In a very mild exercise, then, of critical judgment, Erasmus omitted this text from the fi

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.[[308]]

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.[310]

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.[311]


             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.[[312]]

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."[[313]]

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.[[316]]

Naturally, then, in this new atmosphere the bolder scholars of
Europe soon began to push mnore 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 fullv 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 188o, 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.[[321]]

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 condemnned: 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 contiuued: 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.[[332]]


     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.[[333]]

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."[[334]]

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.[[334b]]

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.[[341]]

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.[[348]]


                    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."[[351]]

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.[[352]]

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.[[353]]

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