all the half truths or specious untruths urged by minor critics whose

zeal outran their discretion. This was a great constructive scholar--not

a destroyer, but a builder--Wellhausen. Reverently, but honestly and

courageously, with clearness, fulness, and convicting force, he summed

up the conquests of scientific criticism as bearing on Hebrew history

and literature. These conquests had reduced the vast structures which

theologians had during ages been erecting over the sacred text to

shapeless ruin and rubbish: this rubbish he removed, and brought out

from beneath it the reality. He showed Jewish history as an evolution

obedient to laws at work in all ages, and Jewish literature as a growth

out of individual, tribal, and national life. Thus was our sacred

history and literature given a beauty and high use which had long been

foreign to them. Thereby was a vast service rendered immediately to

Germany, and eventually to all mankind; and this service was greatest of

all in the domain of religion.(476)

(476) For Lowth, see the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, D. D., Professor of the

Interpretation of the Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford,

Founders of the Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, pp. 3, 4.

For Astruc's very high character as a medical authority, see the

Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicales, Paris, 1820; it is significant that

at first he concealed his authorship of the Conjectures. For a brief

statement, see Cheyne; also Moore's introduction to Bacon's Genesis of

Genesis; but for a statement remarkably full and interesting, and based

on knowledge at first hand of Astruc's very rare book, see Curtiss, as

above. For Michaelis and Eichorn, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese;

also Cheyne and Moore. For Isenbiehl, see Reusch, in Allg. deutsche

Biographie. The texts cited against him were Isaiah vii, 14, and Matt.

i, 22, 23. For Herder, see various historians of literature and writers

in exegesis, and especially Pfleiderer, Development of Theology in

Germany, chap. ii. For his influence, as well as that of Lessing, see

Beard's Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For a brief comparison of Lowth's

work with that of Herder, see Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 377.

For examples of interpretations of the Song of Songs, see Farrar, as

above, p. 33. For Castellio (Chatillon), his anticipation of Herder's

view of Solomon's Song, and his persecution by Calvin and Beza, which

drove him to starvation and death, see Lecky, Rationalism, etc.,

vol. ii, pp. 46-48; also Bayle's Dictionary, article Castalio; also

Montaigne's Essais, liv,. i, chap. xxxiv; and especially the new life

of him by Buisson. For the persecution of Luis de Leon for a similar

offence, see Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. ii, pp. 41,

42, and note. For a remarkably frank acceptance of the consequences

flowing from Herder's view of it, see Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 211, 405.

For Geddes, see Cheyne, as above. For Theodore Parker, see his various

biographies, passim. For Reuss, Graf, and Kuenen, see Cheyne, as above;

and for the citations referred to, see the Rev. Dr. Driver, Regius

Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in The Academy, October 27, 1894; also a

note to Wellhausen's article Pentateuch in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

For a generous yet weighty tribute to Kuenen's method, see Pfleiderer,

as above, book iii, chap. ii. For the view of leading Christian critics

on the book of Chronicles, see especially Driver, Introduction to the

Literature of the Old Testament, pp. 495 et seq.; also Wellhausen, as

above; also Hooykaas, Oort, and Kuenen, Bible for Learners. For many of

the foregoing, see also the writings of Prof. W. Robertson Smith; also

Beard's Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For Hupfield and his discovery, see

Cheyne, Founders, etc., as above, chap. vii; also Moore's Introduction.

For a justly indignant judgment of Hengstenberg and his school, see

Canon Farrar, as above, p. 417, note; and for a few words throwing a

bright light into his character and career, see C. A. Briggs, D. D.,

Authority of Holy Scripture, p. 93. For Wellhausen, see Pfleiderer, as

above, book iii, chap. ii. For an excellent popular statement of the

general results of German criticism, see J. T. Sunderland, The Bible,

Its Origin, Growth, and Character, New York and London, 1893.

III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.

The science of biblical criticism was, as we have seen, first developed

mainly in Germany and Holland. Many considerations there, as elsewhere,

combined to deter men from opening new paths to truth: not even in those

countries were these the paths to preferment; but there, at least, the

sturdy Teutonic love of truth for truth's sake, strengthened by the

Kantian ethics, found no such obstacles as in other parts of Europe.

Fair investigation of biblical subjects had not there been extirpated,

as in Italy and Spain; nor had it been forced into channels which led

nowhither, as in France and southern Germany; nor were men who might

otherwise have pursued it dazzled and drawn away from it by the

multitude of splendid prizes for plausibility, for sophistry, or for

silence displayed before the ecclesiastical vision in England. In the

frugal homes of North German and Dutch professors and pastors high

thinking on these great subjects went steadily on, and the "liberty of

teaching," which is the glory of the northern Continental universities,

while it did not secure honest thinkers against vexations, did at least

protect them against the persecutions which in other countries would

have thwarted their studies and starved their families.(477)

(477) As to the influence of Kant on honest thought in Germany, see

Pfleiderer, as above, chap. i.

In England the admission of the new current of thought was apparently

impossible. The traditional system of biblical interpretation seemed

established on British soil forever. It was knit into the whole fabric

of thought and observance; it was protected by the most justly esteemed

hierarchy the world has ever seen; it was intrenched behind the bishops'

palaces, the cathedral stalls, the professors' chairs, the country

parsonages--all these, as a rule, the seats of high endeavour and

beautiful culture. The older thought held a controlling voice in the

senate of the nation; it was dear to the hearts of all classes; it was

superbly endowed; every strong thinker seemed to hold a brief, or to be

in receipt of a retaining fee for it. As to preferment in the Church,

there was a cynical aphorism current, "He may hold anything who will

hold his tongue."(478)

(478) For an eloquent and at the same time profound statement of the

evils flowing from the "moral terrorism" and "intellectual tyrrany"

at Oxford at the period referred to, see quotation in Pfleiderer,

Development of Theology, p. 371.

For the alloy of interested motives among English Church dignitiaries,

see the pungent criticism of Bishop Hampden by Canon Liddon, in his Life

of Pusey, vol. i, p. 363.

Yet, while there was inevitably much alloy of worldly wisdom in the

opposition to the new thought, no just thinker can deny far higher

motives to many, perhaps to most, of the ecclesiastics who were resolute

against it. The evangelical movement incarnate in the Wesleys had not

spent its strength; the movement begun by Pusey, Newman, Keble, and

their compeers was in full force. The aesthetic reaction, represented on

the Continent by Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England

by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in

to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in

this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century

had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and

mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by rococo

work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in

the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological

disputations were fascinated and made devoted reactionists by the newly

revealed beauties of medieval architecture and ritual.(479)

(479) A very curious example of this insensibility among persons of

really high culture is to be found in American literature toward the

end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife of John Adams, afterward

President of the United States, but at that time minister to England,

one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, in her very

interesting letters from England, of her journey to the seashore, refers

to Canterbury Cathedral, seen from her carriage windows, and which she

evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as "looking like a vast

prison." So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the American

plenipotentiary in France, a devoted lover of classical and Renaissance

architecture, giving an account of his journey to Paris, never refers to

any of the beautiful cathedrals or churches upon his route.

The centre and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction against

the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the University of Oxford.

Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special exponent of its spirit and

object of its admiration was its member of Parliament, Mr. William Ewart

Gladstone, who, having begun his political career by a laboured plea

for the union of church and state, ended it by giving that union what

is likely to be a death-blow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in

the days of the Byzantine emperors was hardly more wildly orthodox than

the mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the Anglo-Saxon

race during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Moslem

students of El Azhar are hardly more intolerant now than these English

students were then. A curious proof of this had been displayed just

before the end of that period. The minister of the United States at the

court of St. James was then Edward Everett. He was undoubtedly the most

accomplished scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that America

had produced; his eloquence in early life had made him perhaps the most

admired of American preachers; his classical learning had at a later

period made him Professor of Greek at Harvard; he had successfully

edited the leading American review, and had taken a high place in

American literature; he had been ten years a member of Congress; he had

been again and again elected Governor of Massachusetts; and in all

these posts he had shown amply those qualities which afterward made him

President of Harvard, Secretary of State of the United States, and

a United States Senator. His character and attainments were of the

highest, and, as he was then occupying the foremost place in the

diplomatic service of his country, he was invited to receive an

appropriate honorary degree at Oxford. But, on his presentation for

it in the Sheldonian Theatre, there came a revelation to the people he

represented, and indeed to all Christendom: a riot having been

carefully prepared beforehand by sundry zealots, he was most grossly and

ingeniously insulted by the mob of undergraduates and bachelors of art

in the galleries and masters of arts on the floor; and the reason for

this was that, though by no means radical in his religious opinions, he

was thought to have been in his early life, and to be possibly at

that time, below what was then the Oxford fashion in belief, or rather

feeling, regarding the mystery of the Trinity.

At the centre of biblical teaching at Oxford sat Pusey, Regius Professor

of Hebrew, a scholar who had himself remained for a time at a German

university, and who early in life had imbibed just enough of the German

spirit to expose him to suspicion and even to attack. One charge

against him at that time shows curiously what was then expected of a

man perfectly sound in the older Anglican theology. He had ventured

to defend holy writ with the argument that there were fishes actually

existing which could have swallowed the prophet Jonah. The argument

proved unfortunate. He was attacked on the scriptural ground that the

fish which swallowed Jonah was created for that express purpose. He,

like others, fell back under the charm of the old system: his ideas

gave force to the reaction: in the quiet of his study, which, especially

after the death of his son, became a hermitage, he relapsed into

patristic and medieval conceptions of Christianity, enforcing them from

the pulpit and in his published works. He now virtually accepted the

famous dictum of Hugo of St. Victor--that one is first to find what is

to be believed, and then to search the Scriptures for proofs of it. His

devotion to the main features of the older interpretation was seen at

its strongest in his utterances regarding the book of Daniel. Just as

Cardinal Bellarmine had insisted that the doctrine of the incarnation

depends upon the retention of the Ptolemaic astronomy; just as Danzius

had insisted that the very continuance of religion depends on the

divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation; just as Peter Martyr had made

everything sacred depend on the literal acceptance of Genesis; just as

Bishop Warburton had insisted that Christianity absolutely depends upon

a right interpretation of the prophecies regarding Antichrist; just

as John Wesley had insisted that the truth of the Bible depends on the

reality of witchcraft; just as, at a later period, Bishop Wilberforce

insisted that the doctrine of the Incarnation depends on the "Mosaic"

statements regarding the origin of man; and just as Canon Liddon

insisted that Christianity itself depends on a literal belief in Noah's

flood, in the transformation of Lot's wife, and in the sojourn of Jonah

in the whale: so did Pusey then virtually insist that Christianity must

stand or fall with the early date of the book of Daniel. Happily, though

the Ptolemaic astronomy, and witchcraft, and the Genesis creation myths,

and the Adam, Noah, Lot, and Jonah legends, and the divine origin of

the Hebrew punctuation, and the prophecies regarding Antichrist, and the

early date of the book of Daniel have now been relegated to the limbo of

ontworn beliefs, Christianity has but come forth the stronger.

Nothing seemed less likely than that such a vast intrenched camp as that

of which Oxford was the centre could be carried by an effort proceeding

from a few isolated German and Dutch scholars. Yet it was the unexpected

which occurred; and it is instructive to note that, even at the

period when the champions of the older thought were to all appearance

impregnably intrenched in England, a way had been opened into their

citadel, and that the most effective agents in preparing it were really

the very men in the universities and cathedral chapters who had most

distinguished themselves by uncompromising and intolerant orthodoxy.

A rapid survey of the history of general literary criticism at that

epoch will reveal this fact fully. During the last decade of the

seventeenth century there had taken place the famous controversy

over the Letters of Phalaris, in which, against Charles Boyle and his

supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard Bentley at Cambridge, who

insisted that the letters were spurious. In the series of battles royal

which followed, although Boyle, aided by Atterbury, afterward so noted

for his mingled ecclesiastical and political intrigues, had gained a

temporary triumph by wit and humour, Bentley's final attack had proved

irresistible. Drawing from the stores of his wonderfully wide and minute

knowledge, he showed that the letters could not have been written in the

time of Phalaris--proving this by an exhibition of their style, which

could not then have been in use, of their reference to events which had

not then taken place, and of a mass of considerations which no one but

a scholar almost miraculously gifted could have marshalled so fully. The

controversy had attracted attention not only in England but throughout

Europe. With Bentley's reply it had ended. In spite of public applause

at Atterbury's wit, scholars throughout the world acknowledged Bentley's

victory: he was recognised as the foremost classical scholar of his

time; the mastership of Trinity, which he accepted, and the Bristol

bishopric, which he rejected, were his formal reward.

Although, in his new position as head of the greatest college in

England, he went to extreme lengths on the orthodox side in biblical

theology, consenting even to support the doctrine that the Hebrew

punctuation was divinely inspired, this was as nothing compared with the

influence of the system of criticism which he introduced into English

studies of classical literature in preparing the way for the application

of a similar system to ALL literature, whether called sacred or profane.

Up to that period there had really been no adequate criticism of ancient

literature. Whatever name had been attached to any ancient writing was

usually accepted as the name of the author: what texts should be imputed

to an author was settled generally on authority. But with Bentley began

a new epoch. His acute intellect and exquisite touch revealed clearly

to English scholars the new science of criticism, and familiarized the

minds of thinking men with the idea that the texts of ancient literature

must be submitted to this science. Henceforward a new spirit reigned

among the best classical scholars, prophetic of more and more light in

the greater field of sacred literature. Scholars, of whom Porson was

chief, followed out this method, and though at times, as in Porson's

own case, they were warned off, with much loss and damage, from the

application of it to the sacred text, they kept alive the better

tradition.

A hundred years after Bentley's main efforts appeared in Germany another

epoch-making book--Wolf's Introduction to Homer. In this was broached

the theory that the Iliad and Odyssey are not the works of a single

great poet, but are made up of ballad literature wrought into unity by

more or less skilful editing. In spite of various changes and phases of

opinion on this subject since Wolf's day, he dealt a killing blow at

the idea that classical works are necessarily to be taken at what may be

termed their face value.

More and more clearly it was seen that the ideas of early copyists, and

even of early possessors of masterpieces in ancient literature, were

entirely different from those to which the modern world is accustomed.

It was seen that manipulations and interpolations in the text by

copyists and possessors had long been considered not merely venial sins,

but matters of right, and that even the issuing of whole books under

assumed names had been practised freely.

In 1811 a light akin to that thrown by Bentley and Wolf upon ancient

literature was thrown by Niebuhr upon ancient history. In his History

of Rome the application of scientific principles to the examination

of historical sources was for the first time exhibited largely and

brilliantly. Up to that period the time-honoured utterances of ancient

authorities had been, as a rule, accepted as final: no breaking away,

even from the most absurd of them, was looked upon with favour, and any

one presuming to go behind them was regarded as troublesome and even as

dangerous.

Through this sacred conventionalism Niebuhr broke fearlessly, and,

though at times overcritical, he struck from the early history of Rome a

vast mass of accretions, and gave to the world a residue infinitely more

valuable than the original amalgam of myth, legend, and chronicle.

His methods were especially brought to bear on students' history by

one of the truest men and noblest scholars that the English race

has produced--Arnold of Rugby--and, in spite of the inevitable heavy

conservatism, were allowed to do their work in the field of ancient

history as well as in that of ancient classical literature.

The place of myth in history thus became more and more understood,

and historical foundations, at least so far as SECULAR history was

concerned, were henceforth dealt with in a scientific spirit. The

extension of this new treatment to ALL ancient literature and history

was now simply a matter of time.

Such an extension had already begun; for in 1829 had appeared Milman's

History of the Jews. In this work came a further evolution of the

truths and methods suggested by Bentley, Wolf, and Niebuhr, and their

application to sacred history was made strikingly evident. Milman,

though a clergyman, treated the history of the chosen people in the

light of modern knowledge of Oriental and especially of Semitic peoples.

He exhibited sundry great biblical personages of the wandering days

of Israel as sheiks or emirs or Bedouin chieftains; and the tribes of

Israel as obedient then to the same general laws, customs, and ideas

governing wandering tribes in the same region now. He dealt with

conflicting sources somewhat in the spirit of Bentley, and with the

mythical, legendary, and miraculous somewhat in the spirit of Niebuhr.

This treatment of the history of the Jews, simply as the development of

an Oriental tribe, raised great opposition. Such champions of orthodoxy

as Bishop Mant and Dr. Faussett straightway took the field, and with

such effect that the Family Library, a very valuable series in which

Milman's history appeared, was put under the ban, and its further

publication stopped. For years Milman, though a man of exquisite

literary and lofty historical gifts, as well as of most honourable

character, was debarred from preferment and outstripped by ecclesiastics

vastly inferior to him in everything save worldly wisdom; for years he

was passed in the race for honours by divines who were content either

to hold briefs for all the contemporary unreason which happened to be

popular, or to keep their mouths shut altogether. This opposition to him

extended to his works. For many years they were sneered at, decried, and

kept from the public as far as possible.

Fortunately, the progress of events lifted him, before the closing years

of his life, above all this opposition. As Dean of St. Paul's he really

outranked the contemporary archbishops: he lived to see his main ideas

accepted, and his History of Latin Christianity received as certainly

one of the most valuable, and no less certainly the most attractive, of

all Church histories ever written.

The two great English histories of Greece--that by Thirlwall, which was

finished, and that by Grote, which was begun, in the middle years of

the nineteenth century--came in to strengthen this new development. By

application of the critical method to historical sources, by pointing

out more and more fully the inevitable part played by myth and legend

in early chronicles, by displaying more and more clearly the ease

with which interpolations of texts, falsifications of statements, and

attributions to pretended authors were made, they paved the way still

further toward a just and fruitful study of sacred literature.(480)

(480) For Mr. Gladstone's earlier opinion, see his Church and State, and

Macaulay's review of it. For Pusey, see Mozley, Ward, Newman's

Apologia, Dean Church, etc., and especially his Life, by Liddon. Very

characteristic touches are given in vol. i, showing the origin of many

of his opinions (see letter on p. 184). For the scandalous treatment of

Mr. Everett by the clerical mob at Oxford, see a rather jaunty account

of the preparations and of the whole performance in a letter written at

the time from Oxford by the late Dean Church, in The Life and Letters of

Dean Church, London, 1894, pp. 40, 41. For a brief but excellent summary

of the character and services of Everett, see J. F. Rhodes's History of

the United States from the Compromise of 1850, New York, 1893, vol.

i, pp. 291 et seq. For a succinct and brilliant history of the

Bentley-Boyle controversy, see Macauley's article on Bentley in the

Encyclopaedia Britannica; also Beard's Hibbert Lectures for 1893, pp.

344, 345; also Dissertation in Bentley's work, edited by Dyce, London,

1836, vol. i, especially the preface. For Wolf, see his Prolegomena ad

Homerum, Halle, 1795; for its effects, see the admirable brief statement

in Beard, as above, p. 345. For Niebuhr, see his Roman History,

translated by Hare and Thirlwall, London, 1828; also Beard, as above.

For Milman's view, see, as a specimen, his History of the Jews, last

edition, especially pp. 15-27. For a noble tribute to his character, see

the preface to Lecky's History of European Morals. For Thirlwall, see

his History of Greece, passim; also his letters; also his Charge of the

Bishop of St. David's, 1863.

Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the traditionally orthodox

side of English scholarship, while it had not been able to maintain

any effective quarantine against Continental criticism of classical

literature, had been able to keep up barriers fairly strong against

Continental discussions of sacred literature. But in the second half of

the nineteenth century these barriers were broken at many points, and,

the stream of German thought being united with the current of devotion

to truth in England, there appeared early in 1860 a modest volume

entitled Essays and Reviews. This work discussed sundry of the older

theological positions which had been rendered untenable by modern

research, and brought to bear upon them the views of the newer school

of biblical interpretation. The authors were, as a rule, scholars in

the prime of life, holding influential positions in the universities and

public schools. They were seven--the first being Dr. Temple, a successor

of Arnold at Rugby; and the others, the Rev. Dr. Rowland Williams, Prof.

Baden Powell, the Rev. H. B. Wilson, Mr. C. W. Goodwin, the Rev. Mark

Pattison, and the Rev. Prof. Jowett--the only one of the seven not in

holy orders being Goodwin. All the articles were important, though

the first, by Temple, on The Education of the World, and the last, by

Jowett, on The Interpretation of Scripture, being the most moderate,

served most effectually as entering wedges into the old tradition.

At first no great attention was paid to the book, the only notice being

the usual attempts in sundry clerical newspapers to pooh-pooh it. But in

October, 1860, appeared in the Westminster Review an article exulting

in the work as an evidence that the new critical method had at last

penetrated the Church of England.

The opportunity for defending the Church was at once seized by no less a

personage than Bishop Wilberforce, of Oxford, the same who a few months

before had secured a fame more lasting than enviable by his attacks on

Darwin and the evolutionary theory. His first onslaught was made in

a charge to his clergy. This he followed up with an article in the

Quarterly Review, very explosive in its rhetoric, much like that which

he had devoted in the same periodical to Darwin. The bishop declared

that the work tended "toward infidelity, if not to atheism"; that the

writers had been "guilty of criminal levity"; that, with the exception

of the essay by Dr. Temple, their writings were "full of sophistries and

scepticisms." He was especially bitter against Prof. Jowett's dictum,

"Interpret the Scripture like any other book"; he insisted that Mr.

Goodwin's treatment of the Mosaic account of the origin of man "sweeps

away the whole basis of inspiration and leaves no place for the

Incarnation"; and through the article were scattered such rhetorical

adornments as the words "infidel," "atheistic," "false," and "wanton."

It at once attracted wide attention, but its most immediate effect

was to make the fortune of Essays and Reviews, which was straightway

demanded on every hand, went through edition after edition, and became a

power in the land. At this a panic began, and with the usual results

of panic--much folly and some cruelty. Addresses from clergy and laity,

many of them frantic with rage and fear, poured in upon the bishops,

begging them to save Christianity and the Church: a storm of abuse

arose: the seven essayists were stigmatized as "the seven extinguishers

of the seven lamps of the Apocalypse," "the seven champions NOT of

Christendom." As a result of all this pressure, Sumner, Archbishop of

Canterbury, one of the last of the old, kindly, bewigged pluralists

of the Georgian period, headed a declaration, which was signed by the

Archbishop of York and a long list of bishops, expressing pain at

the appearance of the book, but doubts as to the possibility of any

effective dealing with it. This letter only made matters worse.

The orthodox decried it as timid, and the liberals denounced it as

irregular. The same influences were exerted in the sister island, and

the Protestant archbishops in Ireland issued a joint letter warning the

faithful against the "disingenuousness" of the book. Everything seemed

to increase the ferment. A meeting of clergy and laity having been held

at Oxford in the matter of electing a Professor of Sanscrit, the older

orthodox party, having made every effort to defeat the eminent scholar

Max Miller, and all in vain, found relief after their defeat in new

denunciations of Essays and Reviews.

Of the two prelates who might have been expected to breast the storm,

Tait, Bishop of London, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury, bent to it

for a period, though he soon recovered himself and did good service; the

other, Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, bided his time, and, when the

proper moment came, struck most effective blows for truth and justice.

Tait, large-minded and shrewd, one of the most statesmanlike of

prelates, at first endeavoured to detach Temple and Jowett from their

associates; but, though Temple was broken down with a load of care,

and especially by the fact that he had upon his shoulders the school at

Rugby, whose patrons had become alarmed at his connection with the book,

he showed a most refreshing courage and manliness. A passage from his

letters to the Bishop of London runs as follows: "With regard to my own

conduct I can only say that nothing on earth will induce me to do what

you propose. I do not judge for others, but in me it would be base and

untrue." On another occasion Dr. Temple, when pressed in the interest

of the institution of learning under his care to detach himself from his

associates in writing the book, declared to a meeting of the masters

of the school that, if any statements were made to the effect that he

disapproved of the other writers in the volume, he should probably find

it his duty to contradict them. Another of these letters to the Bishop

of London contains sundry passages of great force. One is as follows:

"Many years ago you urged us from the university pulpit to undertake the

critical study of the Bible. You said that it was a dangerous study, but

indispensable. You described its difficulties, and those who listened

must have felt a confidence (as I assuredly did, for I was there) that

if they took your advice and entered on the task, you, at any rate,

would never join in treating them unjustly if their study had brought

with it the difficulties you described. Such a study, so full of

difficulties, imperatively demands freedom for its condition. To tell a

man to study, and yet bid him, under heavy penalties, come to the same

conclusions with those who have not studied, is to mock him. If the

conclusions are prescribed, the study is precluded." And again, what,

as coming from a man who has since held two of the most important

bishoprics in the English Church, is of great importance: "What can be a

grosser superstition than the theory of literal inspiration? But because

that has a regular footing it is to be treated as a good man's mistake,

while the courage to speak the truth about the first chapter of Genesis

is a wanton piece of wickedness."