I.  THE OLDER INTERPRETATION.


The great sacred books of the world are the most precious of

human possessions.  They embody the deepest searchings into the

most vital problems of humanity in all its stages:  the naive

guesses of the world's childhood, the opening conceptions of its

youth, the more fully rounded beliefs of its maturity.



These books, no matter how unhistorical in parts and at times,

are profoundly true.  They mirror the evolution of man's

loftiest aspirations, hopes, loves, consolations, and

enthusiasms; his hates and fears; his views of his origin and

destiny; his theories of his rights and duties; and these not

merely in their lights but in their shadows.  Therefore it is

that they contain the germs of truths most necessary in the

evolution of humanity, and give to these germs the environment

and sustenance which best insure their growth and strength.



With wide differences in origin and character, this sacred

literature has been developed and has exercised its influence in

obedience to certain general laws.  First of these in time, if

not in importance, is that which governs its origin:  in all

civilizations we find that the Divine Spirit working in the mind

of man shapes his sacred books first of all out of the chaos of

myth and legend; and of these books, when life is thus breathed

into them, the fittest survive.



So broad and dense is this atmosphere of myth and legend

enveloping them that it lingers about them after they have been

brought forth full-orbed; and, sometimes, from it are even

produced secondary mythical and legendary concretions--satellites

about these greater orbs of early thought.  Of these secondary

growths one may be mentioned as showing how rich in myth-making

material was the atmosphere which enveloped our own earlier

sacred literature.



In the third century before Christ there began to be elaborated

among the Jewish scholars of Alexandria, then the great centre of

human thought, a Greek translation of the main books constituting

the Old Testament.  Nothing could be more natural at that place

and time than such a translation; yet the growth of explanatory

myth and legend around it was none the less luxuriant.  There

was indeed a twofold growth.  Among the Jews favourable to the

new version a legend rose which justified it.  This legend in its

first stage was to the effect that the Ptolemy then on the

Egyptian throne had, at the request of his chief librarian, sent

to Jerusalem for translators; that the Jewish high priest

Eleazar had sent to the king a most precious copy of the

Scriptures from the temple at Jerusalem, and six most venerable,

devout, and learned scholars from each of the twelve tribes of

Israel; that the number of translators thus corresponded with the

mysterious seventy-two appellations of God; and that the combined

efforts of these seventy-two men produced a marvellously perfect

translation.



But in that atmosphere of myth and marvel the legend continued to

grow, and soon we have it blooming forth yet more gorgeously in

the statement that King Ptolemy ordered each of the seventy-two

to make by himself a full translation of the entire Old

Testament, and shut up each translator in a separate cell on the

island of Pharos, secluding him there until the work was done;

that the work of each was completed in exactly seventy-two days;

and that when, at the end of the seventy-two days, the

seventy-two translations were compared, each was found exactly

like all the others.  This showed clearly Jehovah's APPROVAL.



But out of all this myth and legend there was also evolved an

account of a very different sort.  The Jews who remained

faithful to the traditions of their race regarded this Greek

version as a profanation, and therefore there grew up the legend

that on the completion of the work there was darkness over the

whole earth during three days.  This showed clearly Jehovah's

DISAPPROVAL.



These well-known legends, which arose within what--as compared

with any previous time--was an exceedingly enlightened period,

and which were steadfastly believed by a vast multitude of Jews

and Christians for ages, are but single examples among scores

which show how inevitably such traditions regarding sacred books

are developed in the earlier stages of civilization, when men

explain everything by miracle and nothing by law.[461]



[461] For the legend regarding the Septaguint, especially as

developed by the letters of Pseudo-Aristeas, and for quaint

citations from the fathers regarding it, see The History of the

Seventy-two Interpretors, from the Greek of Aristeas, translated

by Mr. Lewis, London, 1715; also Clement of Alexandria, in the

Ante-Nicene Christian Library, Edinburgh, 1867, p. 448.  For

interesting summaries showing the growth of the story, see

Drummond, Philo Judaeus and the Growth of the Alexandrian

Philosophy, London, 1888, vol. i, pp. 231 et seq.; also Renan,

Histoire du Peuple Israel, vol. iv, chap. iv; also, for Philo

Judaeus's part in developing the legend, see Rev. Dr. Sanday's

Bampton Lectures for 1893, on Inspiration, pp. 86, 87.





As the second of these laws governing the evolution of sacred

literature may be mentioned that which we have constantly seen so

effective in the growth of theological ideas--that to which Comte

gave the name of the Law of Wills and Causes.  Obedient to

this, man attributes to the Supreme Being a physical,

intellectual, and moral structure like his own; hence it is that

the votary of each of the great world religions ascribes to its

sacred books what he considers absolute perfection:  he imagines

them to be what he himself would give the world, were he himself

infinitely good, wise, and powerful.



A very simple analogy might indeed show him that even a

literature emanating from an all-wise, beneficent, and powerful

author might not seem perfect when judged by a human standard;

for he has only to look about him in the world to find that the

work which he attributes to an all-wise, all-beneficent, and

all-powerful Creator is by no means free from evil and wrong.



But this analogy long escapes him, and the exponent of each great

religion proves to his own satisfaction, and to the edification

of his fellows, that their own sacred literature is absolutely

accurate in statement, infinitely profound in meaning, and

miraculously perfect in form.  From these premises also he

arrives at the conclusion that his own sacred literature is

unique; that no other sacred book can have emanated from a divine

source; and that all others claiming to be sacred are impostures.



Still another law governing the evolution of sacred literature in

every great world religion is, that when the books which compose

it are once selected and grouped they come to be regarded as a

final creation from which nothing can be taken away, and of which

even error in form, if sanctioned by tradition, may not be

changed.



The working of this law has recently been seen on a large scale.



A few years since, a body of chosen scholars, universally

acknowledged to be the most fit for the work, undertook, at the

call of English-speaking Christendom, to revise the authorized

English version of the Bible.



Beautiful as was that old version, there was abundant reason for

a revision.  The progress of biblical scholarship had revealed

multitudes of imperfections and not a few gross errors in the

work of the early translators, and these, if uncorrected, were

sure to bring the sacred volume into discredit.



Nothing could be more reverent than the spirit of the revisers,

and the nineteenth century has known few historical events of

more significant and touching beauty than the participation in

the holy communion by all these scholars--prelates, presbyters,

ministers, and laymen of churches most widely differing in belief

and observance--kneeling side by side at the little altar in

Westminster Abbey.



Nor could any work have been more conservative and cautious than

theirs; as far as possible they preserved the old matter and

form with scrupulous care.



Yet their work was no sooner done than it was bitterly attacked

and widely condemned; to this day it is largely regarded with

dislike.  In Great Britain, in America, in Australia, the old

version, with its glaring misconceptions, mistranslations, and

interpolations, is still read in preference to the new; the

great body of English-speaking Christians clearly preferring the

accustomed form of words given by the seventeenth-century

translators, rather than a nearer approach to the exact teaching

of the Holy Ghost.



Still another law is, that when once a group of sacred books has

been evolved--even though the group really be a great library of

most dissimilar works, ranging in matter from the hundredth Psalm

to the Song of Songs, and in manner from the sublimity of Isaiah

to the offhand story-telling of Jonah--all come to be thought one

inseparable mass of interpenetrating parts; every statement in

each fitting exactly and miraculously into each statement in

every other; and each and every one, and all together, literally

true to fact, and at the same time full of hidden meanings.



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

folloeing 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 knowlegde

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."



The storm howled on.  In the Convocation of Canterbury it was

especially violent. In the Lower House Archdeacon Denison

insisted on the greatest severity, as he said, "for the sake of

the young who are tainted, and corrupted, and thrust almost to

hell by the action of this book."  At another time the same

eminent churchman declared: "Of all books in any language which I

ever laid my hands on, this is incomparably the worst; it

contains all the poison which is to be found in Tom Paine's Age

of Reason, while it has the additional disadvantage of having

been written by clergymen."



Hysterical as all this was, the Upper House was little more

self-contained.  Both Tait and Thirlwall, trying to make some

headway against the swelling tide, were for a time beaten back by

Wilberforce, who insisted on the duty of the Church to clear

itself publicly from complicity with men who, as he said, "gave

up God's Word, Creation, redemption, and the work of the Holy

Ghost."



The matter was brought to a curious issue by two

prosecutions--one against the Rev. Dr. Williams by the Bishop of

Salisbury, the other against the Rev. Mr. Wilson by one of his

clerical brethren.  The first result was that both these authors

were sentenced to suspension from their offices for a year.  At

this the two condemned clergymen appealed to the Queen in

Council.  Upon the judicial committee to try the case in last

resort sat the lord chancellor, the two archbishops, and the

Bishop of London; and one occurrence now brought into especial

relief the power of the older theological reasoning and

ecclesiastical zeal to close the minds of the best of men to the

simplest principles of right and justice.  Among the men of his

time most deservedly honoured for lofty character, thorough

scholarship, and keen perception of right and justice was Dr.

Pusey.  No one doubted then, and no one doubts now, that he would

have gone to the stake sooner than knowingly countenance wrong or

injustice; and yet we find him at this time writing a series of

long and earnest letters to the Bishop of London, who, as a

judge, was hearing this case, which involved the livelihood and

even the good name of the men on trial, pointing out to the

bishop the evil consequences which must follow should the authors

of Essays and Reviews be acquitted, and virtually beseeching the

judges, on grounds of expediency, to convict them.  Happily,

Bishop Tait was too just a man to be thrown off his bearings by

appeals such as this.



The decision of the court, as finally rendered by the lord

chancellor, virtually declared it to be no part of the duty of

the tribunal to pronounce any opinion upon the book; that the

court only had to do with certain extracts which had been

presented.  Among these was one adduced in support of a charge

against Mr. Wilson--that he denied the doctrine of eternal

punishment.  On this the court decided that it did "not find in

the formularies of the English Church any such distinct

declaration upon the subject as to require it to punish the

expression of a hope by a clergyman that even the ultimate pardon

of the wicked who are condemned in the day of judgment may be

consistent with the will of Almighty God."  While the archbishops

dissented from this judgment, Bishop Tait united in it with the

lord chancellor and the lay judges.



And now the panic broke out more severely than ever.  Confusion

became worse confounded.  The earnest-minded insisted that the

tribunal had virtually approved Essays and Reviews; the cynical

remarked that it had "dismissed hell with costs." An alliance was

made at once between the more zealous High and Low Church men,

and Oxford became its headquarters: Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon

Denison were among the leaders, and an impassioned declaration

was posted to every clergyman in England and Ireland, with a

letter begging him, "for the love of God," to sign it.  Thus it

was that in a very short time eleven thousand signatures were

obtained.  Besides this, deputations claiming to represent one

hundred and thirty-seven thousand laymen waited on the

archbishops to thank them for dissenting from the judgment.  The

Convocation of Canterbury also plunged into the fray, Bishop

Wilberforce being the champion of the older orthodoxy, and Bishop

Tait of the new.  Caustic was the speech made by Bishop

Thirlwall, in which he declared that he considered the eleven

thousand names, headed by that of Pusey, attached to the Oxford

declaration "in the light of a row of figures preceded by a

decimal point, so that, however far the series may be advanced,

it never can rise to the value of a single unit."



In spite of all that could be done, the act of condemnation was

carried in Convocation.



The last main echo of this whole struggle against the newer mode

of interpretation was heard when the chancellor, referring to the

matter in the House of Lords, characterized the ecclesiastical

act as "simply a series of well-lubricated terms--a sentence so

oily and saponaceous that no one can grasp it; like an eel, it

slips through your fingers, and is simply nothing."



The word "saponaceous" necessarily elicited a bitter retort from

Bishop Wilberforce; but perhaps the most valuable judgment on the

whole matter was rendered by Bishop Tait, who declared, "These

things have so effectually frightened the clergy that I think

there is scarcely a bishop on the bench, unless it be the Bishop

of St. David's [Thirlwall], that is not useless for the purpose

of preventing the widespread alienation of intelligent men."



During the whole controversy, and for some time afterward, the

press was burdened with replies, ponderous and pithy, lurid and

vapid, vitriolic and unctuous, but in the main bearing the

inevitable characteristics of pleas for inherited opinions

stimulated by ample endowments.



The authors of the book seemed for a time likely to be swept out

of the Church.  One of the least daring but most eminent, finding

himself apparently forsaken, seemed, though a man of very tough

fibre, about to die of a broken heart; but sturdy English sense

at last prevailed.  The storm passed, and afterward came the

still, small voice.  Really sound thinkers throughout England,

especially those who held no briefs for conventional orthodoxy,

recognised the service rendered by the book.  It was found that,

after all, there existed even among churchmen a great mass of

public opinion in favour of giving a full hearing to the reverent

expression of honest thought, and inclined to distrust any cause

which subjected fair play to zeal.



The authors of the work not only remained in the Church of

England, but some of them have since represented the broader

views, though not always with their early courage, in the highest

and most influential positions in the Anglican Church.[481]



[481] For the origin of Essays and Reviews, see Edinburgh

Review, April, 1861, p. 463.  For the reception of the book, see

the Westminster Review, October, 1860.  For the attack on it by

Bishop Wilberforce, see his article in the Quarterly Review,

January, 1861; for additional facts, Edinburgh Review, April,

1861, pp. 461 et seq.  For action on the book by Convocation, see

Dublin Review, May, 1861, citing Jelf et al.; also Davidson's

Life of Archbishop Tate, vol. i, chap. xii.  For the

Archepiscopal Letter, see Dublin Review, as above; also Life of

Bishop Wilberforce, by his son, London, 1882, vol. iii, pp. 4,5;

it is there stated that Wilberforce drew upon the letter.  For

curious inside views of the Essays and Reviews controversy,

including the course of Bishop Hampden, Tait, et al., see Life of

Bishop Wilberforce, by his son, as above, pp. 3-11; also pp.

141-149.  For the denunciation of the present Bishop of London

(Temple) as a "leper," etc., see ibid., pp. 319, 320. For general

treatment of Temple, see Fraser's Magazine, December, 1869.  For

very interesting correspondence, see Davidson's Life of

Archbishop Tait, as above.  For Archdeacon Denison's speeches,

see ibid, vol. i, p. 302.  For Dr. Pusey's letter to Bishop Tait,

urging conviction of the Essayists and Reviewers, ibid, p. 314.

For the striking letters of Dr. Temple, ibid., pp. 290 et seq.;

also The Life and Letters of Dean Stanley.  For replies, see

Charge of the Bishop of Oxford, 1863; also Replies to Essays and

Reviews, Parker, London, with preface by Wilberforce; also Aids

to Faith, edited by the Bishop of Gloucester, London, 1861; also

those by Jelf, Burgon, et al.  For the legal proceedings, see

Quarterly Review, April, 1864; also Davidson, as above.  For

Bishop Thirlwall's speech, see Chronicle of Convocation, quoted

in Life of Tait, vol. i, p. 320.  For Tait's tribute to

Thirlwall, see  Life of Tait, vol. i, p. 325.  For a remarkable

able review, and in most charming form, of the ideas of Bishop

Wilberforce and Lord Chancellor Westbury, see H. D. Traill, The

New Lucian, first dialogue.  For the cynical phrase referred to,

see Nash, Life of Lord Westbury, vol. ii, p. 78, where the noted

epitaph is given, as follows:



            "RICHARD BARON WESTBURY

        Lord High Chancellor of England,

          He was an eminent Christian,

      An energetic and merciful Statesman,

   And a still more eminent and merciful Judge.

    During his three years' tenure of office

  He abolished the ancient method of conveying land,

The time-honoured institution of the Insolvent's Court,

                   And

        The Eternity of Punishment.

    Toward the close of his early career,

In the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council,

         He dismissed Hell with costs,

And took away from the Orthodox members of the

            Church of England

   Their last hope of everlasting damnation."







IV.   THE CLOSING STRUGGLE.



The storm aroused by Essays and Reviews had not yet subsided when

a far more serious tempest burst upon the English theological

world.



In 1862 appeared a work entitled The Pentateuch and the Book of

Joshua Critically Examined its author being Colenso, Anglican

Bishop of Natal, in South Africa.  He had formerly been highly

esteemed as fellow and tutor at Cambridge, master at Harrow,

author of various valuable text-books in mathematics; and as long

as he exercised his powers within the limits of popular orthodoxy

he was evidently in the way to the highest positions in the

Church: but he chose another path.  His treatment of his subject

was reverent, but he had gradually come to those conclusions,

then so daring, now so widespread among Christian scholars, that

the Pentateuch, with much valuable historical matter, contains

much that is unhistorical; that a large portion of it was the

work of a comparatively late period in Jewish history; that many

passages in Deuteronomy could only have been written after the

Jews settled in Canaan; that the Mosaic law was not in force

before the captivity; that the books of Chronicles were clearly

written as an afterthought, to enforce the views of the priestly

caste; and that in all the books there is much that is mythical

and legendary.



Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced this work

of a churchman relegated to the most petty of bishoprics in one

of the most remote corners of the world, as a proof "that the

problems of biblical criticism can no longer be suppressed; that

they are in the air of our time, so that theology could not

escape them even if it took the wings of the morning and dwelt in

the uttermost parts of the sea."



The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused

horror.  Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical

arguments, and among them those which showed that an army of six

hundred thousand men could not have been mobilized in a single

night; that three millions of people, with their flocks and

herds, could neither have obtained food on so small and arid a

desert as that over which they were said to have wandered during

forty years, nor water from a single well; and that the butchery

of two hundred thousand Midianites by twelve thousand Israelites,

"exceeding infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, had

happily only been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the

scoffer in him.  While preserving his own independence, he had

kept in touch with the most earnest thought both among European

scholars and in the little flock intrusted to his care.  He

evidently remembered what had resulted from the attempt to hold

the working classes in the towns of France, Germany, and Italy to

outworn beliefs; he had found even the Zulus, whom he thought to

convert, suspicious of the legendary features of the Old

Testament, and with his clear practical mind he realized the

danger which threatened the English Church and Christianity--the

danger of tying its religion and morality to interpretations and

conceptions of Scripture more and more widely seen and felt to be

contrary to facts.  He saw the especial peril of sham

explanations, of covering up facts which must soon be known, and

which, when revealed, must inevitably bring the plain people of

England to regard their teachers, even the most deserving, as

"solemnly constituted impostors"--ecclesiastics whose tenure

depends on assertions which they know to be untrue.  Therefore it

was that, when his catechumens questioned him regarding some of

the Old Testament legends, the bishop determined to tell the

truth.  He says: "My heart answered in the words of the prophet,

`Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord?' I determined

not to do so."



But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first.



The outcry against the work was deafening: churchmen and

dissenters rushed forward to attack it.  Archdeacon Denison,

chairman of the committee of Convocation appointed to examine it,

uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and

a zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy,

deposed and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given over

to Satan."  On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned with

"answers," some of these being especially injurious to the cause

they were intended to serve, and none more so than sundry efforts

by the bishops themselves. One of the points upon which they

attacked him was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus to

the hare chewing its cud contains an error.  Upon this Prof.

Hitzig, of Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time,

remarked: "Your bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock

of Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in

Leviticus is really the hare;. . . every zoologist knows that it

does not chew the cud."[482]



[482] For the citation referred to, see Pfleiderer, as above,

book iv, chap. ii.  For the passages referred to as provoking

especial wrath, see Colenso, Lectures on the Pentateuch and the

Moabite Stone, 1876, p. 217.  For the episode regarding the hare

chewing the cud, see Cox, Life of Colenso, vol. i, p. 240.  The

following epigram went the rounds:



"The bishops all have sworn to shed their blood

To prove 'tis true that the hare doth chew the cud.

O bishops, doctors, and divines, beware--

Weak is the faith that hangs upon a HAIR!"





On Colenso's return to Natal, where many of the clergy and laity

who felt grateful for his years of devotion to them received him

with signs of affection, an attempt was made to ruin these

clergymen by depriving them of their little stipends, and to

terrify the simple-minded laity by threatening them with the same

"greater excommunication" which had been inflicted upon their

bishop.   To make the meaning of this more evident, the

vicar-general of the Bishop of Cape Town met Colenso at the door

of his own cathedral, and solemnly bade him "depart from the

house of God as one who has been handed over to the Evil One."

The sentence of excommunication was read before the assembled

faithful, and they were enjoined to treat their bishop as "a

heathen man and a publican." But these and a long series of other

persecutions created a reaction in his favour.



There remained to Colenso one bulwark which his enemies found

stronger than they had imagined--the British courts of justice.

The greatest efforts were now made to gain the day before these

courts, to humiliate Colenso, and to reduce to beggary the clergy

who remained faithful to him; and it is worthy of note that one

of the leaders in preparing the legal plea of the com mittee

against him was Mr. Gladstone.



But this bulwark proved impregnable: both the Judicial Committee

of the Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's

favour.  Not only were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him

of his salary, but their excommunication of him was made null and

void; it became, indeed, a subject of ridicule, and even a man so

nurtured in religious sentiment as John Keble confessed and

lamented that the English people no longer believed in

excommunication.  The bitterness of the defeated found vent in

the utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had

excommunicated Colenso--Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town"--who

denounced the judgment as "awful and profane," and the Privy

Council as "a masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the

English Church."  Even Wilberforce, careful as he was to avoid

attacking anything established, alluded with deep regret to "the

devotion of the English people to the law in matters of this

sort."



Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence

of the attacking party.  The Anglican communion, both in England

and America, was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and

various dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal.  Great pains

were taken to root out his reputation: it was declared that he

had merely stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by

wholesale, and peddled them out in England at retail; the fact

being that, while he used all the sources of information at his

command, and was large-minded enough to put himself into

relations with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he

was singularly independent in his judgment, and that his

investigations were of lasting value in modifying Continental

thought. Kuenen, the most distinguished of all his contemporaries

in this field, modified, as he himself declared, one of his own

leading theories after reading Colenso's argument; and other

Continental scholars scarcely less eminent acknowledged their

great indebtedness to the English scholar for original

suggestions.[483]



[483] For interesting details of the Colenso persecution, see

Davidson's Life of Tait, chaps. xii and xiv; also the Lives of

Bishops Wilberforce and Gray.  For full accounts of the struggle,

see Cox, Life of Bishop Colenso, London, 1888, especially vol. i,

chap. v.  For the dramatic performance at Colenso's cathedral,

see vol. ii, pp. 14-25.  For a very impartial and appreciative

statement regarding Colenso's work, see Cheyne, Founders of Old

Testament Criticism, London, 1893, chap. ix.  For testimony to

the originality and value of Colenso's contributions, see Kuenen,

Origin and Composition of the Hexateuch, Introduction, pp. xx, as

follows: "Colenso directed my attention to difficulties which I

had hitherto failed to observe or adequately to reckon with; and

as to the opinion of his labours current in Germany, I need only

say that, inasmuch as Ewald, Bunsen, Bleek, and Knabel were every

one of them logically forced to revise their theories in the

light of the English bishop's research, there was small reason in

the cry that his methods were antiquated and his objections

stale."  For a very brief but effective tribute to Colenso as an

independent thinker whose merits are now acknowledged by

Continental scholars, see Pfleiderer, Development of Theory, as

above.





But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny.

He was socially ostracized--more completely even than Lyell had

been after the publication of his Principles of Geology thirty

years before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick

Denison Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had

been defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who

turned against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a

true ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and

people, of all books in the world, Spinoza's Tractatus. A large

part of the English populace was led to regard him as an

"infidel," a "traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean

being"; servants left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and

Sweetheart were let loose upon him"; and one of the favourite

amusements of the period among men of petty wit and no

convictions was the devising of light ribaldry against him.[484]



[484] One of the nonsense verses in vogue at the time summed up

the contoversy as follows:



"A bishop there was of Natal,

Who had a Zulu for his pal;

  Said the Zulu, 'My dear,

  Don't you think Genesis queer?'

Which coverted my lord of Natal."



But verses quite as good appeared on the other side, one of them

being as follows:



"Is this, then, the great Colenso,

Who all the bishops offends so?

  Said Sam of the Soap,

  Bring fagots and rope,

For oh! he's got no friends, oh!"



For Matthew Arnold's attack on Colenso, see Macmillan's Magazine,

January, 1863.  For Maurice, see the references already given.





In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of

whom has connected his name with it permanently.



First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of

Oxford.  The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been

honoured throughout the world for his efforts in the suppression

of the slave trade, he had been rapidly advanced in the English

Church, and was at this time a prelate of wide influence.  He was

eloquent and diplomatic, witty and amiable, always sure to be

with his fellow-churchmen and polite society against

uncomfortable changes.  Whether the struggle was against the

slave power in the United States, or the squirearchy in Great

Britain, or the evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views

promulgated by the Essayists and Reviewers, he was always the

suave spokesman of those who opposed every innovator and

"besought him to depart out of their coasts."  Mingling in

curious proportions a truly religious feeling with care for his

own advancement, his remarkable power in the pulpit gave him

great strength to carry out his purposes, and his charming

facility in being all things to all men, as well as his skill in

evading the consequences of his many mistakes, gained him the

sobriquet of "Soapy Sam."  If such brethren of his in the

episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn and Tait might claim to be in

the apostolic succession, Wilberforce was no less surely in the

succession from the most gifted and eminently respectable

Sadducees who held high preferment under Pontius Pilate.



By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached

the sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and

one passage in it may be cited as showing the preacher's gift of

prophecy both hortatory and predictive.  Wilberforce then said to

Colenso: "You need boldness to risk all for God--to stand by the

truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the

devil's wrath;. . . you need a patient meekness to bear the

galling calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are

faithful, that same Satanic working, which, if it could, would

burn your body, will assuredly assail you daily through the pens

and tongues of deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of

a zeal for Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent

your motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors,

and seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your

powers of service."[485]



[485] For the social ostracism of Colenso, see works already

cited; also Cox's Life of Colenso.  For the passage from

Wilberforce's sermon at the consecration of Colenso, see Rev. Sir

G. W. Cox, The Church of England and the Teaching of Bishop

Colenso.  For Wilberforce's relations to the Colenso case in

general, see his Life, by his son, vol. iii, especially pp. 113-

126, 229-231.  For Keble's avowal that no Englishman believes in

excommunication, ibid., p. 128.  For a guarded statement of Dean

Stanley's opinion regarding Wilberforce and Newman, see a letter

from Dean Church to the Warden of Keble, in Life and Letters of

Dean Church, p. 293.





Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice his adviser

became the most untiring of his persecutors.  While leaving to

men like the Metropolitan of Cape Town and Archdeacon Denison the

noisy part of the onslaught, Wilberforce was among those who were

most zealous in devising more effective measures.



But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance between

the two prelates.  Colenso is seen more and more of all men as a

righteous leader in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from

fatal entanglements with an outworn system of interpretation;

Wilberforce, as the remembrance of his eloquence and of his

personal charm dies away, and as the revelations of his

indiscreet biographers lay bare his modes of procedure, is seen

to have left, on the whole, the most disappointing record made by

any Anglican prelate during the nineteenth century.



But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of

England; for the second of the three who linked their names with

that of Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean

of Westminster.  His action during this whole persecution was an

honour not only to the Anglican Church but to humanity.  For his

own manhood and the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he

had cheerfully given up the high preferment in the Church which

had been easily within his grasp.  To him truth and justice were

more than the decrees of a Convocation of Canterbury or of a

Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he braved the

storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to last

held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the

most critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster

Abbey.[486]



[486] For interesting testimony to Stanley's character, from a

quarter from whence it would have been least expected, see a

reminiscence of Lord Shaftesbury in the Life of Frances Power

Cobbe, London and New York, 1894.  The late Bishop of

Massachusetts, Phillips Brooks, whose death was a bereavement to

his country and to the Church universal, once gave the present

writer a vivid description of a scene witnessed by him in the

Convocation of Canterbury, when Stanley virtually withstood alone

the obstinate traditionalism of the whole body in the matter of

the Athanasian Creed.  It is to be hoped that this account may be

brought to light among the letters written by Brooks at that

time.  See also Dean Church's Life and Letters, p. 294, for a

very important testimony.





The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England

whose names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall.  He was

undoubtedly the foremost man in the Church of his time--the

greatest ecclesiastical statesman, the profoundest historical

scholar, the theologian of clearest vision in regard to the

relations between the Church and his epoch.  Alone among his

brother bishops at this period, he stood "four square to all the

winds that blew," as during all his life he stood against all

storms of clerical or popular unreason.  He had his reward.  He

was never advanced beyond a poor Welsh bishopric; but, though he

saw men wretchedly inferior constantly promoted beyond him, he

never flinched, never lost heart or hope, but bore steadily on,

refusing to hold a brief for lucrative injustice, and resisting

to the last all reaction and fanaticism, thus preserving not only

his own self-respect but the future respect of the English nation

for the Church.



A few other leading churchmen were discreetly kind to Colenso,

among them Tait, who had now been made Archbishop of Canterbury;

but, manly as he was, he was somewhat more cautious in this

matter than those who most revere his memory could now wish.



In spite of these friends the clerical onslaught was for a time

effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was

discredited and virtually driven from his functions.  But this

enforced leisure simply gave him more time to struggle for the

protection of his native flock against colonial rapacity and to

continue his great work on the Bible.



His work produced its effect.  It had much to do with arousing a

new generation of English, Scotch, and American scholars.  While

very many of his minor statements have since been modified or

rejected, his main conclusion was seen more and more clearly to

be true.  Reverently and in the deepest love for Christianity he

had made the unhistorical character of the Pentateuch clear as

noonday.  Henceforth the crushing weight of the old

interpretation upon science and morality and religion steadily

and rapidly grew less and less.  That a new epoch had come was

evident, and out of many proofs of this we may note two of the

most striking.



For many years the Bampton Lectures at Oxford had been considered

as adding steadily and strongly to the bulwarks of the old

orthodoxy.  If now and then orthodoxy had appeared in danger from

such additions to the series as those made by Dr. Hampden, these

lectures had been, as a rule, saturated with the older traditions

of the Anglican Church.  But now there was an evident change.

The departures from the old paths were many and striking, until

at last, in 1893, came the lectures on Inspiration by the Rev.

Dr. Sanday, Ireland Professor of Exegesis in the University of

Oxford.  In these, concessions were made to the newer criticism,

which at an earlier time would have driven the lecturer not only

out of the Church but out of any decent position in society; for

Prof. Sanday not only gave up a vast mass of other ideas which

the great body of churchmen had regarded as fundamental, but

accepted a number of conclusions established by the newer

criticism.  He declared that Kuenen and Wellhausen had mapped

out, on the whole rightly, the main stages of development in the

history of Hebrew literature; he incorporated with approval the

work of other eminent heretics; he acknowledged that very many

statements in the Pentateuch show "the naive ideas and usages of

a primitive age."  But, most important of all, he gave up the

whole question in regard to the book of Daniel.  Up to a time

then very recent, the early authorship and predictive character

of the book of Daniel were things which no one was allowed for a

moment to dispute.  Pusey, as we have seen, had proved to the

controlling parties in the English Church that Christianity must

stand or fall with the traditional view of this book; and now,

within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in his own

university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had

so often insisted upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the

older view, this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of

divinity, showing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that

the critical view had won the day; that the name of Daniel is

only assumed; that the book is in no sense predictive, but was

written, mainly at least, after the events it describes; that

"its author lived at the time of the Maccabean struggle"; that it

is very inaccurate even in the simple facts which it cites; and

hence that all the vast fabric erected upon its predictive

character is baseless.



But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even

more striking.



To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even

every germ that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a

special movement was begun, of which the most important part was

the establishment, at the University of Oxford, of a college

which should bring the old opinion with crushing force against

the new thought, and should train up a body of young men by

feeding them upon the utterances of the fathers, of the medieval

doctors, and of the apologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries; and should keep them in happy ignorance of the

reforming spirit of the sixteenth and the scientific spirit of

the nineteenth century.



The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet most

widely beloved among high churchmen; large endowments flowed in

upon it; a showy chapel was erected in accordance throughout with

the strictest rules of medieval ecclesiology.  As if to strike

the keynote of the thought to be fostered in the new institution,

one of the most beautiful of pseudo-medieval pictures was given

the place of honour in its hall; and the college, lofty and

gaudy, loomed high above the neighbouring modest abode of Oxford

science.  Kuenen might be victorious in Holland, and Wellhausen

in Germany, and Robertson Smith in Scotland--even Professors

Driver, Sanday, and Cheyne might succeed Dr. Pusey as expounders

of the Old Testament at Oxford--but Keble College, rejoicing in

the favour of a multitude of leaders in the Church, including Mr.

Gladstone, seemed an inexpugnable fortress of the older thought.



But in 1889 appeared the book of essays entitled Lux Mundi, among

whose leading authors were men closely connected with Keble

College and with the movement which had created it.  This work

gave up entirely the tradition that the narrative in Genesis is a

historical record, and admitted that all accounts in the Hebrew

Scriptures of events before the time of Abraham are mythical and

legendary; it conceded that the books ascribed to Moses and

Joshua were made up mainly of three documents representing

different periods, and one of them the late period of the exile;

that "there is a considerable idealizing element in Old Testament

history"; that "the books of Chronicles show an idealizing of

history" and "a reading back into past records of a ritual

development which is really later," and that prophecy is not

necessarily predictive-- "prophetic inspiration being consistent

with erroneous anticipations."  Again a shudder went through the

upholders of tradition in the Church, and here and there threats

were heard; but the Essays and Reviews fiasco and the Colenso

catastrophe were still in vivid remembrance.  Good sense

prevailed: Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury, instead of

prosecuting the authors, himself asked the famous question, "May

not the Holy Spirit make use of myth and legend?" and the

Government, not long afterward, promoted one of these authors to

a bishopric.[487]



[487] Of Pusey's extreme devotion to his view of the book of

Daniel, there is a curious evidence in a letter to Stanley in the

second volume of the latter's Life and Letters.  For the views

referred to in Lux Mundi, see pp. 345-357; also, on the general

subject, Bishop Ellicott's Christus Comprobator.





In the sister university the same tendency was seen.  Robertson

Smith, who had been driven out of his high position in the Free

Church of Scotland on account of his work in scriptural research,

was welcomed into a professorship at Cambridge, and other men, no

less loyal to the new truths, were given places of controlling

influence in shaping the thought of the new generation.



Nor did the warfare against biblical science produce any

different results among the dissenters of England.  In 1862

Samuel Davidson, a professor in the Congregational College at

Manchester, published his Introduction to the Old Testament.

Independently of the contemporary writers of Essays and Reviews,

he had arrived in a general way at conclusions much like theirs,

and he presented the newer view with fearless honesty, admitting

that the same research must be applied to these as to other

Oriental sacred books, and that such research establishes the

fact that all alike contain legendary and mythical elements.   A

storm was at once aroused; certain denominational papers took up

the matter, and Davidson was driven from his professorial chair;

but he laboured bravely on, and others followed to take up his

work, until the ideas which he had advocated were fully

considered.



So, too, in Scotland the work of Robertson Smith was continued

even after he had been driven into England; and, as votaries of

the older thought passed away, men of ideas akin to his were

gradually elected into chairs of biblical criticism and

interpretation.  Wellhausen's great work, which Smith had

introduced in English form, proved a power both in England and

Scotland, and the articles upon various books of Scripture and

scriptural subjects generally, in the ninth edition of the

Encyclopaedia Britannica, having been prepared mainly by himself

as editor or put into the hands of others representing the recent

critical research, this very important work of reference, which

had been in previous editions so timid, was now arrayed on the

side of the newer thought, insuring its due consideration

wherever the English language is spoken.



In France the same tendency was seen, though with striking

variations from the course of events in other

countries--variations due to the very different conditions under

which biblical students in France were obliged to work.   Down to

the middle of the nineteenth century the orthodoxy of Bossuet,

stiffly opposing the letter of Scripture to every step in the

advance of science, had only yielded in a very slight degree.

But then came an event ushering in a new epoch.  At that time

Jules Simon, afterward so eminent as an author, academician, and

statesman, was quietly discharging the duties of a professorship,

when there was brought him the visiting card of a stranger

bearing the name of "Ernest Renan, Student at St. Sulpice."

Admitted to M. Simon's library, Renan told his story.   As a

theological student he had devoted himself most earnestly, even

before he entered the seminary, to the study of Hebrew and the

Semitic languages, and he was now obliged, during the lectures on

biblical literature at St. Sulpice, to hear the reverend

professor make frequent comments, based on the Vulgate, but

absolutely disproved by Renan's own knowledge of Hebrew.  On

Renan's questioning any interpretation of the lecturer, the

latter was wont to rejoin: "Monsieur, do you presume to deny the

authority of the Vulgate--the translation by St. Jerome,

sanctioned by the Holy Ghost and the Church? You will at once go

into the chapel and say `Hail Mary' for an hour before the image

of the Blessed Virgin."



"But," said Renan to Jules Simon, "this has now become very

serious; it happens nearly every day, and, MON DIEU! Monsieur, I

can not spend ALL my time in saying, Hail Mary, before the statue

of the Virgin." The result was a warm personal attachment between

Simon and Renan; both were Bretons, educated in the midst of the

most orthodox influences, and both had unwillingly broken away

from them.



Renan was now emancipated, and pursued his studies with such

effect that he was made professor at the College de France.  His

Life of Jesus, and other books showing the same spirit, brought a

tempest upon him which drove him from his professorship and

brought great hardships upon him for many years.  But his genius

carried the day, and, to the honour of the French Republic, he

was restored to the position from which the Empire had driven

him.  From his pen finally appeared the Histoire du Peuple

Israel, in which scholarship broad, though at times inaccurate in

minor details, was supplemented by an exquisite acuteness and a

poetic insight which far more than made good any of those lesser

errors which a German student would have avoided.  At his death,

in October, 1892, this monumental work had been finished.  In

clearness and beauty of style it has never been approached by any

other treatise on this or any kindred subject: it is a work of

genius; and its profound insight into all that is of importance

in the great subjects which he treated will doubtless cause it to

hold a permanent place in the literature not only of the Latin

nations but of the world.



An interesting light is thrown over the history of advancing

thought at the end of the nineteenth century by the fact that

this most detested of heresiarchs was summoned to receive the

highest of academic honours at the university which for ages had

been regarded as a stronghold of Presbyterian orthodoxy in Great

Britain.



In France the anathemas lavished upon him by Church authorities

during his life, their denial to him of Christian burial, and

their refusal to allow him a grave in the place he most loved,

only increased popular affection for him during his last years

and deepened the general mourning at his death.[488]



[488] For a remarkably just summary of Renan's work, eminently

judicial and at the same time deeply appreciative, see the Rev.

Dr. Pfleiderer, professor at the University of Berlin,

Development of Theology in Germany, pp. 241, 242, note.  The

facts as to the early relations between Renan and Jules Simon

were told in 1878 by the latter to the present writer at

considerable length and with many interesting details not here

given.  The writer was also present at the public funeral of the

great scholar, and can testify of his own knowledge to the deep

and hearty evidences of gratitude and respect then paid to Renan,

not merely by eminent orators and scholars, but by the people at

large.  As to the refusal of the place of burial that Renan

especially chose, see his own Souvenirs, in which he laments the

enevitable exclusion of his grave from the site which he most

loved.  As to calumnies, one masterpiece, very widely spread,

through the zeal of clerical journals, was that Renan received

enormous sums from the Rothschilds for attacking Christianity.





In spite of all resistance, the desire for more light upon the

sacred books penetrated the older Church from every side.



In Germany, toward the close of the eighteenth century, Jahn,

Catholic professor at Vienna, had ventured, in an Introduction to

Old Testament Study, to class Job, Jonah, and Tobit below other

canonical books, and had only escaped serious difficulties by

ample amends in a second edition.



Early in the nineteenth century, Herbst, Catholic professor at

Tubingen, had endeavoured in a similar Introduction to bring

modern research to bear on the older view; but the Church

authorities took care to have all passages really giving any new

light skilfully and speedily edited out of the book.



Later still, Movers, professor at Breslau, showed remarkable

gifts for Old Testament research, and much was expected of him;

but his ecclesiastical superiors quietly prevented his publishing

any extended work.



During the latter half of the nineteenth century much the same

pressure has continued in Catholic Germany.  Strong scholars have

very generally been drawn into the position of "apologists" or

"reconcilers," and, when found intractable, they have been driven

out of the Church.



The same general policy had been evident in France and Italy, but

toward the last decade of the century it was seen by the more

clear-sighted supporters of the older Church in those countries

that the multifarious "refutations" and explosive attacks upon

Renan and his teachings had accomplished nothing; that even

special services of atonement for his sin, like the famous

"Triduo" at Florence, only drew a few women, and provoked

ridicule among the public at large; that throwing him out of his

professorship and calumniating him had but increased his

influence; and that his brilliant intuitions, added to the

careful researches of German and English scholars, had brought

the thinking world beyond the reach of the old methods of hiding

troublesome truths and crushing persistent truth-tellers.



Therefore it was that about 1890 a body of earnest Roman Catholic

scholars began very cautiously to examine and explain the

biblical text in the light of those results of the newer research

which could no longer be gainsaid.



Among these men were, in Italy, Canon Bartolo, Canon Berta, and

Father Savi, and in France Monseigneur d'Hulst, the Abbe Loisy,

professor at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most

eminent of all, Professor Lenormant, of the French Institute,

whose researches into biblical and other ancient history and

literature had won him distinction throughout the world.  These

men, while standing up manfully for the Church, were obliged to

allow that some of the conclusions of modern biblical criticism

were well founded.  The result came rapidly.  The treatise of

Bartolo and the great work of Lenormant were placed on the Index;

Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually

silenced; the Abbe Loisy was first deprived of his professorship,

and then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur

d'Hulst was summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.[489]



[489] For the frustration of attempts to admit light into

scriptural studies in Roman Catholic Germany, see Bleek, Old

Testament, London, 1882, vol. i, pp. 19, 20.  For the general

statement regarding recent suppression of modern biblical study

in France and Italy, see an article by a Roman Catholic author in

the Contemporary Review, September, 1894, p. 365.  For the papal

condemnations of Lenormant and Bartolo, see the Index Librorum

Prohibitorum Sanctissimi Domini Nostri, Leonis XIII, P.M., etc.,

Rome, 1891; Appendices, July, 1890, and May, 1891.  The ghastly

part of the record, as stated in this edition of the Index, is

that both these great scholars were forced to abjure their

"errors" and to acquiesce in the condemnation--Lenorment doing

this on his deathbed.





The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of

the Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter

by the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on The Study of Sacred Scripture.



Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last

century, there had sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually

so competent to discuss the whole subject.  While, then, those

devoted to the older beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts

would crush the whole brood of biblical critics, votaries of the

newer thought ventured to hope that the encyclical might, in the

language of one of them, prove "a stupendous bridge spanning the

broad abyss that now divides alleged orthodoxy from established

science."[490]



[490] For this statement, see an article in the Contemporary

Review, April, 1894, p. 576.





Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole,

it is a question whether the world at large may not congratulate

itself upon this papal utterance.  The document, if not

apostolic, won credit as "statesmanlike." It took pains, of

course, to insist that there can be no error of any sort in the

sacred books; it even defended those parts which Protestants

count apocryphal as thoroughly as the remainder of Scripture, and

declared that the book of Tobit was not compiled of man, but

written by God.  His Holiness naturally condemned the higher

criticism, but he dwelt at the same time on the necessity of the

most thorough study of the sacred Scriptures, and especially on

the importance of adjusting scriptural statements to scientific

facts.  This utterance was admirably oracular, being susceptible

of cogent quotation by both sides: nothing could be in better

form from an orthodox point of view; but, with that statesmanlike

forecast which the present Pope has shown more than once in

steering the bark of St. Peter over the troubled waves of the

nineteenth century, he so far abstained from condemning any of

the greater results of modern critical study that the main

English defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father Clarke, did

not hesitate publicly to admit a multitude of such

results--results, indeed, which would shock not only Italian and

Spanish Catholics, but many English and American Protestants.

According to this interpreter, the Pope had no thought of denying

the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the plurality of

sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of

Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of

St. Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole

encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the

power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any

previous decisions which may be found inconvenient.  More than

that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of

the most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old

Testament, "numbers must be expected to be used Orientally," and

that "all these seventies and forties, as, for example, when

Absalom is said to have rebelled against David for forty years,

can not possibly be meant numerically"; and, what must have given

a fearful shock to some Protestant believers in plenary

inspiration, he, while advocating it as a dutiful Son of the

Church, wove over it an exquisite web with the declaration that

"there is a human element in the Bible pre-calculated for by the

Divine."[491]



[491] For these admissions of Father Clarke, see his article The

Papal Encyclical on the Bible, in the Contemporary Review for

July, 1894.





Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to

be grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances,

which perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the

old and the new than could have been framed by engineers more

learned but less astute. Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a

Paul V nor an Urban VIII, and is too wise to bring the Church

into a position from which it can only be extricated by such

ludicrous subterfuges as those by which it was dragged out of the

Galileo scandal, or by such a tortuous policy as that by which it

writhed out of the old doctrine regarding the taking of interest

for money.



In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and

Berta and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in

which the Pope issued this encyclical, there is every reason to

hope that the path has been paved over which the Church may

gracefully recede from the old system of interpretation and

quietly accept and appropriate the main results of the higher

criticism.  Certainly she has never had a better opportunity to

play at the game of "beggar my neighbour" and to drive the older

Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.



In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new

went on.  In the middle years of the century the first adequate

effort in behalf of the newer conception of the sacred books was

made by Theodore Parker at Boston.  A thinker brave and of the

widest range,--a scholar indefatigable and of the deepest

sympathies with humanity,--a man called by one of the most

eminent scholars in the English Church "a religious Titan," and

by a distinguished French theologian "a prophet," he had

struggled on from the divinity school until at that time he was

one of the foremost biblical scholars, and preacher to the

largest regular congregation on the American continent.  The

great hall in Boston could seat four thousand people, and at his

regular discourses every part of it was filled.  In addition to

his pastoral work he wielded a vast influence as a platform

speaker, especially in opposition to the extension of slavery

into the Territories of the United States, and as a lecturer on a

wide range of vital topics; and among those whom he most

profoundly influenced, both politically and religiously, was

Abraham Lincoln.  During each year at that period he was heard

discussing the most important religious and political questions

in all the greater Northern cities; but his most lasting work was

in throwing light upon our sacred Scriptures, and in this he was

one of the forerunners of the movement now going on not only in

the United States but throughout Christendom.  Even before he was

fairly out of college his translation of De Wette's Introduction

to the Old Testament made an impression on many thoughtful men;

his sermon in 1841 on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity

marked the beginning of his great individual career; his

speeches, his lectures, and especially his Discourse on Matters

pertaining to Religion, greatly extended his influence.  His was

a deeply devotional nature, and his public prayers exercised by

their touching beauty a very strong religious influence upon his

audiences.  He had his reward.  Beautiful and noble as were his

life and his life-work, he was widely abhorred.  On one occasion

of public worship in one of the more orthodox churches, news

having been received that he was dangerously ill, a prayer was

openly made by one of the zealous brethren present that this

arch-enemy might be removed from earth.  He was even driven out

from the Unitarian body.  But he was none the less steadfast and

bold, and the great mass of men and women who thronged his

audience room at Boston and his lecture rooms in other cities

spread his ideas.  His fate was pathetic.  Full of faith and

hope, but broken prematurely by his labours, he retired to Italy,

and died there at the darkest period in the history of the United

States--when slavery in the state and the older orthodoxy in the

Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant. The death of

Moses within sight of the promised land seems the only parallel

to the death of Parker less than six months before the

publication of Essays and Reviews and the election of Abraham

Lincoln to the presidency, of the United States.[492]



[492] For the appellation "religious Titan" applied to Theodore

Parker, see a letter of Jowett, Master of Balliol, to Frances

Power Cobbe, in her Autobiography, vol. 1, p. 357, and for

Reville's statement, ibid., p. 9.  For a pathetic account of

Parker's last hours at Florence, ibid., vol. i, pp. 10, 11.  As

to the influence of Theodore Parker on Lincoln, see Rhodes's

History of the United States, as above, vol. ii, p. 312.  For the

statement regarding Parker's audiences and his power over them,

the present writer trusts to his own memory.





But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully

aided by the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost

opponents.  Nothing during the American struggle against the

slave system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and

women from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it

to justify slavery.  Typical among examples of this use were the

arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man whose noble

character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence in

all branches of the American Protestant Church.  While avowing

his personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible

sanctioned it.  Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took

the same ground; and then came that tremendous rejoinder which

echoed from heart to heart throughout the Northern States: "The

Bible sanctions slavery?  So much the worse for the Bible."  Then

was fulfilled that old saying of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg:

"Press not the breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield

blood rather than milk."[493]



[493] There is a curious reference to Bishop Hopkins's ideas on

slavery in Archbishop Tait's Life and Letters.  For a succinct

statement of the biblical proslavery argument referred to, see

Rhodes, as above, vol. i, pp. 370 et seq.





Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting

Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority

was to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless.  Even after

the foremost scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the

most conservative of those whose opinions were entitled to weight

had made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable,

there was fanatical opposition to any change.  The Syllabus of

Errors put forth by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other

documents issued from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties

of this needed transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman

Catholic scholars skilfully explained away the obstacles thus

created, others published works insisting upon the most extreme

views as to the verbal inspiration of the sacred books.  In the

Church of England various influential men took the same view.

Dr. Baylee, Principal of St. Aidan's College, declared that in

Scripture "every scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all

its histories and narrations of every kind are without any

inaccuracy.  Its words and phrases have a grammatical and

philological accuracy, such as is possessed by no human

composition."  In 1861 Dean Burgon preached in Christ Church

Cathedral, Oxford, as follows: "No, sirs, the Bible is the very

utterance of the Eternal: as much God's own word as if high

heaven were open and we heard God speaking to us with human

voice.  Every book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely.

Inspiration is not a difference of degree, but of kind.  The

Bible is filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God; the

books of it and the words of it and the very letters of it."



In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must

either receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or

deny the veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus

Christ as a teacher of divine truth."



As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in

the Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's

Cathedral, used in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that

the authority of Christ himself, and therefore of Christianity,

must rest on the old view of the Old Testament; that, since the

founder of Christianity, in divinely recorded utterances, alluded

to the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to

Noah's ark and the Flood, and to the sojourn of Jonah in the

whale, the biblical account of these must be accepted as

historical, or that Christianity must be given up altogether.



In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the

Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no

argument could be more fraught with peril to the interest which

the gifted preacher sought to serve.



In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to

the newer biblical studies were heard; and from America,

especially from the college at Princeton, came resounding echoes.

As an example of many may be quoted the statement by the eminent

Dr. Hodge that the books of Scripture "are, one and all, in

thought and verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly

the work of God, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine

authority all that God meant to convey without human additions

and admixtures"; and that "infallibility and authority attach as

much to the verbal expression in which the revelation is made as

to the matter of the revelation itself."



But the newer thought moved steadily on.  As already in

Protestant Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America,

it took strong hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches

known as orthodox: Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved

Smith, Moore, Haupt, Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and,

though most of them were opposed bitterly by synods, councils,

and other authorities of their respective churches, they were

manfully supported by the more intellectual clergy and laity.

The greater universities of the country ranged themselves on the

side of these men; persecution but intrenched them more firmly in

the hearts of all intelligent well-wishers of Christianity.  The

triumphs won by their opponents in assemblies, synods,

conventions, and conferences were really victories for the

nominally defeated, since they revealed to the world the fact

that in each of these bodies the strong and fruitful thought of

the Church, the thought which alone can have any hold on the

future, was with the new race of thinkers; no theological

triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have been won since the

Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.



And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in

the second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most

powerful aid to the new school of biblical research.









V.   VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS.





While this struggle for the new truth was going on in various

fields, aid appeared from a quarter whence it was least expected.



The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in Assyria were

supplemented by the researches of Rawlinson, George Smith,

Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec, Pinches, and others, and thus it was

revealed more clearly than ever before that as far back as the

time assigned in Genesis to the creation a great civilization was

flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages, probably two thousand

years, before the scriptural date assigned to the migration of

Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization had

bloomed forth in art, science, and literature; that the ancient

inscriptions recovered from the sites of this and kindred

civilizations presented the Hebrew sacred myths and legends in

earlier forms--forms long antedating those given in the Hebrew

Scriptures; and that the accounts of the Creation, the Tree of

Life in Eden, the institution and even the name of the Sabbath,

the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and much else in the Pentateuch,

were simply an evolution out of earlier Chaldean myths and

legends.   So perfect was the proof of this that the most eminent

scholars in the foremost seats of Christian learning were obliged

to acknowledge it.[494]



[494] As to the revelations of the vast antiquity of Chaldean

civilization, and especially regarding the Nabonidos inscription,

see Records of the Past, vol. i, new series, first article, and

especially pp. 5, 6, where a translation of that inscription is

given; also Hommel, Geschichte Babyloniens und Assyriens,

introduction, in which, on page 12, an engraving of the Sargon

cylinder is given; also, on the general subject, especially pp.

116 et seq., 309 et seq.; also Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums,

pp. 161-163; also Maspero and Sayce, Dawn of Civilization, p. 555

and note.



For the earlier Chaldean forms of the Hebrew Creation accounts,

Tree of Life in Eden, Hebrew Sabbath, both the institution and

the name, and various other points of similar interest, see

George Smith, Chaldean Account of Genesis, throughout the work,

especially p. 308 and chaps. xvi, xvii; also Jensen, Die

Kosmologie der Babylonier; also Schrader, The Cuneiform

Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant, Origines de

l'Histoire; also Sayce, The Assyrian Story of Creation, in

Records of the Past, new series, vol. i.  For a general statement

as to earlier sources of much in the Hebrew sacred origins, see

Huxley, Essays on Controverted Questions, English edition, p.

525.





The more general conclusions which were thus given to biblical

criticism were all the more impressive from the fact that they

had been revealed by various groups of earnest Christian scholars

working on different lines, by different methods, and in various

parts of the world.  Very honourable was the full and frank

testimony to these results given in 1885 by the Rev. Francis

Brown, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at

New York.  In his admirable though brief book on Assyriology,

starting with the declaration that "it is a great pity to be

afraid of facts," he showed how Assyrian research testifies in

many ways to the historical value of the Bible record; but at the

same time he freely allowed to Chaldean history an antiquity

fatal to the sacred chronology of the Hebrews.  He also cast

aside a mass of doubtful apologetics, and dealt frankly with the

fact that very many of the early narratives in Genesis belong to

the common stock of ancient tradition, and, mentioning as an

example the cuneiform inscriptions which record a story of the

Accadian king Sargon--how "he was born in retirement, placed by

his mother in a basket of rushes, launched on a river, rescued

and brought up by a stranger, after which he became king"--he did

not hesitate to remind his readers that Sargon lived a thousand

years and more before Moses; that this story was told of him

several hundred years before Moses was born; and that it was told

of various other important personages of antiquity.  The

professor dealt just as honestly with the inscriptions which show

sundry statements in the book of Daniel to be unhistorical;

candidly making admissions which but a short time before would

have filled orthodoxy with horror.



A few years later came another testimony even more striking.

Early in the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised

abroad that the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most eminent

Assyriologist and Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about to

publish a work in which what is known as the "higher criticism"

was to be vigorously and probably destructively dealt with in the

light afforded by recent research among the monuments of Assyria

and Egypt.  The book was looked for with eager expectation by the

supporters of the traditional view of Scripture; but, when it

appeared, the exultation of the traditionalists was speedily

changed to dismay.  For Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity

toward sundry minor assumptions and assertions of biblical

critics, confirmed all their more important conclusions which

properly fell within his province.  While his readers soon

realized that these assumptions and assertions of overzealous

critics no more disproved the main results of biblical criticism

than the wild guesses of Kepler disproved the theory of

Copernicus, or the discoveries of Galileo, or even the great laws

which bear Kepler's own name, they found new mines sprung under

some of the most lofty fortresses of the old dogmatic theology.

A few of the statements of this champion of orthodoxy may be

noted.  He allowed that the week of seven days and the Sabbath

rest are of Babylonian origin; indeed, that the very word

"Sabbath" is Babylonian; that there are two narratives of

Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully like the two

leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the latter were

undoubtedly drawn from the former; that the "garden of Eden" and

its mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of Chaldea in

pre-Semitic days; that the beliefs that woman was created out of

man, and that man by sin fell from a state of innocence, are

drawn from very ancient Chaldean-Babylonian texts; that

Assyriology confirms the belief that the book Genesis is a

compilation; that portions of it are by no means so old as the

time of Moses; that the expression in our sacred book, "The Lord

smelled a sweet savour" at the sacrifice made by Noah, is

"identical with that of the Babylonian poet"; that "it is

impossible to believe that the language of the latter was not

known to the biblical writer" and that the story of Joseph and

Potiphar's wife was drawn in part from the old Egyptian tale of

The Two Brothers.  Finally, after a multitude of other

concessions, Prof. Sayce allowed that the book of Jonah, so far

from being the work of the prophet himself, can not have been

written until the Assyrian Empire was a thing of the past; that

the book of Daniel contains serious mistakes; that the so-called

historical chapters of that book so conflict with the monuments

that the author can not have been a contemporary of

Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus; that "the story of Belshazzar's fall is

not historical"; that the Belshazzar referred to in it as king,

and as the son of Nehuchadnezzar, was not the son of

Nebuchadnezzar, and was never king; that "King Darius the Mede,"

who plays so great a part in the story, never existed; that the

book associates persons and events really many years apart, and

that it must have been written at a period far later than the

time assigned in it for its own origin.



As to the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted by a

chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity can

explain away.  He also acknowledges that the book of Esther

"contains many exaggerations and improbabilities, and is simply

founded upon one of those same historical tales of which the

Persian chronicles seem to have been full."  Great was the

dissatisfaction of the traditionalists with their expected

champion; well might they repeat the words of Balak to Balaam, "I

called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast

altogether blessed them."[495]



[495] For Prof. Brown's discussion, see his Assyriology, its Use

and Abuse in Old Testament Study, New York, 1885, passim.  For

Prof. Sayce's views, see The Higher Criticism and the Monuments,

third edition, London, 1894, and especially his own curious

anticipation, in the first lines of the preface, that he must

fail to satisfy either side.  For the declaration that the

"higher critic" with all his offences is no worse than the

orthodox "apologist," see p. 21.  For the important admission

that the same criterion must be applied in researches into our

own sacred books as into others, and even into the mediaeval

chronicles, see p. 26.  For justification of critical scepticism

regarding the history given in the book of Daniel, see pp. 27,

28, also chap. ix.  For very full and explicit statements, with

proofs, that the "Sabbath," both in name and nature, was derived

by the Hebrews from the Chaldeans, see pp. 74 et seq.  For a very

full and fair acknowledgment of the "Babylonian element in

Genesis," see chap. iii, including the statement regarding the

statement in our sacred book, "The Lord smelled a sweet savour,"

at the sacrifice made by Noah, etc., on p. 119.  For an excellent

summary of the work, see Dr. Driver's article in the Contemporary

Review for March, 1894.  For a pungent but well-deserved rebuke

of Prof. Sayce's recent attempts to propitiate pious subscribers

to his archaeological fund, see Prof. A. A. Bevan, in the

Contemporary Review for December, 1895.  For the inscription on

the Assyrian tablets relating in detail the exposure of King

Sargon in a basket of rushes, his rescue and rule, see George

Smith, Chaldean account of Genesis, Sayce's edition, London,

1880, pp. 319, 320.  For the frequent recurrence of the Sargon

and Moses legend in ancient folklore, see Maspero and Sayce, Dawn

of History, p. 598 and note.  For various other points of similar

interest, see ibid., passim, especially chaps. xvi and xvii; also

Jensen, Die Kosmologie der Babylonier, and Schrader, The

Cuneiform Inscriptions and the Old Testament; also Lenormant,

Origines de l'Histoire.





No less fruitful have been modern researches in Egypt.  While, on

one hand, they have revealed a very considerable number of

geographical and archaeological facts proving the good faith of

the narratives entering into the books attributed to Moses, and

have thus made our early sacred literature all the more valuable,

they have at the same time revealed the limitations of the sacred

authors and compilers.  They have brought to light facts utterly

disproving the sacred Hebrew date of creation and the main

framework of the early biblical chronology; they have shown the

suggestive correspondence between the ten antediluvian patriarchs

in Genesis and the ten early dynasties of the Egyptian gods, and

have placed by the side of these the ten antediluvian kings of

Chaldean tradition, the ten heroes of Armenia, the ten primeval

kings of Persian sacred tradition, the ten "fathers" of Hindu

sacred tradition, and multitudes of other tens, throwing much

light on the manner in which the sacred chronicles of ancient

nations were generally developed.



These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of

Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs

every year; as, for example, the changing of the water of the

Nile into blood--evidently suggested by the phenomena exhibited

every summer, when, as various eminent scholars, and, most recent

of all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us, "about the middle of July, in

eight or ten days the river turns from grayish blue to dark red,

occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed

blood."  These modern researches have also shown that some of the

most important features in the legends can not possibly be

reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that

the Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the

Red Sea.  As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations

with Egypt, even the most devoted apologists have become

discreetly silent.



Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of

The Two Brothers, and have shown, as we have already seen, that

one of the most striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was

drawn from it; they have been obliged to admit that the story of

the exposure of Moses in the basket of rushes, his rescue, and

his subsequent greatness, had been previously told, long before

Moses's time, not only of King Sargon, but of various other great

personages of the ancient world; they have published plans of

Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon their walls,

revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking

features of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been

revealed especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the

Egyptian Book of the Dead, and in various inscriptions of the

Nile temples and tombs, earlier sources of much in the ethics so

long claimed to have been revealed only to the chosen people in

the Book of the Covenant, in the ten commandments, and elsewhere;

they have given to the world copies of the Egyptian texts showing

that the theology of the Nile was one of various fruitful sources

of later ideas, statements, and practices regarding the brazen

serpent, the golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions,

incarnations, resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that

Egyptian sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and

Christian sacred literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases

regarding the Creation, astronomy, geography, magic, medicine,

diabolical influences, with a multitude of other ideas, which we

also find coming into early Judaism in greater or less degree

from Chaldean and Persian sources.



But Egyptology, while thus aiding to sweep away the former

conception of our sacred books, has aided biblical criticism in

making them far more precious; for it has shown them to be a part

of that living growth of sacred literature whose roots are in all

the great civilizations of the past, and through whose trunk and

branches are flowing the currents which are to infuse a higher

religious and ethical life into the civilizations of the

future.[496]



[496] For general statements of agreements and disagreements

between biblical accounts and the revelations of the Egyptian

monuments, see Sayce, The Higher Criticism and the Monuments,

especially chap. iv.  For discrepancies between the Hebrew sacred

accounts of Jewish relations with Egypt and the revelations of

modern Egyptian research, see Sharpe, History of Egypt; Flinders,

Patrie, History of Egypt; and especially Maspero and Sayce, The

Dawn of Civilization in Egypt and Chaldea, London, published by

the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1894.  For the

statement regarding the Nile, that about the middle of July "in

eight or ten days it turns from grayish blue to dark red,

occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed

blood," see Maspero and Sayce, as above, p. 23.  For the relation

of the Joseph legend to the Tale of Two Brothers, see Sharpe and

others cited. For examples of exposure of various great

personages of antiquity in their childhood, see G. Smith,

Chaldean Accounts of Genesis, Sayce's edition, p. 320.  For the

relation of the Book of the Dead, etc., to Hebrew ethics, see a

striking passage in Huxley's essay on The Evolution of Theology,

also others cited in this chapter.  As to trinities in Egypt and

Chaldea, see Maspero and Sayce, especially pp. 104-106, 175, and

659-663.  For miraculous conception and birth of sons of Ra,

ibid., pp. 388, 389.  For ascension of Ra into heaven, ibid., pp.

167, 168; for resurrections, see ibid., p. 695, also

representations in Lepsius, Prisse d'Avennes, et al.; and for

striking resemblance between Egyptian and Hebrew ritual and

worship, and especially the ark, cherubim, ephod, Urim and

Thummim, and wave offerings, see the same, passim.  For a very

full exhibition of the whole subject, see Renan, Histoire du

Peuple Israel, vol. i, chap. xi.  For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas

in astronomy, out of which Hebrew ideas of "the firmament,"

"pillars of heaven," etc., were developed, see text and

engravings in Maspero and Sayce, pp. 17 and 543.  For creation of

man out of clay by a divine being in Egypt, see Maspero and

Sayce, p. 154; for a similar idea in Chaldea, see ibid., p. 545;

and for the creation of the universe by a word, ibid., pp. 146,

147.  For Egyptian and Chaldean ideas on magic and medicine,

dread of evil spirits, etc., anticipating those of the Hebrew

Scriptures, see Maspero and Sayce, as above, pp. 212-214, 217,

636; and for extension of these to neighboring nations, pp. 782,

783.  For visions and use of dreams as oracles, ibid., p. 641 and

elsewhere.  See also, on these and other resemblances, Lenormant,

Origines de l'Histoire, vol. i, passim; see also George Smith and

Sayce, as above, chaps. xvi and xvii, for resemblances especially

striking, combining to show how simple was the evolution of many

Hebrew sacred legends and ideas out of those earlier

civilizations.  For an especially interesting presentation of the

reasons why Egyptian ideas of immortality were not seized upon by

the Jews, see the Rev. Barham Zincke's work upon Egypt.  For the

sacrificial vessels, temple rites, etc., see the bas-reliefs,

figured by Lepsius, Prisse d'Avennes, Mariette, Maspero, et. al.

For a striking summary by a brilliant scholar and divine of the

Anglican Church, see Mahaffy, Prolegomena to Anc. Hist., cited in

Sunderland, The Bible, New York, 1893, p. 21, note.





But while archaeologists thus influenced enlightened opinion,

another body of scholars rendered services of a different

sort--the centre of their enterprise being the University of

Oxford.  By their efforts was presented to the English-speaking

world a series of translations of the sacred books of the East,

which showed the relations of the more Eastern sacred literature

to our own, and proved that in the religions of the world the

ideas which have come as the greatest blessings to mankind are

not of sudden revelation or creation, but of slow evolution out

of a remote past.



The facts thus shown did not at first elicit much gratitude from

supporters of traditional theology, and perhaps few things

brought more obloquy on Renan, for a time, than his statement

that "the influence of Persia is the most powerful to which

Israel was submitted."  Whether this was an overstatement or not,

it was soon seen to contain much truth.  Not only was it made

clear by study of the Zend Avesta that the Old and New Testament

ideas regarding Satanic and demoniacal modes of action were

largely due to Persian sources, but it was also shown that the

idea of immortality was mainly developed in the Hebrew mind

during the close relations of the Jews with the Persians.  Nor

was this all.  In the Zend Avesta were found in earlier form

sundry myths and legends which, judging from their frequent

appearance in early religions, grow naturally about the history

of the adored teachers of our race.  Typical among these was the

Temptation of Zoroaster.



It is a fact very significant and full of promise that the first

large, frank, and explicit revelation regarding this whole

subject in form available for the general thinking public was

given to the English-speaking world by an eminent Christian

divine and scholar, the Rev. Dr. Mills.  Having already shown

himself by his translations a most competent authority on the

subject, he in 1894 called attention, in a review widely read, to

"the now undoubted and long since suspected fact that it pleased

the Divine Power to reveal some of the important articles of our

Catholic creed first to the Zoroastrians, and through their

literature to the Jews and ourselves."  Among these beliefs Dr.

Mills traced out very conclusively many Jewish doctrines

regarding the attributes of God, and all, virtually, regarding

the attributes of Satan.



There, too, he found accounts of the Miraculous Conception,

Virgin Birth, and Temptation of Zoroaster, As to the last, Dr.

Mills presented a series of striking coincidences with our own

later account.  As to its main features, he showed that there had

been developed among the Persians, many centuries before the

Christian era, the legend of a vain effort of the arch-demon, one

seat of whose power was the summit of Mount Arezura, to tempt

Zoroaster to worship him,--of an argument between tempter and

tempted,--and of Zoroaster's refusal; and the doctor continued:

"No Persian subject in the streets of Jerusalem, soon after or

long after the Return, could have failed to know this striking

myth."  Dr. Mills then went on to show that, among the Jews, "the

doctrine of immortality was scarcely mooted before the later

Isaiah--that is, before the captivity--while the Zoroastrian

scriptures are one mass of spiritualism, referring all results to

the heavenly or to the infernal worlds."  He concludes by saying

that, as regards the Old and New Testaments, "the humble, and to

a certain extent prior, religion of the Mazda worshippers was

useful in giving point and beauty to many loose conceptions among

the Jewish religious teachers, and in introducing many ideas

which were entirely new, while as to the doctrines of immortality

and resurrection--the most important of all--it positively

determined belief."[498]



[498] For the passages in the Vendidad of special importance as

regards the Temptation myth, see Fargard, xix, 18, 20, 26, also

140, 147. Very striking is the account of the Temptation in the

Pelhavi version of the Vendidad.  The devil is represented as

saying to Zaratusht (Zoroaster): "I had the worship of thy

ancestors; do thou also worship me."  I am indebted to Prof. E.

P. Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of

Munich, for a translation of the original text from Spiegel's

edition.  For a good account, see also Haug, Essays on the Sacred

Language, etc., of the Parsees, edited by West, London, 1884, pp.

252 et seq.; see also Mills's and Darmesteter's work in Sacred

Books of the East.  For Dr. Mills's article referred to, see his

Zoroaster and the Bible, in The Nineteenth Century, January,

1894.  For the citation from Renan, see his Histoire du Peuple

Israel, tome xiv, chap. iv; see also, for Persian ideans of

heaven, hell and resurrection, Haug, as above, p. 310 et seq.

For an interesting resume of Zoroastrianism, see Laing, A Modern

Zoroastrian, chap. xii, London, eighth edition, 1893.  For the

Buddhist version of the judgment of Solomon, etc., see Fausboll,

Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids, London, 1880,

vol. 1, p. 14 and following.  For very full statements regarding

the influence of Persian ideas upon the Jews during the

captivity, see Kahut, Ueber die judische Angelologie und

Daemonologie in ihren Abhangigkeit vom Parsismus, Leipzig, 1866.





Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific

criticism applied to the sacred literature of southern and

eastern Asia.  The resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives

and ideas in our own sacred books with those of Buddhism were

especially suggestive.



Here, too, had been a long preparatory history.  The discoveries

in Sanscrit philology made in the latter half of the eighteenth

century and the first half of the nineteenth, by Sir William

Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, and others, had met at

first with some opposition from theologians.  The declaration by

Dugald Stewart that the discovery of Sanscrit was fraudulent, and

its vocabulary and grammar patched together out of Greek and

Latin, showed the feeling of the older race of biblical students.



But researches went on.  Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney,

Max Muller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth

century.  More and more evident became the sources from which

many ideas and narratives in our own sacred books had been

developed.  Studies in the sacred books of Brahmanism, and in the

institutions of Buddhism, the most widespread of all religions,

its devotees outnumbering those of all branches of the Christian

Church together, proved especially fruitful in facts relating to

general sacred literature and early European religious ideas.



Noteworthy in the progress of this knowledge was the work of

Fathers Huc and Gabet.  In 1839 the former of these, a French

Lazarist priest, set out on a mission to China.  Having prepared

himself at Macao by eighteen months of hard study, and having

arrayed himself like a native, even to the wearing of the queue

and the staining of his skin, he visited Peking and penetrated

Mongolia.  Five years later, taking Gabet with him, both

disguised as Lamas, he began his long and toilsome journey to the

chief seats of Buddhism in Thibet, and, after two years of

fearful dangers and sufferings, accomplished it.  Driven out

finally by the Chinese, Huc returned to Europe in 1852, having

made one of the most heroic, self-denying, and, as it turned out,

one of the most valuable efforts in all the noble annals of

Christian missions.  His accounts of these journevs, written in a

style simple, clear, and interesting, at once attracted attention

throughout the world.  But far more important than any services

he had rendered to the Church he served was the influence of his

book upon the general opinions of thinking men; for he completed

a series of revelations made by earlier, less gifted, and less

devoted travellers, and brought to the notice of the world the

amazing similarity of the ideas, institutions, observances,

ceremonies, and ritual, and even the ecclesiastical costumes of

the Buddhists to those of his own Church.



Buddhism was thus shown with its hierarchy, in which the Grand

Lama, an infallible representative of the Most High, is

surrounded by its minor Lamas, much like cardinals; with its

bishops wearing mitres, its celibate priests with shaven crown,

cope, dalmatic, and censer; its cathedrals with clergy gathered

in the choir; its vast monasteries filled with monks and nuns

vowed to poverty, chastity, and obedience; its church

arrangements, with shrines of saints and angels; its use of

images, pictures, and illuminated missals; its service, with a

striking general resemblance to the Mass; antiphonal choirs;

intoning of prayers; recital of creeds; repetition of litanies;

processions; mystic rites and incense; the offering and adoration

of bread upon an altar lighted by candles; the drinking from a

chalice by the priest; prayers and offerings for the dead;

benediction with outstretched hands; fasts, confessions, and

doctrine of purgatory--all this and more was now clearly

revealed.  The good father was evidently staggered by these

amazing facts; but his robust faith soon gave him an explanation:

he suggested that Satan, in anticipation of Christianity, had

revealed to Buddhism this divinely constituted order of things.

This naive explanation did not commend itself to his superiors in

the Roman Church.  In the days of St. Augustine or of St. Thomas

Aquinas it would doubtless have been received much more kindly;

but in the days of Cardinal Antonelli this was hardly to be

expected: the Roman authorities, seeing the danger of such plain

revelations in the nineteenth century, even when coupled with

such devout explanations, put the book under the ban, though not

before it had been spread throughout the world in various

translations.  Father Huc was sent on no more missions.



Yet there came even more significant discoveries, especially

bearing upon the claims of that great branch of the Church which

supposes itself to possess a divine safeguard against error in

belief.  For now was brought to light by literary research the

irrefragable evidence that the great Buddha--Sakya Muni

himself--had been canonized and enrolled among the Christian

saints whose intercession may be invoked, and in whose honour

images, altars, and chapels may be erected; and this, not only by

the usage of the medieval Church, Greek and Roman, but by the

special and infallible sanction of a long series of popes, from

the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth--a

sanction granted under one of the most curious errors in human

history.   The story enables us to understand the way in which

many of the beliefs of Christendom have been developed,

especially how they have been influenced from the seats of older

religions; and it throws much light into the character and

exercise of papal infallibility.



Early in the seventh century there was composed, as is now

believed, at the Convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, a pious

romance entitled Barlaam and Josaphat--the latter personage, the

hero of the story, being represented as a Hindu prince converted

to Christianity by the former.



This story, having been attributed to St. John of Damascus in the

following century became amazingly popular, and was soon accepted

as true: it was translated from the Greek original not only into

Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic, but into every important

European language, including even Polish, Bohemian, and

Icelandic.   Thence it came into the pious historical

encyclopaedia of Vincent of Beauvais, and, most important of all,

into the Lives of the Saints.



Hence the name of its pious hero found its way into the list of

saints whose intercession is to be prayed for, and it passed

without challenge until about 1590, when, the general subject of

canonization having been brought up at Rome, Pope Sixtus V, by

virtue of his infallibility and immunity against error in

everything relating to faith and morals, sanctioned a revised

list of saints, authorizing and directing it to be accepted by

the Church; and among those on whom he thus forever infallibly

set the seal of Heaven was included "The Holy Saint Josaphat of

India, whose wonderful acts St. John of Damascus has related."

The 27th of November was appointed as the day set apart in honour

of this saint, and the decree, having been enforced by successive

popes for over two hundred and fifty years, was again officially

approved by Pius IX in 1873.  This decree was duly accepted as

infallible, and in one of the largest cities of Italy may to-day

be seen a Christian church dedicated to this saint.  On its front

are the initials of his Italianized name; over its main entrance

is the inscription "Divo Josafat"; and within it is an altar

dedicated to the saint--above this being a pedestal bearing his

name and supporting a large statue which represents him as a

youthful prince wearing a crown and contemplating a crucifix.



Moreover, relics of this saint were found; bones alleged to be

parts of his skeleton, having been presented by a Doge of Venice

to a King of Portugal, are now treasured at Antwerp.



But even as early as the sixteenth century a pregnant fact

regarding this whole legend was noted: for the Portuguese

historian Diego Conto showed that it was identical with the

legend of Buddha.   Fortunately for the historian, his faith was

so robust that he saw in this resemblance only a trick of Satan;

the life of Buddha being, in his opinion, merely a diabolic

counterfeit of the life of Josaphat centuries before the latter

was lived or written--just as good Abbe Huc saw in the ceremonies

of Buddhism a similar anticipatory counterfeit of Christian

ritual.



There the whole matter virtually rested for about three hundred

years--various scholars calling attention to the legend as a

curiosity, but none really showing its true bearings--until, in

1859, Laboulaye in France, Liebrecht in Germany, and others

following them, demonstrated that this Christian work was drawn

almost literally from an early biography of Buddha, being

conformed to it in the most minute details, not only of events

but of phraseology; the only important changes being that, at the

end of the various experiences showing the wretchedness of the

world, identical with those ascribed in the original to the young

Prince Buddha, the hero, instead of becoming a hermit, becomes a

Christian, and that for the appellation of Buddha-- "Bodisat"--is

substituted the more scriptural name Josaphat.



Thus it was that, by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to

the papacy in matters of faith and morals, Buddha became a

Christian saint.



Yet these were by no means the most pregnant revelations.   As

the Buddhist scriptures were more fully examined, there were

disclosed interesting anticipations of statements in later sacred

books.   The miraculous conception of Buddha and his virgin

birth, like that of Horus in Egypt and of Krishna in India; the

previous annunciation to his mother Maja; his birth during a

journey by her; the star appearing in the east, and the angels

chanting in the heavens at his birth; his temptation--all these

and a multitude of other statements were full of suggestions to

larger thought regarding the development of sacred literature in

general.   Even the eminent Roman Catholic missionary Bishop

Bigandet was obliged to confess, in his scholarly life of Buddha,

these striking similarities between the Buddhist scriptures and

those which it was his mission to expound, though by this honest

statement his own further promotion was rendered impossible.

Fausboll also found the story of the judgment of Solomon imbedded

in Buddhist folklore; and Sir Edwin Arnold, by his poem, The

Light of Asia, spread far and wide a knowledge of the

anticipation in Buddhism of some ideas which down to a recent

period were considered distinctively Christian.   Imperfect as

the revelations thus made of an evolution of religious beliefs,

institutions, and literature still are, they have not been

without an important bearing upon the newer conception of our own

sacred books: more and more manifest has become the

interdependence of all human development; more and more clear the

truth that Christianity, as a great fact in man's history, is not

dependent for its life upon any parasitic growths of myth and

legend, no matter how beautiful they may be.[498]



[498] For Huc and Gabet, see Souvenirs d'un Voyage dans la

Tartarie, le Thibet, et la Chine, English translation by Hazlitt,

London, 1851; also supplementary work by Huc.  For Bishop

Bigandet, see his Life of Buddha, passim.  As for authority for

the fact that his book was condemned at Rome and his own

promotion prevented, the present writer has the bishop's own

statement.  For notices of similarities between Buddhist and

Christian institutions, rituals, etc., see Rhys David's Buddhism,

London, 1894, passim; also Lillie, Buddhism and Christianity,

especially chaps. ii and xi.  It is somewhat difficult to

understand how a scholar so eminent as Mr. Rhys Davids should

have allowed the Society for the Promotion of Christian

Knowledge, which published his book, to eliminate all the

interesting details regarding the birth of Buddha, and to give so

fully everything that seemed to tell against the Roman Catholic

Church; cf. p. 27 with p. 246 et seq.  For more thorough

presentation of the development of features in Buddhism and

Brahmanism which anticipate those of Chrisitianity, see

Schroeder, Indiens Literatur und Cultur, Leipsic, 1887,

especially Vorlesung XXVIII and following.  For full details of

the canonization of Buddha under the name of St. Josaphat, see

Fausboll, Buddhist Birth Stories, translated by Rhys Davids,

London, 1880, pp. xxxvi and following; also Prof. Max Muller in

the Contemporary Review for July, 1890; also the article Barlaam

and Josaphat, in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia

Britannica.  For the more recent and full accounts, correcting

some minor details in the foregoing authorities, see Kuhn,

Barlaam und Joasaph, Munich, 1893, especially pages 82, 83.  For

a very thorough discussion of the whole subject, see Zotenberg,

Notice sur le livre de Barlaam et Joasaph, Paris, 1886;

especially for arguments fixing date of the work, see parts i to

iii; also Gaston Paris in the Revue de Paris for June, 1895.  For

the transliteration between the appelation of Buddha and the name

of the saint, see Fausboll and Sayce, as above, p. xxxvii, note;

and for the multitude of translations of the work ascribed to St.

John of Damascus, see Table III, on p. xcv.  The reader who is

curious to trace up a multitude of the myths and legends of early

Hebrew and Christian mythology to their more eastern and southern

sources can do so in Bible Myths, New York, 1883.  The present

writer gladly avails himself of the opportunity to thank the

learned Director of the National Library at Palermo, Monsignor

Marzo, for his kindness in showing him the very interesting

church of San Giosafat in that city; and to the custodians of the

church for their readiness to allow photographs of the saint to

be taken.  The writer's visit was made in April, 1895, and copies

of the photographs may be seen in the library of Cornell

University.  As to the more rare editions of Barlaam and

Josaphat, a copy of the Icelandic translation is to be seen in

the remrkable collection of Prof. Willard Fiske, at Florence.  As

to the influence of these translations, it may be noted that when

young John Kuncewicz, afterward a Polish archbishop, became a

monk, he took the name of the sainted Prince Josafat; and, having

fallen a victim to one of the innumerable murderous affrays of

the seventeenth century between different sorts of fanatics--

Greek, Catholic, and Protestant--in Poland, he also was finally

canonized under that name, evidently as a means of annoying the

Russian Government. (See Contieri, Vita di S. Giosafat, Arcivesco

e Martira Rutena, Roma, 1867.)





No less important was the closer research into the New Testament

during the latter part of the nineteenth century.  To go into the

subject in detail would be beyond the scope of this work, but a

few of the main truths which it brought before the world may be

here summarized.[499]



[499] For a brief but thorough statement of the work of Strauss,

Baur, and the earlier cruder efforts in New Testament exegesis,

see Pfleiderer, as already cited, book ii, chap. i; and for the

later work on Supernatural Religion and Lightfoot's answer,

ibid., book iv. chap. ii.





By the new race of Christian scholars it has been clearly shown

that the first three Gospels, which, down to the close of the

last century, were so constantly declared to be three independent

testimonies agreeing as to the events recorded, are neither

independent of each other nor in that sort of agreement which was

formerly asserted.   All biblical scholars of any standing, even

the most conservative, have come to admit that all three took

their rise in the same original sources, growing by the

accretions sure to come as time went on--accretions sometimes

useful and often beautiful, but in no inconsiderable degree ideas

and even narratives inherited from older religions: it is also

fully acknowledged that to this growth process are due certain

contradictions which can not otherwise be explained.  As to the

fourth Gospel, exquisitely beautiful as large portions of it are,

there has been growing steadily and irresistibly the conviction,

even among the most devout scholars, that it has no right to the

name, and does not really give the ideas of St. John, but that it

represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish theology,

and that its final form, which one of the most eminent among

recent Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical

product of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted

representative or representatives of the Alexandrian school.

Bitter as the resistance to this view has been, it has during the

last years of the nineteenth century won its way more and more to

acknowledgment.  A careful examination made in 1893 by a

competent Christian scholar showed facts which are best given in

his own words, as follows: "In the period of thirty years ending

in 1860, of the fifty great authorities in this line, FOUR TO ONE

were in favour of the Johannine authorship.  Of those who in

that period had advocated this traditional position, one

quarter--and certainly the very greatest--finally changed their

position to the side of a late date and non-Johannine authorship.



Of those who have come into this field of scholarship since

about 1860, some forty men of the first class, two thirds reject

the traditional theory wholly or very largely.  Of those who have

contributed important articles to the discussion from about 1880

to 1890, about TWO TO ONE reject the Johannine authorship of the

Gospel in its present shape--that is to say, while forty years

ago great scholars were FOUR TO ONE IN FAVOUR OF, they are now

TWO TO ONE AGAINST, the claim that the apostle John wrote this

Gospel as we have it.  Again, one half of those on the

conservative side to-day--scholars like Weiss, Beyschlag, Sanday,

and Reynolds--admit the existence of a dogmatic intent and an

ideal element in this Gospel, so that we do not have Jesus's

thought in his exact words, but only in substance."[500]



[500] For the citations given regarding the development of

thought in relation to the fourth gospel, see Crooker, The New

Bible and its Uses, Boston, 1893, pp. 29, 30.  For the

characterization of St. John's Gospel above referred to, see

Robertson Smith in the Encyc. Brit., 9th edit., art. Bible, p.

642.  For a very careful and candid summary of the reasons which

are gradually leading the more eminent among the newer scholars

to give up the Johannine authorship ot the fourth Gospel, see

Schurer, in the Contemporary Review for September, 1891.

American  readers, regarding this and the whole series of

subjects of which this forms a part, may most profitably study

the Rev. Dr. Cone's Gospel Criticism and Historic Christianity,

one of the most lucid and judicial of recent works in this field.





In 1881 came an event of great importance as regards the

development of a more frank and open dealing with scriptural

criticism.  In that year appeared the Revised Version of the New

Testament.  It was exceedingly cautious and conservative; but it

had the vast merit of being absolutely conscientious.  One thing

showed, in a striking way, ethical progress in theological

methods.  Although all but one of the English revisers

represented Trinitarian bodies, they rejected the two great proof

texts which had so long been accounted essential bulwarks of

Trinitarian doctrine.  Thus disappeared at last from the Epistle

of St. John the text of the Three Witnesses, which had for

centuries held its place in spite of its absence from all the

earlier important manuscripts, and of its rejection in later

times by Erasmus, Luther, Isaac Newton, Porson, and a long line

of the greatest biblical scholars.  And with this was thrown out

the other like unto it in spurious origin and zealous intent,

that interpolation of the word "God" in the sixteenth verse of

the third chapter of the First Epistle to Timothy, which had for

ages served as a warrant for condemning some of the noblest of

Christians, even such men as Newton and Milton and Locke and

Priestley and Channing.



Indeed, so honest were the revisers that they substituted the

correct reading of Luke ii, 33, in place of the time-honoured

corruption in the King James version which had been thought

necessary to safeguard the dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus of

Nazareth.   Thus came the true reading, "His FATHER and his

mother" instead of the old piously fraudulent words "JOSEPH and

his mother."



An even more important service to the new and better growth of

Christianity was the virtual setting aside of the last twelve

verses of the Gospel according to St. Mark; for among these

stood that sentence which has cost the world more innocent blood

than any other--the words "He that believeth not shall be

damned."  From this source had logically grown the idea that the

intellectual rejection of this or that dogma which dominant

theology had happened at any given time to pronounce essential,

since such rejection must bring punishment infinite in agony and

duration, is a crime to be prevented at any cost of finite

cruelty.  Still another service rendered to humanity by the

revisers was in substituting a new and correct rendering for the

old reading of the famous text regarding the inspiration of

Scripture, which had for ages done so much to make our sacred

books a fetich.  By this more correct reading the revisers gave a

new charter to liberty in biblical research.[501]



[501] The texts referred to as most beneficially changed by the

revisers are I John v, 7 and I Timothy iii, 16.  Mention may also

be made of the fact that the American revision gave up the

Trinitarian version of Romans ix, 5, and that even their more

conservative British brethren, while leaving it in the text,

discredited it in the margin.



Though revisers thought it better not to suppress altogether the

last twelve verses of St. Mark's Gospel, they softened the word

"damned' to "condemned," and separated them from the main Gospel,

adding a note stating that "the two oldest Greek manuscripts, and

some other authorities, omit from verse nine to the end"; and

that "some other authorities have a different ending to this

Gospel."



The resistance of staunch high churchmen of the older type even

to so mild a reform as the first change above noted may be

exemplified by a story told of Philpotts, Bishop of Exeter, about

the middle of the nineteenth century.  A kindly clergyman reading

an invitation to the holy communion, and thinking that so an

affectionate a call was difigured by the harsh phrase "eateth and

drinketh to his own damnation," ventured timidly to substitute

the word "condemnation."  Thereupon the bishop, who was kneeling

with the rest of the congregation, threw up his head and roared

"DAMNATION!"  The story is given in T. A. Trollope's What I

Remember, vol. i, p. 444.  American churchmen may well rejoice

that the fathers of the American branch of the Anglican Church

were wise enough and Christian enough to omit from their Prayer

Book this damnatory clause, as well as the Commination Service

and the Athanasian Creed.





Most valuable, too, have been studies during the latter part of

the nineteenth century upon the formation of the canon of

Scripture.  The result of these has been to substitute something

far better for that conception of our biblical literature, as

forming one book handed out of the clouds by the Almighty, which

had been so long practically the accepted view among probably the

majority of Christians.  Reverent scholars have demonstrated our

sacred literature to be a growth in obedience to simple laws

natural and historical; they have shown how some books of the Old

Testament were accepted as sacred, centuries before our era, and

how others gradually gained sanctity, in some cases only fully

acquiring it long after the establishment of the Christian

Church.  The same slow growth has also been shown in the New

Testament canon.  It has been demonstrated that the selection of

the books composing it, and their separation from the vast mass

of spurious gospels, epistles, and apocalytic literature was a

gradual process, and, indeed, that the rejection of some books

and the acceptance of others was accidental, if anything is

accidental.



So, too, scientific biblical research has, as we have seen, been

obliged to admit the existence of much mythical and legendary

matter, as a setting for the great truths not only of the Old

Testament but of the New.  It has also shown, by the comparative

study of literatures, the process by which some books were

compiled and recompiled, adorned with beautiful utterances,

strengthened or weakened by alterations and interpolations

expressing the views of the possessors or transcribers, and

attributed to personages who could not possibly have written

them.  The presentation of these things has greatly weakened that

sway of mere dogma which has so obscured the simple teachings of

Christ himself; for it has shown that the more we know of our

sacred books, the less certain we become as to the authenticity

of "proof texts," and it has disengaged more and more, as the

only valuable residuum, like the mass of gold at the bottom of

the crucible, the personality, spirit, teaching, and ideals of

the blessed Founder of Christianity.  More and more, too, the

new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament

as, like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to law--a

conception which in al probability will give it its strongest

hold on the coming  centuries.  In making this revelation

Christian scholarship has by no means done work mainly

destructive.   It has, indeed, swept away a mass of noxious

growths, but it has at the same time cleared the ground for a

better growth of Christianity--a growth through which already

pulsates the current of a nobler life.  It has forever destroyed

the contention of scholars like those of the eighteenth century

who saw, in the multitude of irreconcilable discrepancies between

various biblical statements, merely evidences of priestcraft and

intentional fraud.  The new scholarship has shown that even such

absolute contradictions as those between the accounts of the

early life of Jesus by Matthew and Luke, and between the date of

the crucifixion and details of the resurrection in the first

three Gospels and in the fourth, and other discrepancies hardly

less serious, do not destroy the historical character of the

narrative.  Even the hopelessly conflicting genealogies of the

Saviour and the evidently mythical accretions about the simple

facts of his birth and life are thus full of interest when taken

as a natural literary development in obedience to the deepest

religious feeling.[502]



[502] Among the newer English works of the canon of Scripture,

especially as regards the Old Testament, see Ryle in work cited.

As to the evidences of frequent mutilations of the New Testament

text, as well as of frequent charge of changing texts made

against each other by early Christian writers, see Reuss, History

of the New Testament, vol. ii, S 362.  For a reverant and honest

treatment of some of the discrepancies and contradictions which

are absolutely irreconcilable, see Crooker, as above, appendix;

also Cone, Gospel Criticism and Historic Christianity, especially

chap. ii; also Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, and God and

the Bible, especially chap. vi; and for a brief but full showing

of them in a judicial and kindly spirit, see Laing, Problems of

the Future, chap. ix, on The Historical Element in the Gospels.





Among those who have wrought most effectively to bring the

leaders of thought in the English-speaking nations to this higher

conception, Matthew Arnold should not be forgotten.  By poetic

insight, broad scholarship, pungent statement, pithy argument,

and an exquisitely lucid style, he aided effectually during the

latter half of the nineteenth century in bringing the work of

specialists to bear upon the development of a broader and deeper

view.  In the light of his genius a conception of our sacred

books at the same time more literary as well as more scientific

has grown widely and vigorously, while the older view which made

of them a fetich and a support for unchristian dogmas has been

more and more thrown into the background.  The contributions to

these results by the most eminent professors at the great

Christian universities of the English-speaking world, Oxford and

Cambridge taking the lead, are most hopeful signs of a new epoch.



Very significant also is a change in the style of argument

against the scientific view.  Leading supporters of the older

opinions see more and more clearly the worthlessness of rhetoric

against ascertained fact: mere dogged resistance to cogent

argument evidently avails less and less; and the readiness of the

more prominent representatives of the older thought to consider

opposing arguments, and to acknowledge any force they may have,

is certainly of good omen.  The concessions made in Lux Mundi

regarding scriptural myths and legends have been already

mentioned.



Significant also has been the increasing reprobation in the

Church itself of the profound though doubtless unwitting

immoralities of RECONCILERS.  The castigation which followed the

exploits of the greatest of these in our own time--Mr. Gladstone,

at the hands of Prof. Huxley--did much to complete a work in

which such eminent churchmen as Stanley, Farrar, Sanday, Cheyne,

Driver, and Sayce had rendered good service.



Typical among these evidences of a better spirit in controversy

has been the treatment of the question regarding mistaken

quotations from the Old Testament in the New, and especially

regarding quotations by Christ himself.  For a time this was

apparently the most difficult of all matters dividing the two

forces; but though here and there appear champions of tradition,

like the Bishop of Gloucester, effectual resistance to the new

view has virtually ceased; in one way or another the most

conservative authorities have accepted the undoubted truth

revealed by a simple scientific method.  Their arguments have

indeed been varied.  While some have fallen back upon Le Clerc's

contention that "Christ did not come to teach criticism to the

Jews," and others upon Paley's argument that the Master shaped

his statements in accordance with the ideas of his time, others

have taken refuge in scholastic statements--among them that of

Irenaeus regarding "a quiescence of the divine word," or the

somewhat startling explanation by sundry recent theologians that

"our Lord emptied himself of his Godhead."[504]



[504] For Matthew Arnold, see, besides his Literature and Dogma,

his St. Paul and Protestantism.  As to the quotations in the New

Testament from the Old, see Toy, Quotations in the New Testament,

1889, p. 72; also Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in Israel.

For Le Clerc's method of dealing with the argument regarding

quotations from the Old Testament in the New, see earlier parts

of the present chapter.  For Paley's mode, see his Evidences,

part iii, chapter iii.  For the more scholastic expresssions from

Irenaeus and others, see Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891, especially

note on p. 267.  For a striking passage on the general subject

see B. W. Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, p. 33, ending with the

words, "We must decline to stake the authority of Jesus Christ on

a question of literary criticism."





Nor should there be omitted a tribute to the increasing courtesy

shown in late years by leading supporters of the older view.

During the last two decades of the present century there has been

a most happy departure from the older method of resistance, first

by plausibilities, next by epithets, and finally by persecution.

To the bitterness of the attacks upon Darwin, the Essayists and

Reviewers, and Bishop Colenso, have succeeded, among really

eminent leaders, a far better method and tone.  While Matthew

Arnold no doubt did much in commending "sweet reasonableness" to

theological controversialists, Mr. Gladstone, by his perfect

courtesy to his opponents, even when smarting under their

heaviest blows, has set a most valuable example.  Nor should the

spirit shown by Bishop Ellicott, leading a forlorn hope for the

traditional view, pass without a tribute of respect.  Truly

pathetic is it to see this venerable and learned prelate, one of

the most eminent representatives of the older biblical research,

even when giving solemn warnings against the newer criticisms,

and under all the temptations of ex cathedra utterance, remaining

mild and gentle and just in the treatment of adversaries whose

ideas he evidently abhors.  Happily, he is comforted by the faith

that Christianitv will survive; and this faith his opponents

fully share.[505]



[505] As an example of courtesy between theologic opponents may

be cited the controversy between Mr. Gladstone and Prof. Huxley,

Principal Gore's Bampton Lectures for 1891, and Bishop Ellicott's

Charges, published in 1893.



To the fact that the suppression of personal convictions among

"the enlightened" did not cease with the Medicean popes there are

many testimonies.  One especially curious was mentioned to the

present writer by a most honoured diplomatist and scholar at

Rome.  While this gentleman was looking over the books of an

eminent cardinal, recently deceased, he noticed a series of

octavos bearing on their backs the title "Acta Apostolorum."

Surprised at such an extension of the Acts of Apostles, he opened

a volume and found the series to be the works of Voltaire.  As to

a similar condition of things in the Church of England may be

cited the following from Froude's Erasmus: "I knew various

persons of high reputation a few years ago who thought at the

bottom very much as Bishop Colenso thought, who nevertheless

turned and rent himto clear their own reputations--which they did

not succeed in doing."  See work cited, close of Lecture XI.







VI.   RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM.





For all this dissolving away of traditional opinions regarding

our sacred literature, there has been a cause far more general

and powerful than any which has been given, for it is a cause

surrounding and permeating all.  This is simply the atmosphere of

thought engendered by the development of all sciences during the

last three centuries.



Vast masses of myth, legend, marvel, and dogmatic assertion,

coming into this atmosphere, have been dissolved and are now

dissolving quietly away like icebergs drifted into the Gulf

Stream.  In earlier days, when some critic in advance of his

time insisted that Moses could not have written an account

embracing the circumstances of his own death, it was sufficient

to answer that Moses was a prophet; if attention was called to

the fact that the great early prophets, by all which they did and

did not do, showed that there could not have existed in their

time any "Levitical code," a sufficient answer was "mystery"; and

if the discrepancy was noted between the two accounts of creation

in Genesis, or between the genealogies or the dates of the

crucifixion in the Gospels, the cogent reply was "infidelity."

But the thinking world has at last been borne by the general

development of a scientific atmosphere beyond that kind of

refutation.



If, in the atmosphere generated by the earlier developed

sciences, the older growths of biblical interpretation have

drooped and withered and are evidently perishing, new and better

growths have arisen with roots running down into the newer

sciences.  Comparative Anthropology in general, by showing that

various early stages of belief and observance, once supposed to

be derived from direct revelation from heaven to the Hebrews, are

still found as arrested developments among various savage and

barbarous tribes; Comparative Mythology and Folklore, by showing

that ideas and beliefs regarding the Supreme Power in the

universe are progressive, and not less in Judea than in other

parts of the world; Comparative Religion and Literature, by

searching out and laying side by side those main facts in the

upward struggle of humanity which show that the Israelites, like

other gifted peoples, rose gradually, through ghost worship,

fetichism, and polytheism, to higher theological levels; and

that, as they thus rose, their conceptions and statements

regarding the God they worshipped became nobler and better--all

these sciences are giving a new solution to those problems which

dogmatic theology has so long laboured in vain to solve.  While

researches in these sciences have established the fact that

accounts formerly supposed to be special revelations to Jews and

Christians are but repetitions of widespread legends dating from

far earlier civilizations, and that beliefs formerly thought

fundamental to Judaism and Christianity are simply based on

ancient myths, they have also begun to impress upon the intellect

and conscience of the thinking world the fact that the religious

and moral truths thus disengaged from the old masses of myth and

legend are all the more venerable and authoritative, and that all

individual or national life of any value must be vitalized by

them.[506]



[506] For plaintive lamentations over the influence of this

atmosphere of scientific thought upon the most eminent

contemporary Christian scholars, see the Christus Comprobator, by

the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, London, 1893, and the

article in the Contemporary Review for May, 1892, by the Bishop

of Colchester, passim.  For some less known examples of sacred

myths and legends inherited from ancient civilizations, see

Lenormant, Les Origines de l'Histoire, passim, but especially

chaps. ii, iv, v, vi; see also Goldziher.





If, then, modern science in general has acted powerfully to

dissolve away the theories and dogmas of the older theologic

interpretation, it has also been active in a reconstruction and

recrystallization of truth; and very powerful in this

reconstruction have been the evolution doctrines which have grown

out of the thought and work of men like Darwin and Spencer.



In the light thus obtained the sacred text has been transformed:

out of the old chaos has come order; out of the old welter of

hopelessly conflicting statements in religion and morals has

come, in obedience to this new conception of development, the

idea of a sacred literature which mirrors the most striking

evolution of morals and religion in the history of our race.  Of

all the sacred writings of the world, it shows us our own as the

most beautiful and the most precious; exhibiting to us the most

complete religious development to which humanity has attained,

and holding before us the loftiest ideals which our race has

known.  Thus it is that, with the keys furnished by this new

race of biblical scholars, the way has been opened to treasures

of thought which have been inaccessible to theologians for two

thousand years.



As to the Divine Power in the universe: these interpreters have

shown how, beginning with the tribal god of the Hebrews--one

among many jealous, fitful, unseen, local sovereigns of Asia

Minor--the higher races have been borne on to the idea of the

just Ruler of the whole earth, as revealed by the later and

greater prophets of Israel, and finally to the belief in the

Universal Father, as best revealed in the New Testament.  As to

man: beginning with men after Jehovah's own heart--cruel,

treacherous, revengeful--we are borne on to an ideal of men who

do right for right's sake; who search and speak the truth for

truth's sake; who love others as themselves.  As to the world at

large: the races dominant in religion and morals have been lifted

from the idea of a "chosen people" stimulated and abetted by

their tribal god in every sort of cruelty and injustice, to the

conception of a vast community in which the fatherhood of God

overarches all, and the brotherhood of man permeates all.



Thus, at last, out of the old conception of our Bible as a

collection of oracles--a mass of entangling utterances, fruitful

in wrangling interpretations, which have given to the world long

and weary ages of "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"; of

fetichism, subtlety, and pomp; of tyranny bloodshed, and solemnly

constituted imposture; of everything which the Lord Jesus Christ

most abhorred--has been gradually developed through the

centuries, by the labours, sacrifices, and even the martyrdom of

a long succession of men of God, the conception of it as a sacred

literature--a growth only possible under that divine light which

the various orbs of science have done so much to bring into the

mind and heart and soul of man--a revelation, not of the Fall of

Man, but of the Ascent of Man--an exposition, not of temporary

dogmas and observances, but of the Eternal Law of

Righteousness--the one upward path for individuals and for

nations.  No longer an oracle, good for the "lower orders" to

accept, but to be quietly sneered at by "the enlightened"--no

longer a fetich, whose defenders must be persecuters, or

reconcilers, or "apologists"; but a most fruitful fact, which

religion and science may accept as a source of strength to both.



End