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EDITED BY
SHAILER MATHEWS

THE

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM
OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

Cestament Handbooks

EDITED BY SHAILER MATHEWS

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

A series of volumes presenting briefly and intelligibly the
results of the scientific study of the New Testament. Each vol-
ume covers its own field, and is intended for the general reader as
well as the special student.

Arrangements have been made for the following volumes : —

THE HISTORY OF THE TEXTUAL CRITICISM OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT. Professor MARVIN R. VINCENT, Union Theo-
logical Seminary. [Ready.

THE HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF THE NEW
TESTAMENT. Professor HENRY S. NASH, Cambridge Divinity
School. [Ready.

INTRODUCTION TO THE BOOKS OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Professor B. WISNER BACON, Yale Divinity School. [In Press.

THE HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT.
Professor J. R. S. STERRETT, Amherst College.

THE HISTORY OF NEW TESTAMENT TIMES IN PALESTINE.
Professor SHAILER MATHEWS, The University of Chicago.

[Ready.

THE LIFE OF PAUL. President RUSH RHEES, The University
of Rochester.

THE HISTORY OF THE APOSTOLIC AGE. Dr. C. W. VOTAW,
The University of Chicago.

THE TEACHING OF JESUS. Professor GEORGE B. STEVENS,
Yale Divinity School.

THE BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF THE NEW TESTAMENT. Pro-
fessor E. P. GOULD. [Ready.

THE TEACHING OF JESUS AND MODERN SOCIAL PROB-
LEMS. Professor FRANCIS G. PEABODY, Harvard Divinity
School.

THE HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN LITERATURE UNTIL EUSEBIUS.
Professor J. W. PLATNER, Harvard Divinity School.

THE HISTORY

THE HIGHER CRITICISM OF
THE NEW TESTAMENT

BEING THE HISTORY OF THE PROCESS WHEREBY

THE WORD OF GOD HAS WON THE RIGHT

TO BE UNDERSTOOD

HENRY S. NASH

PROFESSOR OF NEW TESTAMENT INTERPRETATION IN THE
EPISCOPAL THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL AT CAMBRIDGE

Nefo
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., LTD.
1900

COPYEIOHT, 1900,

BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Norfooct)

J. S. Cushin? & Co. — Berwick & Smith
Norwood Maes. U.S.A.

PREFACE

THIS book may seem to be badly planned. Where
space is so scanty, to spend four chapters in working
up to the critical period that began in the eighteenth
century looks out of proportion. Yet the purpose of
the book justifies and even compels this procedure.
The aim is to make clear to non-professional readers
the nature of the Higher Criticism and its divine
right within the churches. To do this the history of
Bible-study must be followed far into the history
of Christianity, even as far as the time when, by the
cooperation of the Catholic Church with the moral
forces of pagan antiquity, the foundations of modern
life and culture were laid, and the Bible was taken
to the heart of Europe. Criticism can defend itself
before the people only by showing that the history
of our religion has made it inevitable. And to do
this with any measure of success, the historical causes
and conditions of criticism must be treated at greater
length than would be seemly if the book were designed
for professional readers.

The reader will remember that the aim of the book
is not to give a detailed account of the movements of
opinion in the field of Introduction. That matter
is handled by another book in this series. The aim
is rather a philosophy of the history of Criticism.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I

PAOB

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION ..... 1

View taken of the subject — Criticism is the modern
form of Bible-study — Its motive is identical with the
motive of Bible-study in earlier periods — The means
and methods differ — The motive of Bible-study has
always been the desire to know the Word of God
deeply — In former times the Scriptures were not free
to speak their mind in their own tongue — The text
was dominated and manipulated by dogma that came
upon it from without — In our times the text is being
interpreted along the lines of its own meaning. This,
in sum, is criticism — The explanation and defence
of criticism is to be found in the history of Bible-
study as a whole.

CHAPTER II

THE BIBLE'S DEFINITION OF REVELATION AND THE IDEAL

OF BIBLE-STUDY THAT GOES WITH IT . . . ,17

The main qualities of the book upon which Chris-
tian interpretation has exercised itself — The nature
of the self-revelation of God — The Bible defines itself
as a Word of God delivered through a genuinely
human experience — The Bible describes itself as
being mainly a book of histories — The heart of the
New Testament is the story of a sinless, yet absolutely
human, life, wherein God's deepest Word about Him-
self took flesh — The Holy Scriptures command us to

vii

viii CONTENTS

PA6B

test all views of the Bible by bringing them close to
the definition given by Scripture itself — The nature
of the Bible forces us to take it into the light of his-
tory in order to understand it.

CHAPTER III

How CRITICISM BECAME NKCKSSART .... 27

The irrepressible conflict between the ecclesiastical
interpretation of the Middle Ages and the sacred
text. The fundamental idea of genuine Christianity
is that the Sacred Scriptures, being the record of God's
self-revelation and the book of witness to the promise
and presence of the perfect life amongst men, are the
standard by which the Church is to judge her life —
The ecclesiastical doctrine of Tradition led the Church
to a position where she was more or less disloyal to
this fundamental idea — The Tradition put itself for-
ward as an infallible, that is to say, a sufficient inter-
pretation of God's Word — Finally it vested its claims
and rights in the person of an infallible Pope — The
contradiction between the sacred text and the estab-
lished interpretation was concealed by an allegorical
or unhistorical interpretation — The Bible itself, to
secure its rights, demanded a breach with Tradition
— Criticism inevitable.

CHAPTER IV

How THE POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM WAS GIVEN . . 53

The Reformation — Renaissance movement ; — The
laity secure the right to think and speak on sacred
things — The sacerdotal monopoly of interpretation
comes to an end — The Reformation asserts the right
of the lay conscience to know the Scriptures, the
standard of the ideal life, at first hand — The Renais-

CONTENTS IX

PAGE

sance asserts the right of reason to look into divine
truth — The Bible comes into direct contact with
common religious consciousness, and is set up as its
supreme authority — The fundamental idea of Chris-
tianity clearly recognised — The Bible shakes off the
bonds put upon it by human opinion — An historical
interpretation of Scripture necessary — Bible-study
ceases to be indirect, through the Fathers and through
Tradition, and becomes a study at first hand.

CHAPTER V

How CRITICISM WAS REALISED 77

The eighteenth century — The critical period in the
thought of Europe — Dogma breaks down — Tradition
cashiered — The sacred text set free — By means of
a grammatical and historical method of interpretation
the Bible insures itself against allegorical abuse —
The Bible its own guardian — The human authors of
Holy Scripture come plainly into view — The ideal of
criticism appears — All the records of the past open
themselves to a searching examination.

CHAPTER VI

THE PRELIMINARY WORK or CRITICISM . . . . 100

From Semler to Strauss, 1750-1835; — The criti-
cism of the text followed by "Higher" or interior
study — The decay of the ancient conception of inspi-
ration makes a literary study of the New Testament
possible — Problems appear — The relations of New
Testament books to one another are discovered —
The historical movements back of the books are
suggested.

X CONTENTS

CHAPTER VII

PAGB

THE TURNING-POINT IN THE COURSE OF CRITICISM, 1835 111

The criticism of 1750-1835 lacked a controlling and
coordinating conception — The dogmatic concept of
the Canon had given unity to patristic and mediaeval
and early Protestant Bible-study — That conception
shattered in the eighteenth century — No new unify-
ing principle to take its place — Studies of Scripture,
while critical and free, were disconnected — The re-
sults lacked an organising principle — In 1835 a new
ruling idea comes on the field — The idea of humanity
— Sacred history the record of a human process —
The literary study of the New Testament becomes
coherent.

CHAPTER VIII

TENDENCIES . . • 134

Criticism as an academic process — Forces deeper
than academic thought — The men of the chair freer
in Germany than in any other country — Even in
Germany, influences coming from outside the uni-
versities have been masterful — A purely critical
process is an illusion — Fundamental tendencies in
German criticism — The individual scholars did not
create them and can only in part modify them.

CHAPTER IX

THE SCHOOLS .153

The "Schools" of critical opinion more or less
loosely connected groups of scholars — Tubingen
School — Conservative School — Mediating School —
Ritschliau School.

CONTENTS XI

CHAPTER X

PAGE

THE HISTORICAL SPIRIT . . . 171

The historical spirit " a new kind of piety " — The
aim is to give the right of free speech to the men of
the past — The records of the past to be read in their
own language and along the lines of their own feeling

— The aim of the Reformation was to set the Word
of God free from subjection to ecclesiastical tradition

— By the help of modern methods in historical study
and through the use of the materials of knowledge
now brought within our reach, the principle of the
Reformation can be realised — The spirit of scientific
study the ally of Holy Scripture.

CHAPTER XI

THE INSPIRATION OF CRITICISM . . 180

A critical age may find in its criticism an ideal no
less noble than the one found by a dogmatic age in
its dogma — Criticism an ideal — The nature of revela-
tion calls for it — The logic of history makes it inevi-
table— The Church must take criticism seriously or
be untrue to Christianity — Possible connection be-
tween the tasks of criticism and the preparation of
the churches for their work in the coming age — The
ideal and the promise of criticism divinely given and
ordained.

INDEX 189

THE HISTOKY OF THE HIGHER CRIT-
ICISM OF THE NEW TESTAMENT

CHAPTER I

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION1

LET us fasten our minds on the Bible and take note The first
of the thoughts it gives rise to. We shall find that
we are stirred by a deep and lively interest, like that
which any great object excites, when it would call us
out of ourselves. Our interest runs out toward many
things. A mighty and majestic universe has always
beset the reason of our race. But it was only a little
while ago that we came to know the universe in its
true character. Man's discovery of the world he lives
in is the commanding feature of the mental life of our
time. Nature, having so long and patiently besieged
us, has, at last, carried the citadel by storm. The
walls are down. Neither indolence nor dogma can
longer resist Nature's questions. The results are not
all good. Religious folk are sometimes brought into

1 Literature : The ruling idea of this book being that the
Higher Criticism of the N. T. is an integral part of the process
whereby the men of the N. T. have corne to be interpreted
historically, many of the books referred to must necessarily be
very general in their character. Farrar, History of Interpreta-
tion, 1885; Immer, Hermeneutics of the N. T., tr. by New-
man, 1890 ; S. Davidson, Sacred Hermeneutics, 1843 ; Diestel,
Geschichte d. A. T., 1869; Hagenbach, History of Christian
Doctrines, 3 vols. (The Foreign Theological Library); Alfred
Cave, Introduction to Theology and its Literature, 2d ed., 1896.
B 1

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Bible-study
one of the
mental
interests of
our day.

All interest-
ing things
have the
right to be
known.

deep trouble. Many devout souls, finding the clear
and simple horizons of the old life blurred and
beclouded, are in sore distress. Masses of people
who, in earlier days, would have been under the
influence of Christianity, now wander about as sheep
having no shepherd. These things grieve our hearts.
Still, we cannot turn back the tide of history. The
age we live in, along with its many grievous faults,
has some incomparable virtues. The disinterested
love of truth has never been so strong; nor has there
ever been anything to compare with the wide and eager
study of our time. We have perfected the telescope,
and so broken through the barriers of the skies. We
have developed the microscope until the infinite has
come out of its hiding-place within the familiar.
Above us, around us, beneath our feet, is a world of
objects, all of them interesting, all of them command-
ing us, with an authority that may not be gainsaid,
to study them and so enlarge our minds.

Dogma, the simple, unhesitating, untiring convic-
tion regarding the things unseen, has greatly weak-
ened. Some day, changed in form, it will regain its
edge and force. For dogma means power and temper
of will, depth and persistence of purpose. And our
age, with the inspiring yet terrible difficulties that
are beginning to confront its choicest ideals, will find,
sooner or later, that it has sore need of dogma. But,
meanwhile, as we wait and pray for a truer and kind-
lier statement of the old faith, we recognise to the full
the intellectual glory and splendour of our epoch. We
are not outsiders to our time. We are within it and
of it. And because we drink deep of its spirit, our
world is full of interesting things, each endowed with
a divine right to be known. The depths of the sea
challenge us to fathom and explore them. The North
Pole does to men what the deed of Miltiades at Mara-

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION

thon did to Theraistocles — it will not let them sleep.
Nature stands before us with a full and eager mind.
To listen to her reverently, to go outside the bounds
of our present knowledge in order to learn new things,
and by learning to enrich and strengthen our race in
its struggle against the conditions that have enslaved
us, this is the ideal of mental life that inspires and
disciplines the highest reason of our time.

To that ideal our minds owe unhesitating loyalty.
Every object that makes a part of our universe calls
to us to come forth from ourselves that we may inter-
pret it. And we reverently acknowledge the divine
right of the object to challenge us, even though the
time and strength, the faculties and opportunities of
knowledge, be denied us. Now the Bible is one object
amongst others. It challenges the reason in us, just
as every great object does. At the same time, its
challenge has peculiar and compelling power. For
when reason passes from the high scientific study of
Nature to the scientific study of history ; when it sets
out on the search for that self-knowledge which is the
highest form of knowledge ; and when, in pursuit of
the deepest self-knowledge, it comes to the history or
autobiography'of our race, the Bible comes upon it with
irresistible authority. In supreme degree it has the
right to be reverently studied.

The Bible has been knit into the experience of the
nations whom God has put in control of the earth.
The story of the way it grew up is at the very heart
of universal history in its ancient period, as that his-
tory moved slowly but resistlessly from the earliest
Chaldean Empire to Eome. The story of its influence
is at the centre of universal history in its modern
period, as that history has marched on from the down-
fall of Kome to the building of the nations. It has,
then, a sovereign right to command our attention, a

The Bible
supremely
interesting
because of
the part it
has played.

4 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

supreme power to tax and control our interest. Think
of it as a book set deep iu the best experience of our
race. Then, if we would truly know our responsi-
bilities and our capacities, we must know its story
intimately. Think of it as a literature that has
strongly coloured and shaped the conscience and
imagination of the Occident. As students of litera-
ture, we must acquaint ourselves with its intrinsic
qualities and its external fortunes. Think of it as
the book of devotion to high aims and ennobling ends,
from which the choicest spirits of the world have
drawn strength and inspiration. Then, as men of
serious mind, who will not let their science distract
them from their main business — the art of living
nobly — we must study this book thoroughly. That
splendid ideal of knowledge, that impassioned desire
to know, which is the mental glory of our time, lays
upon us the obligation to acquaint ourselves with the
Bible and its history.
The second As we go deeper into our own hearts, we discover
anotner motive at work. This book, the book of Life
to our fathers, is the selfsame book of Life to us,
their children. As we look at it, warm and joyous
thoughts of the deeds of God visit and cheer us.
Through it the Christ speaks home to us a Word of
God that comes from the depths of the divine Being,
and tells us of a work of God perfectly wrought out in
humanity. We have listened to the Word. The best
that is in us has said "Amen" to Christ's report of
good things. Christ's book has enkindled in us the
sweet and masterful hope that we ourselves may grow
up to the doing of a perfect work. Our reverence for
ourselves, and our trust in our race, bid us reverence
and love the Bible. Our hearts stir us up to study
and know it.

And so, two kinds of piety join their forces to press

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION 5

upon us the duty of knowing the Bible intimately.1 The desire
The first is the historical spirit, a true kind of piety, JhekX.J"
in that it bids us know the words and deeds of the be saved,
men of the past, because of their intrinsic worth and
meaning. The second is the piety of the Christian,
which bids us search the Scriptures because they have
a deeper root in human experience than any other
book, and because they speak home to our hearts as
no other book can. Here are the two great spiritual
desires of our nature working to the same end. There
is, indeed, a vulgar desire to know. Vanity, the
appetite for knowledge that shall have a market value,
the love of fame, the low pleasure of the disillusion-
ment that comes from criticism of the noblest aspects
of the past, these things sometimes stain and soil the
purity of the desire to know. Likewise, there is a
vulgar desire to be saved. The subtle egotism that
pervades many forms of religion, the wish to avoid
complete responsibility for one's own character and
deeds, the base dread of the physical pains of hell, the
low pleasure of feeling one's self spiritually insured,

1 " Allenthalben widmet man der Erforschung der Alter-
th timer em Studium das durch eine Art von Pietat belebt wird."
Ranke, Weltgeschichte, I, Vorrede. Eanke, after Niebuhr, is
the greatest name in modern historical study. When he calls
the historical spirit a kind of piety, he speaks with authority.
It is indeed a new sort of piety. Its motive is reverence for the
total human past. Its aim is to insure to the men of the past
the right of free speech, so that their words and deeds may re-
tain their individual character, and not be taxed to meet the
needs of feeling or fancy in the present. So the two motives
of modern Bible-study are in unison. The scientific motive de-
mands the original facts and thoughts of Scripture, distinct and
separate from subsequent opinion regarding Scripture. The
religious motive demands the Word of God in its pristine beauty.
The two motives are at one. See also, Keim, Jesus of Nazara,
I, p. 4 f.

6 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

these things stain and soil the purity of the desire to
be saved.

Yet, for all that, these two desires — the desire to
know and the desire to be saved — are supreme among
the motives that rightfully mould the affections and
command the will. The pith of the desire to know is
the resolute purpose to see things as they are and to
report what one has seen without fear or favour. The
pith of the desire to be saved is the holy aim to con-
secrate one's self as Christ was consecrated, to be per-
fect as God is perfect, and to work even as He works
for the redemption of our race.

The two Now and then, as we read our Bible, these two

desires desires conflict. Our devotional reading of Scripture

conflict. is sometimes disturbed by our scientific interest in
questions of authorship and history. The scientific
endeavour to know the various parts of Scripture in
their original meaning and setting is sometimes
impeded by our devotional moods. None the less,
both desires are at home in our hearts. The Christian
in us may not say to the historical student in us,
" Thou art of a different spirit ; I can have no fellow-
ship with thee ! " To say so were to play false to the
history of the Occident. Our religion could not have
established itself in Europe, unless it had first made
its peace with the philosophy of the ancient world. A
true victor never wins a victory save through service.
The Christianity that conquered the Mediterranean
world first served both its mind and its heart. The
same law still prevails. By reason of the very frame
and constitution of Occidental history, the desire to
know is as deep in us as the desire to be saved. The
two desires, spite of temporary jars and conflicts,
must work side by side in our study of the Scrip-
tures. Otherwise, the Bible will cease to be the Word
of Life for men of our kind.

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION

The union of the two motives for Bible-study sug- Union of

the two
motives.

gests the ruling idea of this book. Holy Scripture thetwo
has the right to be understood. As one great object in
a universe of objects, all of them demanding the best
effort and the most patient study of the student, it
must be known as it is in itself, whether the know-
ledge agrees or disagrees with the established opinions
of the churches. As the sovereign object of religious
study, it asserts the right in supreme degree. Our
deep reverence for it forces us to interpret it along
the lines of its own meaning and purpose.

It is indeed true that Bible-study, under modern Risks
conditions, is attended by risks and sometimes fol- modern^
lowed by losses. A sober-minded scholar cannot Bible-study,
think without pain of the many devout souls who
cry out, — when criticism shatters some old statement
or view, — " They have taken away my Lord, and I
know not where they have laid him." No matter
how erroneous the statement may have been or imper-
fect the view, the pain inflicted by its destruction
must needs bring grief to the destroyer. A youthful
critic may take pleasure in the use of his apparatus,
even as a young surgeon delights to use his instru-
ments upon the human body. And sincere Chris-
tians, ripe in faith, see things most dear to them, and
to many generations of believers before them, handled
as intellectual playthings, or at best as a chemist
handles elements in his laboratory. The academic
thinker is not infrequently far away from the body of
the people, and through sheer lack of imagination
cannot realise the grief and alarm that criticism is
causing. But upon scholars who keep their hearts as
well as their heads, these things weigh heavily.

There is something even more distressing. Num-
bers of Protestant Christians, although they have
neither ability nor equipment for critical study, feel

HISTOEY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

No sound
conception
of authority.

Certain
losses are
inevitable.

The divine
compulsion
in criticism.

themselves forced to dip into criticism. They have
no sane conception of authority that can take the
place of the irrational and sacerdotal conception of
the Eoman Church. As long as the Bible stood before
their eyes clothed with an infallibility which frowned
down all questions, they lived untroubled. But the
Bible has now come within reach of questions. They
are forced to assume a certain responsibility for the
answers. Lacking the wherewithal of critical study,
yet carried into it by the main forces of the day, they
do not, because they cannot, work at criticism. They
merely worry over it. Criticism enters as a sort of
slow fever into their religion. Their spiritual energies
are grievously wasted.

Yet we have read the history of Christianity to little
purpose, if we suppose that the Master of Life will
give us his best things without our paying for them
in grief and trouble. From the beginning, the way
of the cross has been the way of light. We are wit-
nessing, and with or without our will are helping on,
the break-up of that conception of authority and
inspiration which satisfied and controlled the Chris-
tian reason for many centuries. Now the undoing of
a great conception, one that has long shaped and
coloured the thoughts of men, is sure to bring some
distressing things in its train. Evil and trouble and
pain have come among us. But we know well that
we are not critics by grace of any human authority.
It is not by our own wish or will that we are what
we are.

The divine will that ever and again drives the
Church out of the old ways and views, to the end that
her eyes may be opened upon new fields of privilege
and diity, is the critic's authority and stay. He
doubts not that a divine compulsion is laid upon him.
And he seeks to persuade the great body of Christian

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION

people that he is ordained of God to defend and make
good the rights of God's own Word. If it can be
shown that criticism is the inevitable result, the saving
necessity of the Church's life, the laity will not be as
the children of Ephraini, who, being harnessed and
carrying bows, turned themselves back in the day of
battle.

It is a commonplace of mental method that we
cannot hope to understand the nature of any object,
unless we follow it through the stages of its growth.
We must know how it became what it is, if we would
penetrate its being. This law of method has a force
that increases in proportion to the greatness and scope
of the object we are studying. The more significant
the idea or the ideal that stands before us, the more
compelling its claim upon our attention, the less shall
we be able to understand its permanent bearings,
unless we acquaint ourselves with the story of its
growth. Hence, in a matter so significant in itself,
and so pregnant with consequences as Biblical criti-
cism, we must follow its history from the beginning.

Since the second century the Christian Scriptures
have been deeply and devoutly studied. Why they
were studied in one way down to the eighteenth cen-
tury, and why in our time they are being studied in a
different way, constitute a single question. It should
be clear that the question can be answered only by a
broad appeal to history. And if, through our reading
of the history of Bible-study at large, criticism shall
be given to us as being both an historical necessity
and a divine ideal, we shall all be cleansed of our
vanity and fear. The conceit of the critic will dis-
appear when he realises that he is called of God to be
a critic. The fears of the layman will vanish when
once he is assured that God is holding up before his
Church new ideals of life and knowledge. We shall

We must
know how a
thing grew,
in order to
understand
it.

A broad
appeal to
history
necessary.

10 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

be delivered from mental frivolity, — the most hide-
ous of all intellectual faults, — and from that habit of
coquetting with criticism upon which Christians of a
certain kind congratulate themselves. For criticism
will show itself to be the defence of the rights of
Holy Scripture, the process through which God is
emancipating his Word from servitude to human
opinion.

History of Nothing short of the history of Bible-study as a
as a wholeT whole can achieve this result. If we confine our atten-
tion to the years just past — a hundred and fifty, more
or less — wherein the " Higher Criticism " has become
a distinct discipline, we shall not be able to prove to
ourselves that the root of reverent criticism goes as
deep as the life of the Church; we shall not wholly
allay the suspicion that the Higher Critics are men
who, for insufficient reasons, are breaking the peace
of the Church. It may be said that, taking the sub-
ject so largely, we shall run the risk of losing our-
selves. But that is not to the point. Better to be
lost than to transgress the law laid down for us by the
nature of the subject we propose to take in hand.

The Christian Bible was recognised as Holy Writ
during the period that saw the establishment of
Christianity as the religion of the Occident.1 The

1 Speaking broadly, the building of the Canon is the first
chapter in the history of Bible-study. That is clearly the case
in the 0. T. field. The prophetical literature being the spiritual
patrimony of Israel after the Exile, to study and assimilate it, to
edit it and to apply it to the needs of the time, became the chief
mental and legal training of the Jews. Out of this Bible-study
issued the fact and conception of the 0. T. Canon. The case is
not so clear in the N. T. field. But only because the preexist-
ence of the 0. T. Canon, along with Christianity's speedy de-
tachment from its Jewish base, brought it to pass that the first
and decisive steps in the building of the N. T. Canon were
quickly taken, when once the need of a N. T. Canon came to be

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION

doctrine of the Canon was built up, not as a thing
apart, but as one part of a vast structure of dogma.
No one thought of separating the idea of the Bible
from the idea of the Church. The two ideas belonged
to a single organism of ideas. During the Middle
Ages, while the Church's estimate of the Bible's
worth kept going higher, still the two ideas clung
close to each other. Hence, if we are to take any
cognizance of Bible-study before the Eeformation, we
must read the story in connection with the whole
mental life of the Church. Now the part played by
the Bible in the Eeformation period becomes unintel-
ligible, if we detach it from the history of Bible-
study during the mediaeval and patristic periods. So,
if we take a single step beyond the eighteenth century,
we must keep on until we reach the times of the
Fathers.

But why should we take that first step? Why not
confine our attention to the period of conscious criti-
cism? The specialist in modern Bible-study is
tempted to do that. He knows that criticism as an
ideal is distinctly a modern thing. It is for the most
part in the modern university — and chiefly in the
German university — that scientific Bible-study has
found both its standing-ground and its apparatus.
"Why, then, in a book so small as this, attempt to
cover so much ground? Why not neglect the com-
paratively unimportant periods of Bible-study and
give all our time to the work of getting clear views
concerning the evolution of the critical ideal and
methods throughout the professedly critical period?

There are two sufficient reasons against this pro-
cedure. In the first place, we should go wide of our

The idea
of the Bible
and the
idea of the
Church.

Specialist's
point of
view.

Reasons
against the
specialist.

felt. For a brief description of this process, see Muzzey, The
Rise of the Neio Testament.

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Accidental
element in
phrase
" Higher
Criticism."

mark. The purpose of the book is to show that criti-
cism is a sacred obligation, a divine calling. We
should have no hope of manifesting this, if we went
no deeper into the history of Bible-study than the
eighteenth century. Criticism must prove that it is
not an alien, not an intruder upon the field of devout
Bible-study; that, on the contrary, it is doing the
same work the Fathers and Scholastics and Reformers
did, and doing it better.

In the second place, we should be disregarding the
nature of our subject, if we took its history so nar-
rowly. Even now, when criticism has fully won the
right of free speech, the Bible is not the critic's book.
It never will be. It is the dearest possession of all
Christians. The critic might as well try to get away
from his own shadow as to get away from the common
Christian feeling about the book to whose interpreta-
tion he has given himself. If he does nothing more,
he must at least account for that common feeling, or
else leave himself unexplained. He cannot under-
stand himself without a knowledge of the whole his-
tory of Bible-study. There is, then, something better
than a tactical reason for taking our subject very
broadly, although that alone would suffice. There
is a logical reason. The very nature of the subject
forbids our taking its history narrowly.1

Part of the phrase "Higher Criticism" is a mere
accident. Criticism, in its earliest stage, took the
form of text-criticism. When, at a more advanced

1 Any view we may take must needs be one-sided. The
critical movement in the life of the churches is one of momen-
tous significance. We ourselves, who attempt to estimate and
assess it, are in the thick of it. If we think ourselves judicial
and " objective," for the most part we deceive ourselves. Our
view cannot but be partial and provisional. We appeal from
ourselves to a later age that shall be better able to judge soundly.

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION 13

stage, it entered upon the inner study of Scripture, it
called itself "higher" in order to distinguish itself
from the criticism of the text as a "lower," or pre-
paratory form of study. The adjective is the result
of a bare historical incident, having no merit in itself,
deserving to be retained — if retained at all — solely
on the ground of present convenience.1

"Criticism," the other part of the title, is not
wholly pleasing. It stirs up needless prejudice, thus
partly defeating its own end. A certain kind of
mental conceit is often, sometimes not unjustly, asso-
ciated with the word. On some accounts, " The His-
tory of Modern Bible-study " would be a better title
than "The History of the Higher Criticism." For
" criticism " is one form of Bible-study. The Fathers
and the Reformers interpreted the Bible by one
method. They were taught of God. We interpret the
Bible by another method. We fully believe that God
is teaching us. Our study is one with their study in
its motive and its reverence. It is superior to theirs,
we think, both in its ideal and its apparatus. The
term "criticism" is somewhat objectionable. It Term
breaks up the continuity of Bible-study. It sets
modern students off by themselves, and repels simple
but deep-hearted Bible readers. Yet, for the present,
at least, the terra is indispensable. It is as signifi-
cant of our day as the word "evolution." It is not,

1 It might be well to drop the word " Higher" altogether.
Devout lay people take offence at it as advertising a superior
form of knowledge. If the adjective involved a principle, we
should have to retain it, spite of the popular error. But so
long as no principle is at stake, it is possibly worth the while
of scholars to remind themselves of Rom. 14 : 21. The word
"Higher" answers to no present need. It makes neither for
clearness nor precision. "Text-criticism" arid "Criticism"
serve every purpose.

14 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Criticism
and inter-
pretation.

Definition of
criticism.

like the adjective "higher," a mere incident of his-
tory. On the contrary, it is as necessary to us, just
now, as the term "philosophy" was to the Greeks.
We must, then, retain it, while taking pains, by our
work and behaviour, to commend it.

We shall accomplish our desire, if we can prove that
criticism has in view a thoroughly positive end, that
back of the critical method which analyses and tests
the sources of our information, stands the historical
spirit whose aim is to see the past just as it was in
itself, to see the course of sacred history — if we may
be so bold — as its Author sees it. It will then be
plain that criticism is a superior method of inter-
pretation, a better road to the original meanings of
Holy Scripture. The exegesis of the Church, from
the third century onward, thought of the Bible either
as a book of divine law and dogma, or as a book of
devotion. Christians went to Scripture to get an
answer to the needs of the Church as a thinking, and
governing, and praying Church. We have the same
needs. But the difference between the old exegesis
and the new is this. The old exegesis took the Bible
out of its historical setting, and removed it from its
relations to definite times and concrete situations,
causing the men of the Bible to speak altogether in
the language of the men of a far later time. The aim
of our exegesis is to find the Bible at home within its
history, and, having found it there, to listen patiently
and reverently while it tells its story in its own
tongue.

We define criticism, therefore, as that mental
process in modern Christianity whereby the historic
character, the true nature, of divine revelation is
appreciated and manifested. The historic spirit, the
desire to know the whole past even as it was in itself,
comes in as a noble servant raised up by God to help

CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION

tlie Church to truly know her Bible, and thus pay her
debt to the Author of Sacred Scripture. Christianity
stands and falls with the Bible. For we believe our
Scriptures to be the book of witness to the true
quality of ultimate religious experience, and to the
character and being of God as revealed through that
experience, — the authentic record of the blessed prom-
ise and the saving presence of the perfect life on earth.
The well-being of the Church depends upon the right
interpretation of the Bible. We must seek to know
it from within and along the lines of its own meaning
and purpose. That is our most sacred obligation.

Criticism is Bible-study, or interpretation, as it
must needs be pursued in an historical age. We con-
ceive revelation as a historical process. In order to
understand the Bible in its own sense, we seek to find
each book of Scripture in its time, and place, and cir-
cumstance, and discover the original shape and colour
of its author's feeling and thought. The lower, or
preparatory criticism aims at the original text, cleared
of corruptions and accretions. The Higher Criticism,
the original text having been found, aims at the his-
torical interpretation of Scripture. And to study the
Bible critically is to assert its right to be understood,
to be taken in its own sense.

With this definition to guide us, we may venture
upon the broad field before us without fear of losing
ourselves. Seeing that the old view of the Bible was
strongly disposed to take the Bible out of its histori-
cal frame, and seeing that the new, or critical, view
seeks to put the books of Scripture within that frame,
our road is already laid out for us. We are to trace
the steps that brought the Church to the point where
critical study became an absolute necessity, if the
thought and feeling of the Bible were to be rightly
apprehended. Then we must consider the conditions

Well-being
of the
Church and
interpreta-
tion.

Criticism
true to the
Scriptures.

Summary of
the history.

16 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

that made criticism possible. And, finally, we shall
try to understand — so far as it is possible for men to
understand a movement whereof their own lives con-
stitute a part — the course taken by the critical study
of the New Testament during the hundred and fifty
years just passed.1

1 While we have no need to remind ourselves of the great
gains of specialism in the N. T. field, it is timely to recall the
dangers. The old theological " encyclopaedia " having fallen
into discredit, the various departments or disciplines of N. T.
study are in some danger of temporarily forgetting their mutual
relations. Thus Hilgenfeld writes, "Die Isagogik der alten
Kirche war durchaus hermeneutisch" (Einleituny in d. N. T.,
p. 1). And Holtzmann to the same intent (Einleitung, p. 1).
The terms are not happy. The fault in the ancient Introduc-
tions is not that they are " exegetical " but that the exegesis to
which they contributed was thoroughly unhistorical in its aim
and methods. If we use our terms carefully, we may say that
Introduction is intrinsically exegetical. Its purpose is to de-
termine the time, place, author, and relationships of the N. T.
books, to the end that we may enter upon the study of them from
the right or historical point of view. Nor has a sound Intro-
duction any real surplusage over and above the needs of exe-
gesis. The appearance of a surplusage is either due to the fact
that a given book is considered too much by itself, apart from
the N. T. as a whole, or else it contains material which might as
well be found in a dozen other places as in a N. T. Introduction.

CHAPTER II

THE BIBLE'S DEFINITION OF REVELATION AND THE
IDEAL OF BIBLE-STUDY THAT GOES WITH IT1

WE must not think that the Bible has played a pas- The Bible

sive part in the history of criticism. It has been in its -
, .. -i guardian.

large measure its own keeper. The Old Testament

Scriptures did not lie under the hand of the Jewish
Church, waiting for the opinion of the rabbins to give
them worth. The New Testament Scriptures did not
lie under the hand of the Catholic Church, until recog-
nition by that Church should insure to them their
standing.

It is, indeed, a common saying that the Church "The
came before the Bible.2 If rightly taken, the saying £eforehthe
contains a helpful truth; wrongly taken, an imposing Scriptures."
fallacy. The Church did not create the Scriptures.
She appreciated them and recognised their incom-
parable value. And her recognition resulted in what
Ave call the Canon of Holy Scripture. The destruc-

1 Literature : Sanday, Inspiration, 1893, and The Oracles of
God; Rielmi, Messianic Prophecy, 2d ed., tr. 1891 ; Ladd,
What is the Bible ? 4th ed. , 1890 ; Maurice, What is Revela-
tion ?

2 This was first said in High Church circles, and was meant
to be an arraignment of Protestantism. Of late it has been
widely used, in order to lessen the strain of criticism. If it is
meant to correct the mechanical separation between the idea of
the Church and the idea of the Bible, it is helpful. But, as
commonly employed, it would be difficult to find a looser state-
ment.

c 17

18 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

tiou of the Jewish State by the Babylonians, the Exile
of the Jews, caused the first step in the building of
the Canon to be taken. For centuries the Prophets
of Israel criticised and condemned the life of their
nation. Their assessments and valuations ran straight
against the popular desires and tendencies. The
Exile verified their prophecies. Common minds, says
Locke, like earthen walls, resist the strongest batteries.
The preaching of the Prophets, unaided by external
fact, could not have carried conviction with the
people. But the Exile brought history over to the
side of the Prophets, proving that their words were
God's words. Thus the prophetic writings came to be
appreciated as their incomparable merit demanded.
The build- So it would be an absurdity to say that, in the
nig of the pioneer work of building the Canon of Holy Scripture,
the Church came before the Bible. The Jewish Church
did not create the prophetical books, but admired
them, and, by admiration, became capable of appre-
ciating them as they deserved to be appreciated. The
Prophets were installed in human opinion as the
teachers of humanity. Their word was acknowledged
to be God's Word, their criticism of society His criti-
cism, their great hope His personal promise. The
Jewish Church was endowed with spiritual perception.
And through that perception the prophetical literature
canonised itself.

In the building of the New Testament Canon and
the formation of the Christian Bible, things took the
same course. The Saviour came and fulfilled the
prophecies, embodying their words in history and life.
His chosen men, filled with his spirit and carried, by
his death and resurrection, outside the bounds of
Jewish opinion, gave to the world his Gospel, the glad
news that God had kept His promise and that the
Kingdom of God had been set up amongst men. The

THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF REVELATION 19

Church of the second, third, and fourth centuries,
while, in one sense, identical with the Church of the
Apostles, in another sense was distinct. It was one Criticism in
and the self -same Church, just as the Church of our [j^Canou.
time is one and the self -same Church. If criticism
be reverently done, it is a work of exactly the same
order as the work done by the Catholic Church when
she built the Canon. The Church set the books of
Scripture apart from all other books, making them a
class by themselves, because she perceived their eter-
nal value as witnesses to the Christ. She appreciated
the New Testament Scriptures, and through her
appreciation they canonised themselves. And our
study, inspired and supported by the desire to see the
Oracles of God in their pristine beauty, has the same
spiritual quality. We are critics to please the Bible.

The saying that the Church came before the Bible,
as it is commonly used, can lead only to mental con-
fusion. So far as clear thought is concerned, it either
says nothing at all, or it says something that is worse
than an out and out error by reason of its specious
confusion of error and truth. We cannot affirm that The Scrip-
the Church came before the Scripture, if thereby it is boiTow°theh-
meant that the action of the Church gave them their authority
value and authority. Their authority is theirs by church.6
divine right, because they are the record of God's
self-revelation. Their merit is an intrinsic merit,
belonging as truly to them, and to them alone, as the
qualities of a triangle belong to the triangle.

The Bible has not played a passive part in the his-
tory of Bible-study. From the days when the Scrip-
tures canonised themselves down to our own time, they
have had a strong hand in the making of their own
fortune. As little as the sun is idle before the human
eye that gazes upon the beauty of the sunset ; as little
as the stars are idle when our hearts leap up toward

20 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

their splendour, just so little is the Bible inactive
while the Church insures its worth and standing.
The Bible was its own keeper while it was being can-
onised. It is its own keeper now that it is being
criticised. The "criticising Church" — if we know
and weigh our words — is as noble a title as the " can-
onising Church." The process of canonising and the
process of criticising the Scriptures have mental and
spiritual qualities in common.1 Through the former,
God led the world to accept the Christian Bible as
the book wherein we can learn to think aboiit God as
He thinks about Himself. Through the latter God is
teaching men to take the Bible in its own sense.
The Bible Criticism, then, is not a process thrust upon the

itself!81"8 Bible from without. The Bible demands criticism
just as truly to-day as it demanded canonisation in
the third century. For, without modern Bible-study,
the true nature of our Scriptures cannot be fully under-
stood. If it were possible for us to take up the Bible
as we take up the latest book issued from the press,
could we but open it with eyes unvexed by dogmatic
prejudice, we should see at a glance that it is a
thoroughly human book, issuing, as every truly human
document must, from the vital movements of humanity.
So it must be studied as a human book if we would
reach its deepest meanings. In the matter of time it
ranges through fifteen centuries. In the matter of

1 It has already been said that the canonisation of the sacred
books was itself a form of Bible-study. The literature of the
O. T. and N. T. imposed itself upon the religious consciousness
as the standard of religious feeling. The end was accomplished
through study. With this process^the critical process has much
in common. For just as the sovereign worth of the Scriptures
forced the world to canonise them, so is the selfsame worth
forcing the Christian reason to know them from within. And
knowledge from within, in contrast with knowledge at second-
hand, is criticism.

THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF REVELATION 21

feeling it ranges from Samuel, hewing Agag in pieces,
to our Lord on the cross, praying for his enemies.
But at every point in its range the Bible is deeply
human. Samuel is a real man. The Saviour is not
less a man, but more. Our Scriptures are not like the
Hindoo sacred epics, wherein a great cloudy mist of
abstraction settles down upon history, making it look
like a mysterious island looming through the fog.
The Bible is close to history. The turns of its thought
and feeling took place in connection with the great
crises of history.1 It is itself the greatest of histories.
It describes a vast mixed movement of human life,
through which the creative, redemptive purpose of
God shines as the body of heaven for clearness.2

Because the Word of God has come to us through
the medium of vital history, and not through the
broodings and speculations of men who cut themselves
off from the common life in order to deepen and clarify
their thought, it is rich in colour. The Oriental
world stands behind it. The Oriental man lives in it.

For the same reason, it is the book of the common
life. The sincerest wisdom of the Hindoos, even the
ripest wisdom of the Greeks, is flawed by the distinc-
tion between a truth meet for the average man and a
truth open only to the religious specialist. The Hin-
doo and the Greek did not give the world its Bible.
That is God's gift and Word to the average man, who
does the world's common work and pays the taxes that

1 Riehm, Messianic Prophecy, p. 133, 135, 208 ; Baur, Church
History of the First Three Centuries, I, pp. 1-5 ; Westcott, The
Bible in the Church, 1893, p. 2.

2 The 0. T. is a better guide than the N. T. into the nature
and meaning of revelation. No great idea or conception can be
clearly understood, if it is approached only when it is full grown.
The 0. T. as the book of beginnings, the book mediating be-
tween the N. T. and the religions of the world, offers to the
student peculiar advantages.

Historical
study.

Bible not
a book for
religious
specialists.

22 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

keep its roads in order. The greatest men of the Old
Testament were citizens and statesmen. The Master
of men was a carpenter. His favoured disciples got
no small part of their schooling through the discipline
of a fisherman's life passed upon an exceptionally
stormy and dangerous lake. The religious specialist
is not found in the ranks of the true men of the Gos-
pel. The philosopher does not rule in Israel. God
"hath put down the mighty from their seat and hath
exalted the humble and meek. The bows of the
mighty are broken and they that stumbled are girded
with strength." The Bible is the love-story of the
Lord of Life, who meets us in the beaten highway of
history, telling us all that is in His heart.
The Bible Because the Bible is mainly a book of histories, it

of specSj is chiefly a book of action. The men of the Bible are
tioa. doers of deeds rather than speculators on thought.

The doubts they meet and wrestle Avith are practical,
not philosophic doubts.1 The dissolving of doubts is
attained not so much through clearer thinking as
through deeper living. The way of the Scriptures, the
way of light, is not the road of abstract reasoning,
but the road of the cross.2 God reveals Himself at
the crises of humanity. His word and His deed go
together, until His deepest word and His final deed are
brought into unity through Christ. It is on this
ground that the Bible is called a religion of redemp-
tion,— revelation being the story of God's creative
life imparting itself under historical conditions. The
men of the Bible seek to build up the Kingdom of
God amongst their fellows. They do not seek to save

1 Even Job is not a philosophic book in the Greek sense.
The speculative element in the Fourth Gospel has been greatly
overestimated. The theology of the Bible might fairly be called
Pastoral Theology, in contrast with speculative divinity.

2 Is. 53 ; 1 Cor. 2 : 2.

THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF REVELATION 23

their souls by fleeing into the desert. God's life is
one of redemptive action. So is theirs.

The men of the Bible are deeply individual, each of Individual-
them rooted firmly in his time and place. Quite as scriptures
little as the men of Homer are they personifications
of religious abstractions. They are genuine flesh and
blood, — the spirit of God shining through their
humanity. Their style of speech, their turns of
thought are individual. The body of the New Tes-
tament, outside the Gospels, is made up of the letters
of St. Paul. Now, the law that the style is the man
never had a more perfect illustration. His style is
himself; it is like no other style in the Bible, as char-
acteristic as the style of Thucydides, or Heraclitus, or
Carlyle. The style of the Johannine writings tells
the story of an individual life, of an intense nature
that has been led through the storms of experience
into a childlike simplicity of mind and clearness of
intuition. The Bible is a book of individual minds.
A single, controlling, divine purpose holds them
together. Their books compose into one great book
of witness to the reality and the quality of the saving
life. Yet each of them is stuck deep in his time and
place, as deep as Thucydides, as deep as Shakespeare.
Yea, deeper. For each of them took a definite field of
human experience for his province, and going to the
bottom of the human found the divine.1

It follows that the human author plays a very great The human
part in the Bible. If we go to our Bible for our defi-
nition of revelation, if we do not first block out and
finish our definition in regions of experience more or
less remote from the experience of the men of the

1 The growth of the Scriptures is thus the supreme case under
the law governing all catholic or classic literature. Only the
books that go to the root of their own time can be a possession
for all time.

24 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Epistle to
Philemon.

The human
and the
divine.

Bible and then proceed to fasten our definition upon
the Scriptures, we shall see that the human author in
the process of revelation is indispensable to the Divine
Author. It is not enough to say that the Bible has a
human side. We must say that the Bible is a deeply,
an intensely human book. The little letter to Phile-
mon, — from one point of view a mere literary episode,
written by the Apostle on the spur of the moment,
aimed at a private need, given to the Church from
the treasure of a pious family, a fragment out of a
life, accidentally picked up and borne along by a great
religious movement, — this little letter, rightly taken,
becomes one of the most instructive books of Scripture,
when once we have made up our minds to take our
definition of revelation from no other source than reve-
lation itself. The Bible defines the Bible as a book
wherein the Divine Author demands the human author,
and bids us see to it that we let not the human author
pass out of our sight ; lest, perchance, fondly thinking
that thus, and thus alone, shall we have a pure "Word
of God, we deceive ourselves and listen all the while
to the echoes of our own words.

The humanness of the Bible, then, is as essential
as its divineness. Herein the book is one with the
Christ whose book it is. And we shall find that the
history of Bible-study keeps in step with the history
of opinion regarding the person of Christ. Even as
the Church for a long time neglected and sometimes
for a while came near forgetting the humanity of our
Lord, even so she neglected and almost made light
of the human authors in his book. But if once we
clearly understand ourselves as Christians, we shall
feel sure that all is over with Christianity, if we per-
manently lose or undervalue the humanity of our
Lord.1 The deepest scepticism of our race lurks

1 Dorner's, Lehre von der Person Christi, is the best aiid most
thorough treatment of this point.

THE BIBLICAL IDEA OF REVELATION 25

within the belief that it is impossible for God to come
near us, unless we shall first have ceased to be our-
selves. Because it is so deep a scepticism, it is wont
to palm itself off on less thorough forms of doubt as
the deepest truth, persuading men that they must
needs abandon the common life in order to find the
divine life, that they must go out of humanity if they
would take fast hold on deity. But this is not the
truth as it is in Jesus. All is lost, if we lose the Humanity
humanity of our Lord. We slip back from the high of Christ>
and holy ground of revelation into the hopeless morass
of speculative heathenism.1

Then the Bible, no longer the book of witness to
the simplicity and intelligibleness of God, no longer
the book of divine promises touching a Kingdom of
God that shall come on earth, no longer the book of
that Christ who is humanity's Amen to all the divine
promises, — the Bible ceases to be the Bible, the joy-
ous and refreshing study of God's search for us ; and
adds itself to the number of those great books that tell
us the fine yet pathetic story of man's search — the
search of the philosopher, and the sage, and the monk,
and the mystic — after God.

If, therefore, we would do justice to the humanity Historical

of our Saviour, we must do justice to the human and c^^?c.te.^

. J of Christ s

historical character of his book. Criticism, that is to book,
say the kind of Bible-study that seeks an historical

1 One of the most significant debates of our century is that
between Mansel and Maurice. (Mansel, Limits of Religious
Thought; Maurice, What is Revelation ? Lives of Mansel and
Maurice.) Heresy makes strange bedfellows. Mansel's idea of
God is cognate to Occam's. It requires an imperial, monasti-
cal, papalised Church to work it. It practically divorces the
ethics of the common life from the idea of God. And it ends
by setting up a magnificent clerical establishment which keeps
the lay world from throwing the light of reason upon the prob-
lems of Biblical study.

26 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

interpretation of Scripture, is the Master's personal
interest and cause. Without the historical, human
book the historical, human Christ ceases to stand out
clearly before the eyes of his people. The Bible,
therefore, defines revelation as an historical process.
With this definition a certain ideal of Bible-study goes
along.

Plato, comparing the teaching powers of a book
with those of a living teacher, declared that the book
is self-helpless, at the mercy of the reader. But this
is not true. No great book is at the mercy of its
readers. When Plato said so, he was looking at the
short run of things. Look to the long run, and his
own books prove the contrary. They are his deep-
est thought eternised, lifted above the changes and
chances of the short Athenian day. Students have
misread them, carrying into them their own wisdom
and ignorance, making Plato speak a language widely
All great different from his own. But only for a while. Sooner
books their or ]a^er a prreat book becomes its own interpreter.

own inter™

preters. Pressing steadily upon the minds of those who love
it, it creates at last a true taste for itself. The price
the world has to pay for the ownership of a great book
is the labour of understanding it. And no matter how
long the payment of the debt may be put off, sooner
or later it must be paid to the uttermost farthing.

So has it been with our Scriptures. Because the
Church of an earlier time saw in them a value incom-
parable, and felt in them a power of God not to be
withstood, she canonised them, made of them a Bible.
And because the Church of our day, the self-same
Church, but living under changed conditions and
facing new tasks, has the self-same reverence for
them, she is being led into the paths of criticism. In
all this mental movement, the Bible does not play a
passive part. It is its own keeper.

CHAPTER III

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY l

IT is the basal idea of Christianity that the Sacred The basal
Scriptures, being the book of Witness to the promise ciifistian-
and presence of the perfect life amongst men, is the ity.
standard whereby the Church must test her doctrine
and her life. This does not mean that the Bible alone
is our religion, if by " the Bible alone " we mean to
take the Scriptures out of relation with the continuous
experience of Christians. It does mean, however,
that Christian experience, perpetuating and propa-
gating itself through the ages, shall again and again
bring itself to book, searching out all possible contra-
dictions between its own ideals and the ideals attested
in the Scripture as God's own desire for his people.2

The aim of this chapter is to follow the first steps
in the history of Higher Criticism by showing how it
happened that the Bible, taken away from its history,
was interpreted in ways foreign to its own sense.

1 Literature : Harnack, Hist, of Dogma ; Allen, Christian
Institutions, 1897 ; Moeller, Church History, Vol. I ; Westcott,
The Bible in the Church, 1893 ; The Canon of the N. T., 6th
ed., 1889; Credner, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanon,
1847 ; Loofs, Leitfaden z. Studium der Dogmengeschichte, 2.
Aufl., 1890.

2 Briggs, The Study of Holy Scripture, 1899, c. 1 ; Macpher-
son, Christian Dogmatics, pp. 24-29 ; Kaftau, The Truth of the
Christian Religion, tr. 1894, I, pp. 188-202 ; Schaff, Creeds of
Christendom, III, s.v. "Scriptures."

28 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Like inter-
preted by
like.

Bible not a

sacerdotal

book.

At the outset we lay it down as a fundamental law
of interpretation that like must be interpreted by like.
This holds good in the study of single books of the
New Testament. There must be a mental and spir-
itual affinity between the book and the student, if a
first-rate piece of exegetical work is to be done.1 It
holds good of the New Testament as a whole. In the
long run men think what they are. They will inter-
pret their great text-books along lines parallel with
the main motion of their own experience. And if that
experience has a different shape and colour from the
experience of the men who wrote the books, the books
will be misinterpreted accordingly.

Now the Bible is not a sacerdotal book. It was not
written by priests. It is true that the Old Testament
contains a large sacerdotal element. But the soul of
the Old Testament is that view of the divine and hu-
man life which God gave to the world through the
Prophets. And as regards the New Testament, along
with the other great qualities that distinguish it
amongst the " Sacred Books " of the race, this quality
is noteworthy, namely, its marvellous freedom from
the sacerdotal view of life. Our Master himself was
of the tribe of Judah, not the tribe of Levi (Heb. 7. 14).
The men through whom he founded the Church and
wrote the New Testament were, in almost every case,
men of lay birth and breeding.2 This does not lead

1 This law of spiritual affinity shows itself very plainly when
a commentator like Meyer undertakes to cover the entire N. T.
While his exegetical methods are the same at every point, the
spirit in him answers the mood and purpose of one book better
than another. A man who shall write a great commentary on
the Fourth Gospel is not likely to do so well with Eomans.

2 The text might have said that this is true without excep-
tion. The legend about John's priestly descent is too shadowy
to have any value.

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 29

us to say that the New Testament forbids the existence
of a special priesthood in the Church of Christ. It
does, however, justify the assertion that the New
Testament, if it would be interpreted in its own sense,
cannot permit a body of priests to exercise an ex-
clusive right of interpretation, or anything like it.
Through the training and schooling of the Apostles,
through the very nature of his book, the Master of
Life plainly warned his Church that, if ever she
should bring herself to the point where the priesthood
should claim such rights, he would put down the
usurpation with his own hands, carrying his book
into a region of freer life and more generous light.

Criticism, the historical interpretation of the New
Testament, became necessary and inevitable when the
ecclesiastical doctrine of Tradition carried the Church
to a position where her interpretation of Scripture
required radical correction. It came to pass that
a vast, highly organised and centralised hierarchy
claimed to hold in its hands the keys to the meanings
of Holy Writ. Their being as a hierarchy was out
of keeping with the deepest thoughts of Scripture.
Their interpretation, moulded by their being, could
not fail to do grievous wrong to the mind of Scripture.
Yet they put forward their own interpretation as
infallible, — that is, as sufficient, not needing and not
open to a searching examination. The ideal of the
Church's life demands a true interpretation of the
Bible. But the mediaeval Church's Tradition was not
a true interpretation; it sorely obscured and often
destroyed the historical character of the New Testa-
ment. The mind of the Church was far away from
the original language and the original feelings of the
Sacred Books. The human authors of the New Testa-
ment passed nearly out of sight.

The greatest work that men do is often bound up

Hierarchy
holding
keys of
Bible
knowledge.

Human
authors of
Scripture
neglected.

30 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Historical
aspect of
revelation
obscured.

with great errors. The Catholic Church could not
have made her wonderful contribution to the history
of Christianity, unless she had developed the dogma
of authority. It was the growing sense of authority
that gave her strength and coherence, making possible
her victory over the Empire. It was the same sense
of authority that gave us our Bible. For without it
we should have had no Canon. Under the mental
conditions of the time, it was impossible to achieve a
fixed list of Sacred Books by means of historical study.
The spirit of scholarship was too weak, the spirit of
dogma too strong. Men, as a whole, cared little for
the historic aspect of revelation. They cared every-
thing for immediate religious certitude and, in case
they had any capacity for speculation, for religious
philosophy. The Gnostics, against whom the Church
built up the doctrine of the Canon, had no interest in
questions of fact. Their whole concern was with the
philosophy of religion.1 And, beyond question, they
embodied the deepest and freest mental tendency of
the time. So the Church could not guard herself
against the Gnostics without and the Gnostical ten-
dencies within, by historical investigation. Nothing
but authority could save the day. Thus alone could a
fixed or canonic list of Sacred Books be achieved.2

1 A knowledge of Gnosticism is essential to our understand-
ing of the Catholic Church's motives and methods. For Gnos-
ticism enables us to see what direction the speculative view of
Christianity might have taken, had it not been bridled by Tradi-
tion. Credner, Canon, pp. 2-68 ; Harnack, Hist, of Dogma, II,
pp. 1-38.

2 By this it is not meant that there was no historical motive
or element in the process by which the Catholic Church settled
the Canon. Her traditions regarding the N. T. books were sub-
stantially correct (Harnack, Chronologie der altchrist. Litera-
tur, 1897, xi). But the mental bias was dogmatic, rather than
historical.

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 31

But with the fixing of the Canon went along the A fixed
necessity of a fixed and authoritative interpretation of
the Sacred Books. The intellectual conditions of the tion.
age forbade sound interpretation on any great scale.
The allegorical interpretation, in one form or another,
was the inevitable tendency of the age.1 Now, alle-
gory is a system whereby the interpreter can first
put any given set of ideas into Scripture, and then,
with a grand air of authority, take them out of Scrip-
ture. Under the hand of a bold, allegorical method
the sacred text lay helpless. To use the blunt speech
of a later day, it was no better than a wax nose. The
interpreter could shape it and twist it as he pleased.

Philo transformed Plato into an Athenian Moses
and Moses into a Sinaitic Plato.2 The Gnostics found
their several systems in our Lord's parables.3 Even
the Catholic interpreters freely allegorised.4 The

1 The single exception is the "school" of Antioch (Farrar,
Hist, of Interpretation, pp. 210-218 ; Kihn, Theodore von Mops-
nestia, 1880). Strictly speaking, it was not a " school." Theo-
dore was a genius, as far above his time in his scholarship as
Aristotle was above his time in his theory of evolution. If
Chrysostom and others were exegetically superior to the Alex-
andrian interpreters, it was not so much because their methods
were better as because they had no passion for philosophy.
Chrysostoin's splendid interest in ethics set him in tune with
the X. T. ; he had no philosophical system to import into the
Scriptures.

2 Farrar, Lect. 3.

3 Irenseus (in library of Ante-Nicene Fathers), I, 1,3. The
Gnostics, in dealing with the 0. T., were free from allegory and
therefore comparatively strong. But they gained their freedom
by sacrificing the 0. T., and so tearing Christianity from its
foundation (Bigg, The Christian Platonists of Alexandria, 1886,
p. 30).

* Justin Martyr did not directly allegorise. But by means
of wholesale " typology" he so overrode the historical sense of
the 0. T. that the difference between him and Philo is hardly

32 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Prevalence
of allegory
made this
necessary.

Historical-
grammati-
cal interpre-
tation not
possible.

bent and bias of the time was altogether that way.
Now, the Catholic Church stood for the common
Christian feeling, thought, and law. But if the alle-
gorical method was to be given free play, no wide-
spread community of life and purpose was attainable.
Given the allegorical principle, freedom of interpreta-
tion meant chaos. Every man would do that which
was right in his own eyes. Every school would derive
from Scripture a different set of ideas. No broad
common ground could be taken and held. Chaos in
Bible-study, anarchy in Church government, would
have been the upshot.

If the Catholic Church was to do her great work of
subjecting Europe to a common spiritual law, a fixed
interpretation was not a whit less necessary than a
fixed list of Sacred Books. The grammatical-histori-
cal methods of interpretation to which our own period
has attained, put the keys to the meanings of Scripture
where they rightly belong — in the control of the
Bible itself. The well-nigh total lack of such methods
in the early centuries forced the Church into her line
of action. She insisted upon a fixed and authorita-
tive interpretation.1

In those days no one dreamed of setting the Bible
against the Church or the Church against the Bible.
The antithesis would have disabled the Christianity
of the period. Even a clear mental distinction, with-
out separation, of -Church and Bible would have been
untimely. The crying need of the hour was a vast

worth mentioning. If Tertullian and the men of the North
African school did not allegorise, it was simply because they had
no dogmatic need that drove them into allegory. They had no
principles that could have withstood the slightest dogmatic
pressure.

1 Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics; Irenseus,
VI, 3, 4 ; Vincent, Commonitory.

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 33

society held together by common feeling and common
purpose. The tactics and discipline of the Roman
legion which made the Empire possible, the magnifi-
cent capacity of the Latins for law which made the
Empire the storehouse of civilisation, was not a bit
more essential to the welfare of the world than the
splendid coherence, the superb dogmatic drill, of the
Catholic Church. The Bible was accepted as the final
court of appeal in matters of faith.1 Upon any other
ground the Church would not have been Christian.
But there was no thought of pulling Church and Bible
apart. The orderly life of the one was assumed to be
the indispensable medium of the mind and heart of
the other.

Long afterward the clear distinction between the
authority of the Church and the authority of the Bible
became necessary. At the Reformation the times
demanded it. But in the period in which Christianity
established itself as the religion of the Mediterranean
world, history had no use for the distinction. The

1 Irenseus, II, 27 ; 28, 7.

Origen declared that Holy Scripture contained the sum of
all the knowledge about God that is attainable in this life. The
highest exercise of the sanctified reason is to understand it.
(Redepenning, Origenes, 1841 ; 1" Abth., pp. 259, 270-272.)

Augustine, Contra Epist. Man., ch. 6 (the famous declara-
tion, "I would not have believed the Scriptures "). But, con-
tending with the Donatists, he insisted on the Scriptures as the
supreme authority (II, 3, 4). Theoretically, he leaned toward
the ecclesiastical principle (Dorner, A. ; Augitatinus, 1873, pp.
237-244). But practically, he assumed that the sovereign wis-
dom of life was embodied in the Scriptures. — Vincent, Com-
monitory, ch. 2, 27, 29. Cassiodorus expressed the estimate
of the Bible that passed out of the patristic period into the
medieeval period when he described the patristic expositions of
Holy Writ as the Jacob's Ladder by means of which men were
to ascend to the contemplation of God (De Inst. Div. Lit.,
Prcef.).

No distinc-
tion between
authority of
Church and
authority of
Scripture.

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Idea of
infallibility.

Bible
isolated.

life of the Church was conceived as a mystical total.
It was an organism. Holy Scripture was indeed its
heart. But the heart did not say to the hands, '' I
have no need of thee! " Tradition, the fixed interpre-
tation of an authoritative Church, was thought to be
inseparable from a true and saving knowledge of God's
Word.

All the conditions of the period favoured the
growth of the ancient idea of inspiration. In like
manner they fostered the idea of infallibility. The
ideas are inseparable. If the random, destructive
work of the sectarian allegorists was to be successfully
opposed, if there was to be an absolute, final body of
dogma, then the Sacred Books from which the dogmas
drew their texts had to be conceived as an infallible
body of theological truth. But if it was to be valued
as infallible, the human author must go out of it, or,
at least, hide in the closet. So the Divine Author of
Scripture was left in exclusive possession. When the
Biblical student entered the Bible, God alone met
him. The doctrine of inspiration tended to remove
the Sacred Books from all direct connection with the
minds and wills of their authors.

The Bible was dogmatically isolated. It could not
be treated as a human document. It was held to be
inspired. And inspiration, as antiquity conceived it,
drew infallibility in its train. So, as an infallible
book, the Bible is out of vital touch with reason. For
reason exists to ask questions and to insist upon
rational answers. But the Scriptures were lifted
beyond the reach of searching questions.1 Reason
must kneel, not investigate.

1 The ancient doctrine of inspiration was shaped in a period
•when reason was passing into bankruptcy (Windelband, Hist,
of Philosophy, pp. 210-229>

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 35

The inspiration and infallibility of Holy Scripture infallibility
entailed the infallibility of the Church. Scriptural andhSi-6
infallibility without ecclesiastical infallibility is no Mityof
better than a mighty SAVord without a mighty hand to
wield it. It hangs on a wall as a glorious memory.
It cannot do its work. In the long run, the rule-of-
thumb infallibility of extreme Protestantism will not
serve. The dogma of infallibility, if it is to play an
efficient and enduring part in history, must have an
infallible Church to translate it into law. Hence, the
doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility developed along-
side the doctrine of Scriptural infallibility. It was
not, however, systematically elaborated. It lay in
the mind of Christendom, awaiting the opportunity
for a free career.

The opportunity came when the seat of empire was
removed from Home to Constantinople and the emper-
ors lost their hold on the West. Political life, of a
high and ennobling order, went off the stage. The
State passed into spiritual bankruptcy. The Church
of the Occident, thus emancipated from secular con-
trol and secured against rival interests, found a field
cleared for the development of the sacerdotal prin-
ciple. And that necessitated the steady exaltation of The Papacy
the Papacy. Mohammed came to the aid of the Popes.
His gift was only less helpful than the gift of Con
stantine. Lopping off from Christendom all the
ancient centres of Christianity in Asia and Africa,
he insured to the Popes a practical monopoly of
spiritual prestige.1

Tradition, as the ancient Church handed the idea
over to the mediaeval Church, meant a conception of
the Bible as infallible, applied to life and carried into
practice by a Church believed to be infallible. If, now,

1 Allen, Christian Institutions, ch. 11; also, the standard
church histories.

EISTOBY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Centralisa-
tion of
Tradition.

The classic
period of
Tradition.

the idea of Tradition was to be logically worked out and
carried forward historically into all its consequences
of good and evil, a thorough-going centralisation of the
Church was necessary.

External history enabled the Papacy to achieve the
required centralisation. Down to the eleventh cen-
tury, all the conditions of the West strongly encour-
aged the power of Tradition. The success of Tradition
depended upon a body of dogmatic interpretations of
Scripture pressed steadily upon the mind by a sov-
ereign ecclesiastical authority. Any teacher will tell
us that, to have efficient education, we must have con-
centration of purpose. If a given idea is to take fast
hold upon the child's mind, rival interests and pur-
suits must be kept at a distance. The calamity, the
temporary calamity, that sits like a ghost at our mod-
ern feast of education, is mental interference. In the
primary and grammar schools intellectual persistence
is attained. In the high school a crowd of conflicting
attractions rush upon the mind, and the capacity of
attention is dissipated. The multiplication of inter-
ests makes steady pressure of any sort a thing very
hard to get.

But mental concentration was the' natural tendency
in the early Middle Ages. The poverty of interests
gave the principle of Tradition full sway. The cities
of the West had fallen into ruins. Now, we know
that throughout antiquity the city, in opposition to
the country, was the place where mind rubbed against
mind, where impressions jostled each other, where
ideas moved and changed. The country was the place
where the mind handed on, without alteration, the
views it had obtained from the past. In the modern
world, the antithesis does not hold good; because the
marvellous mechanical inventions of our age have
largely conquered space. But in the ancient and the

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 37

mediaeval world, it held true, without exception, that
the city was the place where, by reason of the conflict
of impressions and the collision of ideas, a single idea
found the most difficulties in the way of its making a
permanent fortune. The countryman's life and con-
ditions fostered conservative views and gave an easy
monopoly to any strong and persistent conception.1

The cities were in ruins, commerce at a standstill. External
The great public and private libraries of the Komaii
world had perished. It was not possible that there
should be any large and free mental life. It is true
that the monasteries earned the undying gratitude of
scholars by giving a safe asylum to literature. Against
the attacks of barbarous men, and the pressure of bar-
barous times, they maintained the continuity of men-
tal life. None the less, mental life was at a low ebb.
The scope of the mind was narrow. The quantity of
knowledge was small.2 The desire to know filled a
comparatively small space in the field of attention.
The pressure of facts on the mind was slight. The
times were free from mental interference. Tradition
throve.

Everybody knows that the mental conditions of our Contrast
own period are fundamentally different. The uni-

1 Sparta and Athens are the contrasted types in Greek life ;
Palestinian and Alexandrian Judaism in Jewish life. Droysen
brings out the function of the city in the economy of the ancient
world, in his masterly Gesch. d. Hellenismus. It was not an
accident that made Alexandria the centre of the religious specu-
lation of the Empire (Windelband, Hist, of Philosophy, p. 213).

2 The history of the map of the world is a good index to the
shrinking or enlarging body of earth-knowledge. Beazeley,
The Dawn of Modern Geography, 1897 ; Fiske, Discovery of
America, I, ch. 3.

A trustworthy witness to the state of mental productivity
down to the year 1000 is found in the statistics of exegetical
work (Schaff, Hist, of the Christian Church, IV, p. 602).

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Ideas fixed.

Bible iso-
lated in
a double
sense.

verse, whose infinitude and majesty we have just begun
to discover, presses resistlessly upon our minds. The
whole world, for the first time made one, sends a vast
body of conflicting ideas and conceptions against all
established ideas. Many sore evils follow. Faith
lacks stability. The spirit loses its simplicity. Clear
vision is often obscured. Creeds are as wax in the
hands of circumstance. Believers drift without sail
and anchor, or lie on the flats. But the gain far out-
weighs the loss. The infinitude of truth becomes a
passion. On all sides we hear the wind of God blow-
ing. And we know that we do not know whence it
comes and whither it goes. Humility becomes, in
the realm of the mind, the same cardinal virtue it has
always been in the sphere of Christian ethics. Our
minds are kept open to the new things that God has in
store.

How unlike the early Middle Ages ! The men of
that time had no appetite for the learning that lies
remote from narrow, practical ends. They altogether
lacked our lively feeling for a world of things stand-
ing close to knowledge, although not yet come into
knowledge. They had no eager sense of the truths
that stand at the door and knock.1 Free from severe
mental pressure, the ruling ideas became stiff and
unelastic. In the absence of an expanding know-
ledge, there was no need to reconstruct interpretations.
The principle of a fixed, authoritative interpretation
of Scripture found everything to its liking.

The Bible was now isolated in a double sense. It
had been dogmatically isolated by the ancient Church,
through the doctrines of inspiration and infallibility.

1 The text does no injustice to scholars like Bede and Eri-
gena. They had a profound sense of the majesty of divine truth.
But their knowledge carne to them along the line of Tradition.
There was no mental competition.

CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 39

Jerome's dream illustrates this. "How can Horace Jerome's
go with the Psalter? " he writes, " Virgil with the Gos- dream<
pels, Cicero with the Apostle? . . . Many years ago,
when for the kingdom of heaven's sake I had cut
myself off from home, parents, sister, relations, and,
harder still, from the dainty food to which I had been
accustomed ; and when I was on my way to Jerusalem
to wage my warfare, I still could not bring myself to
forego the library which I had formed for myself at
Rome with great care and toil. And so, miserable
man that I was, I would fast only that I might after-
ward read Cicero. After many nights spent in vigil,
after floods of tears from my inmost heart, after the
recollection of my past sins, I would once more take
up Plautus. And when at times I returned to my
right mind, and began to read the Prophets, their style
seemed rude and repellent. I failed to see the light
with my blinded eyes ; but I attributed the fault not
to them, but to the sun. While the old serpent was
thus making me his plaything, about the middle of
Lent a deep-seated fever fell upon my weakened body,
and while it destroyed my rest completely, — the story
seems hardly credible, — it so wasted my unhappy
frame that scarcely anything was left of me but skin
and bone. Meantime, preparations for my funeral
went on; my body grew gradually colder, and the
warmth of life lingered only in my throbbing breast.
Suddenly I was caught up in the spirit and dragged
before the judgment seat of the Judge; and here the
light was so bright, and those who stood around w-ere
so radiant, that I cast myself upon the ground and
did not dare to look up. Asked who and what I was,
I replied, ' I am a Christian.' But he who presided
said: 'Thou liest; thou art a follower of Cicero, and
not of Christ. For " where thy treasure is, there will
thy heart be also." Instantly I became dumb, and

40 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

amid the strokes of the lash — for he had ordered me
to be scourged — I was tortured more severely still by
the fire of conscience, considering with myself that
verse, 'In the grave who will give thee thanks? ' Yet
for all that I began to cry and bewail myself, saying,
' Have mercy upon me, 0 Lord ; have mercy upon me. '
Amid the sound of scourges this cry still made itself
heard. At last the bystanders, falling down before
the knees of him who presided, prayed that he would
have pity upon my youth, and that he would give me
space to repent of my error. He might still, they
urged, inflict torture on me, should I ever again read
the works of the Gentiles. Under the stress of that
awful moment I should have been ready to make still
larger promises than these. Accordingly, I made oath
and called upon his name, saying, 'Lord, if ever again
I possess worldly books, or if ever again I read such,
I have denied thee.' Dismissed, then, on taking this
oath, I returned to the upper world, and, to the sur-
prise of all, I opened upon them eyes so drenched
with tears that my distress served to convince even the
incredulous. And that this was no sleep nor idle
dream, such as those by which we are often mocked, I
call to witness the tribunal before which I lay, and
the terrible judgment which I feared. May it never
hereafter be my lot to fall under such an inquisition !
I profess that my shoulders were black and blue, that
I felt the bruises long after I awoke from my sleep,
and thenceforth I read the books of God with a zeal
greater than I had previously given to the books of
men."1

1 It would not be safe to take Jerome literally. By nature
he was a religious impressionist, a lover of the luxury of feeling.
And lie associated with devout women more than was good for
him. Yet, after the necessary discount is made, his "dream " is
typical of the tendency in the Western Church. No scholar of

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 41

Jerome's dream shows how the Scriptures were
dogmatically isolated. Between the fifth and the
twelfth centuries circumstances operated powerfully
in favour of practical isolation. The desire to know,
scientific curiosity, existed, but that was all. The Little
motive of knowledge was weak, the materials scanty, curiosity.
Even the knowledge about the authors and circum-
stances of the New Testament books had shrivelled to
a bare handful of facts.1 This small body of informa-
tion was considered sufficient. It had the prestige of
a sacred antiquity and the authority of an infallible
Church to guarantee it. Men felt no desire to go
beyond it. They lacked the motives that should lead
them to study the New Testament as a history. They
lacked the knowledge that holds our idea of the Bible
close to the ground of a human and historical process.
So the isolation of circumstances canie to the help of
the dogmatic isolation of Scriptures. The Bible was
separated from human literature by forces external as
well as by forces internal. It was cut off from the
possibility of historical investigation.

Owing to this twofold isolation of Scripture, it

the Greek Church could have had such a dream. The suspicion
of pagan learning became deep-seated. "It was the custom
among some monks, when they were under the discipline of
silence and desired to ask for Virgil, Horace, or any other Gen-
tile work, to indicate their wish by scratching their ears like
a dog, to which animal, it was thought, the pagans might be
reasonably compared" (Lecky, Hist, of European Morals,
Appleton, 1877, 2, p. 203). Boccaccio was badly frightened
(about 1360) by a monk who foretold his speedy death and
bade him give up his classical studies (Raurner, Gesch. d. Pada-
gogik, I, p. 16).

1 The student should read Cassiodorus in order to get an idea
of the narrow range of the information regarding the N. T.
books in the Western Church after the sixth century. Yet, such
as it was, it gave entire satisfaction. The mind rested on it.

42 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Immuta-
bility.

Ancient dif-
ferences of
opinion for-
gotten.

caine to pass that the idea of change or process in
connection with the New Testament lay outside the
range of ecclesiastical opinion. The scholars of the
ancient Church were well aware that there had been
differences of opinion concerning the canonical stand-
ing of various New Testament books. The familiar
words of Eusebius will bring this clearly to mind.
He distinguished between the books of an unquestion-
able standing and those whose standing was in doubt.1
He knew, as Jerome and other scholars knew, that the
Latin and Syrian and Alexandrian churches were not
of one mind upon some important points.2 And the
most elementary study nowadays brings to us the
knowledge that the Christian Bible was not made at a
stroke, that the New Testament literature did not
come fully level with the Old until the end of the
second century, and that the process of canonisation
lasted for two centuries.

But all this knowledge lay outside the ken of the
Middle Ages. The Canon was thought of as a deed
of God, done at a stroke. The human authors of the
New Testament books were out of sight and mind,
and, with them, all sense of the special occasions or
the particular aims of individual books. The thought
of change or process either within the New Testament
or in connection with it was wholly foreign to the
student of the Bible. The Canon of the Scripture
stood before the mind's eye as a divine immutable
total.

The mediaeval Church had also lost the scientific

1 Eusebius, Church History, III, 3, 25 (McGiffert's Transla-
tion and Notes in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1890).
Until the sixteenth century these facts were practically sunk in
oblivion.

2 Bleek, Introd. to N. T.,II, pp. 263, 269, 272 sq. ; Hilgenfeld,
Einleitung in d. N. T., p. 123.

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 43

apparatus for Bible-study. The ancient Church could
show a noble band of scholars, some of them great
both in spirit and in method. The text-criticism of
Origen and Lucian, the Commentaries of Theodore
and Chrysostorn, the historical studies of Julius Afri-
eanus, the labours of Jerome, deserve high praise.
These men had direct access to Scripture. All of
them knew the Greek. The Syrian scholars, and
Jerome as well, knew the Old Testament in the origi-
nal. The Bible-study of the ancient Church was, in
large measure, direct study. It used the original
languages of Scripture. It stood close to the original
sources of information.

But in the Middle Ages the scientific apparatus for
the direct study of Scripture was very largely lost.
The knowledge of the Greek kept up a meagre and pre-
carious existence.1 Hebrew, so far as practical use
went, was lost altogether.2 The Latin text, called the
Vulgate, was supreme. What with ignorance, and
piety, and habit, — a mighty triumvirate, — men did
not feel called to go behind it.3

There is a well-known kind of sloth that gladly
finds an asylum in religion. So subtly do the noble
and base elements in humanity intermingle, that the

1 " G-rcecum est, non legitur," nearly covered the ground.
The greatest thinker of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas,
knew Greek, but his knowledge was neither full nor sure.

2 Bede knew a little Hebrew (Giles, Bede's Works, 1843, I,
p. li). But like Philo's knowledge of the meanings of Hebrew
names, it was just enough to be a snare. The Council of Vienna
(1312) urged the establishment of chairs of Hebrew at Paris, Ox-
ford, Salamanca, and Bologna (Geiger, Joh. Reuchlin, p. 103).
But nothing of account came of it.

8 There were good reasons for the supremacy of the Vulgate.
The devotions, the Canon Law, the liturgical usages of a thou-
sand years, the universal value of Latin as the language of edu-
cated men, worked toward this end.

Lack of

scientific

apparatus.

Direct
knowledge
of Scripture
not possible.

44 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

holiest things are sometimes made the cloak and cover
for the meanest. Piety often stands hard by mental
laziness. So the ignorance and inertia of the period,
using the noble name of religion, accumulated upon
the sacred text a great mass of traditions, coining
indeed from various sources, yet all claiming the
highest authority, even the authority of Holy Writ,
inertia and The monks of Sinai, in course of time, placed within
easy walking distance of their monastery all the sacred
sites associated with the giving of the Law.1 When
scientific curiosity and mental stimulus were absent,
it was inevitable that they should introduce men to
sacred things along the line of least resistance. This
illustrates the way in which mediaeval piety frequently
went to work in order to acquire its knowledge of the
Sacred Books.

Even when Biblical students were like Bede, strenu-
ous and eager, the lack of data was a fatal handicap.
A first-hand knowledge of Scripture was impossible.
This condition of knowledge concerning the Holy
Land is a good example of the prevailing ignorance
regarding Biblical realities. Palestine was covered
deep with a thick stratum of Western traditions
which, in a majority of cases, had lost all connection
with the traditions of the country as well as with the
text of Scripture. The land where the Sacred Books
grew up, although under the feet of pilgrims and
monks, ceased to be a witness to the meanings of the
Bible. Foreign opinion and foreign ignorance had a

1 Palmer, The Desert of the Exodus, I, p. 8 : "All the most
interesting sites" were grouped " within an hour's walk of the
Convent of St. Katherine." Adam Smith, discussing the low
state of learning at the English universities in his time, observes,
" It is the interest of every man to live as much at his ease as
he can" (Wealth of Nations, bk. 5, ch. 1). The remark has a
wide bearing.

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 45

free hand. The established ecclesiastical interpreta- Ecclesiasti-
tion of Scripture had the same free hand. Antiquity SiSS™"
was indeed reverenced as the seat and source of its own way.
authority. But antiquity, so far as clear knowledge
went, was largely an empty field open to preemption
by pious fancy or dogmatic interest.1

Furthermore, the ecclesiastical Tradition of the
West had a peculiar power. Compared with it, the
Tradition of the Eastern Church was a body without
a head, deficient in clear self-consciousness and in
capacity for self-direction. The idea of ecclesiastical
infallibility — that idea without which Scriptural
infallibility could not be successfully applied — could
not attain in the East a logical evolution. In the
West this was possible. The Papacy provided the
organ that was needed. Now, the doctrine of Tra-
dition presupposes the belief that the Church is infal-
lible. Just in proportion as this belief takes itself
seriously, does Tradition become masterful. So,
through the triumph of Rome, Tradition came under
the control of a hand capable of directing it to definite
ends. The papal authority became the centre of the
entire body of traditional interpretations of Scripture.
The Popes held the power of the keys. They could
bind and loose. It was for them to determine how the
Bible should be understood.2

What was the mental quality of the Tradition or Mental
interpretation that laid its hands on the sacred text

with an authority so self-possessed and so command- cai interpre-

tation.

1 Reverence for antiquity, if not chastened by the scientific
desire for knowledge and checked by a large and lively body of
facts, always acts in this way. For an illustration close at hand
see Lodge's discussion of the stories about Washington's boy-
hood. Yet America is the least likely place in the world for
legendary growths.

2 Luther's address to the German nobility.

46 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

ing? We have seen that, in early centuries, Tradi-
tion was the sole means of bridling the allegorical
exegesis ; that, without it, the New Testament would
have been helpless in the grasp of any philosophical
system or theosophic view that happened along. For,
since the grammatical and historical method of inter-
pretation had not been reached, the Bible was not
permitted to tell its story in its own tongue. There-
fore, just as the Church gave us our Bible by insist-
ing on a fixed list or canon of Sacred Books, so she
preserved for us our spiritual heritage by dogmati-
cally ruling out the multitudinous Gnostical inter-
pretations which would have shattered her unity and
unfitted her to train and tutor the strong but bar-
barous nations of the West.

The Church was true to the Bible. Under the
conditions of the time, there was no other way to
appropriate and hand down God's saving Word —
the revelation of the human unity that is to be built
up on the divine. But in the course of a thousand
years it came to pass that the dogmatic tradition of
the Western Church, thanks to deep ignorance on the
one side and to an imperious confidence in its own
finality on the other, imprisoned the sacred text which
in the old days it had guarded.1

Knowledge of the original languages of Scripture
being at a minimum, the main body of information
and Hebrew, concerning the books of the Scripture — their authors,
their times, and places — having sunk into forgetful-

1 One of our needs is a thorough study of the Bullarium as a
contribution to the history of interpretation. Nowhere else is
it made so plain that the interpretation of the Middle Ages was
based, not on the nature and qualities of Holy Writ, but upon
the will of a vast institution. Eashdall well says that the
mediaeval mind had a peculiar genius for embodying its ideals
in institutions ( Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, 1895,
I, p. 6).

Little
knowledge
of Greek

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 47

ness, it was easy for a dogmatic or mystical exegesis
to run a free course.1 And this was the universal
exegesis of the Middle Ages.2 Philology had not yet
come to create in Christian scholars a sense for the
solidity of the laws that govern language. History
had not yet brought in a commanding body of facts to
check and restrain the will of an imperial Church.
In one way or another, under one form or another,
allegory was the established, the authoritative method
of interpretation. The dogmas of the Church,
received upon authority, kept chaos from breaking
forth upon Bible-study. But in the course of a thou-
sand years, dogma itself travelled far from the origi-
nal feeling and thought of Scripture. The historical
meaning of God's Word was grievously obscured.

The Church that now imposed her interpretation Dogma of
upon God's Word headed up in the Papacy. The
dogma of infallibility was already entering the last
stage of its history. Looking forward from the tower-
ing claims of the great mediaeval Popes, the Vatican
Council of 1870 is in plain view.8 The belief in the

1 Upon the relation of the mystical interpretation to the dog-
matic interpretation and the relation of both to the historical
nature of Christianity, see Dorner, Protestant Theology, 1867,
pp. 1-59.

2 The mediaeval interpretation of the N. T. was superior to
the interpretation of the Old (Rosenmiiller says this of Bede,
Hist. Interp. Lib. Sac., 1795-1814, vol. 5, p. 92 sq. It might be
said at large). This was a happy accident. In an age that
lacked the idea of evolution, the 0. T. had a far stronger need
of the allegorical interpretation.

3 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of dog-
matic relaxation. The rally and revival of medievalism in the
sixteenth century sketched the modern conception of the Papacy
at the Council of Trent. In the eighteenth century came an-
other period of relaxation. But the religious revival of the
nineteenth century carried the Papacy straight on to the Vati-
can Council of 1870.

48 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The tem-
poral power
of Papacy.

The Church

monasti-

cised.

papal supremacy and the papal infallibility were on
the verge of being regarded as essential to salvation.
And the Church taught that all this could be found
more or less clearly in God's Word.

The Church that read her own mind into Scripture
had become a vast political establishment claiming
dominion over kings and peoples. The Pope took it
upon himself to crown and to discrown monarchs.
He laid his hands on Magna Charta. And all this
under the guise of an infallible and final interpreta-
tion of texts like " Thou art Peter " and " Here are
two swords."

The Church that claimed the power of the keys, the
sole and exclusive right to interpret Holy Scripture,
had become an out and out monastic Church. And if
ecclesiastical infallibility is to be effectively used; if
it is to be anything better than a cloudy abstraction
wherein the mind, pursued by difficulties, hides itself
from its pursuers ; if it is to be a working institution,
this must always be the ^course of things. There
must be a body of men who shall be as unlike common
human society as it is possible for men to become
while remaining upon the earth and existing as a
society. They must have a constitution fundamen-
tally unlike the constitution of laymen. In lay
society men and women marry, calling upon God to
help them cleanse their love from lust that they may
build up holy families. But the men and women who
constitute the inner circles of the infallible Church
cannot marry. In lay society the individual holds
property, calling on God to help him use his money
for the good of others. But the men who constitute
the governing body within the infallible Church cannot
have any property of their own. In the lay world
men insist upon their right to know and govern them-
selves, to think freely, and to speak freely. Only in

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 49

time of war do they subject themselves to martial law.
But at the heart of the infallible Church a different
ideal holds sway. The control of the Church is in the
hands of a society, like the Jesuits, which sets up the
martial law of absolute obedience as the type of law,
and in which the individual must piit his will at the
feet of the institution, making himself will-less like
a corpse. And all this had to be, if ecclesiastical
infallibility was to really work. The right to govern
and to think in the Church, the right to claim, in the
full sense, the ideal of holiness, must be vested in a
vast, undying corporation, in a close-knit body of
priests, whose members are detached from the lay
world by the vows of poverty, and chastity, and obedi-
ence. Moreover, the confirmation of all this, if not
the authority for it, must be found in Scripture. For
the Church all along was loyal, in purpose and
motive, to God's Word. The sovereignty of the
Scriptures was practically, if not theoretically, taken
for granted. Tradition was indeed sacred, and the
Bible could not be understood apart from Tradition.
But the sincere and devout assumption was that it
interpreted the Bible aright.1 So it was necessary to
find in the sacred text the entire conception and
scheme of the monastic and infallible Church. A
non-grammatical, unhistorical exegesis carried the
Pope and monastic establishment into the Scriptures,
— into that Old Testament which is the book of Wit-
ness to the inspired thoughts of men who lived out
their lives within the bounds of a nation's experience,
and into that New Testament which is the book of

A large body
of foreign
opinion
imposed on
Scripture.

1 The history of the doctrine of Tradition in its relation to
Scripture still remains to be written. H. J. Holtzmann's Kanon
u. Tradition, 1859, is a strong book, but almost wholly on dog-
matic lines.

50 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

a Son of God who made himself like unto us in all
things, sin only except.

Thus the mediaeval Church fell into deep self-
contradiction. Her main desire was to know God's
Word truly. Erigena prayed thus with himself, " 0
Lord Jesus, no other reward, no other blessedness, no
other joy ask I of thee than this — that I may be freed
from the error of my own speculation and know thy
words in their purity."1 All the saints and leaders
of the mediaeval Church prayed so. By their study
and thought they exalted Holy Scripture. The great
Popes stopped the mouths of their adversaries with a
text. The Canon Law rested upon the Bible as an
ultimate authority. Everything of high degree in the
Middle Ages joyously paid tribute to the majesty of
the Scriptures.

Indeed, as one century followed another, the spir-
itual prestige of the Bible rose higher and higher.
The longer the reign of Tradition lasted, the more
precious, in the eyes of the Church, did the Scriptures
become.

Church con- But the doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility shut
6 *ne Church up within a circle from which she could
not break forth. An infallible interpretation, if it
means anything worth speaking of, means a sufficient
interpretation, not only sufficient for the needs of the
contemporary Church, but also satisfactory to the
sacred text itself. Now the doctrine of infallibility —
no longer loose-jointed as in earlier days, but, thanks
to the Papacy, compact and masterful — gave large
satisfaction to certain governmental and devotional
needs of the Church. It did not, however, and it

1 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, 5e Aufl., p. 354. The let-
ters of the great Popes, Ilildebrand and Innocent, and of saints
like Bernard, show how truly this noble prayer expressed the
deepest desire of the Middle Ages.

HOW CRITICISM BECAME NECESSARY 51

could not meet the demands of the Bible for an inter-
pretation along its own interior lines, On the one
side, a human interpretation of the Word was installed
as its keeper. And so the fortunes of the Bible were
bound up with the fortunes of Tradition. An attack
upon Tradition turned into an attack upon God's
Word. On the other side, the authoritative interpre-
tation was not open to searching criticism.

The established interpretation of Scripture could, The Scrip-

tii res not
of course, be changed. Necessarily, an institution so allowed to

vast as the medieval Church, including and satisfy-
ing so many interests, has its laws of development.
But the changes were indirect and roundabout, made
under cover of legal fictions.1 The very changes, so
long as they were covered by the fiction, not frankly
recognised as the correction of errors, gave a longer
lease of life to the original error, the doctrine of eccle-
siastical infallibility. As a result, these indirect cor-
rections of false interpretation could not lead the
Church toward the true goal of Bible -study, namely,
the insurance of the right of Holy Scripture to be
interpreted in its own language and in its own sense.
Here, then, the Church fell into a grievous inter-
nal conflict. The Bible was the centre and heart of
the Church's collective testimony to God's view of
man's life and His own. It was a supreme, if not the
supreme, object of faith. As such, it possessed, in
the highest degree, the right of all great objects —
the right to be understood. And the Church loyally
conceded the right. But at the same time, by her

1 Upon the vast part played by legal fiction in the building
and maintenance of institutions, see Maine, Ancient Law, cli. 2.
There is a large element of legal fiction in the conception of
papal infallibility. The discussions concerning the notes that
distinguish the Pope speaking ex cathedra, from the same Pope
speaking on a lower level, prove it.

52 HI STOUT OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The supreme

question

postponed.

Criticism
essential to
the Scrip-
tures.

efficient governmental application of infallibility, she
made it impossible to put the ultimate question of
Christianity fairly and to force it home. What is
Revelation? what its nature and method? is our ulti-
mate question. The appeal to the Church's infalli-
bility merely puts the question off.

No great question can be settled by being put off.
With every postponement the debt to reason and con-
science grows heavier. Sooner or later, the debt must
be paid, and paid in full. The Bible could not be
permanently pent up within Tradition. Its breaking
forth was only a question of time. To be true to
itself, it must come within reach of the lay reason,
and into direct touch with the conscience of the lay
world. The choice before the Bible lay between a
splendid isolation and imprisonment within Tradi-
tion, on the one side, and, on the other, criticism with
all its risks and dangers. In the light of the Bible's
own nature and history, but one choice was possible.
The Scriptures must choose the path of free criticism,
under pain of not being known as they are.1

1 The grip of this dilemma cannot be loosened. Were the
entire Protestant world to enter the Eoman communion to-
morrow, the "Reformers before the Reformation" would
straightway begin their work again, and Holy Scripture would
insist upon bringing Tradition to book.

CHAPTER IV

HOW THE POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM WAS GIVEN1

So far, the history of criticism runs as follows: Summary.
The Scriptures of Israel and of Apostolic Christianity,
by their own intrinsic merit, were able, in the course
of the second, third, and fourth centuries, to canonise
themselves in the mind of the Catholic Church, thus
becoming the Sacred Books of Christendom. While
this was happening, they were being tied up with tra-
ditions and doctrines not altogether to their liking.
In the following centuries, by reason of the hard times,
the decay of lay learning, and the weakness of the
State, the Church was led to take her own infallibility
with deepening seriousness and to apply it with
increasing efficiency. Tradition set itself up as a
sufficient interpretation of the Scriptures, while assum-
ing a grand air of finality. Through the development
of the Papacy and the resulting centralisation of
Church institutions, Tradition tightened its hold on
the sacred text. Yet, all the while, by isolating the
Scriptures, by keeping them remote from reason, and
treating them as if they were altogether above reason,
the Church exalted their value in the eyes of the self-
same laity who were denied the right to interpret

1 Literature : Ranke, Hist, of Germany in the Period of the
Reformation, I ; Luther, Primary Works (tr. by Wace and
Buchheim) ; Moulton, Hist, of the English Bible, 1878 ; Schaff,
Creeds of Christendom, III ; Dorner, Hist, of Protestant The-
ology.

54 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The Bible
must be
treated as
a human
book.

them. The longer the isolation and prohibition lasted,
the more powerfully did the Scriptures strain at
the cords of Tradition. It was inevitable that,
sooner or later, the Bible should break away from its
keeper.1

And now we are to see how, from the one side, the
laity pressed in to touch the most sacred things with
their own hands, while from the other the Bible went
forth to meet them. Hereby the death knell of the
allegorical exegesis was rung. That the Bible should
be interpreted as a human book became only a ques-
tion of time. For, taken to the heart of the laity and
lying open in their hands, it must needs be studied
as the lay reason studies other things — through free
questioning and through scientific investigation.

So long as the interpretation of Holy Scripture
remained in the hands of ecclesiastical infallibility,
Bible-study could not be thorough. The appeal to
the authority of the general councils, the appeal to the
Fathers, the appeal to the Popes, all had their value.

1 Marsilius of Padua put forth (about 1324) the Defensor
Pacis, as a plea for the Emperor against the Pope. With great
clearness he affirms the sovereignty of Scripture (III, 2, 1).
Christ is the sole judge in things divine (Christus . . . mill us
alius, TI, 9). Nothing deserves unconditional belief save Holy
Scripture, and the interpretation is to \>ecommnni concilia fidel-
ium. (In Melchior Goldasti, Monarchies S. Romani Imperil,
1668, II.) A study of the other political treatises contained in
the three volumes demonstrates that the theoretical emphasis
upon the rights of the State, growing steadily from the thir-
teenth century on, worked for the depreciation of Tradition as
a clerical monopoly, and for the exaltation of the Scriptures.
See, also, Wiclif, Preface to De Dom. Div., and Lechler, Wic-
lif, I, pp. 467-489. While the political life of the Occident was
thus loosening the connection between Scripture and Tradition
in one way, the devotional needs of Christendom were loosen-
ing it in another (Ullmann, Reformers before the Reformation,
I, pp. 8, 54 ; II, pp. 485, 488). ,

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM

But each of them shut up the mind of the Church
to indirect Bible-study. Behind all these stood the
Bible. But it stood behind them, and could not be
got at save through them. Bible-study was, in the
main, secondary. The Fathers were believed to con-
stitute a harmonious body of teaching, so that when
Abelard suggested the contrary, the rulers of the
Cliurch uttered a horrified "Hush!"1 The Papal
Bulls assumed that the Bullarium was a luminous
exposition of Holy Writ. When Churchmen spoke
about the councils, they assumed that all things they
counted dear could be found within the scope of Vin-
cent's "Believed always, everywhere, and by every-
body." And when the three appeals joined their
voices in unison, they made it practically impossible
for the Bible's own voice to be heard, save in so far
as it was in agreement with them.

Boniface the Eighth, under the stress of opposition
to the rising power of the French monarchy, carried
the statements of the Papacy, if not its claims, higher
than any of his predecessors. Amongst other tower-
ing words of his are these, "The Koman Pontifex
has all laws within his breast." 2 If he spoke like a
madman, then his madness was logical. Sometimes it
takes a madman to draw a straight conclusion from a
simple premise. Men in their senses are aware of the
limitations of life, of the need of moderate statement,
of the inevitableness of compromise. A man of great
ability, just a trifle unbalanced, is more fearlessly
logical. Boniface was thoroughly logical. If the
doctrine of papal supremacy is to be seriously taken,

1 See Bernard's letters.

2 " Roman us Pontifex, qui jura omnia in scrinio pectoris sui
censetur habere" (In Fr. von Schulte, Gesch. d. Quellen u.
Literatur d. canon. Rechts von Gratian bis auf die Gegenwart,
II, p. 34, n. 3).

Ecclesiasti-
cal infalli-
bility made
Bible-study
secondary.

Boniface
VIII.

56 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

he was well within his rights. And in asserting that
the Pope's breast was the place of composition, or
The Papacy record, for all laws, he asserted, in effect, that the
interpreter? P°Pes were the ultimate interpreters of Scripture. Of
course, neither he nor any other Pope ever proposed
to dispense with the counsel and consent of the
Church at large. But in him the life and authority
of the Church is centred. In him the claim of Tra-
dition to be a sufficient interpreter of Scripture is
embodied. Only through the Papacy, and through
the opinion of the Church as represented in the
Papacy, may the laity hope to get at the right mean-
ing of the Bible. Now, by reason of the vast vested
interests of the most imposing institution history
has ever seen, the chances of the papal hierarchy
changing its line of interpretation were exceedingly
small.

So long, then, as Bible-study remained under the
control of the papal hierarchy, there could be no direct
approach to the Word of God. The authority of the
Church jealously guarded the frontiers of all sacred
things.1 Inside the frontier the scientific reason had
no rights.2 Questions regarding the Bible could not

1 A sort of intellectual concordat was agreed upon, more
or less unconsciously (Erdmann, Hist, of Philosophy, § 216 ;
Ueberweg, Hist, of Philosophy (Ancient and Mediaeval}, §§ 102,
104). Rashdall says truly concerning the great university
movement of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, that the
"intellectual enthusiasm " of Europe began to flow in a chan-
nel separate from religious enthusiasm ( Universities, I, pp. 29,
30) . But thanks to the concordat whereby reason was relegated
to a sphere of its own, apart from the field of theology and
sacred things, the "humanities" could not touch the text of
Scripture.

2 Maywald, Die Lchre von der Zweifacher Wahrheit, 1871.
The theory of a twofold truth was officially condemned. For
all that, it was deeply related to the mediseval view of things.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM 57

get over the ecclesiastical guard and strike home. Biblical
There could be no direct Bible-study.1 Therefore, a
breach with ecclesiastical Tradition was necessary.
God's Word must go forth from bondage to human
opinion. The Bible refuses to accept the Pope as its
authoritative interpreter. It insists upon interpreting
itself.

The main forces of European life in the sixteenth
century favoured a breach between the Scriptures and
Tradition. The classic age of Tradition, from 500 A. D.
to 1000, was a period of contracting life. But in the
Keformation period life was expanding on every side.
The cry, " Land! Land! " from the masthead of Colum-
bus's ship foretold a new age of commerce and travel,
of widening adventure, of multiplying human inter-
ests.2 " For the inhabitants of Europe, the fourteenth

1 It has been commonly said that the action of Trent in can-
onising the Vulgate was a mortal blow to sound Bible-study.
E.g. Westcott, Bible in the Church, p. 259. This is overdone.
No institution so vast as the Roman Catholic Church ever seri-
ously troubles itself to be consistent. It is no single conciliary
action that affects the course of Bible-study in the Roman
Catholic communion ; rather is it the whole mental attitude
which results from taking the dogma of ecclesiastical infalli-
bility with seriousness and applying it effectively. The dogma
of infallibility, so long as it is an intellectual plaything, may not
permanently retard sound Bible-study. But, vested in a vast
and highly organised hierarchy, it renders thorough and reso-
lute criticism impossible.

2 The travels of the thirteenth century (Yule, Marco Polo;
also, Cathay and the Way Thither'). Expansion of geographi-
cal knowledge (Fiske, Old Virginia, I, pp. 41-43). The study
and theories of Roger Bacon. The body of ' ' earth-knowledge ' '
began to grow rapidly. Dowden's Mind and Art of Shakespeare
gives a brilliant sketch of the mental consequences in the six-
teenth century (the Introduction). Hakluyt's Voyages, read
in comparison with Butler's Lives of the Saints, is a vivid illus-
tration of the new motive and stimulus of life.

58 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The expand-
ing lifeof the
sixteenth
century.

Travellers
take the
place of
pilgrims.

century had doubled the works of creation."1 New
things pressed forward to claim attention. The
sphere of intelligence was vastly enlarged. "Never
has a discovery, in itself purely material, produced,
by widening the horizon, a moral change more extra-
ordinary and more durable/' 2 Peter Martyr, writing
in 1493, said, " I feel myself blessed when I speak
with certain sensible men from the number of those
returning from that province" (Hispaniola). His
friend, Pomponius Laetus, wept for joy when he got
the news.3 That letter indicates a vital change in the
centre of mental gravity. The pleasures of reason
had been found, for many centuries, in the scholastic
philosophy and in the study of the Scriptures under
the tuition of the Fathers. But now a new world was
coming above the horizon. And a thrill of joy ran
through men as they thought of the unknown things
that were pressing upon knowledge.

The chief end of the pilgrims, the men who did
the disinterested travelling of Europe for six centu-
ries, was to visit the traditional holy places and to see
as large a number of the bones of the saints as pos-
sible.4 And they always saw what they went to see.
They did not seek enlargement of knowledge, and they
carried home a minimum acquaintance with new facts.
But with the thirteenth century a new fashion in travel
set in. And after the fifteenth century the men who
took long journeys, for objects larger than gain, went
to see the new lands, the new things. The desire to
enlarge the knowledge of Europe led them on. The
age of Tradition had passed. The age of mental
curiosity had come.

1 Humboldt, Geographic du Nouveau Continent, 1836, 1, viii ;
also, Cosmos (ed. Bohn), II, 601.

2/6., ix. »Ib., pp. 4? 5.

4 Beazeley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, 1897, cli. 2, 3, 4.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM 59

In the nineteenth century men put upon Herschel's
tomb the words, " He broke through the barriers of
the heavens and added a universe to our knowledge." l
This is the signature of the period that began in the
fifteenth century, — the discovery of the universe ;
boundless expanses of potential experience encompass
the mind. Such an age is necessarily a critical age.
For criticism is not an extraordinary form of mental
action. The critical reason of our time is identical,
in its main qualities, with the scholastic reason of
the Middle Ages. The reason is one and the same.
It is the circumstances that differ. In the earlier
period, the knowledge of facts was nearly at a stand-
still. The increments of knowledge came almost
wholly from commenting on text-books and from the
masterly use of the power of mental abstraction.2
New facts did not mass themselves on the frontiers
of the traditional conceptions. That, however, is
what continually happens in our own period. And
the result is criticism. Using terms broadly, we
may say that the controlling thought of our time is
critical.

The explanation is, that vast bodies of new facts New facts
have risen behind the old hypotheses and interpreta- thtfoid1*
tions, assailing them in the rear. In a time of rapidly hypotheses,
expanding knowledge, the certainty that truth, unex-
plored, yet real, stretches out on all sides of the mind,
causes a shadow of suspicion to fall upon every

1 Perrupit claustra, Humboldt, Cosmos, I, p. 71.

2 Whewell, Hist, of the Inductive Sciences, 3d ed., 1875, Bk.
IV, ch. 2 ("The Comraentatorial Spirit"). The mind was
content with " collections of opinions," ib., II, p. 187. A simi-
lar disposition prevailed in Bible-study. The commentaries
were for the most part catense, collections of patristic opinions.
This tendency began as early as Jerome (Harnack, AUchrist.
Lit., L.). Direct study, observation, was not the order of the
day.

60 HISTORY OF THE HIGHEE CRITICISM

hypothesis. Reason as a whole becomes critical, con-
stantly challenging the old definitions in the interest
of material which they did not include, steadily press-
ing forward through the old conceptions to unmeasured
realities that lie behind them. Criticism is the mental
climate of such a period.

In the sixteenth century the influence of the State
was rapidly rising. Two hundred years before,
Philip of France said to Boniface, "Holy Mother
Church, the Bride of Christ, is made up not only of
clergy, but of laity."1 Since then the credit of the
secular power had steadily increased. A hundred
years later a great cardinal, Richelieu, allied himself
with Protestants in order to exalt France. The prin-
Principle of ciple of nationality shattered mediaeval unity. It had
nationality. tlmt resu}t even jn literature; for in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, the culture of Europe throwing
off the common forms that made mediseval literatures,
wherever written, so strikingly alike, commenced to
nationalise itself.2 The records of the printing-press
show a steady decline in the number of books written
in Latin, a corresponding increase in the number of
those written in the modern languages.8

The unity of the Canon Law was broken, its domain
curtailed. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
it had succeeded in completely emancipating itself
from the civil law, and had established an exclusive
control over all matters relating to marriages and
wills.4 But the civil and the common law, strength-

1 Gieseler, Ecclesiastical History, Philadelphia, 1836, II,
p. 238.

2 Brunetiere, Hist. d. 1. Lit. Franqaise, 1898, Livre 2, ch. 2.

3 Paulsen, Geschichted. gelehrten Unterrichts, 1885, Beilage 1.
The records of the press in other countries would no doubt give
results similar to those in Germany.

* Schulte, Canon Recht, II, pp. 25-28.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM

ening with the use of the secular power, kept gaining
ground until the sixteenth century, and then its vic-
tory was assured. As in literature, so in law, the
period of national development had opened. The
age of imperial unity in spiritual things was over.
The prestige of Tradition had received a mortal
wound.

The age of criticism, as we know it, did not come
straightway. But the promise of criticism was given
when once the break between the Bible and Tradition
had been made. For Tradition and criticism are
diverse forms of Biblical interpretation. Tradition
is the interpretation that sets up the opinions about
the Scriptures held by the papal hierarchy as sufficient
and authoritative. Criticism is the interpetation that
insists upon going behind the interpretation, to put
direct questions to the Sacred Books. As soon, then,
as the principle of Tradition fell into discredit, the
critical principle was conceived. Centuries might
pass before it came clearly to the light. None the
less, the moment the Bible began to shake off the hold
of Tradition, criticism, as a new form of the Church's
mental obligation, had won its footing.

The obligation of criticism is composed of two ele-
ments, the element of conscience and the element of
reason. Men are so made that, in the long run, only
the best is good in their eyes. If the Bible is the
best thing the Church owns, then it is an act of con-
science to bring the Bible forth from behind Tradition
into direct and quickening touch with the common life
of men. Again, if conscience insists upon a first-hand
knowledge of God's Word for the sake of the man who
needs to be saved, reason insists upon the same thing
for the sake of the object to be known. For to every
object, great and small, the scientific mind guarantees
the right to be seen as it is.

Age of im-
perial unity
gone by.

Fall of Tra-
dition made
criticism
inevitable.

62 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Reformation
an act of
conscience.

Christ and
the Scrip-
tures.

The act of conscience made the Reformation.1
That is not saying that the forces which made the
Reformation possible were altogether pure and spir-
itual. No great historical movement will stand the
test of the Sermon on the Mount. When the Children
of Israel went up out of Egypt, a mixed multitude
went with them. So, when the desire for the pure
Word of God carried the Bible outside the bounds of
ecclesiastical Tradition, a mixed multitude of desires
and motives went along. For all that, the main
reason for the movement was the longing of men to
see the oracles of God in their original meanings.2

Conscience is the pledge and guarantee of our right
to the best. Now the fortunes of Christianity as a
historical religion are wrapped up with the fortunes
of Christ's book. It is true, of course, that our Lord
is not imprisoned within his book. He is the living
Head of a living Church, and touches men through
the sacraments, the ministry, and the manifold mani-
festations of his real presence. Yet it is no less true
that Christianity without the Bible would be a religion
adrift upon the tide of human feeling. Christ's book
is God's record of the true process of revelation. It
is, therefore, the abiding standard whereby we shall
test the spirit that seeks to rule the Church in God's
name, so that we may learn whether it is God's Spirit
or only the spirit of a period or a time. The Bible,
so far as human thought can go, is God's best thing.
It is the thing that Christians most deeply need to
know.

So it was an act of conscience to appeal to the Bible

1 Schenkel, Das Wesen d. Protestantismus, 1862, §§ 12-30.
"The Roman Catholic depotentiation of the Bible."

2 The connection between the political and the religious ele-
ments is admirably wrought out by Ranke, Hist, of Germany
in Period of Reformation, I.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM

as the Reformers did. Papal Tradition interposed
itself between the religious consciousness and Scrip-
ture, asserting that the papal interpretation was the
true and sufficient one, and that whosoever sought
entry into the Scriptures by any other way was a thief
and a robber. But this position no longer satisfied
the mature religious sense of Christendom. The Bible
is God's best thing for our thought. It must be
known as it is in itself. And since Tradition refused
to permit men to go behind it, in order to compare it
with the Word of God, there was nothing to be done
but discard Tradition altogether, in order to achieve
a direct study of the Scriptures.

At the cry, "The Bible and the Bible alone the
religion of Protestants,"1 confusion broke in upon
Bible-study. The immediate result was that indi-
vidual infallibility threatened to take the place of
ecclesiastical infallibility. A chaos of conflicting
interpretations followed. Historical interpretation
was very slow in coming. Even Erasmus, lover of
Greek and ardent believer in the human aspects of
the New Testament, could contend for the manifold
sense of Scripture. Colet, arguing against him, " set
down " the manifold meanings found in the texts " not
to the fecundity of the Scriptures, but to the sterility
of men's minds and their incapacity of getting at the
pure and simple truth. If they could but reach that,
they would as completely agree as now they differ."2
This is the ground taken by the exegesis of our time,
and, what is more, it is successfully defended against

1 William Chillingworth, Religion of Protestants, 1635. He
contended for the rational interpretation of Scripture. The
clergyman who read the burial service over Chillingworth's
body threw the book into his grave, crying, " Go, rot with thine
author."

2 In Seebohm, TJie Oxford Reformers (3d ed.), p. 124.

First-hand
knowledge
of Scripture
demanded.

Historical
interpreta-
tion came
slowly.

64 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Individual
infallibility
a poor sub-
stitute for
papal infal-
libility.

Luther's
words to the
German
nobility.

the assaults of ecclesiastical and dogmatic interests.
But it was ground far in advance of the capacities of
the age. Other reformers approved of Colet's posi-
tion.1 Even three or four swallows, however, do not
make a summer. Tradition had held the allegorical
interpretation with bit and bridle. Tradition having
lost control, and the grammatical-historical interpreta-
tion being still in the future, the text continued to
lie at the mercy of the interpreter. The difference
was that the Pope by the Tiber had given place to the
pope in the individual Christian's breast.

Moreover, Chillingworth's position entailed an
unnatural and morbid relationship between the idea
of the Church and the idea of the Bible. Eightly
understood, these two ideas must live together, if they
would live nobly. But the Keformation was neces-
sary. The supreme need of conscience was a true
understanding of Scripture. And this could not be
hoped for, so long as ecclesiastical opinion claimed
infallibility. No matter, then, whether chaos broke
loose or not, the Bible must be set up, for the time
being, as if it were a thing in itself, apart from the
Church's life.

The genius of Christianity required that the book
of Life should be opened and that the issues of Church
government should be fearlessly examined. Luther
wrote to the German nobility, "Hath not the Pope
erred ? . . . freshly would we judge everything ac-
cording to Scripture."2 No longer should the Bible
be studied at second hand. The Fathers, looked up
to by the Middle Ages as authoritative interpreters,
were driven out of their place. " For articles of faith
may not be drawn from the words and deeds of the

1 Luther and Calvin (Farrar, Interpretation, pp. 327, 345).

2 Primary Works (Wace and Buchheim).

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM

Fathers. . . . Our creed is that the Word of God
alone can ground articles of faith, no one else, not
even an angel."1

" It is not true, " said Petrus Verruilius, " that the
Scriptures take their authority from the Church.
Their certitude is derived from God and not from
men. The Word came before the Church. It is from
the Word that the Church holds its vocation." 2 This
was a thoroughly representative saying. The Keform-
ers conceived the Church as existing to interpret the
Scriptures truly and to bring God's saving Word close
to the consciences of men. And if the Church fails to
do this, she misses her vocation. But if the authority The Church

of the Church must freshly verify itself by the inter- must verify

, * herself by

pretation of the Scriptures, her authority ceases to be the study of
for the laity an ultimate thing, and becomes a medium ScriPture-
through which the layman is brought into touch with
the ultimate. Then, in the last analysis, it is not the
authority of the Church that verifies Scripture, but it
is Scripture that verifies itself. The Bible is set up
as its own interpreter.

While, therefore, at first, the cashiering of Tradi-
tion might appear to throw interpretation into confu-
sion by making each individual, however ignorant, a
master of interpretation, it was only in appearance.
In reality, to set up the Bible as its own interpreter
meant, in the long run, that Scripture must be gram-
matically and historically interpreted. For, on the
one side, to throw down the bulwark of Tradition,
and invite the common feeling of Christians to test
God's Word by direct study, presupposes an entire
confidence in the ability of the Bible to take care of
itself. The Bible is its own keeper. The Scriptures

1 Sinai. Art. To same effect the various Protestant confes-
sions. See Schaff, Creeds of Christendom.

2 In Reuss, Hist, of the Canon, p. 296.

66 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

do not fear what men may do unto them. So Bible-
study should be fearless and free. On the other side,
the Scriptures, having once asserted the power of self-
interpretation, having cast off the guardianship of
Tradition, must be studied until they are known in
their original sense. And this necessity was sure, in
course of time, to usher in the grammatical and
historical interpretation.

So the Sacred Books of Christendom were to build
up for themselves a defence against chaotic and
unworthy renderings. Taken in their own mind and
meaning, they can have, as Colet affirmed, only a
The single single sense. This single sense is the safeguard
sense. against exegetical abuse — a far better defence than

Tradition could provide. For Tradition gained uni-
formity of interpretation by imposing the allegorical
system upon Scripture, along with the proviso that
allegory must keep within the bounds marked out by
authority. But the tiger does not change his spots
when he is put within a cage. The allegorical prin-
ciple, whether rioting with the Gnostics or forced by
the mediaeval Church to keep the peace, could have
but one upshot. The Scriptures could not be clearly
known in their own sense. The best, then, that Tra-
dition could do was to limit the scope of allegorical
exegesis. But the Reformation principle, consistently
applied, overcame it altogether.

The rights When the Bible came forth from behind Tradition,
of the laity, ft sought translation into the people's tongue. The
Reformation, being an act of conscience, required that
the supreme law of the Church should be published
in the language of the laity. Just as the publication of
the Twelve Tables at Rome, in the fifth century B.C.,
indicated that the law of Rome was to be no longer
the monopoly of the patricians, so did the widespread
enthusiasm for translations of the Bible indicate that

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM 67

the interpretation of Scripture was to be no longer a
monopoly of the priesthood.1

This accords well with the nature of Eevelation.
Our Sacred Books were written by men of the people.
They were written for the people. The Bible, by
abolishing all distinction between religious truth as it
is for the multitude, and the same truth as it is for
the religious specialist, makes of itself the most demo-
cratic book in the world. It was not possible, then,
for the Scriptures to be deeply taken in their own
sense so long as a monasticised priesthood held the

•nower of the keys. Written as they were in the broad The Bible

17 , . . ., T.T T • -IT taken back

day of history, enshrining as they do the divine ideals to the com.

for humanity at large, they must be carried back into mou life-
the midst of the common life through which their
inspiration came, in order to be truly interpreted.
So the assertion, by means of translation into the ver-
nacular, of the laity's right to a first-hand knowledge
of the Bible was, in effect, an assertion of the Bible's
right to be understood.

The religious motive at work in the movement of
the sixteenth century effected a breach between Bible-
study and Tradition. It did this because the essence
of religion is the desire to be saved; that is, the
desire to be in close and cleansing touch with the ulti-
mate realities of life. The Bible, as God's book of
Witness to the fundamental qualities and final issues
of life, required to be known at first-hand, if men
were to • be truly saved. So conscience cashiered
Tradition. At the same time, the downfall of Tra-
dition, of the sacerdotal monopoly of interpretation,
threw the doors of Bible-reading and Bible-study wide The Bible-
open to the laity. While the breach with Tradition
involved the direct study of Scripture, the incoming

i Moulton, Hist, of the English Bible, pp. 21, 22.

68 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

of the laity involved free study. For the lay mind of
Europe must needs move with the lay will ; and the
lay will, building up the modern State, could not stop
short of orderly freedom, political and mental.1 When
Christianity established itself in the Roman Empire,
the Bible became the Vade-mecum, the book of devo-
tion, for Europe. When, in the sixteenth century,
Tradition's claim to be an authoritative interpretation
was rejected, the Bible entered into the expanding life
of the Occident. Henceforth it must take its chances
in a climate of free action and free thought.2
The reli- Thus, through the religious motive, the first great

of°Bn>Te°-tiVe steP was taken in the direction of criticism. The
study not original thought and feeling of Scripture must be dis-
covered and appropriated. Once started upon this
road, where could Bible-study bring up, short of the
historical interpretation?

But the religious motive, by itself, would not have
been equal to the work of discovering and shaping
these new principles of interpretation which the nature
of revelation called for. The Bible, in its essence, is
a history, a body of facts; its saving thought is intel-
ligible only in connection with those facts. As a his-
tory, and, what is more, a history moving over a
very broad field of time, it needs to be studied in the
light of history at large. Now, work of that sort is
the function of reason. For reason exists to see
things as they are. As Bacon finely said, it "doth
buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things."

1 Ranke calls the Reformation period one of the "greatest
conjunctions" of universal history, I, p. 243.

2 This stands out very clearly in the history of England and
America. The Bible has been knit up into the life of free peo-
ples. The free mental action that accompanies free life must
touch the Bible to the quick. The Bible must submit to the
most searching examination or cease to be our national book.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM

The religious motives of the Reformation, the splen-
did protest of conscience against vicars and substi-
tutes for realities, laid upon the Church the obligation
to return to the first sources of our religion. Reason
alone, however, — scientific curiosity, multiplying the
materials of knowledge and shaping its methods, —
could create the apparatus of historical Bible-study.

In the thirteenth century, the mediaeval Church
had made a concordat with reason. The field of expe-
rience was divided. There were to be two bodies of
truth, and they were not to harass each other. On
the frontier between them stood the infallible authority
and Tradition of the Church. Behind Tradition the
Scriptures lay secure, beyond the reach of such ques-
tions as an impassioned love of truth always forces
home. Raymond of Sabonde, in his Natural Theology
published about 1436, put the point perfectly when he
said that there are two books, the book of Nature and
the book of Scripture; and that the former is open to
everybody, while the latter is only open to the priest-
hood.1 So reason could not get at the sacred text
save through authority. That meant that reason,
when it crossed the frontier between the study of
Nature and the study of Scripture, surrendered its
sword. The Bible was secure.

The security was dearly bought. We must again
remind ourselves that an authority of the mediaeval
sort could not be efficiently worked, unless by a mon-
asticised Church headed up in a Pope. So the Bible,
fleeing from reason to find asylum in authority, must
be content when the deepest elements in its own nature
are suppressed or kept in the background. The heart
of Scripture is its view of the creative, saving unity
of the divine life as revealed through a human expe-

The concor-
dat of the
thirteenth
century.

Price paid
by Scrip-
ture for
insurance
against
questions.

Hagenbach, Dogmengesch., § 159.

70 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

rience worked out under historical conditions. If the
Bible, then, in order to be unvexed by reason, takes
the veil and becomes the text-book of a monasticised
Church, it allows its own fundamental qualities to be
overshadowed.

The Bible would not pay the price. If, as the book
of Witness to God's best things, it demanded a direct
touch on the lay conscience, as a book of history it
demanded, with equal insistence, a direct touch on
the lay reason.

In the movement called the Renaissance, the reason
of Europe began to claim again the right of suffrage
in things spiritual. It had gone into bankruptcy in
the fifth century, when the State broke down. For
many centuries thereafter, all the truth that seemed
vital to man passed into the keeping of men living the
monastic life and separated, as far as possible, from
the conditions under which the layman lives and
Growing within which his reason works. But the principle
dence°of " °^ ^ie ^enaissance was the exaltation of lay learning,
reason. — the learning of the Greeks and the Eomans. To be

sure, the Latin classics had been read all through the
Middle Ages. Not, however, in and for themselves.
Rather as forerunners of Christianity. The Renais-
sance made them an end in themselves. The differ-
ence is profound.1 In the one case they were treated
as if they stood within the mediaeval view of life. In
the other case, they called the mind away from that
view. This involved a revolution in the aims and
methods of education. The mediaeval universities
were, in the main, clerical establishments.2 The
teaching staff was made up almost wholly of men in

1 Brunetiere, Lit. Franq., pp. 41, 42.

2 Rashdall, Universities; Denifle, Entstehung d. Universitd-
ten des Mittelalters, 1885. The words of the text need to be
qualified, but they are substantially sound.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM 71

orders or men under the monastic vows. They were
within the sphere and under the discipline of the
Papacy. Vital truth, all the truth that touched the
heart and quickened the imagination, was controlled
by Tradition. But the Renaissance brought the mind Revolution
of the Occident to a sharp turn in the road. It ineducation-
brought to light new principles of education. It con-
tained the promise of a new type of university. It
exalted lay learning. It involved the emancipation
of reason from authority.

Ultimately, Tradition must justify itself before Tradition
reason, even as the Reformation forced it to justify and reason-
itself before conscience. Hooker, the great English-
man, wrote, " Although ten thousand general councils
would set down one and the same definitive sentence
concerning any point of religion whatsoever, yet one
demonstrative reason alleged or one manifest testimony
cited from the mouth of God himself to the contrary,
could not choose but overweigh them all." l In words
like these the relationship between the two elements
in the sixteenth-century movement comes out. The
desire to know and the desire to be saved must work
together in order to settle the accounts between Reve-
lation and Tradition. The Bible freely puts itself
within the reach of reason.

The Reformation and the Renaissance created a Demand for
resistless demand for the original text of the Scrip-
ture. The mediaeval Church, fixing the lines of her
character in the counter-Reformation, blundered into
an undue valuation of the Vulgate. But Protestant-
ism went straight to the Greek and the Hebrew. And
the free study of the times travelled the same road.
How closely the needs of awakening reason and the
needs of the quickened conscience kept together may

1 Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, II, 5, 7.

72 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

be seen in the work of Keuchlin, who published the
first Hebrew grammar, in 1506, 1 and of Erasmus, who
put out the first Greek Testament, in 1516. Eras-
mus urged the need of improved texts of the Fathers.
Reuchlin proclaimed the necessity of the original text
of Aristotle. Men had outgrown the secondary sources
of knowledge that satisfied the Middle Ages.2

With well-nigh incredible heat men laid hold of
the rudiments of Greek and Hebrew. The study of
grammar became a matter of prime importance. In
effect this meant the downfall of the allegorical
method of interpretation which had reigned, without
a break, since the second century. The simple, his-
torical sense of Scripture became, in principle, the
final and decisive sense. And therewith the human
authors of our Sacred Books were restored to honour.
For allegory, when it exalted the mystical and theo-
logical meanings of Scripture far above the historical,
by one and the self-same mental act, so conceived the
divine that in its presence the human lost colour and
individuality.

Protestantism was inconsistent. The principles of

1 Reuchlin was fully self-conscious regarding the signifi-
cance of his work. "Exegi monumentum sere perennius," he
wrote.

2 The entire scholarly movement of the sixteenth century
was toward the direct study of the ancients. It constituted a
veritable revolution of reason. One might find a good illustra-
tion of the "critical" bias, the bent toward direct study of
antiquity, in the history of Egyptology. The first feeble attacks
upon the hieroglyphs were made between 1529 and 1589. Kept
up through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was not
until 1799 that the Rosetta stone was found, which a few years
later gave to Champollion the entree into Egyptian antiquity.
Ed. Meyer, Gesch. d. alten Aegyptens, 1887 ; Einleitung, pp.
282-313. The dates synchronise with the course of the Higher
Criticism closely enough to be instructive.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM 73

the Reformation were not followed home. The Protestant-
doctrine of ecclesiastical infallibility was thrown consistent,
overboard. But the cognate doctrine of Scriptural
infallibility was retained and even exaggerated. In
the Middle Ages the two doctrines grew together.
The idea of the Bible and the idea of the Church were
practically identified. In the sixteenth century the
two ideas parted company. The Roman wing of
Christianity proceeded to force and strain the idea of
the Church. The Protestant wing, for a time, forced
and strained the idea of inspiration. It even came
to pass, in the seventeenth century, that the Roman
Catholic scholars held far more liberal views of in-
spiration than the Protestants.1

As a temporary thing this inconsistency might be
pardoned. Under the circumstances it was entirely
natural. The case is parallel to the prodigious
emphasis that the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
put upon the divine right of kings. In those days
the Monarchy was the Protestant bulwark against the
Papacy. It was well-nigh inevitable that political
theory should make much of the divine right of
kings.2 Even so, the infallibility of the Bible was
set up as a bulwark against the infallibility of the
Church. Naturally the theory of literal inspiration
was strained to the uttermost.8 Natural as it was,
however, it was none the less a dire inconsistency.
The Protestant principle brought forward the human
authors of Scripture and insured their standing with
the Divine Author. The Protestant practice drove
them out of His presence. So the Reformation went

1 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, § 243.

2 Maine, Ancient Law (3d Am. ed.), p. 334.

8 The claim of inspiration even for the Hebrew vowel-points
shows how the theory was strained until it snapped (Diestel,
§39).

74 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The promise
of historical
interpreta-
tion given.

Bible-
reading.

limping and halting. The sacred text still lay at the
mercy of allegory.1

In spite, however, of backsets and hindrances, the
pledge and assurance of a human, historical interpre-
tation of Scripture had been given. Once given, it
could not be recalled. A mighty clerical establish-
ment like the Komau Catholic Church can put off for
*an indefinite period the frank and full discussion of
the ultimate question touching the nature and scope
of revelation. But the Protestant churches could not
long postpone it. Once and for all they had rejected
the sacerdotal monopoly of interpretation. Once and
for all the Bible had gone forth into the open field of
free life and thought. After the third century the
forum publicum of the Church, the body of men who
put questions and gave answers about sacred things,
was made up mainly, at times almost wholly, of the
clergy. The laity now pressed in to claim a place on
the jury.2

The Bible became the people's Bible, and Bible-
reading a widespread habit.8 The habit had no great
spread in the ancient Church. In the latter Middle

1 Thus Tradition successfully reasserted itself as a sufficient
and practically final interpretation of the sacred text (Griind-
berg, Spener, 1892, pp. 23, 24).

2 Speaking broadly, there are four periods in the history of
the forum publicum for theological, that is to say, primary
questions. (1) In the conciliar action of the Nicene period, the
laity have no direct part, save in so far as they were represented
by the Emperor. (2) The bishops get complete control of the
clergy. This carries the primary question farther away from
the laity. (3) The Pope conquers the episcopate. This takes
the primary question still farther away from the judgments and
criticisms of the lay world. (4) The rise of the laity since the
sixteenth century.

8 " Bibel-Lesung " in Realencyclopadie (3e Auf.) ; Reuss,
Hist, of the JV. T., §§ 424, 458, 459, 405, 468, 600.

POSSIBILITY OF CRITICISM 75

Ages, it gained ground. That is proved by the atti-
tude of the hierarchy in and after the thirteenth cen-
tury. In the fifteenth century, popular appreciation
of the Bible grew strong. That is shown by the con-
siderable number of translations. Just at this time
the printing-press came to the help of God's Word.
We have here a very striking illustration of the way
in which the spiritual and the mechanical elements of
history work together. In the patristic period a man
could not carry about with him the entire Bible. The
shape and bulk of books in those days rendered it
impossible. But the form of the modern Bible had
been reached before the printing-press came into use.
Thus, when the hour struck for the passing of the
Scripture out of the control of the clergy, the mechani-
cal agencies of civilisation were on hand to do their
full part.1

The laity began to be Bible-students.2 The story story of
of Bradford, the first governor of Plymouth Colony, Bedford,
is a vivid proof that the change brought about by the
Eeformation was a mighty one. In his old age, this
heroic Pilgrim, who had done a man's full work in
the rough New World, took up the study of Hebrew.
He desired "to see with his own eyes the ancient
oracles of God in all their pristine beauty." What a
change since the days of Jerome! A layman, a
pioneer, his hands hardened by the sword and rough-
ened by the axe, studying Hebrew in his old age ! A
revolutionary departure this from the state of things
prevailing in the Middle Ages. Then no man might
see the Scriptures save through the medium of the

1 Stevens well says that "the secular history of the Holy
Scriptures is the sacred history of printing" (Bible in the
Caxton Exhibition, 1877, p. 25).

2 Cassiodorus in the sixth century was a Bible-student after
a fashion. But he went to the monastery to get his Bible-class.

76 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Fathers. But now the Bible is its own interpreter.
And it is face to face with the layman's world, the
new world of the spirit. No longer can there be two
bodies of truth that corne not near each other. All
truth must be vitally related. Once and for all the
Bible abandons the cloisters of mediaeval Tradition,
where security is paid for by misinterpretation. Once
and for all the Scriptures pass out into the world
where philosophy and science claim a divine right to
be, and where the layman, looking into his heart,
speaks his mind freely.

CHAPTER V

THE CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING1

IT was in the eighteenth century that criticism The eigh-
became an historical force. The mental conditions of th cen"
the time differed profoundly from those of the early
Middle Ages. If the latter was the classic age of
Tradition, then the eighteenth century was the classic
age of scepticism touching Tradition. The typical
reasoner in the first case was a man who looked at the
Scriptures through the interpretation of the Fathers,
and who looked at the universe through such frag-
ments of ancient knowledge as had come down to him.
Authority was the first word of the mediaeval man.
It was also his last. For when, in the fourteenth cen-
tury, Occam gave up Auselm's attempt to make Tra-
dition seem rational, he did not, for that reason, give
up faith. Things might be true in theology that
were false in philosophy, and contrariwise. For all
that, the devout son of the Church held fast his belief
and bowed to the authority of the Church.

The typical man of the eighteenth century threw

1 Literature : Paulsen, German Universities, tr. 1895, Ge-
schichte d. gelehrten Unterrichts, 1885; Lecky, Hist, of national-
ism; Hettner, Literaturgeschichte d. achtzehnten Jahrhunderts,
1872; Morley, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot; Leslie Stephen,
English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. The justification
and necessity of these general references is found in the fact
that the eighteenth century is the decisive turn of our history.
To understand its mental character is a fundamental need.

78 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Character- Tradition upon the dust-heap. He cared nothing for
the Fathers. He did not care much for books. Des-
cartes' scorn of book-learning was representative.
His resolve to know his own mind thoroughly was
prophetic.1 Bacon, however he might differ from Des-
cartes in matters of method, was not a whit more
modern than he. The two together were the heralds
of the new age of mental life. All intellectual
"idols," all the notions that came down out of the
past, with the mark of Aristotle and the schoolmen
on them, were to be turned out of doors. No tra-
ditions, scholastic or ecclesiastical, shall thrust them-
selves between reason and reality. All knowledge
shall be first-hand.

Individual- The eighteenth-century man fully possessed him-
self. He cried down the ancients and cried up the
moderns.2 No kind of experience, though ever so
true in its time and place, could set itself up as a
classic. He built upon his own reason and intuitions.
In the strongest sense he was an individual. The
mediaeval man had lived and thought as a member of
a corporation, or a class, or a Church ; he had a deep,
nai've faith in all the traditions, whether sacred or
secular.8 But the eighteenth-century man thought

1 Contrast with the " commentatorial method" of the Middle
Ages. Descartes' Treatise on Method was, to use a much-
abused phrase, epoch-making (Huxley's essay on Descartes in
Lay Sermons').

2 Bacon's adage, " Antiquitas saeculi juventus muntli," indi-
cated antiquity's loss of prestige. Rigault, Le querelle des
anciens et des modernes, 1856 ; Flint, Philosophy of History
("France"), 1894, pp. 212-215.

3 If the student should glance at Thomas Stanley's Hist, of
Philosophy (1st ed., London, 1655), and contrast it with any
modern history of philosophy, he would quickly see that the
faith of the mediaeval and early modern world in ancient tradi-
tions was sweeping. It was quite as childlike in dealing with

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 79

for himself, — or thought that he did; and that, for
our purpose, amounts to the same thing. He shook
off not one kind of tradition, but all kinds. Hume
declared that the first page of Thucydides was the
commencement of real history.1 Schleiermacher,
when a mere boy in his twelfth year, was tortured by
the suspicion that all the ancient records, both sacred
and profane, might turn out to be forgeries.2 His-
toric doubt was widespread.

So it came to pass that the word " antiquity," which,
for so many centuries, had been a word of inspiration,
even a word to conjure with, now became a word that
called up a problem. Ceasing to be an authority,
reverenced and exploited, it turned into a body of
facts, or possibilities of fact, which must be studied
and explored.

It were easy to dwell on the negative side of the
historic doubt of the eighteenth century. It were
equally easy to dwell on the mediaeval saint's indiffer-
ence to personal cleanliness. But every great tendency
must be estimated by the flower it puts forth, not by
the muck in which it grows. The mood of mediaeval
sainthood put forth the Gothic cathedral and the Imi-
tation. And the eighteenth century put forth the his-
torical spirit of the nineteenth. Historic doubt made
Niebuhr possible.8

the traditions regarding the Greek philosophers as in its deal-
ing with the legends of the Apostles. It was a universal bias
(Chwolson, Die Ssabier, 1856, I, pp. 3, 4).

1 Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations. Life and
Letters of Niebuhr (tr. by Winkworth), II, p. 433.

2 Life (tr. by Rowan), I, p. 4. "My twelfth year ... I
conceived the idea that all the ancient authors, and with them
the whole of ancient history, were supposititious." Cf. Des-
cartes' resolution to begin his mental life by doubting everything.

3 It is something better than a mere coincidence that the 2d
edition of De Beaufort's Diss. sur V incertitude des cinq pre-

80 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

For the prime mental quality of the eighteenth-
century man was not his doubts and negations. They
were on the surface. Below them was a deep, strong
sense of outlying fact, of truth waiting to be known,
of a new world of undiscovered, but discoverable
things. In this field the story of Anquetil du Perron
is as representative and as refreshing as the story of
Bayard is in a very different field.1 He was born in
1731. Studying in Paris he acquainted himself with
Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian. He happened upon a
fragment of the Zend-Avesta in the Eoyal Library at
Paris. It kindled in him the desire to see India, and
to learn the Zend and the Sanscrit languages. To
that end, he enlisted as a common soldier, that he
might be sent to India, and there find an opening into
those regions of knowledge whither no European had
penetrated. His life is typical of the eighteenth cen-
tury in its promise and potency. The consciousness
of facts standing outside all existing knowledge and
casting suspicion upon the established framework of
knowledge, was its chief characteristic.

It was in this century that criticism was born.

miers siecles de Vhistoire romaine appeared in 1750, nearly
synchronous with the beginning of Seinler's Bible-work. This
reference is taken from Puchta, Institutionen (6e Auf., 1865),
I, p. 101, n. Flint, Phil, of H., pp. 253-261. Beaufort's Disser-
tation suggests Niebuhr, although widely different in spirit ; it
indicates the fact that the mind of Western Europe had entered
a "critical "climate. The first parts of Niebuhr's Roman His-
tory issued in 1811-1812. If the term "epoch-making" had
not been rendered useless by overuse, we should call it " epoch-
making " in the fullest sense. See Stanley's Life of Arnold for
the profound impression it made.

1 Translation of the Avesta, 1771 ; Legislation Orientale,
1778. One catches from his work the same thrill of discovery
and mental enlargement that we feel in the letters of Columbus.
Alfred Cave, Introduction to Theology (2d ed.), p. 209.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 81

From the conditions and causes that gave it birth we Criticism
may draw a definition of its essential nature. The born<
main condition was the bankruptcy of Tradition, leav-
ing the mind free to know and possess itself. The
main cause was the sense of outlying facts. So we
define criticism as a movement of the human mind,
inspired by the consciousness of truth unknown, but
kuowable, and sustained by the resolution to serve
the truth without fear or favour. This definition is
indeed a general one, having no specific reference to
Bible-study. All the better. It will serve to remind
us that the critical period of Bible-study is part and
parcel of the general mental movement of Europe.

The eighteenth-century man was a Deist. In the Deism,
place of ecclesiastical infallibility he put his own
infallibility. Even if he was too well-bred to speak
like Tom Paine, calling theology a mischievous inven-
tion of priests and proclaiming his own mind to be his
Church, yet, in effect, he constituted a Church of one :
his religion found its sole authority in his reason.
Moreover, he spoke with authority on theological
questions. His dogmas were indeed few and portable.
Yet, such as they were, he took them with great seri-
ousness. His confidence in the rightfulness and
conclusiveness of his own theological processes was
absolute.1

Furthermore, — and this is the most significant The lay
point, — in a great majority of cases, the leading movement
Deists were laymen.2 They inaugurated a lay move-

1 Sidney Lee, Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, 1886. Herbert of Cherbury, in contrast with Bay-
ard and with the Puritans. He marks the arrival of a new type.

2 England was the birthplace of Deism, because it was the
home of the self-governing layman. It is interesting to note
that the first English Deist was a Member of Parliament. See
speech of a "Gentleman from Gray's Inn "(1530) in Rhys

82 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

ment in theology. The bearings of this fact upon the
history of criticism are easily found. If we are care-
ful to distinguish between that mental attitude which
is the spring and source of criticism and that body of
opinions touching special points and special questions
with which it is often confused, we shall define Bibli-
cal criticism as the applications of scientific methods
to the textual and literary study of our Scriptures.
Now, the soul of science is its disposition toward facts
as a whole. And this disposition or mental tempera-
ment is a result of a union between two elements.
The first is the desire to know facts just as they are,
without regard to the vested interests of society.
The second is the sense of outlying fact, of things
unknown invading the frontiers of knowledge, the
sense, too, of unexplored and undiscovered meanings
in those things with which, so far as appearances go,
the mind may long have been intimate.

Philosophy. Both the desire to know and the sense of outlying
fact are parts of the lay movements of reason. Of
course, that is a somewhat rough and ready statement.
But, taking history broadly, it is sufficiently exact to
satisfy practical requirements. The history of phi-
losophy proves this. The Greeks founded philosophy.
And their philosophy was part and parcel of a rich
development of lay life; that is, of human life as it
unfolds itself along the secular lines of trade and
travel and widening experience, of systematised
observation, of art and politics. When Greek phi-
losophy finished its course, theology succeeded it as

Davids, Hibbert Lectures, 1882, pp. 5, 6. The gentleman from
Gray's Inn brings forward the discontent of " laiques and secu-
lar persons" and seeks the "catholic and common notions"
which Herbert of Cherbury knew he had found. See also
Leslie Stephen, English Thought, and Hettner, Literaturge-
schichte d. achtzehnten Jahr., I.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 83

the highest form of thought. Such, in truth, it by
nature is, and such, in the long run, it will show itself
to be. But the theology that dominated the Occident
from the beginning of the second century to the four-
teenth, was a theology produced almost wholly by
men in orders. In the Middle Ages, it was well-
nigh exclusively the affair of men who had taken the
monastic vows. Philosophy, the tradition of lay
thought and learning, never lost its continuity.
Straight down through the darkest ages it maintained
its dignity as an intellectual tradition. But for a
long time it was a bare tradition. And even after the
great intellectual revival of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, philosophy was not truly philosophic. For
the essence of philosophy is the freedom of its look
at the universe. It matters not whether the philoso-
pher be a layman or a man in orders. But it matters
a great deal, everything in fact, whether a layman
shall have the self-confidence to philosophise, and to
philosophise with no man to make him afraid.

Moreover, philosophy contradicts its own nature, if Authority
it stops short at some boundary marked out by
authority and bows its head to listen to the words,
"Thus far and no farther! " The spirit of philosophy
is a free look at things and a free look at all things.
To permit authority to shut it up to a contemplation
of "secular" things, or to put it off with a merely
preliminary view of " sacred " things, while the real
body of " sacred " things is reserved for the study and
contemplation of a clerical hierarchy, were to deny
itself.1 That is precisely what inedieeval philosophy
did when it made a concordat or compromise with
Tradition in the thirteenth century.

1 Ueberweg, Hist, of Philosophy (Ancient and Mediaeval),
pp. 355-357, 443.

84 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Laymen

competent
to speak on
the myste-

ries.

What is
criticism ?

In truth, mediaeval philosophy was not philosophy
at all, since philosophy can recognise no authority
save the inherent laws of human nature and mind, and
since those laws can only authenticate themselves as
laws by opening themselves to a free and fearless
examination. Besides, if mediaeval philosophy gain-
said the nature of philosophy, mediaeval theology
no less gainsaid the nature of true theology. For
theology, if it is to be permanently and for all men
the highest form of thought, must establish itself
within the common sense and reason of mankind.
And in order to do that, it must give to the layman
the privilege of debate.

It is from this point of view that we see the full
significance of Deism. It was the initiation of the
lay movement in theology. The words are accurate
enough for all practical purposes. The Deist thought
himself competent to speak upon all these points
which the Tradition of the Middle Ages had reserved
to the hierarchy. Whether he was really competent
or not is no concern of ours. It is his supreme self-
confidence that interests us here. And that, taken in
connection with the fact that the common feeling of
the eighteenth century fully admitted his competence,
is a most momentous matter. For it published and
spread far and wide the belief that the lay reason
need not shrink from applying to the most sacred
objects the same methods of research and examination
which commend themselves as means to a richer and
more accurate knowledge of the world at large.

Criticism is not, primarily, any given set of opinions
regarding the Bible. Not a few " critical " opinions
are less " critical " than some " traditional " opinions,
inasmuch as they are equally haughty and overbearing
and, at the same time, are farther from the real facts
in the case. Criticism is not this or that opinion;

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 85

neither is it this or that body of opinions. It is an
intellectual temperament, a mental disposition. Its
premise is the unity of truth ; authority shall not draw
a line between " sacred " truth and " secular " truth :
truth is one. The ideal is the free study of all facts,
howsoever named and catalogued. There is, indeed,
order and precedence in facts. And there are diverse
human faculties at work in the testing and authentica-
tion of facts. But access to the whole body of facts
must be full and free. The Bible, if it is to be a per-
manent part of the Occidental layman's world, — the
world of political freedom and reverent devotion to
truth, — if it will not content itself with being the
" Good Book " of weak women, and helpless children,
and priests in petticoats, must come within reach of
the scientific reason.

The lay movement in theology was partly the result Theological
of theological indifference. The fearful religious wars indlfferenc&
that devastated Europe for more than a hundred
years were followed by a kind of glacial epoch in
theology. Dogma, apart from the simple system of
the Deists, became abhorent. Systematic divinity,
long the queen of the sciences, was now a Cinderella.1

1 Kant, in the Preface to the first edition of the Critique, says
regarding metaphysics : "Es war eine Zeit, in welcher sie die
Koniginal\er Wissenschaften genannt wurde. . . . Jetzt(1781)
bringt es der Modeton des Zeitalters so mit sich, ihr alle Verach-
tung zu beweisen, u. die Matrone klagt, verstossen u. verlas-
sen wie Hecuba : modo maxima rerum, tot generis natisque
potens . . . nunc trahor exul, inops." Even more truly might
this have been said of theology whose " ancilla," — handmaid,
— philosophy had once been glad to be.

The Pope's suppression of the Jesuits is a striking proof
that the eighteenth century was the glacial epoch in theology.
F. A. Wolff's philological seminar (he died in 1824) is an illus-
tration. He would not permit a theological student to enter it
(Arnoldt, F. A. Wolff, I, pp. 97, 98). This was not because

86 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

In part, the lay movement was the upshot of mental
competition. We remember that in the classic period
of Tradition mental competition did not exist. The
Greek and Koman classics, so far as they were known,
were lowly handmaids of the established interpreta-
tion of the Scriptures. But with the Renaissance
" new things " began to compete with the old. At first
the competition was unconscious. Later, entering
into consciousness, its possible dangers were detected
New inter- by the guardians of the established view. The new
things being assigned to a definite sphere, the effects
of mental competition were checked and controlled.
Finally, however, in the eighteenth century, the new
things triumphed for a time over the old. "Nature,"
or the truth and experience lying outside all tradition
and lying especially remote from all theological tra-
ditions, became supremely, absorbingly interesting.
Franklin with his kite attracted more attention than
Thomas Aquinas with his Summa, Linnaeus, with
his reform of botanical terminology, was more signifi-
cant than the most acute dogmatician. Cook, voyag-
ing around the world, was thought to be doing work
far more important than theological discussion. The
centre of mental gravity had shifted.1

he abhorred theology, but because he wished to separate the
teacher's profession from the minister's. But this ousting of
the minister from the higher teaching went along with the down-
fall of theology. Wolff's seminar was of great importance in
the mental life of Germany (Arnoldt, I, pp. 79-88 ; Herman
Schiller, Gesch. d. Padagngik, 1891, § 27).

1 (1) On the side of the more popular movement. The history
of modern feeling about Nature (Gribble, The Early Mountain-
eers, 1899 (especially ch. 3); Stopford Brooke, Tlieology in the
English Poets; Humboldt, Cosmos.

(2) Hist, of the Novel. It is an interesting chapter in the
history of the mental competition that has changed the face of
the Occident. Pattison, speaking of the brilliant success of

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 87

But, whatever the causes, the consequence was clear. Dogma of
The entire dogma of infallibility dissolved. For that j?0feasntoility
dogma rested upon authority, upon the ecclesiastical pieces,
right to reserve certain questions as outside the com-
petence of reason, as above the reach of real ques-
tions. Protestantism, after throwing ecclesiastical
infallibility overboard, let out the last reef in Biblical
infallibility. And with the result that it temporarily
dismasted itself. The whole conception of infalli-
bility had to go. Under that condition alone could a
critical study of the Scripture become possible. For
the dissolution of the belief in infallibility was the
negative aspect of the positive work of the eighteenth
century, namely, the affirmation of the competence of
reason in all things, sacred as well as secular.1

Thus, the eighteenth century became a precipita-
tion-point in universal history, one of those rare con-
junctions of causes and conditions which lay bare the
foundations of life and enable men to ask the ultimate
questions. The limitations of the period were marked.
It lacked reverence. It starved the imagination. It
had no capacity for great poetry. Its fundamental
heresy was the belief that the historical and the ideal
cannot closely touch, far less penetrate each other.2
But pronounced limitations are apt to go with great

Baronius' history and its subsequent disappearance, says that
it appealed to the " hagiographical temper": "the competition
of the secular novel, which came in the seventeenth century,
tended to throw hagiography into the shade " (Life of Casan-
bon, p. 380).

1 The dominant word in speculative things was common sense,
the standard of truth and use set up in the bosom of the aver-
age man.

2 Kaftan, Truth of the Christian Religion, I, pp. 249, 250 ;
Windelband, Hist, of Philosophy, p. 497 ; Pfleiderer, The Phi-
losophy of Religion, I, pp. 102-108 ; Harnack, Christianity and
History (tr. 1896), pp. 19-23.

88 HISTOET OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

virtues. It is so with individuals and nations. It is
so with historical periods. The defects of the eigh-
teenth century waited upon its great mental virtue.
By its idolatry of common sense and its worship of
reason, by the splendid self-reliance it fostered, by
its glorification of the right and duty of research into
all the outlying facts that touch and challenge human
attention, it delivered the Occident from the tyranny
of dogma and Tradition. The ground was cleared for
historical study.1

The word " critical " now broke loose. It preempted
all fields of experience. Like the word " evolution "
in our own time, it coloured all thought and was even
made a substitute for thinking.2 Like every word
that has made a permanent fortune, it indicated a new
turn of feeling. In this case the turn was revolu-
tionary. Tradition entailed the acceptance of certain
long-established views regarding the Sacred Books.
Tradition having broken down, criticism took posses-
sion of the mind, calling for a fresh study of all the data

1 The life and work of Niebuhr is a typical one. His work
bore upon the entire field of historical criticism. An English
reviewer of the translation of his Roman history bewailed it
on the ground that the next thing to be assailed would be the
early O. T. history.

2 The catalogue of any great library, s.v. "criticism" and
"critical," will show that, with the entrance of the eighteenth
century, the word began to run almost like wildfire. The
career of a word is sometimes full of instruction. Compare the
career of the word "evolution" after the publication of Dar-
win's Genesis of Species. In the Preface to the first edition of
the Critique, Kant said with truth: "Unser Zeitalter ist das
eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik, der sich alles unterwerfen
muss."

The universal critical tendency of the eighteenth century is
connected with the movement toward social revolution. See
Comte, Philosophic Positive, IV (1839), pp. 9-51. His words,
while exaggerated, are suggestive.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 89

involved. The old source of knowledge must be made
more of, and new sources opened. The true text of
experience must be discovered, the original facts laid
bare.

The downfall of the doctrine of infallibility threw
the Scriptures open to observation. As the old con-
ception of inspiration lost credit, men's eyes were dissolves.
enabled to see the human aspects of the sacred text.
A good illustration of this process is found in the his-
tory of the " Purist " controversy. The conservative
scholars started with the unconscious assumption that
the style of the Greek Testament could not be a whit
less perfect than the best "classic " Greek. No "bar-
barism," no slips of construction, no words which,
from a literary point of view, were uncouth or awk-
ward, could be found in it. Their opponents con-
tended that, as a matter of fact, the Greek of the New
Testament was not "pure," did not conform to the
classical standard; that St. Paul did not write as well
as Plato. The debate lasted a long time. The con-
servatives were moved by the highest motives. Yet
they were as men whom dogma had blinded to facts.
The debate could end in but one way. The style of
the New Testament is as perfect for its purpose as any
style can possibly be.1 But its Greek is not classical
Greek. And the moment the old conception of
inspiration weakened, the facts of the case came into be seen.
clear view.2

The text of Scripture was no longer defended or
enslaved by Tradition. Keason was free to do its
whole work, bad as well as good.

It was natural that the criticism of the text, the
so-called "Lower Criticism," should first take the

1 Renan, Les Evangiles, p. 99.

2 Bleek, Introduction to N. T. , I, pp. 58, 59 ; Bleek-Mangold,
Einleitung in d. N. T., p. 13.

HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Deists assail
Protestant-
ism.

The Roman

Catholic

attack.

field. The history of Protestantism made this inevi-
table. On the one hand, the Reformed churches, setting
the Bible in opposition to the Church, made it neces-
sary to appeal to the original form of Scripture ; they
would have no patience with quotations from the Vul-
gate. On the other hand, by cashiering the princi-
ple of ecclesiastical authority, they brought the text
within reach of observation. And, at the same time,
by straining the doctrine of inspiration to the break-
ing-point, they rendered themselves morbidly sensi-
tive to any suggestion of uncertainty touching the
original and authentic words of Scripture.

When the fierce religious wars of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries were over, when men sat down
to think in cold blood, Protestantism was exposed to
attack in two directions. From the rear the Deists
assailed it. They were free-thinking laymen. They
first won the right of free speech in Protestant coun-
tries,— England, for example. Devout scholars,
Walton and Mill, had assembled a large number of
variants. The Deists used these variants to shatter
the current Protestant conception of inspiration.
"All is over," they triumphantly said, "with the tra-
ditional views of the Scriptures ! " How great was
the alarm in England, how serious the crisis appeared
to the leading men within the churches, may be seen
in the life of Bentley.1 The dangers of the situation
set him to thinking upon the right methods of reaching
through the variants to the original text.

The Eoman Catholic scholars attacked Protestantism
in front. They did not strain the doctrine of inspira-
tion. On the contrary, developing the idea of eccle-
siastical infallibility, they were able to adopt more
liberal views. It served their purpose well to prove

1 E. C. Jebb, Bentley, 1882, p. 158.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 91

that the sacred text was not everywhere certain and
clear. Thus, Simon said that the variants in the
text could be used " to show that the Protestants had
no assured principle for their religion."1 If a great
scholar, as Simon undoubtedly was, could thus use the
New Testament variants as a weapon against Protes-
tantism, beyond doubt the average Koman Catholic
disputant used them freely.

This double attack made Textual Criticism neces- The "Lower
sary. The life of Bengel makes very real to us the Criticism-"
pain and grief inflicted upon noble natures by the fact
that the text seemed to be uncertain. Writing in
1725, he says, " More than twenty years ago, before
Mill appeared, at the very beginning of my academic
life, when I happened upon an Oxford exemplar, I
was greatly distressed by the various readings; but all
the more was I driven to examine Scripture carefully,
so far as my slender abilities would permit, and after-
ward, by God's grace, I got new strength of heart."2
Bengel was a man of deep piety. Living in the

1 " Pour montier que les Protestans n'avoient aucun principe
assur^ de leur Religion " (Hist. cr. du V. T., Pref.). Credner,
Einleitung in d. N. T., I, p. 35. Beyond doubt, this motive
played a relatively small part in Simon's life ; he was too great
a scholar to give it large play. Still, the motive existed in him.
In the average Roman Catholic apologete it was strong and lively,
and the Protestants heard of it, in season and out of season.
The history of the ancient doctrine of inspiration falls into three
periods. (1) The formation of the conception in the Catholic
Church. (2) The Middle Ages. The tendency toward an ex-
treme doctrine was strong and steady (Hagenbach, Dogrnenge-
schichte, s.v." Inspiration " ; Schaff, Hist, of Christian Church,
IV, pp. 613, 614). (3) The sixteenth century. The Romanists
made a specialty of the idea of the Church and so eased up on
the theory of inspiration. The Protestants exalted the Scrip-
tures above the Church and so made a specialty of the doctrine
of inspiration.

2 Appar. Grit. (2d ed., 1763), p. 634.

92 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

eighteenth century, he was, perforce, a man of reason.
He had no dogma of Church authority to lean upon
with one arm, while, with the other, he should deal
freely with the various readings. So his reverence
for God's Word compelled him to take reason into his
service and, no matter what the pain he met, to toil
through the mass of variants into clear opinions regard-
ing the original text. The labours of a long line of
scholars have carried our methods and our materials
far beyond BengeFs standpoint. Our conception of
inspiration does not expose us to the mental distress
which he and the Protestants of his time had to
undergo. But the object of the Lower Criticism is
the same for us as for him. Piety and reason con-
spire to set up the ideal of the pure original text
as the inspiration and reward of scholarly devotion.1
Che" Higher The old theory of inspiration having broken down,
Criticism." and the «Lower Criticism" having taken the field,

the "Higher Criticism" could not long lag behind.
Similar causes and similar conditions gave it an ideal
of similar quality. The original text of Apostolic
thought and feeling must be discovered.2

1 Hort, in Westcott and Hort's "New Testament'1 (N.Y.,
1882), II, pp. 1-3.

2 The necessity of the transition from the "Lower " to the
"Higher" Criticism was laid down plainly by Wetstein : " Si
libros N. T. planius et plenius intelligere cupis, indue personam
illorum, quibus primum ad legendum ab Apostolis traditi fue-
runt ; transfer te cogitatione in illud ternpus et in illam regionein
ubi primum lect sunt ... ad hsec prtecipue atteude, ubi in
locum incideris, unde te per systema hodiernum vel Theologise
vel Logicse, aut per opiniones hodie receptas expedire non
potes." Nov. T. (Amstel, 1752), II. p. 878. Cf. Semler's words
in Credner, Einleitung, I, p. 44. Semler might have taken in-
due personam illorum for his motto. On the connection between
the breakdown of the ancient doctrine of inspiration and criti-
cism, see Michaelis, Introduction (tr. from 4th ed. by Marsh),
I, pp. 72-78. "An inward sensation of the effects of the Holy

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 93

From the sixth century down, the body of knowledge
concerning the New Testament was both narrow in
scope and fixed in its outlines.1 Time, piety, and
ignorance — a mighty triumvirate — gave it a most
imposing air of finality. It was accepted by all men
as authentic and sufficient. Even the Reformation
scholars accepted it, for the most part, without
demur.2 It was part and parcel of a sacred Tradi-
tion. By reason of the ideas wherewith it was
connected, it gave Christians of all name mental satis-
faction, putting their questions to rest. The little
handful of facts which Cassiodorus gave to his monks
had the authority of the Church or the inspiration of
Scripture behind it. But when both these dogmas in
their ancient form played the eighteenth-century
Protestant false, he immediately felt the need of a
larger range of facts regarding the New Testament
books and of a more interior study of the books them-
selves. This interior study grew out of the desire to Traditional

know the New Testament from the inside, to discover knowledge

-, r. ..••-, . of the New

and nx its original meanings, the true text of its Testament

thought and feeling. The desire for a larger body of glffsf8 to
facts was born of the knowledge that the text of any

Ghost and the consciousness of the utility of these writings
... I have never experienced it in the whole course of my
life." So the question about inspiration gives way to the ques-
tion about genuineness. A dogmatic question gives way to an
historical one.

1 The "Introduction" of Cassiodorus. A small body of
opinions became stereotyped. For nearly a thousand years no-
body felt the need of examining them, still less of going behind
them.

2 Bleek, Introduction to N. T., I, pp. 16, 21. Luther was
free in some of his judgments on Biblical questions. But his
judgments, while they have considerable dogmatic interest, were
a very slight contribution to historical study. On Bodenstein,
see Credner, Kanon, p. 201 ff.

94 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Protestant-
ism and
Criticism.

Germany.

form of human experience cannot be taken away
from the context of its time and place and remain
wholly intelligible. The backbone, then, of Higher
Criticism, as its history interprets it, was the resolu-
tion to know the mental and emotional text and
context of the New Testament books.

Necessarily, the Higher Criticism could not be
loyally developed save in a Protestant country. The
Koman Catholic Church has given the world some
great Biblical scholars. But something more than
the work of occasional scholars was required, if the
principle of the Higher Criticism was to be perma-
nently established. A persistent, critical mood, that
is, an intellectual temper which steadily impels men
to push in behind traditions and legends, in order to
verify or reject them, was demanded. The Roman
Catholic Church, by reason of her doctrine of authority,
could not supply the demand. Until she fundamen-
tally changes her methods, she will reserve a large
number of positions as being not open to question.
Now, it is of no avail to permit men to think freely
upon the Bible, if they will but go far enough with
the authority of the Church. Human reason is an
organic thing. It moves altogether, if it moves at all.
Freedom to deal with the Bible cannot keep house with
absolute obedience to an ecclesiastical body as its
head. At best, the marriage between them is left-
handed, or a marriage of convenience. The critical
work of the Eoman Catholic Church cannot but be
half-hearted and unthorough. The Higher Criticism,
both as a principle and as an achievement, must seek
its fortune in a Protestant land.

It fell to the lot of Germany to give the critical
principle a home and provide its support. Holland,
a leader of scholarship throughout the seventeenth
century, had lost ground by the time that the critical

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 95

mood came over Western Europe. England had done
and was still to do master-work in the field of Lower
Criticism. But by reason of what was worst, as well
as what was best, in the England of 1750-1850, the
chance there for free Bible-study was not great. The
strength of the Anglican Church in matters ecclesias-
tical— like the strength of most English things —
rested upon a compromise. The Bible was indeed
exalted as the supreme, even the exclusive authority
in ultimate questions. But, on the other hand, the
English Church kept hold on the principle of Tradi-
tion. And in the third decade of our century, at the
very time when Biblical criticism in Germany was
reaching its crisis, the Oxford Movement gave to that
principle increased prestige. As to the Dissenters,
while their dogmatic position touching Holy Scrip-
tures was clear and uncompromising, they lacked, in
the eighteenth century, both the culture and the stand-
ing in the universities that was necessary, if men
were to feel the full force of the mental movements
of the epoch.

English Deism had seen some things to which England,
orthodoxy was blind and had spoken its mind freely
upon Biblical questions.1 However, Deistic doubt
did not run its full career in England. It was met
and overcome, not so much by a mental as an emo-
tional process, namely, the revival of religion through
the Wesleyan and Evangelical Movement. Finally,
the university life of England was at a low ebb.2

1 Thus Toland in Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahom-
etan Christianity (1718), discovered that difference of parties in
the primitive church which afterward played so momentous a
part in the criticism of the N. T.

Upon the English Deist's views of Scripture, Leckler's Gesch.
d. Engl. Deismus, 1841.

2 Adam Smith's well-known opinion of the English universi-
ties: "Their laws and life arranged, not for the profit of the

96 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Conditions

Even in this particular, England's merit mingled
with her failings. She was just entering upon that
vast industrial expansion which ended by making
her the mistress of the seas. This, together with her
splendid political opportunities, drew so deeply upon
her finest resources of purpose and character, that
the academic life could not reach a relatively high
position.

In Germany all these conditions were reversed.
iny' There the doubt of Deism, coming from England by
way of France, ran its full career. No revival of
religion cut it short. Pietism indeed played a con-
siderable part, but it could not administer an emo-
tional quietus to rational difficulties. It could temper
criticism by causing sap to run into it from the religious
tap-root of our being, but it could not choke off criti-
cism nor postpone it. In Germany the eager, reso-
lute, self-confident doubt which was so considerable a
part of the eighteenth century's intellectual staple,
was not fended off from the Bible. The traditional
opinion about the Sacred Books and their authors
caught its full force.

Into the deepest mystery of a nation's being and
work we may not hope to penetrate. To the marvel-
lous mental movement of Germany during the period
that began about 1750 we can assign many occasioning
causes. Deeper than that we cannot go. Yet it is
enough for our purpose to be assured of the fact.
And the fact is certain. In the history of the mental
experience of Europe, German philosophy is the only
possible parallel to the philosophy of the Greeks. The
splendid bloom of rational effort and philosophical

students, but for the ease and comfort of the teachers." Allow-
ing for his exaggeration, it is clear that the mental life of the
English universities from 1750 to 1830 compares very poorly
with the German universities.

German
philosophy.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 97

achievement between 1780 and 1840 was indeed short-
lived, when compared with the long career of philoso-
phy in Greece. But in power, and reach, and scope
it is every way worthy to be compared with the best
Greece can show.

Inasmuch as philosophy is the layman's interpreta-
tion of man's life and world, it should be clear that
the place where modern philosophy did the great bulk
of its work was likely to be the place where the final
questions regarding the Bible, its nature and its root
in history, could be driven home. Germany, the land
of philosophy, was the land of a masterful mental
force that would not let any object, however great or
imposing, plead the benefit of clergy.1 As the Canon
Law had yielded to the power of the State, so that men
in orders were judged by the same courts that tried
lay cases, so now, the old barriers between rational
investigation and the Scriptures having broken wholly
down, the entire body of Scriptural fact and interpre-
tation came under examination.

The German university indicated the completion The German
of the mental revolution which had begun at the university.
Kenaissance. The control of education now passes
out of the hands of the clergy. The secular power,
the State, assumes it. This means that the discussion
of sacred things shall be carried on as secular studies

1 The " secularisation " of education is a matter very close to
the history of N. T. criticism. For the bias and control of edu-
cation shows plainly what is the centre of interest and what are
the methods of studying the things that are interesting. The
aim of modern teaching is to overcome the divortium rerum et
verborum, to get the mind close to reality, to the original texts
of nature and history.

Paulsen, Gesch. d. gelehrt. Unter. ; Arnoldt, F. A. Wolff, II,
pp. 1-30; "International Education Series," ed. by W. T.
Harris; Rauuier, Gesch. d. Padagogik, 3d Th., 2d Abtheil,
p. 152 ; Herman Schiller, Gesch. d. Padagogik, 1891.

98 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

are carried on — by free research. The modern uni-
versity is the embodiment of the modern or critical
principles of insistence upon the original facts of
nature and history, and upon nothing but the facts.
The university was a mental workshop of a new kind.
Here the new learning had its stronghold. The out-
lying objects of knowledge could here keep up a con-
stant attack upon reason, preventing the formation of
fixed and unchanging hypotheses. Here the universe
presses steadily upon the mind, forcing it to keep
open house to new ideas and impressions. The very
atmosphere of the modern university is critical.
Nothing can stay its mental impetus toward original
research.1

Theology in Hither came theology to make or lose its fortune.

sity!" This was in keeping with the Eeformation principle.

The theological seminary, as a place isolated and
detached, must be abandoned. Theology, the study
of the most sacred things, must think out its system
in close communion with the vigorous and tumultuous
mental life of the modern world.2 And hither came
our Sacred Books, freely exposing themselves to the
questions and the cross-questions of the free reason.
They had entered into a temporary alliance with the
mediaeval hierarchy. They now chose for themselves
interpreters of a different school. "The Eeforma-
tion," says Holtzmann, "signifies a critical act which

1 Paulsen, TJie German University.

2 Paulsen, op. cit., pp. 226, 227 ; Kuyper, Encyclopedia of
Sacred Theology (tr. 1898), p. 626. Compare upon the history
of seminary education in the Roman Catholic Church, Von
Schulte, Can. Recht, Bd. Ill, ler Th., p. 281, and Paulsen,
German Universities, p. 105. In the Protestant churches of
America, the theological seminaries have been more or less iso-
lated. But this is, on the whole, not so much the expression of
a deliberate policy as the result of position and circumstance.

CRITICAL PRINCIPLE WINS ITS FOOTING 99

the spirit of Christianity, coming to itself and going
deep into its own nature, exercises upon its entire
past."1 In the German university the Reformation
principle could be followed home.

i Einleitung i. d. N. T., 1886, p. 175.

CHAPTER VI

PRELIMINARY WORK OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM1

RICHARD SIMON, the Eoman Catholic scholar (t 1712),
has been honoured by Protestant scholars with the
title "Father of Modern Biblical Study."2 They do
honour to their own impartiality by thus honouring
him. But the correctness of the title may be doubted.
That he was a very great scholar is beyond dispute.
That he contributed largely to the material and spirit
of criticism is equally beyond dispute.8 And it may
seem a waste of time to debate over the correctness of
an epithet. Still, an epithet conveys an opinion. If
it is to be given at all, it should be given to the right

1 Literature : Semler's Leben (autobiography) ; Vincent, Hist,
of Textual Criticism, 1899 ; the sections on the history of Intro-
duction in Reuss, Hist, of the N. T., tr. 1884 ; Holtzmann, Ein-
leitung in d. N. T., 1886 ; Mangold's ed. of Bleek's Einleitung ;
Bacon, Introd. to the N. T. One of the best short histories is
found in Credner, Einleitung, 1836.

2 Bleek, I, p. 17 ; Credner, Einleitung, I, § 24.

8 Simon expresses the spirit and aim of modern criticism with
perfect clearness : " Si je n'ay pas suivy la methode des Theo-
logiens Scholastiques, c'est que je 1'ay trouve"e peu sure. J'ay
ladie" autant qu'il m'a e'te' possible de ne rien avancer qui ne fut
appuye" sur de bons Actes : au lieu que la Theologie de 1'^cole
nous fait quelquefois douter des choses les plus certaines. La
Religion consistant principalement en des choses de fait, les
subtilites de ces Theologiens qui n'ont pas en une connaissance
exacte de 1'antiquite"," etc. (Hist. cr. du Texte du N, T.,
Preface) .

100

PRELIMINARY WORK 101

man. And Simon, great as he was, cannot be called,
with literal accuracy, the Father of criticism. For
the gist of criticism consists in the direct application
of scientific methods to the study of our Sacred Books,
without regard to authority of any kind, with no con-
cern save to know the Bible as it is in itself and in its
history. Criticism is not primarily a body of material
nor an apparatus, but a temperament; and the essence
of the temperament is the free study of the Scriptural
Canon. To this point Simon did not come. His
opinions, however they might seem to break with the
traditional conception of the Canon, remained, at least
as far as form went, within its precincts.

The title, if given at all, should rather be bestowed Semler.
on Semler. For in him the critical principle found a
direct application to the ultimate question of Biblical
study. Since the fourth century the Canon had stood
before the mind and imagination as a finished total, a
mystical unity free from the suggestion of internal
differences and external changes. Memory of the
debates, through which opinion regarding certain
books had passed, utterly perished. The primary
work of the Church, even in the Nicene age, was not
Biblical scholarship. It was anything but a critical
age. Its function was dogmatic theology rather than
interpretation. Fixed positions, finished statements,
were its end. Far more was this the case after the
fourth century. So, when once the limits of the Canon
had been settled, the dominant mood of the Church
suppressed the ideas of process and change. In the
course of a few centuries the impression of the Canon's
divine immutability had so far deepened that the
Bible confronted the mind as a thing so majestic that
no man durst question it.

The Lower Criticism nibbled at the edges of the
ultimate question regarding the Canon. Work like

102 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Simon's penetrated far into it. But it remained for
Sender to go to the centre.

A typical Semler's life typifies the entire critical process of

scholar's ^ eigilteenth century.1 He was born in 1725. His
father being a scholar of rank, he grew up within
scholarly surroundings. To judge by what he himself
tells us in his autobiography, his life falls into three
periods. At the outset of his mental career he had a
very strong bent toward the study of the " Humani-
ties," history and the classics. Then he came under
the influence of pietism, and his interest in the
Humanities was checked.2 The study of theology and
Scripture seemed the only thing. Finally, before he
got through the university, the Humanities returned
in triumph. When, in 1754, he became professor,
and began to lecture upon Biblical subjects, he marked
out the path of historical study. He had already
gone through and come out of the alarms raised by
the various readings. He now entered — and he was
the pioneer — the field of Higher Criticism.

In his first course of lectures he took the principles
of exegesis as his theme. He found fault with exist-

1 The student should make a detailed study of Semler's life
and work. In his autobiography (Leben, 1781), he gives us a
clear eighteenth-century account of himself. The three periods :
(1) He had a strong inclination to the "Humanities," i.e. to
broad historical study of the classics. (2) Pietism got control
of him and his interest in the " Humanities" declined (Leben, I,
p. 96). (3) His old love returned, the " Humanities " triumphed
(II, pp. 11-120). Having already passed through the terrors of
the "Lower Criticism" (II, pp. 124-126), he was ripe for the
"Higher." For the essence of the Higher Criticism is the
application to the Sacred Books of those principles of historical
study into which the " Humanities " had led Semler. For Sem-
ler's general historical studies, see Hase, Kirchengesch., 1885,
ler Th., p. 41.

2 The pietistic attitude toward "secular" learning, Hagen-
bach, § 277 ; Schiller, Gesch. d. Padagogik, pp. 201, 202.

PEELIMINAET WORK

103

ing methods; they stuck too close to the devotional
and dogmatic lines of interpretation. True interpre-
tation must be historical. The student must cut loose
from temporary needs and go back into the period
when the Sacred Books originated, and seek a clear
knowledge of the ideas of the time, both the author's
ideas and those of his contemporaries as well. In
this way he shall see things as they are.

Semler expressly says that he took his exegetical "TheHu-
priuciples from the Humanities.1 He thus exempli- man
fies the final stage in the process of criticism. We
have seen (Ch. Ill) how the Scriptures came to be
practically and theoretically isolated. We remember
(Ch. IV) how the first steps were taken to over-
come this isolation. The infallibility of the Church
was rejected, a first-hand knowledge of Holy Writ
was demanded, and the new learning — the learning
of self-respecting reason — rose to honour. In Semler
the new learning came into direct contact with the
Scriptures, and the critical principle in Bible-study
was the result.

In 1771 he published his Treatise on the Free In-
vestigation of the Canon.2 The very title advertised
the new principle. Semler proved that the traditional "Freeinves-
conception of the building of the Canon was mistaken. t
The Canon was not made at a stroke. On the con-
trary, it took centuries to fix its limits. The opinions
of the ancient Church were not uniform. On the con-
trary, the churches of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jeru-
salem differed regarding certain books. Even in the
same church, opinions touching individual authors
changed; the church of Eome, for example, did not

1 " Aus humanfonbus" are his own words (Leben, I, pp.
208, 209).

2 Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon, 1771 ;
Apparatus ad lib. interp. N. T., 1767.

104 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Differences
found with-
in the New
Testament.

always think alike about the Apocalypse. Thus the
idea of immutability was dislodged from the concep-
tion of the Canon.

It now became evident that the process out of which
the doctrine of the Canon issued was an historical and
human process. Like everything historical, it must
be studied. And the study must be free, with an eye
single in its devotion to the facts as they happened.
Patient and fearless investigation is the privilege and
duty of Christian scholarship.

Semler also called attention to differences within
the New Testament literature. He perceived the
unlikeness between Jewish and Pauline Christianity.
For sixteen hundred years the New Testament had
been thought of as a divine book. The authoritative
theory of inspiration made it impossible for the human
to retain its individuality in the immediate presence
of the divine. So the acceptation of the New Testa-
ment as the canonic expression of God's mind could
not go along with the belief that the New Testament
authors reasoned as men must always reason, unless
they would unman themselves. The Sacred Books
could not admit differences. Everywhere they must
have the same colour of feeling and thought. But
when the ancient theory of inspiration had fallen, the
facts in the case presented themselves to the eye.
Seniler saw what Baur at a later day made so much
of. In other ways, also, he suggested the lines of
subsequent study. And, in a word, he insisted that
the Sacred Books must be studied as human books.

That statement in itself is a very simple one. It
gives us, however, the end and aim of improved Bible-
study. Semler, in effect, published the news of a
mental revolution.1 To study the Sacred Books as

1 Credner, Einleitung, I, p. 43.

PRELIMINARY WORK

105

books.

human books was to study them historically. And to The Sacred
study them historically was to make them their own
interpreters. !

The Reformation principle required that the sim-
ple, historical sense of Scripture should be sovereign.
Only so could the supremacy of Scripture be success-
fully asserted. For, unless the simple sense is taken
as the final sense, the allegorical method, driven out
at the front door, enters at the back door. And, until
allegory is wholly gotten rid of, the Scriptures cannot
be self-interpreting.

The life of Semler serves to remind us that the
Higher Criticism is not primarily an analysis of docu-
ments nor a study of literary problems, but the final
chapter in the history of interpretation. Semler,
passing from the Lower Criticism to the Higher, began
his work by lecturing on exegesis. At the outset, he
saw the necessity of taking the New Testament into
the climate and circumstances of the Apostolic age.
Interpretation must be grammatical. And grammar
must cease to be at the mercy of dogma. The intrin-
sic meanings of the New Testament language must be
the final aim of study.1 But grammar alone does not
suffice.2 Interpretation must be historical. The stu-

1 For the history of N. T. Grammar, Winer, N. T. Gr. (tr. by
Thayer), Introduction, 8e Auf. by Schmiedel, 1894, §§ 1, 2 ;
Keuss, Hist, of N. T. , II, p. 591 ; Cave, Introduction to The-
ology, pp. 323, 324 ; Diestel, Gesch. d. A. T., pp. 150, 620-626,
636 ; Paulsen, Gesch. d. gelehrten Unter., pp. 543-545 ; JKeal-
encyclopddie, VI, p. 290 sq.

Naturally, the principles of grammar come into N. T. study
from the outside. Theology tyrannised over the thought of
Scripture to such an extent that they could not grow up from
within.

2 The connection between " Criticism " and interpretation is
illustrated by the history of the phrase " Grammatical-Histori-
cal Interpretation" which established itself between 1750 and

106 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

dent must realise the mental conditions both of the
New Testament writers and of the men to whom they
wrote. Going further, Semler brought to light the
fact that the Church's doctrine of the Canon was a
growth; and he suggested that the New Testament
literature itself, as a human literature, was likewise
a growth. Thus he pointed out the way into the
Higher Criticism as the free study of the origins and
the literary relationship of our New Testament books.
All the while, however, the object was true interpre-
tation. And we must not permit the manifold depart-
ments of Biblical study in our own time to blind us to
the fact that this is the final aim of criticism in all its
forms.

Michaelis. The first systematic "Introduction" of a modern
kind was published by Michaelis, in 1750. The con-
trast between this and the Introduction of Cassiodorus,
in the sixth century, — the standard book for nearly a
thousand years, — is very instructive. The body of
data is vastly larger. This fact, by itself, betokens
the coming change. For the motive of knowledge and
its material always interact. A growing body of data
indicates an increasing pressure upon the mental
framework approved by Tradition. Again, in the
eighteenth-century book scientific curiosity plays a
very considerable part, while in the sixth-century
book it did not exist. Michaelis has an eager desire

1800 as the only correct description of interpretative methods.
The Selbstbiographie of Bretschneider gives us light. See also
Bretschneider's Auslegung d. N. T. (1806). He calls Ernesti
the father of the true grammatical interpretation, but finds fault
with him on the ground that he lacked the broad knowledge of
the thought and feeling of N. T. times (he calls it " dogmenge-
schichte ") which is essential to a " N. T. Times " (p. 10). On
the use of "Introduction," see Bacon, Introduction to the N. T.,
chs. 1, 2.

PRELIMINARY WORK

107

to know all that it is possible to know regarding the
New Testament literature; and the possession of a
scholarly method insures a steady growth of know-
ledge. And, finally, whereas with Cassiodorus the
ancient doctrine of inspiration is in the vigour of
youth, with Michaelis it is drawing its last breath.
He put forth four editions of his book (1750-1788).
The body of facts grows larger. The emphasis upon
inspiration weakens. The interior criticism — the
so-called " Higher Criticism" — feels firmer ground
beneath its foot.

Problems now appeared. So long as Tradition Problems
reigned, there could be no real problems connected appe!
with the New Testament, because the real facts in
the case could not force themselves into notice. But
between 1750 and 1800 the facts began to come under
the eye. Problems arose forthwith.

The Synoptical Problem, or the question touching Synoptical
the relations between the first three Gospels, attracted <luestlon-
attention. To Irenseus, in the second century, each
Gospel was an eternal type of evangelical truth. Lit-
erary relationship between them, if it existed, was
almost as insignificant, as incapable of drawing and
holding curiosity, as speculation upon the literary
connection between Plato's Ideas. When, however,
the New Testament books came within reach of
scientific methods, it became necessary to ask for an
explanation of their striking likeness and their almost
equally striking diversity.1

1 Tatian's Diatessaron did not aim at a "harmony " ; it was a
history, of the ancient Oriental sort, and was intended to put
more or less out of use the authorities upon which it was based
(Professor G. Moore, Journal of Bib. Lit., 1890 ; Wildeboer, Die
Lit. d. A. T. (1895), pp. 3, 4). Ireneeus contended for the im-
movableness of the truth proclaimed by the Church (1. 9. 5, 10 ;
3. 3). The thought of difference within the Gospels was beyond

108 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The Book of Acts suggested questions. In 1798
Paulus, following a hint of Semler, took the position
that it was written with a dogmatic purpose, to defend
the Apostle Paul against the attacks of the strict
Jewish-Christian party. A generation later, this
idea, taken up by Baur, became fruitful both of truth
and of error. The interest attaching to it here is found
in the treatment of the book as related to the move-
ments of mind and antagonisms of belief in the
Apostolic age. It thus suggested the necessity of
studying the New Testament as a literature in vital
relation with historical forces.

The Pauline Epistles began to be treated as real
letters, addressed to concrete situations and specific
circumstances. They bear that character on their
face. But the Church had been unable to see it.
They had been regarded as timeless books, possessing
the right of free entry into all situations. Kightly
taken, that is deeply true. All great books are time-
less. The New Testament books are supremely so.
None the less, they are related to concrete situations.
They are timeless because they went so deep into time.

his reach ; they are four in number and could not have been
more or less (3. 11) ; each is perfect after its kind. This state
of opinion continued until the sixteenth century. Osiander first
used the title " Harmony " in 1537. The thought of difference
between the Gospels and of difficulty in harmonising the differ-
ences now appeared. But in the first period of the modern Har-
mony, the defence was vastly stronger than the attack ; the
ancient idea of inspiration prevented the discovery of any liter-
ary problem. The WolfenbUttel Fragments (issued by Lessing,
1773-1781) proclaimed the end of the long reign of that idea.
The title of Evanson's book, The Dissonance of the Four Gos-
pels, etc., 1792, is significant. Michaelis published in 1783 his
Erklarung der Begrabniss u. Auferstehungs Geschichte Christi
nach d. vier Evangelisten. The modern period of Gospel
Criticism had begun. The relation of the Synoptists had be-
come a literary problem.

PRELIMINARY WORK

109

its aim.

They are free of space because they took some one part
of space with divine seriousness. St. Paul's epistles
are as truly letters as those of Cicero and Pliny. And
the dawning conception of them as letters showed that
the historical study of the New Testament was well
started.

Still, the criticism of this period, taken as a whole, The criti-
was uncertain in aim. It had the vagueness of work
done during a mental interregnum, when one great
conception has been dethroned and its successor has
not yet been crowned. The New Testament books
were no longer treated as if they possessed an exclu-
sively divine character. The human authors of
Scripture were now in plain view. Yet the new prin-
ciple of study was not followed to its larger issues.

Meanwhile, Germany had entered an epoch grandly
creative both in literature and philosophy. Lessing,
Schiller, and Goethe on the one hand, Kant, Fichte,
and Hegel on the other, gave strength and spirit to
the imagination, depth and scope to reason. Noble
feeling and resolute thought were interpreting human
life at large. How should they interpret the
Scriptures?

The study of the Old Testament was the first to be
affected. In England, Marsh, treating the Hebrew
poetry in a poetical way, had already indicated the
coming change. In Germany, Herder, superior to Herder.
Marsh both in genius and mental freedom, made the
Old Testament seem contemporary to the doubters of
his time. He humanised it. The study of the New
Testament had to wait a while longer. But the delay
was sure to be short. All signs pointed to the quarter
whence the fresh wind was to blow.1

1 The eighteenth century is the explanation of nineteenth-cen-
tury criticism. Biblical criticism is part of a great common
movement of European life and mind. And in that movement

110 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

the eighteenth century is the point of precipitation. The first
main feature of the century is that the intellectual enthusiasm
of the Occident now begins to run in a channel entirely indepen-
dent of that in which religious enthusiasm runs. The active
reason becomes wholly free in its attitude toward theology and
Tradition. The second main feature is that a considerable part
of religious enthusiasm now begins to run in a social channel.
These two things, working together, brought about in the nine-
teenth century a thorough change of climate for the interpreta-
tion of that total human past of which the Bible forms the
canonic part.

CHAPTEK VII

THE TURNING-POINT IN THE HISTORY OF CRITICISM1

THE complete breach, with Tradition, brought about Facts get
by the eighteenth century, enabled the facts of sacred
history to triumph over dogma. For the time being,
the New Testament suffered. Its mysteries were
paraphrased in terms of common sense. Its visions
were brought down to the level of earnest, but prosaic,
morality. The miraculous, translated into the lan-
guage of the day, turned out to be an emotional inter-
pretation of commonplace events.2 Still, the price
paid for freedom was not too high. Now, at last, it
was possible for the Scriptures to be known as they
are in themselves. Keason, unfettered, even auda-
cious, might lay unconsecrated hands on the Ark of
God. Yet, when all is said, the eighteenth-century
rationalist was not more extreme on one side of inter-
pretation than the ideal Pope of the Middle Ages was
on the other. Neither gave the sacred text its

1 Literature : Zeller, David Friedrich Strauss, tr. 1874, and
"Ferdinand Christian Baur," in Vortriige u. Abhandlungen,
1875, Vol. I ; Schwartz, Geschichte d. neuesten Theologie, 3e
Auf., 1864; Pfleiderer, The Philosophy of Religion, tr. 1887,
Vol. II; Baur, Geschichte d. Christ. Kirche, 5r band (1862);
Flint, Philosophy of History (France), 1894 ; Laurent, Hist. d.
V Humanite, Vol. XVI.

2De Wette, Theodore oder des Zweifler's Weihe (1822), I,
pp. 20, 21. This "novel " is well worth reading as a part of
the mental history of a great scholar who passed through the
critical years in the history of criticism.

Ill

112 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Criticism
in need of a
controlling
principle.

New Testa-
ment stud-
ies loosely
related.

rights. But the rationalist provided the negative
condition for the true understanding of the Bible. A
fearless reason, insisting that the need of knowledge
is as fundamental as the need of salvation, and that
all facts are sacred and have a divine right to be
studied from within, had acquired in the field of Bible-
study a position of vantage from which it could not
be dislodged.

Down to 1835, however, the Higher Criticism lacked
a controlling principle. Much good work was done.
Many suggestive beginnings were made. But, on the
whole, it was a period of piecemeal study. An organ-
ising conception, one that should give unity of view
and coordination of results, had not yet appeared.

The defects of the period may be best seen in De
Wette, because in him the critical virtues of the time
were at their highest point.1 He had a clear and
fearless mind, a wide knowledge of facts, a masterly
power of presentation, fine literary taste, a piercing
judgment joined with deep religious feeling. Yet his
studies of the New Testament were mainly individual
studies held together by the traditional conception of
the Canon. The old dogmatic view of the Canon had
gone. The habit of treating the New Testament books
as a body of literature set off by itself remained.
This was an inconsistency. The Church had drawn
up an authoritative list of books. The books it can-
onised were believed to be of apostolic origin. Their
inspiration gave them all a common character. They
constituted an organism, a spiritual body. Each book

1 De "Wette (t 1849) was a man of letters and a theologian
as well as a Biblical scholar, an all-round mind, free from much
of the inherent narrowness of the specialists of a later genera-
tion. He possessed in high degree the clear-headed mental sobri-
ety which was characteristic of Bretschneider and other scholars
whose habits were fixed before 1835.

THE TURNING-POINT 113

was bound to all the others by the tie of a common
divine nature.

The Church did not need to know the literary con-
nection between one book and another. Neither did
she need to know the concrete historical situation to
which this or that book attached itself, nor the broad,
historical background of the New Testament as a
whole. The sole, decisive question touching any por-
tion of the Canon was, Did an Apostle or an Apostolic
man write it?1 An affirmative answer assured its
footing within the Canon. And once there, no ques-
tions concerning its literary pedigree or its historical
belongings needed to be asked. Indeed, they could not
be asked. For the dogma of inspiration not only gave
mystical unity to the New Testament, conceived as an
organism of saving truth, but it so isolated it, so
separated it from human literature, that such questions
became a mental impossibility.

Bible-study had a real unity, a controlling prin- Dogma of
ciple. The Sacred Books were nearer to each other ^ve^mity
than a man's mind and body, more clearly coherent to older
than the parts of a noble statue. The mind of their
common, their Divine Author held them together.
Down to the Eeformation, therefore, Bible-study could
not be fragmentary. And even in the Keformation
period it suffered no loss of unity. Ecclesiastical
infallibility had been discarded. Biblical infalli-
bility, however, remained. The human author of
Scripture had not yet come into view. The magnifi-
cent enthusiasm for the pure Word of God, the exalted
sense of its inspiration, kept every part of the New
Testament in vital touch with every other part. All

1 The principle of Apostolic authorship was not always car-
ried out, but it was the intention. Cf. Holtzmann, Einleitung,
pp. 134-160. Weiss, Einleitung (2e Auf.), pp. 34, 64.

114 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

the results of interpretation were related. Nothing
was detached.

But when the ancient doctrine of inspiration
decayed, Bible-study became piecemeal. Thus De
Wette, having given up the Pauline authorship of the
Pastoral Epistles, left them adrift, as if they were
literary fragments. The reason was twofold. Or,
rather, it was one reason under two aspects. In the
first place, throughout a period of sixteen hundred
years, the sole question regarding any given New
Mechanical Testament book had been one of apostolic origin. It
unity, was perfectly natural, then, that for a considerable

time after the downfall of Tradition — 1750 to 1835
— that question should continue to be decisive.
Hence, when De Wette — herein thoroughly repre-
sentative l — settled the question of Pauline author-
ship against the Pastorals, he seemed to have done all
that the case required. In the second place, the New
Testament books having been so long bound together
and thought together by an overmastering dogma,
the critical studies of the New Testament books
appeared to have a unity which in reality they lacked.
The shell of the old dogma held them together and
gave them vital relation and coherence. But in truth,
from the critical point of view, this was no better than
a mechanical unity. For criticism calls for an his-
torical treatment of the New Testament literature.

1 It is the point of view of Michaelis, Eichhorn, Hug, Credner,
etc. Haenlein's Introduction (1794) will give the student a fail-
conception of the purpose and scope of that period in scholar-
ship. The question of genuineness had supplanted the dogma
of inspiration. This holds good on the radical as well as on the
conservative side of scholarship, e.g. Evanson's Dissonance of
the Four Gospels and the Evidence of their Respective Authen-
ticity examined (1792). But that question was only the half-
way house to a truly historical study.

THE TUENING-POINT

115

Suppose the debate over Apostolic authorship to have
gone against a given book. That is not enough. We
desire to know its relation to the great movement that
lies back of the New Testament as a whole. A
human, literary unity must take the place of the bare
dogmatic unity.

We do not mean to say that, down to 1835, there Suggestions
was no attempt to give the New Testament books a historical
local habitation and a human name, after the questions method.
of apostolic authorship had been settled one way or
the other. There are hints and suggestions in De
Wette. In Gieseler's treatise on the Gospels, the
synoptical question opens the door into the study of
conditions and movements within the Apostolic
Church.1 Bretschneider, in his treatise on the Fourth
Gospel, after he had rejected the Johannine author-
ship, proceeded to discuss the characteristics of Juda-
ism with which, as he thought, the book concerned
itself; and ended by giving the Fourth Gospel an his-
torical habitat early in the second century.2 Credner
urged the need of apprehending the general mental
condition of the Apostolic age.3 Yet the only appli-
cation of it he made was to condemn the notion that
the Christians of the first century ascribed to the
authors of our New Testament books any extraordinary
inspiration.

On the whole, Schleiermacher's essay on 1 Timothy Schleier-
(1807) is representative of the methods of this period,

1 Gieseler, Versuch uber die Entwickelung u. die fruhesten
Schicksale der Schriftlichen Evangdicn (1818).

2 Bretschneider, Probabilia de Evangelii et Epistolarum
Joannis Apostoli indole ft oriyine, 1820. A model of sobriety
and restraint. The specific reference is to chapter 4. Upon
Bretschneider, Watkins, The Fourth Gospel (1890), pp. 179-
190.

3 Credner, Seitrdge z. Einleitung in d. bib. Schriften (1832),
I, p. 7, " die gesammtanschauung der Apostolischen ZeU."

116 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Forces at
work upon
a new con-
ception.

He went through the letter in detail. He compared
its style and use of words with Paul's usage in the
other epistles. He criticised the vocabulary, the turn
of thought, and finally decided against the genuine-
ness of the letter.1 There he stopped. Beyond this
question of genuineness the scholars of the time did
not go. It is well within bounds to say that, down to
1835, the critical study of the New Testament was
fragmentary. De Wette is typical. He gives us an
aggregate of fine observations and suggestive conclu-
sions. But that is all. There is no unifying prin-
ciple, no controlling or coordinating view. We have
a number of detached essays, joined together by the
fact that they deal with different portions of a litera-
tiire which the Church of the third and fourth
centuries was pleased to canonise.

Yet, throughout the first years of the eighteenth
century, and even earlier, forces were at work which
paved the way for a conception that should give
coherence and order to the results of critical studv.

•/

It was that idea of humanity which is the ruling idea
of our time.2 So long as theology was the queen of

1 Schleiermacher, Ueber den sogenannten ersten Brief des
Paulus an den Timotheos, 1807.

2 Edgar Quinet, Le Christianisme et la revolution fran^aise,
1845 ; Laurent, Hist, de VHumanite, XVI ; Hettner, Literatur-
gesch. d. achtzehnten Jahr., Ill, 3, abth. 2 ; Stopford Brooke,
Theology in the English Poets; Morley, Rousseau; Baur,
Christ. Kirche, V, pp. 41-45; R. Haym, Herder, 1880-1885;
Otto Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, I, pp. 203-225 ; Blunt-
schli, Staatsworterbuch, VI, p. 428.

The story of the building of the idea of Humanity is as im-
portant for our knowledge of our own time as is the building of
the idea of the primitive family and tribe for our understanding
of the men of antiquity. Cf. Coulanges, La Cite Antique (ed. of
1895); Hearn, The Aryan Household, 1891; Maine, Ancient
Law; Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, 2d ed.,
Lect. 2.

THE TURNING-POINT 117

reason, the idea of God overbore the idea of humanity.
.It will help us at this point to remember once more
that the history of Bible-study is just one aspect of a
much vaster history. We cannot separate it from the
general movement of Christian experience. So we
need to keep clearly in mind the fact that the main
characteristic of Bible-study down to the eighteenth
century was in unison with the temper and disposition
of Christian thought as a whole. Theology was the
main concern of deep-minded men. Now, the the-
ology of that time, with all its great merits, had
one very serious fault. It made the idea of God alto- The idea of
gether too transcendent. Just as, in practice, the
picked men and women thought it necessary to go out-
side the bounds of the common life, and to cooperate
with one another through a monastic organisation,
in order to become intimate with God; so, in the-
ory, the best thought of the time deemed it neces-
sary to exalt the idea of God above history in order to
insure its purity and majesty. As long as the ten-
dency lasted, the idea of God overpowered the idea of
humanity.

Nevertheless, the genius of Christianity demanded Christianity
that the idea of humanity should be as deeply empha- ft°
sised as the idea of God. Upon any other footing,
the Biblical view of revelation is undone. And
within the institutions of the Church, even when they
were most monastic, were tendencies that exalted our
nature. Even her errors leaned in this direction.
The worship of the Virgin, the coronation of the
Papacy, were indirect ways of magnifying the capacity
of the race. And the ideal of a Catholic communion,
mistaken as its expressions sometimes were, and per-
verted its methods, drew its sap from the inmost being
of Christianity. For our religion is bottomed upon
the most impassioned faith in the spiritual unity of

118 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

mankind ; since, without this, the unity of God were an
empty theological formula. To an equal degree is it
built upon an impassioned faith in the spiritual
capacity of our nature. The doctrines of the Incar-
nation and the Kingdom of God refuse to have it
otherwise.

When, therefore, the idea of humanity came on the
field of Biblical study, it was not at all the case that
the Sacred Books of Christianity were given over to
the tender mercies of an alien. On the contrary, we
find herein a striking illustration of the truth that
God comes to his goal by roads which his children, in
the omniscience of their ignorance, consider aimless
and roundabout. The idea of humanity is, in the
main, a creation of the Christian religion. But it had
to break away from the control of dogmatic Chris-
tianity in order to gain self-confidence. It found a
mighty ally in the Humanities, the study of the
knowledge and inspiration given by God along lines
outside the education and experience of Israel. With
the State, rising into dignity and power, it struck a
covenant. Then, grown strong, and even over-
bearing, it went back to study the Scriptures. So far
as appearances are concerned, it came from outside.
In reality, it came from within. When tempered and
chastened, it was to manifest itself as the spirit of
Christ in modern men communing with the spirit of
Idea of hu- Christ in the Scriptures.

eighteenth Great conceptions form slowly. But, after the long
century. preparatory stages have elapsed, the final touches are
quickly given. For seventeen hundred years the
Biblical view of history and life, aided by the ideal
elements in Greek and Eoman culture, pressed
steadily upon the mind of the Occident. An idea
new to the world's thought was formed. In the
eighteenth century it was clearly expressed. Kous-

THE TURNING-POINT 119

seau preached it with contagious passion.1 Herder
carried it into the study of history. The Revolution
made it a social programme. Through the poets it
passed into the blood of Europe.

When we look back from the Revolution to the The Renais-
Renaissauce, we become aware of a mighty change, the Revohi-
In the earlier period the term " Humanity " denoted tion.
a new kind of literary interest, the eager study of the
Classics, the appropriation of the food for thought and
admiration furnished by the Greeks and Romans, in
distinction from the food so long provided by theology.
But in the days of Rousseau and Herder and Kant,
the term stood for a creed. The sense of humanity
had become, in effect, a religion.

If we have not already seen that the history of the
Higher Criticism is the story of something far larger
than a scholastic process, we should see it now. The
specific results of criticism have been made possible
by the existence of a body of academic students,
broadly separated — as in Germany — from pressing
practical problems, possessing leisure, and sitting at
ease, for the most part, regarding the absorbing tasks
and grinding institutional necessities of a great
Church.2 But the deeper causes of criticism have
been collective forces, forces that are part and parcel
of the total life of the Occident. Neither the divine

1 See Kant, ed. Erdmann (4th), pp. 18, 19. Kant was deeply
influenced by Rousseau. He strikes a new note for the motive
of philosophy as well as for its method. The critical philosophy
is to be the servant of Humanity.

2 Stretching our words a little, we might venture to say that
there are two main types of churchmen. There is the man
whose chief concern is the creation and maintenance of institu-
tions. And there is the man whose primary interest is specu-
lation, the free play of thought. Palestinian and Alexandrian
Judaism give us illustrations from ancient times. In modem
times, examples abound.

120 HI STOUT OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

necessity of criticism nor its actual course can be
appreciated, if we insist upon treating it as wholly an
affair of the school.

This fact stands out plainly from the genealogy of
the great conception that was to give unity and cohe-
rence to the work of the New Testament scholars. It
was given to them out of hand by the deepest spiritual
tendencies of the eighteenth century. The genius of
Christianity conceived the idea of humanity. The
breakdown of Church authority, the breach with Tra-
dition, the decay of theology, brought it to the birth.
And the rise of the State to spiritual dignity, the
ennobling of the secular interests of mankind, the dis-
covery and majesty of the visible universe, by giving
new meaning and scope to the terrestrial experience
of man, provided the field and climate for its growth
and prestige.

Hegelian The philosophy of Hegel endowed the new idea

philosophy. with an efficient organ. For in him German philoso-
phy, self-confident and masterful, refusing to recog-
nise as divine anything that did not make itself
organic to the human, turned back to interpret the
entire experience of the race. He viewed Imman
experience in its totality. He conceived history as
its autobiography. Every book handed down by the
past, whether labelled "secular" or "sacred," must be
treated as the record of a genuinely human experience.
And nothing is fragmentary. The literature of a
nation, the literature of a period, constitutes an organ-
ism. The individual's thoughts, to be intelligible,
must be interpreted as part of a body of thought.
Thus Hegel planned a new department of study, —
the Philosophy of History.1

1 On the history of the philosophy of history, Flint, book
quoted; also his Vico ; and Laurent, Hist, de I'Humanite, XVIII.
It is an interesting fact that the first edition of Vice's Scienza

THE TURNING-POINT 121

For our purpose, it does not matter how largely cer-
tain parts of it resemble a fairy story, nor how high
the hand wherewith Hegel shapes facts to the liking
of his theory. We are concerned solely with the fact
that the Philosophy of History was the theoretic
expression of the idea of humanity and with the
attendant fact that Hegel included within his plan
the entire movement recorded and attested by the
Scriptures.

Here was the organising principle, the controlling The organis-
and coordinating conception for which criticism had
been waiting. After 1750 the emphasis upon the
human authors of the New Testament books steadily
gained strength. When Eichhorn, in 1804, laid down
the rule, " The New Testament writings are to be read
as human books and tested in human ways,"1 schol-
arly opinion had ripened far enough to give it a frank
adherence. But, as the case of Eichhorn himself —
to say nothing of Schleiermacher, Bretschneider, and
De Wette — clearly proves, the rule did not give
coherence to Bible-study. In its application, it was
a rule of literary method rather than a principle of
broad, historical interpretation.

Hegel's contribution to Bible-study — not the less Hegel's con-
significant because it was indirect — lay in the fact
that he carried the philosophical idea of humanity
into the field of Biblical interpretation. Revelation
is to be thought of as a genuinely human process.
The Words of God are spoken and His thoughts worked
out within the precincts of human consciousness. The

Nuova issued in 1725, the second in 1732. The philosophical in-
terpretation of history began at the same time with the outburst
of the criticism of historical sources. On the naive faith of
Hegelianism in its own infallibility, cf. Trendelenburg, Beitrdge
z. Phil., 1846, p. ix.

1 In Holtzmann, Einleitung, p. 184.

122 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Organic
view of
things.

Crisis of
1835.

]S ew Testament, then, must be treated as a thoroughly
human book. Furthermore, it must be treated as the
product of a human life. And since the life realised
itself as a total, all its parts being interknit, the
literature of the life must be regarded as an organism.

The eighteenth century strongly inclined to a
mechanical and atomistic view of things. It bor-
rowed its illustrations from physics and mathematics.
It viewed language as an invention, not a growth. It
took Eobinson Crusoe, the self-sufficient man on an
island, as the unit of thought and feeling. But the
nineteenth century turned toward the organic realm
for its conception of human method.1 And Hegel
embodied this method to the full. He even carried it
to excess. Humanity became too strong for men.
He treated history largely as an affair of the idea.
Individuals lost their footing.2 But the great gain
was that the New Testament, being conceived as a
human literature, was also conceived as a body, an
organism, of thought and feeling, all its parts related
both to one another and to the forces making through
the great empire wherein they took shape.

The application of Hegelian principles to Bible-
study brought about a crisis. In the year 1835
appeared three books, all written by Hegelians.3
The first was Vatke's Old Testament Theology. It is
mentioned here because it helped to indicate the tran-

1 Paulsen, Gesch. d. gelrhrt. Unterrichts, p. 513.

2 Ranke, quoted in Lorenz, Geschichtswissenschaft, II, p. 58.

8 Schwartz, Gesch. d. Theologie, pp. 3, 4 ; Pfleiderer, Develop-
ment of Theology, p. 209. For a qualification on the statement
that Strauss and Baur were Hegelians, Baur, Christ. Kirche,
V, p. 359, and Zeller, Vortrage, p. 401. Zeller emphasises Baur's
relation to Schleiermacher. For an admirable sketch of the
difference between Schleiermacher and Hegel, see Baur, i&.,
pp. 350-355. Yet the statement of the text is substantially
sound.

THE TURNING-POINT

123

Hegelianism
into Bible-

sition of Hegelianism from the stage of philosophy
to the stage of criticism, and also because it showed,
through its treatment of the Old Testament as the
record of a nation's religious experience, what the
main consequence of the transition was to be. The sec-
ond was Baur's treatise on the Pastoral Epistles. The
third was Strauss's Life of Jesus, in its results and
bearings the most significant book that has marked
the course of Bible-study since 1750. Altogether,
1835 is something more than a date in the history of
literature. It stands for a new turn and direction in
the Higher Criticism.

The standpoint in the Hegelian view of revelation Roads from
was the belief that no truth can be divine for man
unless it has been thought out within and appropriated study
by an integral human consciousness. From this posi-
tion two diverging roads ran into the field of inter-
pretation. A disciple of Hegel might emphasise the
life of Christ as an objective thing which, while enter-
ing history through human'feeling and thought, stood
objectively before feeling and thought in order to be
apprehended. In that case he might find himself
somewhere near the position of orthodox Christianity.
Or he might exclusively emphasise the subjective ele-
ment in the New Testament, thinking of nothing but
the process of human experience.

Strauss took the latter road. He was not spiritu- Strauss,
ally interested in facts as such. Only the facts that
are facts for and within the mind, touched him to the
qitick. He did not deal with a Christ who is a spir-
itual centre in an historic order of things. The only
Christ he would have us know is the Christ within
the Christian consciousness. His own Christianity,
in the year 1835, was largely the philosophical product
of his own genius. It was a great system of ideas
resting upon his own reason as its base. So, very

124 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Historical
fact no part
of religion.

Nemesis on
the allegori-
cal method.

naturally, he assumed that the Christ of the New Tes-
tament is, for the most part, the creation and product
of the Christian consciousness. The question, How
far is the Christ of the New Testament an historical
figure? seemed to him a question foreign to the genius
of Christianity. That there was a nucleus of histori-
cal reality he did not dream of denying. But to him
it appeared to be relatively small. And whether it
was large or small was an immaterial point. The sole
essential thing, he said, is the fundamental law of
our common nature and thought. This law, at work
within the Christian consciousness upon the real or
supposed facts in the life of Jesus, created the Christ
of the New Testament.

Possibly, no more naive book than the first edition
of the Life of Jesus was ever written.1 Strauss sup-
posed, in good faith, that he was sacrificing only the
accidents of Christianity. For, like the eighteenth-
century man, he assumed that historical fact can be
no vital part of religion. He believed that his inter-
pretation preserved the entire spiritual essence of
Christianity. He declared that his method of exegesis
was similar to Origen's. Allegory had been for ages
the approved method of the Church. He was merely
doing what the Church had done on a vast scale.2

In part, Strauss was right. Christianity has always
rested, and will always rest, upon the historic facts of
Scripture, — above all, upon the life of Christ. But the
allegorical method of interpretation that dominated
the Church for sixteen hundred years, obscured the
historical foundations of Christianity by means of

1 Strauss, Leben Jesu, 1835, I, p. vii : "Den inneren Kern
des christlichen Glaubens weiss der Verfasser von seinen krit-
ischen Untersuchungen vollig unabliangig " ; Pfleiderer, Develop-
ment of Theology, pp. 213-217.

2 Strauss, ib., I, pp. 6-51 ; Pfleiderer, ib., pp. 213-215.

THE TURNING-POINT 125

the vast dogmatic structure which was built up on the
facts. For, as we have plainly seen, when once the
doctrine of infallibility had preempted the Christian
consciousness, it became necessary to slur over the
simple historical sense of the Scriptures. Or, if it
was not slurred over, it was looked upon as constitut-
ing a single element within a much larger body of
thought. Now, as men interpret Christ's book, so
will they interpret the Master himself. To obscure
the sense of Scripture was, in effect, to overlay the
cardinal facts of Christianity with philosophical and
theological speculations. Hence, while nobody save
Strauss could suppose that the total tendency of
Strauss closely resembled that of Origen, the resem-
blance was close enough to explain an honest error.

By a slight stretch of words, Strauss might be called
the enfant terrible of the allegorical system. The
implicit assumption of the system is that the prime
thing in Scripture is not the plain historical sense nor
the original historical facts, but the spiritual ideas
for which the facts stand as symbols. Now, this
assumption disagrees with the Scriptural conception
of revelation. In truth, it causes the Scriptures to
Platonise. If it could have had its way in the Church,
it would have substituted a splendid body of ideas
for the saving facts of our religion. Of course, it
could not have its way. Neither the powers of Hades
nor the speculation of philosophers could remove the
Church from her foundation. But in so far as the
allegorical system did have its way, the true nature
of revelation was clouded over. We may say, then,
that Strauss let out the secret of the old exegetical
methods. He was the divine nemesis upon a faulty
and imperfect interpretation.

For, what he did, in distinction from what he Annihilation
thought he was doing, was to annihilate the very f* Christian-

126 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The ulti-
mate
question.

Life of
Christ fun-
damental.

being of Christianity. He made out the Christ to be
the creation of the Church. He undid the Biblical
idea of revelation. He volatilised the redemptive
deeds of God into a metaphysical system. And thus
he drove Christianity to its last, its one true line of
defences, — the original facts of revelation.

Protestant Christendom was no-vr compelled to put
to itself the ultimate question. Criticism must go
down to the roots. The mental work of the Church,
in the period when the doctrine and limits of the
Canon were laid down, was credal and dogmatic.
The mental work of the Church in our period must
needs be, for the most part, critical and historical.
And to Strauss, more than to any other one man, we
owe the final clearing up of our ideas about the New
Testament. His challenge to Protestant Christians
was God's challenge to Christianity as a whole.

The first main consequence was that the life of
Christ was seen to be the heart of Bible-study. The
churches had conceived the Bible too abstractly. The
connection between the book of Christ and the person
of Christ had not been sufficiently close and vital.1
But, after 1835, the life of the Saviour became the
fundamental question. Herein the work of Strauss
and the work of Schleiermacher joined consequences.
For Schleiermacher, before 1835, had proclaimed the
need which Strauss's work made so plain. The total
result was to make the person of Christ central.
Henceforward, the study of the historical life of our
Lord commanded attention precisely as the question
touching the Logos commanded it in the third and
fourth centuries.2

1 Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, § 212, especially n. 1.

2 Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology. The study
of the life of Christ is a modern study. In the Nicene period
the Logos doctrine filled the mind. In the Middle Ages, the

THE TURNING-POINT 127

The second main consequence was a more eager and Gospels
careful study of the Gospels, — the sources of our ^greeriy
knowledge regarding our Lord. Strauss himself did studied,
not go deep into Gospel criticism.1 He thought that
the Gospels abounded in unhistorical matter, — the
miracles in particular being plainly such. His object
was to remove all such matter from the original text.
Hence, his work was almost wholly a criticism of the
Gospel story. Only in a secondary sense was it Gos-
pel criticism. But the direct result was that the
study of the Gospels entered a new stage.

In 1838 appeared Ullmann's book, Historical or
Mythical.2 It was more dogmatic than critical. Its
aim was to prove that Christianity is unintelligible
save as the creation of Christ, and thus to cut the
ground from under the feet of Strauss. But it showed
clearly that the bearings of the latter's work were
immediately understood. Strauss was the thorn in
the flesh of evangelical Christians. Gospel criticism
became a matter of life and death.

In the same year came Weisse's Evangelical His-
tory.3 The temper and method of the book, contrasted
with Eichhorn's hypothesis of an "Original Gospel"
(1804), show a decided change, though the change is
not all advance. But the emotional colour is livelier,
the religious interest is keener. Evidently, Gospel

life, so far as it was treated at all, was treated devotionally.
The eighteenth century, turning loose a free and destructive
doubt upon Christianity, made the study primary. Schleier-
macher and Paulus anticipated Strauss in the name and concep-
tion of the discipline. But it was Strauss who forced the
churches to take the matter to heart. Upon the general stir
caused by Strauss, Baur, Christ. Kirche, V, pp. 379-382, and the
Studien Kritiken for the years 1835-1840.

1 Zeller, Strauss, p. 41.

2 Ullmann, Historisch oder Mythisch, 1838.

8 Hermann Weisse, Evangelische Geschichte, 1838.

128 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Baur.

The divine
without the
human is
nothing.

criticism has become a less literary, a more vital,
matter. The cry, "to the sources," has taken a far
more commanding tone.1

The philosophical mood dominated the higher
thought of Germany down to 1830. 2 Strauss, passing
over from that mood to the interpretation of the New
Testament, carried with him a strong metaphysical
bias. The results of his work were largely negative.
He was a revolutionary, not a constructive, force.

Baur took another road. His mind was indeed
metaphysical in its bias, and his interests profoundly
speculative.8 His own words, "Without philosophy
history is always, for me, dead and dumb," make a
good text for a sketch of his life. Yet he differed
broadly from Strauss. While philosophy was his
inspiration in the study of history, none the less his-
tory was his end and aim. He was far more construc-
tive than Strauss, his work more positive.

From Hegel's view of the divine and human life he
drew his primary principle. He believed that nothing
can have value for man or permanent significance for
the historian, unless it has been worked out into life
through a self-conscious, human process. Like his
master, he despised the shallow illuminism of the

1 Weisse and Wilke struck out about the same time the Mark
hypothesis, which has since won so much favour that many
of our contemporaries take it as a finality. Possibly some part
of this air of finality is the product of weariness. Even scholars
may be affected by the popular horror of mental suspense.

2 Hegel died in 1831. Later, Schelling went to Berlin to
preach a philosophical revival (Hase, iLirchengeschichte, 3r Th.,
2e abth. (1892), pp. 446-449). But, by the 40's, Germany's
philosophical mood was on the wane, getting ready to pass into
the study of the history of philosophy.

8 Upon the periods of Baur's activity see Realencyel. ;
(1) "Philosophy of Keligion," (2) "Biblical Criticism,"
(3) "Church History."

THE TURNING-POINT 129

eighteenth century, which had no eyes save for the
subjective aspects of things. The human is nothing
without the divine. Illumination without revelation
is blind. Thus, the idea of revelation recovers the
dignity and honour it had lost. Yet it is equally
true that the divine is nothing to us without the
human. Revelation without illumination is empty.
Therefore, it is not enough to say that the divine
revelation recorded in the New Testament has a
human aspect. If it is to be real for us, it must be
conceived as a thorough and integral human move-
ment. Neither is it enough to say that revelation
has a history. It is a history.

Baur did not look upon the New Testament as being New Testa
primarily a collection of books. He took the books JJJj
as records of certain stages through which human life a unity,
and thought — used by the divine life and mind as
organ and instrument — had passed. So his control-
ling, coordinating conception was practically full-
grown before he began his critical study. At least,
it was so far ready within his mind that a very little
critical work sufficed to call it forth. He could not
take up the New Testament literature as single "books.
He took them in their unity, as mentally and spiritu-
ally related. It did not satisfy him, as it had satisfied
Eichhorn, Schleiermacher, and De Wette, to settle
the question of genuineness either for or against this
or that document. Having proved, as he believed,
that St. Paul could not have written " the so-called
Pastoral Epistles," he went on to give them a definite
place in the ecclesiastical history of the second cen-
tury, a specific function in the mental economy of the
Catholic Church.1

1 Die sogenannte Pastoralbriefe, 1835.

" Ich wenigstens verinag nicht einzusehen, wie die Frage, um
welche es sich hier allein handeln kann, . . . aiiders entschie-

130 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Baur's
dogmatism.

Jewish and
Pauline
Christian-
ity.

Beyond question, Baur's method was, to a consider-
able degree, dogmatic and high-handed. He was not
truly critical. He did not first empty his mind of
theory, then seek patiently for the facts ; and, when
he had found them, determine their full nature and
scope, leaving the theory to ripen in the sunshine of
assumed results. On the contrary, he had a philoso-
phy of the New Testament history nearly complete
within the first ten years of his New Testament study.
He carried a sweeping hypothesis into the examination
of the New Testament.

In an essay upon the parties in the Corinthian
Church l (1832), he had brought out the point that con-
flict played a large part in the movements of the
Apostolic Church. Herein he took up and developed
the suggestion of Semler and Paul us regarding the
opposition between Jewish and Pauline Christianity.
He thus started with a great fact, a fact that put to
confusion the pious notion — seventeen hundred years
old — that the Apostolic age was like the Saviour's
garment, free from seams, a paradise of high-tem-
pered peace. But he put his fact into the hands of
the Hegelian formula for the interpretation of history.
Hegel taught that all human development begins with
a primitive synthesis wherein differences lie con-
cealed, proceeds to an analysis wherein differences are
brought to light, and ends with a deeper synthesis

den vrerden kann, als dadurch, dass wir sie mit den uns bekaun-
ten Erscheinungen innerhalb des ganzen Zeitraurns, in welchen
die Entstehung dieser Briefe fallen muss, also der Geschichte
der beiden ersten Jahrhunderte, zusammenstellen," Vorrede.
" Das Erste, auf was es bei einer kritischen Frage diese Art
ankommt, ist unstreitig die auf bestimuite Data sich stiitzende
Totalanschauung," etc. (the italics are mine). Ib.

1 "Die Christus-partei in der Corinthgeineinde," in Tubinger
Zeitschrift, 1832.

THE TURNING-POINT 131

wherein the differences are unified. Working his
data by the aid of this formula, Baur obtained a flow-
ing outline of historical connection for all the New
Testament books. Nothing was left at loose ends.

The unity that the New Testament had lost between Literary
1750 and 1835 was thus regained. The dogmatic con- pjaces^og-
ception of the Canon put each document in its place, matic unity.
The books were held together by their common
inspiration, their divine and mystical contents.
When the dogmatic conception of the Canon fell into
ruins, or serious disrepair, the books fell apart. They
continued to be treated in connection with one another.
But the reason for it was external rather than internal.
And so long as that treatment lasted, the Higher Criti-
'cism failed to live up to its name. The "Lower"
Criticism busies itself with the Text. The " Higher "
Criticism undertakes to know the New Testament
literature in an interior way. Baur began to pay in
full the debt thus contracted. The New Testament
books are seen to be closely coherent. They consti-
tute an organism of thought and feeling. They have
a magnificent human unity, through which the divine
unity of idea manifests itself.

The hypothesis left many facts out in the cold.
Many others it put on the rack. It did violence to
the nature of religion. It practically banished the
supernatural. It was almost as much a dogmatic as
it was a critical study. Baur was indeed one-sided:
apparently, God never uses a smooth and rounded
man to give a new turn to the world's thought. Yet
criticism is under heavy obligations to him. We
need not waste time in asking how far he was origi-
nal, and how far he was the point where the forces of
modern life, long gathering volume, came to a head.
It does not matter whether he creatively marked out
a path or merely represented a tendency. One thing

132 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Baur and

Semler.

Semler's
treatment
more dog-
matic.

Summary.

is certain: New Testament study, since his time, has
had a different colour.

A comparison of Baur with Semler is instructive.
For the latter was the pioneer of the movement from
the Lower Criticism into the Higher, opening the
history of criticism in the modern sense. And the
former led the way into the period wherein we
ourselves live.

Semler, as we have seen, anticipated, in a vague
fashion, Baur's starting-point, by distinguishing
between the Jewish and Pauline elements of the New
Testament. But he did not reach the conclusion by
the same road. Baur, starting with a study of the
Corinthian Church, came to his goal by way of inves-
tigation. Semler, a typical man of the eighteenth
century, was possessed with the idea of an antipathy
between the spiritual and the historical. The Judais-
ing elements he considered accidental, chaff to be
separated from the wheat of God's pure Word. The
ancient conception of inspiration still controlled him.
Baur, on the contrary, took the Judaising element of
the New Testament to be an organic part of a spiritual
total, a stadium through which Christianity passed
on to a deeper understanding of itself. Semler's
treatment was dogmatical; Baur's was historical.

A rough but serviceable summary of the mental
movement within the period of conscious criticism
runs as follows. The treaty of Westphalia (1648)
marks the end of the religious wars. Indifference
and scepticism were now the order of the day. Deism
became the bent and bias of the educated laity. The
traditional theory of inspiration dissolved, and the
Sacred Books came to close quarters with a self-reliant
reason (1648-1750). Thus, the free study of the
Canon became possible. But the old dogma ruled
men from its burial urn. The cardinal, indeed the

THE TURNING-POINT 133

sole, question was genuineness. New Testament study
was piecemeal (1750-1835). Finally, a great idea,
the idea of Humanity, laid hold of society with
destructive and renovating energy, gave a new birth
to poetry, took systematic form in philosophy, and
invaded the field of New Testament study. The
Sacred Books were treated as a spiritual total, the
product of and the witness to the supreme religious
revolution of history. And criticism, having been
for some time a floating conception, became a clear
ideal.1

1 A more detailed summary of the stages in the critical move-
ments from 1750 : —

(1) The ancient theory of Inspiration breaks down, leaving
the N. T. books open to free investigation. Semler's study of
the Canon is the type.

(2) The question of genuineness is the commanding one.
The N. T. books are studied as individual books. Schleier-
macher on 1 Tim. and Luke's gospel (1817), Bretschneider on
the Fourth Gospel, Bleek on Hebrews (1828), are fine examples.

(3) The sweeping synthesis of Baur. N. T. scholarship takes
a different colour, in some respects a different temper. The
" totalanschauung " becomes the order of the day. E.g.
Schwegler, Der Montanismus (1841), Vorwort, p. iii.

Upon the general literary movement of Germany, with which
the critical movement is in touch, Schlosser, Gesch. d. Achtzehn-
ten Jahrh. (1848), VII, le Abth., pp. 1, 2 ; Schmidt, Gesch. d.
Deutschen Literatur seit Lessing^s Tod (4e Auf., 1858), III.

CHAPTER VIII

TENDENCIES l

The crisis. STRAUSS and Baur brought on a crisis. Up to their
time, criticism had been a mental drift rather than a
systematic programme. But, after 1835, an organised
body of critical opinion took the field. In self -con-
fidence it came near being a match for the dogmas
that the eighteenth century cast off. Within the
criticism lived and worked the Hegelian spirit, a
spirit which, in all its forms, had a grand air of
finality, and which gained, rather than lost, self-
possession when it passed over into a theory of
revelation.

The result was a violent precipitation. A new sys-
tem of thought, a new programme of interpretation, if
it be full of energy and the power of appeal, always
works in that way. It is like a strong book. One is
bound to agree strongly or to differ strongly. Either
way, it clears the reader's head. Strenuous approval
or strenuous resistance causes the perceptions that
were previously vague to take shape and point. The
reader arrives at a clearer knowledge of himself.
Even so with an authoritative body of critical opinion,

1 Literature : Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, Bk. 3,
ch. 1 ; Watkins, The Fourth Gospel (Bampton Lectures, 1890),
Lect. 5 ; Lichtenberger, Hist, of German Theology in the Nine-
teenth Century, tr. 1889 ; Hase, Kirchengeschichte, 3r Th., 2° Abth.
(1892); Zenos, The Elements of the Higher Criticism (1889),
chs. 9 and 11.

134

TENDENCIES

135

in Germany.

such as that which followed 1835. Floating ideas
precipitated themselves. Uneasy impressions hard-
ened into convictions. Old views came forward with
impassioned protest. New views took the air with
prodigious self-enjoyment. Popular feeling was
called in to settle academic questions. The man of
the chair, stiffening under opposition, held his own
opinions with deepening seriousness. Tendencies
defined themselves. Men found their bearings.1

An enemy of the Higher Criticism might use the Criticism
present state of religion in Germany as an indictment
drawn up by history against the critical process,
Here, he would truly say, is the home and hearth of
criticism. And here, he would go on to say, religion
is at a lower ebb than in any other Protestant country.
In the university towns the academic body is largely
hostile and indifferent. Amongst the people positive
religion has a feeble hold. And this is the direct con-
sequence of unrestrained, unbridled criticism. It has
dried up the springs of religious devotion. It has
dragged religious reverence from its old place of van-
tage. It has undermined religious habits. Opinion
about the Bible is eager, fearless, and searching.
And the Bible itself has largely lost its authority and
power of appeal.

No doubt, there is some truth in this statement of
facts. When, however, we proceed to the analysis of
causes, great caution is necessary. Other causes for
the low ebb of religion in Protestant Germany may
easily be suggested. One of them is the history of
the social movement, into which a vast amount of

1 There is a fine description of the way in which military con-
flict hardens and defines opinions in Moses Coit Tyler's Literary
History of the American Revolution, 1897, Vol. I, opening
pages. What he says holds true in greater or less degree of
every severe crisis.

136 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

earnest thought and popular enthusiasm has gone.
Nowhere else, save in France, has socialism come near
being a religion in itself. And in France, the con-
tinuous existence and prestige of the Roman hierarchy
on the one hand, the successive political revolutions
on the other, have changed and deflected the current
of social feeling. In Germany socialism has been, in
effect, a religion. The political power being continu-
ous and unimpaired, and the Church being so closely
identified with the State that its pastors and teachers
have been almost invariably hand in glove with the
authorities, it has come to pass that Christianity is
identified with opposition and indifference to the
popular ideals.

Other causes lie close at hand. But no one of them
concerns us, nor all of them together. A sober-
minded Christian is not prone to think that he can
see far into the mystery of the single soul. Still less
will he presume to look deep into the mystery of a
great nation's spiritual experience and say why one
seed has grown and another has not. He knows that,
in the economy of the Church universal, the Chris-
tians of any one given time are poor judges of the
deepest consequences, the ultimate results of a great
contemporary movement. What God may have in
store for Germany, what new treasures of religious
experience may some day be brought to light in the
land of Luther — who but a child in the interpretation
of history shall undertake to decide for or against?
New Testa- The whole question is out of order. We are con-
cerne(l with a certain great and commanding fact, —
the story of the way in which the New Testament
has come to be studied and valued as a history, —
and with the reconstruction of the Christian concep-
tion of revelation which that study involves. We
have seen how, after the fifth century, the Bible was

TENDENCIES 137

taken farther and farther away from the field of com-
mon experience, the field where the layman's heart,
the layman's reason, could find it and know it at first-
hand. The keys of the deeper knowledge of the Bible
were put into the hands of the monk and the Pope.
The religious consciousness could not see the Word of
God as it is in itself. Men must needs pass through
Tradition in order to reach the sacred text; and, by
the time they reached it, their minds were so filled
with the Church's dogmas that they could not perceive
the plainest and most outstanding objects.

If anything in the history of our religion is certain, Free study
this is certain; namely, that it is necessary to the '
true interpretation of the Scriptures, to the deep
appreciation of God's Word, that Christians should go
behind Tradition, should see the Sacred Books just as
they were when they grew up within their time and
place. If God has not willed that this should come
to pass, then He has willed nothing. The establish-
ment of the Catholic Church in the Roman Empire
was certainly ordained by God. The free and fear-
less study of Holy Scripture was no less ordained by
Him. Indeed, the one divine act drew the other after
it. For the establishment of the Church involved the
canonisation of the Scriptures. Their canonisation
exalted their value far above all other literature. And
this exaltation made criticism inevitable.

Great events need long periods to bring their deeper Germany's
consequences to light. We must not presume to make
our ignorance and our fears judges of the final result
of the great work in which Germany has been the
pioneer and leader. It is enough for us, who live only
in the present and can see but parts of God's mean-
ing and purposes, — it is enough for us to know that
not without the divine will did Germany coine to her
task. Not for Germany alone, but for the world, has

138 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

No purely
critical
process is
possible.

Criticism
not a body
of opinions.

the work been done. No doubt Germany has suffered
loss. Apparently, no great thing can ever come to
pass unless some damage attends it. But the loss in
this case has brought a harvest. If Germany has
undergone a decline in practical religion, her main
work has been well done. God assigns specific duties
to nations as to individuals. Can we doubt, when
once we have followed the course of criticism, can we
doubt that the Master of men assigned to Germany
the duty of free Bible-study? And if He has, it is
not our business to balance the books of universal his-
tory. Taking things as we find them, we must believe
that Germany's gain and loss have been for the whole
Church, to the end that the Word of God might be
unbound. If she has suffered, then her sufferings,
like the burning bodies of Latimer and Ridley, have
kindled a flame that cannot be put out.

It resulted, from the work of Strauss and Baur,
that criticism became a constructive principle, a defi-
nite programme. In a certain sense, it even became
an illusion. There has existed, these past sixty years,
a party of critics who have borne themselves as if
there were some such thing as a purely critical pro-
cess, and as if they were its representatives. In truth,
there is no such thing as an absolutely pure critical
process. And the idolatrous estimate of the imaginary
standard of criticism is just another chapter in the
long history of the reign of words, another divorce
between words and things.

We have learned that the causes which set criticism
on foot were many in number and diverse in nature;
and that the men of the chair unduly exalt them-
selves, if they suppose that the free study of the Bible
is a business which academic processes alone have
created, and which academic processes, by themselves,
maintain. The critics are part of a great stream of

TENDENCIES 139

interest and prejudice and passion. Criticism is a
method, not a body of opinion. With it, as with
science, the stake is not a certain conclusion, a par-
ticular set of truths, but truthfulness, the impassioned
desire to find the original facts of sacred history.
Now, dogmatic interest and points of view have been
at work on all sides. The story of the purely dispas-
sioned critic is another edition of Kobinson Crusoe.
And the ideal critic himself is not a fact, but a
personification.

If the conceit of a purely critical process be kept Criticism
up, it creates a new kind of orthodoxy. By the power an ldeal-
of the keys which it confers, critics of this impossible
class make bold to bind and loose. They put outside
the critical pale those who retain any part of the
supernatural interpretation of the origins of Chris-
tianity.1 Criticism, however, is an ideal, not an
accomplished fact. To identify it with any particular
attitude toward any alleged fact is an act of usurpa-
tion. To get at the truth, the whole truth, and noth-
ing but the truth, is the aim. To surrender all present
views and connections, if they put themselves in the
way of the search for truth, is the obligation. But,
surely, it is at least conceivable that a mind strongly
conservative might be more truly critical than the
most radical critic, might have a holier desire to get
at the whole body of facts recorded in the Scriptures.
Nothing is to be gained by calling names or claiming
titles.

Facts that come from a world outside our deepest Entirely

interests can be weighed without passion. Facts that dispassion-

r ate criticism

an impossi-
1 E.g. Holzmann's treatment of Weiss and Beyschlag, Einlei- bility.

tung, 199. He assigns them to the " Dogmatisch Restauration "
as distinguished from the " Wissenschaftliche Opposition." It
requires a considerable dash of infallibility to draw the " scien-
tific " line across the field of N. T, study in that fashion.

140 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

have little intrinsic weight may be assessed with a
cool head. But Christianity is a fact at the very
centre of Occidental history and as deep as life. It
is not possible that the critic shall have an absolutely
cool head, shall be altogether dispassioned. On all
sides, deep feeling for or against some of the inherited
beliefs of our religion is inevitable.

To organised Christianity, Strauss and Baur gave
so grievous a wound that the most strenuous resistance
followed. Christ is the estate and the endowment of
Christianity. Our faith stands or falls with the person
of its founder. From the beginning, it has built its
claims to spiritual dominion upon the fact that in him
deity and humanity fully met together. The rational-
ism of the eighteenth century reduced the super-
natural events of the Gospels to purely natural
occurrences. The philosophical criticism that came
on the field in 1835 reduced them to symbolical, or
representative, expressions of universal ideas. There
were deep differences between Strauss and Baur. But
their Christology had one fundamental quality in
common : they translated the fact of the Incarnation,
as Christians had understood it, into a personified
idea.

General That an interpretation like this should be widely

forces?* or easity accepted on the spur of the moment, was out
of the question. The critics who even dreamed of it
— if any such there were — stood on the mental level
of the men of the French Eevolution who started a
new calendar in 1792. Humanity has invested a vast
amount of spiritual capital in the institutes of Chris-
tianity. The Church is so great a body, her roots are
so deep in history, that she cannot easily be changed.
In the nature of things, criticism of the kind that got
vogue through Strauss and Baur, was the signal for a
general rally of the forces of Protestant Germany.

TENDENCIES

141

The very standing-ground of Christianity seemed
to be endangered. And when Baur's younger fol-
lowers began to cut and slash the New Testament, it
was as if a man should see the body of his dearest
friend under the knife of a promising, but rough-
handed, medical student. German Christianity had
been shut in by God to the work of criticism. The
task could not be avoided. The original text of
revealed truth, the original elements of Scripture,
must be seen in their native features and dress. But
Christendom could not accept a dogmatic limitation
of the scope and contents of the things that underpin
and support it. The facts, and nothing but the
facts, must be found and laid bare, no matter what
befell the vested interests of the churches. What
the facts were, however, in their whole scope and
content, Baur and his followers could not be permitted
to judge beforehand.

The challenge " To the sources! " must be accepted. Defence
The only alternative was to go back to the sheltering of the su'
arms of Tradition — in other words, to enter the
Roman Communion. And, in fact, a movement in
that direction set in.1 But it amounted to little. All
the conditions that have given to Germany her intel-
lectual leadership in the nineteenth century must be
taken back before it could come to much. Protes-
tantism was hedged in. The work of subjecting the
Sacred Books to a searching examination was a divine
and nevitable work. It did not follow, though, that
the faith of Christendom in the supernatural elements

pernatural

elements iu
the New
Testament.

1 The "Romantic" movement (Haym, Die romantische
Schitle, 1870). Against " common sense " it exalted imagination
and fancy. Against the eighteenth-century love of clearness it
praised the mystical and the mysterious. And against the self-
worship of the present and future it magnified the past. See
also Ornond, The Romantic Triumph, 1900.

142 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

1835-1850.

Central
points of
critical
opinion.

of the New Testament was to be thrown overboard.
On the contrary, they were sure to be strenuously
defended.

Everything combined to make the 30's and 40's
a time of profound agitation.1 German Christian-
ity was stirred to the depths. On the one side, the
old conception of the Bible, the old ideas of in-
spiration, the traditional methods of interpretation,
reasserted themselves. On the other, the bold ideas,
the aggressive methods, the sweeping claims of the
new time let loose upon the old views a war that knew
no quarter. Between these contending forces a great
body of conservative Christian scholars, who believed
that there could be no permanent conflict between the
ideals of reason and the ideals of Scripture, sought to
mediate.

Two main points, kept carefully in mind, may
enable us to get a clear view of the central elements
in the masses of critical opinion that deployed on the
field of New Testament study. One is given to us
by Baur's interpretation of Apostolic history. He
thought that Christianity started on its career as a
Jewish sect.2 Out of this provincial condition it was

1 Political agitation. The Revolution of 1830 in France and
the sympathetic movements in other countries ; the beginnings
of the socialistic movement which have so deeply affected the
inner life of Germany. The growing prestige of the Roman
Catholic Church in Germany ; Mohler's Symbolik (1832) was
the herald of it (Baur, Christ. Kirche, V, pp. 309-320). The
promulgation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of
Mary (1854) betokened the deepened self-consciousness of the
Papacy. Baur says truly regarding the general spirit of the
time, " Charakter der neuesten Zeit, deren Tendenz es ist, die
principiellen Gegensatze so viel moglich zu scharfen" (p. 309).

2 One shrinks from so brief a description of a great scholar's
views. To be absolutely clear one must leave out all colour and
atmosphere, and so become somewhat unfair. It is true that

TENDENCIES 143

delivered by Paul. A bitter warfare between Jew-
ish Christianity and Paulinism ensued. Finally, a
Catholic Christianity, the Catholic Church and Canon,
resulted from a deliberate compromise between the
hostile parties. Within this framework Baur placed
the New Testament literature. He found everywhere
a tendency, a distinct dogmatic aim. And, in each
case, the aim was denned by the relation of the indi-
vidual author to the fundamental opposition between
the original apostles and Paul.1

It is true that Baur's contribution to New Testa-
ment study would be most unfairly judged, if we
summed it all up under this hypothesis.2 His main
work was positive and permanent. He set the example
of treating the New Testament as an organic whole, a
living body of literature to be understood only in con-
nection with the turns and crises of an historical
movement. He was the first to overcome the effects
of the traditional, dogmatic conception of the Canon.

the "tendency" theory concerning the origin of our N. T.
books was, for controversial purposes, the literary nerve of
Baur's interpretation. Each book was assigned its position in
time and space by reason of the conscious relation of its author
to the supposed mortal conflict between the two wings of Apos-
tolic Christianity. This was the salient point. Here the antithe-
sis to the traditional view of the Canon massed its forces.
Here, too, the idea of humanity took possession of the field and
revolutionised the literary treatment of the N. T. Hence, in a
brief history, it must needs have a practical monopoly of atten-
tion. But Baur's view of the first and second centuries was too
large to be exhausted by a single hypothesis, however prominent
it might be. His grasp of the period was wide and strong. His
scholarship was prodigiously fertile. And not one of his many
books was barren. For all his one-sidedness, he remains the
greatest N. T. scholar within the past one hundred and fifty years.

1 Baur, Church History, tr. 1878. One of the finest pieces
of modern historical writing.

2 Jiilicher, Einleitung i. d. N. T., 2e Aufl., 1894, p. 11.

144 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Paul and
the Twelve.

Person of
Christ.

But this part of his work was appropriated by every-
body. It was a common gain. No one could put a
private mark upon it. In this aff air Baur represented
and expressed the permanent mood of criticism.
Consequently, we cannot use the attitude of scholars
toward this conception as a guide to classification.

The more strictly individual element in Baur's con-
struction is the hypothesis of a mortal antipathy
between St. Paul and the Twelve. And this will
serve us well as a clew through the maze. The
changing attitude of scholars toward this "tendency "
theory gives us a fair indication of the degree to which
the historical character of the New Testament has
commended and approved itself to scholars since 1835.
And seeing that our subject is the history of the way
in which the New Testament has come to be inter-
preted as a history, we shall thus keep ourselves close
to the subject in hand, while fitting ourselves to
estimate the assured gains of criticism.

The other point to guide ourselves by is the person-
ality of Jesus. "What think ye of Christ?" is the
supreme question not only for the outsider who is
looking toward the Church, but for the Church her-
self. Down to the eighteenth century, nobody doubted
that Christ created Christianity. Christendom be-
lieved the Gospels to be solidly and literally his-
torical. No one saw in them the work of the "later
hand," or discovered the intrusion of evangelical
legend and comment. Yet the Church, by her way of
putting the supreme question, obscured both our
Lord's humanity and the historical character of the
books that attested his being and work, overlaying
both with a thick deposit of dogma. The result was
that, while the absolute historicity of the New Testa-
ment was assumed, the real answer was sought in the
region of speculation, not in the field of Bible-study.

TENDENCIES

145

Strauss and Baur forced the Christian reason to put
the question aright. We must go back of the great
theological debate of the Nicene period. We must
settle our accounts with the doubts touching the his-
torical being and work of the Saviour. We must
know him as he was on the earth, in his own words
and deeds and sufferings. The historical Christ is
the foundation of Christian theology. He must also
be its touchstone.

This brings us to a point whence we may see that it
is impossible to separate the critical from the theo-
logical movement. Back in the 30's and 40's there
came a crisis in New Testament study. A little later,
with the Neo-Kantian and Eitschlian developments,
came an acute crisis in the history of theology. The
two are parts of a common movement. This may
serve to remind us once more of the cardinal fact that
we are dealing with a history wherein "critical"
motives and "dogmatic" motives are inextricably
mingled. It may also help to press upon us the
conviction that we should not expect to see deeply
or clearly into a history of which we ourselves are so
completely a part, and that we must leave to another
age the task of passing a valuable and abiding judg-
ment upon our own.

The crisis brought out the full force and thought
of Germany. Individual influences formed schools of
opinion. But deeper than these individual influences
were the tendencies that sprang from the life of Chris-
tendom on the one hand, and the life of the age on the
other. The tendencies are more significant than
the schools. The latter stand for the common motives,
the deliberate programmes of small bodies of scholars.
For the most part, they are made by the tendencies.
For no single scholar, however great and consecrated,
and no set of scholars, however eager and devoted,

The critical
and the
theological
movements.

Tendencies
more signifi-
cant than
schools.

146 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Tv/o main
tendencies.

Deepest
mood of
our time.

can do more than give a slight change of direction to
the historical causes that issue from the collective and
continuous life of the Christian world. Only in part
were the schools the places where men made up their
minds. Far more were they the places where men
took observations, getting their bearings, and estimat-
ing the forces at work in the seething, tumultuous life
about them.

Naturally, there were two main currents of feel-
ing. One of them came from the large and deepening
experience of modern times. Since the break-up of
the mediaeval world man has made two great dis-
coveries, — the universe and his own past. Nature
and history have come upon reason with overpower-
ing majesty. The thought of the Greeks was chiefly
philosophical. The thought of the Niceue Age was
almost wholly theological. But the thought of our
day is more and more exclusively scientific. This
is profoundly true even of Germany, where the one
impressive philosophical movement of modern times
ran its course. Philosophy was a temporary, though
a consuming, occupation of reason. It was speedily
followed by a passion for the study of nature and
history. Trendelenburg said that, in consequence of
the Hegelian riot of metaphysics, Germany was like a
man who, having drunk hard and long, waked out of
his stupor with a splitting headache and feeling
strongly disposed to take the pledge.1

Compte's famous summary of the stages in experi-
ence is known to all. Man begins his interpretation
of his life and his world with theology, grows into
metaphysics, and comes to maturity in science. Taken
as Compte meant it should be taken, — as the philoso-
phy of history in a nutshell, — it is easy to find flaws

Trendelenburg, Logische Untersiichungen, 2d ed. , Vonvort.

TENDENCIES 147

in it. On the historical side, exceptions can be found
with little difficulty. On the logical side, it is pos-
sible to show that the scientific stage of experience
must give rise, sooner or later, to the old questions.
But taken as a mental sign of the times, it is the most
instructive generalisation of our century. For the
intellectual mood and temper of our epoch is scientific
beyond question. And equally beyond question this
mood is bound to strengthen rather than weaken.
For it is the mood begotten and fostered by the press-
ure on the mind of a vast body of unmeasured and
unexplored facts. In the presence of the freshly dis-
covered universe, and of all the matter included
within the history of the human past, the scientific
attitude is inevitable. The highest mental virtue of
our time consists in the careful measurement of
facts, in systematic experiment, and in a strong and
unsleeping suspicion of dogmatic statements.

Now the Christian consciousness is not a little land Bible-study
of Goshen, whither the thought and feeling of the B?53e
great outside world does not come. It is part and time,
parcel of consciousness at large. That does not mean
that Christianity is ruled by the world. The Head
and Saviour of the Church has established his throne
in the hearts of his people ; he rules and renews them
by influence from on high. But the Christian con-
sciousness is in the world. Bible-study, then, cannot
be a department of knowledge set off by itself. It
must needs take a colour and bias from the general
thought of the time.1

The centre of our thought is the noble conception of idea of law.
law. And it has, apparently, a strong antipathy for

1 This is saying nothing about modern Christianity which can-
not be said about ancient Christianity. The Nicene Age took
its mental categories and methods from Greek philosophy. Our
age takes them from the scientific study of nature and history.

148 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

the idea of the supernatural. The supernatural seems
to transgress by thrusting into history something
tha refuses to relate itself to what goes before, thus
making real history impossible.1 Again, it seerns to
offend by letting down from above something that
defies the law of cause and effect, and so claims the
benefit of clergy when reason lays hands upon it, to
examine and judge it. On both counts, the super-
natural seems foreign to science and to a scientific
interpretation of history.

Application That Bible-study, when it had once broken with Tra-
study. e dition and had carried the Sacred Books to the modern
university to be examined, as all great objects are
examined when they would have themselves taken
seriously by modern men; that Bible-study should
be profoundly affected by the ruling idea of law,
was a matter of course. If it were not childish to
balance the loss and gain in dealing with a.matter that
involves the inevitable, we might confidently say that
the results, in the long run, are good. Just as our
splendid conception of law provides the revelation of
God's holy, creative Will with a logical apparatus
proportional to its greatness, so the self-same concep-
tion renders the most loyal and efficient service to the
study of revelation. For, as the Bible defines revela-
tion, it is God's gift of Himself and His plan of sal-
vation — the gift of saving unity and cleansing hopes —
conveyed through the experience of men who met God
in the ways of the common life. Revelation, there-
fore, not only has a history, but is a history. And since
history is not rational, unless by law every part is
related to every other part, it follows that our concep-
tion of law is the logical ally for which the Biblical
idea of revelation has long waited.

1 Strauss, tr. 1, pp. 1-4.

TENDENCIES

149

Nevertheless, when the great modern conception Criticism of
came into the field of New Testament study, it brought the history-
in its train some companions of questionable origin
and standing. An Overpowering prepossession against
the supernatural came with it. This led to a radical
criticism of the evangelical history as distinguished
from a criticism of the sources.1 It was assumed, as
a condition of New Testament study, that the super-
natural elements in the life of our Lord were unhis-
torical. Now this assumption was not only in mental
strife with the devotional mood of the Church ; it was
hostile to the mood of judicial criticism. Christianity
is under bonds to know the facts touching its own
origin in their proper shape, their pristine colour.
But it cannot permit a so-called criticism to determine
beforehand that all facts of a certain shape, all data
of a certain colour, shall be condemned by a drum-
head trial. This is not criticism, but dogma.

Strauss 's method of dealing with the supernatural Strauss and
was an advance upon that of the pious rationalism
that characterised the period before him. Paulus took
the Gospels practically in block, as the past handed
them down to him. He then proceeded to translate
the miraculous elements into the language of common
sense. The supernatural kept its standing ground;
the sacred text was undisturbed. The price paid,
however, was ruinous. The method of Paulus was
quite as vicious, exegetically, as the allegorical sys-
tem of Origen. It violated the first principles of
interpretation. The New Testament writers were not
allowed to speak their own language. Far better, so
far as the interests of the New Testament were con-

1 Schwartz, Gesch. d. Theol.,??. 146,147; Ebrard, The Gos-
pel History (tr. 1876), pp. 19-25 ; Zeller, Strauss, p. 41 ("The
criticism . . . was not a criticism of the Gospels, but of the
Gospel story ").

150 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Conserv-
ative
tendency.

Protestant-
ism and
Christ.

cerned, was Strauss's frank dissolution of the super-
natural into the legendary and mythical. Hereby the
fundamental principle of Protestantism — the obliga-
tion to discover the original text of the Scriptures,
the facts in their true order, the thoughts in their his-
torical setting — was resolutely asserted. The Prot-
estant Church could not, without self-stultification,
reject that principle. But neither could she, without
self-destruction, accept the dogmatic rejection of the
supernatural.

The other main tendency was the conservative. It
was not as strong nor as well intrenched as in Eng-
land. Had it been so, criticism would have run a very
different course. It is Germany's freedom of thought
and self-reliance of scholarly reason that has made
modern Bible-study possible. And these qualities do
not thrive in a very conservative climate. Yet, even
in Germany, the conservative forces were strong. The
Eeformation was, first of all, a deed of the heart, an
impassioned insistence upon direct contact with the
Saviour.1 Afterward it became a process of reason,
using the methods of the New Learning in order to
treat the Scriptures historically. Changed as were
many of the conditions in the nineteenth century, this
order of experience still held good. Criticism, as
an act of scattered individuals, was one thing. The
acceptance of the results of criticism by the great
body of Christians was another thing. The critical
process, considered at large, must subserve the emo-
tional and spiritual needs of the Church.

Protestantism, from the very first, sought to com-
mend itself as a defence of the honour of Christ. The
mediaeval theory of the priesthood and of the Mass
had tended to make his part and function in the

Hagenbach, Dogmengeschichte, § 211.

TENDENCIES 151

economy of the soul remote and passive. The medi-
aeval theory of Tradition had done injury to the
sovereignty of his book. The Reformation was a
defence of his rights and honour. And fidelity to the
principles of the Reformation entailed the treatment
of the New Testament as a human literature; for
otherwise, the Saviour himself keeps remote from the
soul. His humanity is overcome by his deity. He
still remains an absentee from the interior affairs of
his Church. The Pope indeed is gone, his claims as
Vicar of Christ thrown into bankruptcy. But into his
place has come something nearly as bad, — a body of
fixed and infallible dogma. The Christ does not
transact his business with the soul at first-hand. His
honour is not secure.

The New Testament, then, must be humanised, or Legend in
all is lost. And when once it is humanised, the
abstract possibility of developments, of conflicts and
changes of view, of the growth of legend, of the uncon-
scious alteration of original facts and colouring of
original words, must be frankly conceded. Other-
wise, the Sacred Books are not human books. And
if they be not human, then the Saviour is not human,
and the spirit is gone out of religion. But Protestant-
ism, for all that, even in the nineteenth century, is a
deed of the heart first, and afterward a deed of reason.
The Christian consciousness finds in the Saviour the
transcendent fact of the spiritual world. Through his
humanity it touches and sees the full being of deity.
It cannot, therefore, permit the critical process to
decide offhand that the supernatural elements in the
story of Christ are unhistorical aftergrowths. For
that would be tantamount to an admission that
humanity in its perfection must keep within range of
humanity on its average level. Dogma shall not shut
out searching criticism from the New Testament in

152 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

"Critical"
•and " con-
servative"
not exclu-
sive of each
other.

the interest of orthodoxy. But no more shall dogma
of another sort shut up our conception of our Lord's
humanity within bounds set either by science so-called
or philosophy so-called. There shall be no abstract
criticism of the history, as distinct from the criticism
of the sources.

These are the two main tendencies. They can-
not be fully classified by the terms "critical" and
"conservative." It is true that a large amount of
dogmatic and irrational prejudice went into the con-
servative resistance to the free examination of the
New Testament literature. Yet it is also true that a
very considerable amount of dogmatic prejudice against
the supernatural has gone along with the freer study
of the Sacred Books. And, without stopping to weigh
and balance the one prejudice against the other, it
should be clear that the word " critical " is too broad
a term to be monopolised by those who, whatever
their scholarly merits, have completely broken with
the traditional conception of Christ. Any form of
New Testament study is critical, exactly in so far as
it admits and affirms the necessity of bringing the
intellectual methods of our time to bear upon the
study of the Bible. That is the only test. A scholar
need not be uncritical, even if he has a very positive
faith in the supernatural. Neither is he made criti-
cal by the most positive rejection of it. We are con-
cerned with a qiiestion of method, not with one or
another set of conclusions. If, then, we speak of the
critical and the conservative tendencies, we must
remember that our words, though handy, are some-
what inexact, and must therefore be carefully watched.

CHAPTER IX

THE SCHOOLS

THE "schools" must be handled. And yet the
treatment is not likely to be satisfactory.2 In the
first place, they are, at best, imperfect classifications.
There are some names, of weight and consequence,
that refuse to come within any group. In the second
place, the groups lack in permanence. They are, at
most, camps rather than schools — the temporary
meeting grounds of men who are more or less of one
rnind. And even within each camp there are consid-
erable differences of opinion and shifting relations.
There are, then, grounds for serious dissatisfaction
with the division of schools. Still, the division has
its uses, particularly in a handbook whose limits,
forbidding details, demand a sketch broadly done.

A common grouping has been "critical," "tradi- "Critical,"
tional," "mediating." What has been said under the ^^V,
head of "tendencies " is enough to show that the prin- " mediat-
ciple of division here used does violence to a true mg'
history of criticism. We cannot permit our master-
word " critical " to be monopolised. Besides, this
grouping has been done by men who would have little

1 Literature : Zeller, " Die Tiibinger historische Schule " (in
Vortdge, I) ; Schaff, Germany, its Universities, etc. (1857);
Life of Schleiermacher (tr. by Kowan); Albrecht Ritschl, by
Otto Ritschl (2 vols., 1892-1896).

3 Holtzmann considerably modifies it (Einleitung, pp. 186-
207).

163

154 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

or nothing to do with the supernatural. In itself it
is no less unfair than groupings made by men on the
other side of the house. For example, Godet classi-
fies New Testament scholars by their theological pro-
clivities: they are "deistic" or "pantheistic" or
" theistic." 1 The one principle of classification tacitly
assumes that no man who believes in the supernatural
can be truly critical. The other assumes that no man
who rejects the supernatural can truly account for the
existence and character of the New Testament books.
Both assumptions are out of place. " Criticism " is
an ideal common to all the earnest Bible-students of
our time. The bond that unites them is the desire to
see the facts and ideas of Scripture in their original
order and connections. Classifications, which per-
petuate theological and philosophical prejudices,
though they may contain a certain truth, are a hin-
drance to the growth of mental sanity and charity.

The simpler the classification is, the nearer the
approach to a bare designation of groups and scholars
without any attempt at description, the less will it
offend. To say little is sometimes the only way to
say anything. We shall, therefore, give a brief sum-
mary of the positions taken (1) by the Tiibingen
School; (2) the believers in the correctness of the
ancient traditions regarding the Sacred Books; (3)
the school of Schleiermacher ; and (4) the school of
Ritschl.

Tubingen. The Tubingen School is the school of Baur. It
started with an overpowering emphasis upon the
" tendencies " in the New Testament literature. The
"tendency" interpretation becomes historically intel-
ligible, if we set it against the conception of Scripture
that prevailed from the fifth to the eighteenth cen-

1 Godet, Introduction to the N. T. (tr. 1894), pp. 57-60.

THE SCHOOLS 155

tury. According to this, there was no process of
human opinion in the New Testament. All the facts
in the life of Christ and in the history of the Apos-
tolic Church were accepted as original facts, with
no element of legend anywhere about them. All the
differences between the Gospels were taken as indi-
vidual variations of a divine type, each variation per-
fect after its kind. The course of Apostolic history
was absolutely clear and fixed, a series of divine
events, as little dependent upon human motives and
human struggles as the motions of the stars. Baur's
interpretation made the New Testament the product
of human thought and struggle. The primitive facts
of Christ's life, the early years of Christianity, were
differently valued, according to the point of view of
the writer. Each author had a "tendency," a thesis
to be established ; and he used the data to prove his
point.

The truth in the " tendency " theory has become a " Ten-
common gain of New Testament scholarship. We all
know that the Gospels were not written as scientific
biographies. They do not aim at completeness.
Their narratives are sometimes divergent. Their
reports of our Lord's words are sometimes coloured by
the feeling of a later day. All this is permanent
ground. But in Baur's statement of it, the "ten-
dency" theory was closely akin, in its effects, to
Strauss's mythical theory. The Jewish Christians
shaped and coloured the facts in one way. The Paul-
inists shaped them in the opposite way. The Fusion-
ists, or Catholics, who mediated between the extremes,
still further slurred over the origins of Christianity,
by making a compromise between two statements,
each of which was largely unhistorical. Much the
greater part of the New Testament fails us, when we
ask direct questions touching the early situations and

156 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

events. They afford us capital information regarding
the moods of a later time. But when we ask them
regarding the early times into which they project
themselves, the information is indirect and secondary.
Our view of those days must be built up almost wholly
by inference and hypothesis.1

Baur's cash- Two main results followed. The first was the
traditions'116 wn°lesa^e cashiering of the superscriptions of the New
Testament books. Only four letters of Paul and the
Apocalypse retained the authorship which antiquity
assigned them. The latter is contemporary with the
situations it describes, from the standpoint of Jewish
Christianity. The Epistles to the Galatians, the
Corinthians, and Romans are contemporary with the
movements of mind and life which they record. All
the other New Testament books come from times later
than tradition had assigned them. They give us, not
history, but highly coloured interpretations of history.
Person of The second result was that the person of Christ

a smaUPpart playe(^ a Part but little greater than that of an occa-
sioning cause. His creative relation to the new
religion and the new community was neglected,
although not dogmatically denied. Baur himself
seemed to make Paul the true founder of Christianity
as we know it. Some of his disciples went beyond
him in this matter. They made a veritable gulf
between Christianity as Jesus conceived it and lived
it, and Christianity as Paul preached it.2

This did not lie in Baur's plan. Neither his phi-
losophy nor his scholarship called for it. On the
contrary, his Hegelian philosophy called for a concep-
tion of Jesus which should make him out to be the

1 Fisher, Supernatural Origin of Christianity; Holtzmann,
Einleitung, pp. 205, 206 ; Bleek-Mangold, Einleitung, p. 31 ;
Schwartz, Gesch. d. TheoL, pp. 171-173.

2 Bleek-Mangold, Einleitung, p. 49.

THE SCHOOLS 157

typical man, the one in whom the universal ideal was
first realised. And his scholarship, using Paul as a
vantage-ground for the reconstruction of the tradi-
tional views concerning Apostolic history, would have
had to stand Paul on his head in order to avoid giving
a true spiritual primacy to Jesus. Baur's earlier view
was the natural one-sidedness of a path-breaker. At
a later day he gave larger function and deeper sig-
nificance to the person of Christ.1 Yet he only went
far enough to make plain the gap in the original
theory. He did not bridge it.

Other members of the school have moderated Baur's Baur's
principles and sobered his methods. They have, for
the most part, abandoned his theory that Matthew is
the earliest Gospel, taking up the Mark hypothesis,
which, since Ebrard's time, has come to be accepted
almost as a finality.2 Hilgenfeld,8 Holtzmanu,4
Weizsacker,5 Pfleiderer,6 have practically abandoned
the central point in Baur's position. They do not
shut up the Twelve within a narrow "Jewish Chris-
tianity," but concede to them a real, albeit a pro-
vincial, catholicity. Now, this is equivalent to a
surrender of a fundamental point in the " tendency "
hypothesis. It drew after it the recognition that ele-
ments in the Gospels and in the Book of Acts, which
Baur had assessed as products of a later dogmatic
mood, are a genuine part of the primitive history. It
also entailed a material shortening of the time required

1 Vorlesungen ilber neutest. TTieologie (1864), pp. 75-121.
In his earlier tendency to exalt Paul at the cost of Christ, Baur
had forerunners (Reuss, Hist, of N. T., I, pp. 53, 54).

2 Hilgenfeld is the only considerable scholar who has held on
to it. Badham, St. Mark's Indebtedness to St. Matthew (1897).

8 Hilgenfeld, Historisch-kritische Einleitung i. d. JV. T. (1875).
* Holtzmann, Einleitung i. d. N. T. (1886) .

5 Weizsacker, Apostolisches Zeitalter, 2e Auf., 1892.

6 Otto Pfleiderer, Das Urchristenthum (1887).

158 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

by Baur for the growth of the New Testament. The
larger part of the New Testament is now found by
most scholars within the bounds of the first century.
Finally, some New Testament books that Baur classi-
fied as ungeimine have been accepted as genuine. This
goes along with the change of base that resulted from
the surrender of the original position of the school.
If primitive Christianity was not the narrow sect Baur
took it to be, and if the Twelve were not at swords'
points with Paul, then there is room in an historical
view of the early days for some things which Baur and
his disciples excluded from it.

Thus the march of Baur's great hypothesis, being
impeded by facts which it overstrained or dragged
along against their will, and kept under the steady
fire of facts which stood altogether outside the hypothe-
sis, was slain at last in the house of its friends. But
not until it had done what an hypothesis is designed
to do. It stirred up discussion, inspired interest, and
marked out the main lines of study.

;' Fragment- On the side of method, the later members of the
school became less sweeping. Compared with Baur
they are "fragmentists."1 This is due, on the one
hand, to the decline of the dogmatic spirit that was
so characteristic of the founder, and, on the other, to
the recognition of the essential nature of a religious
revolution like that recorded by the New Testament.
It involves too many interests of human nature, it

1 Hamack, Chronologic d. altchrist. Literatur (1897), pp.
vii and ix. Two reasons might be advanced. (1) The growing
prestige of science with the resulting suspicion of the " total-
anschauung," of sweeping syntheses. (2) A decline in the
theological passion that went into N. T. study back in the 30's
and 40's. Whatever the cause, the result is not altogether
bad. The " totalanschauung " is a good servant, but a poor
master. It is not well for us to hear the grass growing in
Palestine nineteen hundred years ago.

THE SCHOOLS 159

necessitates too many reconstructions of existing con-
ceptions, too many readjustments of existing relations,
it is altogether too many-sided, to be taken within a
sweeping view. This intellectual " f ragmentism " is
a welcome thing. The great constructive principle,
which Baur heralded, has done its full work in the
field of New Testament study. What is now needed
is patient and restrained study of the facts in detail.1

Protestantism, at its birth, received the traditional
information regarding the New Testament books at its
face value. Down to 1835 destructive doubt, while
it had touched and troubled this body of real or sup-
posed knowledge, had not deeply wounded it. But
Baur dealt it a blow that seemed mortal. Hence the
conservative forces rallied eagerly to its defence.

Conservatism in Germany could not be what it has Conserv-
been in England and America. There are two sub-
stantial differences in the situation. In England to
a marked degree, in America to a considerable degree,
the " Church " idea is strong. It is possible for men
outside as well as inside the Roman communion, by
leaning heavily with one arm on the principle of
authority, to get the other arm free for direct Bible-
study.2 Whether this is a legitimate process or no,

1 In the matter of sweeping synthesis, Baur's mantle has
fallen upon the Dutch scholars, Pierson, Loman, etc. (Jiilicher,
Einleitung, §§ 2, 8). Singularly enough, they stand Baur's
theory on its head, using the Book of Acts to prove the un-
genuineness of Galatians, etc. Sane scholarship is tempted to
wish that the rite of excommunication were within its control.
The only significant consequence of such criticism is to give
occasion to the enemies of criticism to settle themselves com-
fortably in the seat of the scornful.

2 The book called Lux Mundi may be taken as partly coming
under this rule. Since the storm raised by Essays and Reviews,
the '• High Churchmen " of the Anglican communion have found
it easier to chanse front than the " Low Churchmen." They have
used the '• Church " to lessen the strain upon the Scriptures.

160 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

The Church
idea not
strong.

Academic
thought
aloof from
popular
feeling.

and how far the liberty thus acquired is real or per-
manent, are questions that do not here concern us. It
is enough to know that on both sides of the water it is
a possible procedure. The "Church" idea is now
being used to take away the terrors of criticism, open-
ing into popular acceptance a broad door for the self-
same critical process which a generation ago it forbade
altogether.

In Protestant Germany the Church idea was not
strong enough to play this part. It is true that a
High Church movement went on, practically parallel
with the Oxford Movement. The wave of romanti-
cism that swept through Europe in the 20's and 30's
carried a number of prominent individuals over to
Koine. In alarm at this, and at the disintegrating
tendencies of the day, an attempt was made to give
to the Church a larger place, a more real authority.1
This was in keeping with the political tendencies of
the day. For, after Waterloo, the conservative forces
of the State were in the saddle, and rode with a reck-
less hand.2 Yet, with all this to favour, High Church-
manship made slight headway. The critical tendency
was too strong to be roughly checked.

The other difference in the situation is found in
that close connection between popular religious feel-
ing and academic thought which is characteristic of
England and America, and which has been notably
absent from Germany. In the latter country the aca-
demic world has been a world almost by itself. The

1 E.g. Kahnis (Kurz, Church History (tr. 1878), II, pp. 317,
373).

2 Baur, Christ. Kirche, V, pp. 108-113 ; Life of Schleier-
macher, II, p. 208. Hegel's glorification of the status quo —
the monarchical appropriation of his principle, "the rational is
the real," for use against the revolutionary and reformatory
principle.

THE SCHOOLS

161

professor's chair is a long way from the pulpit.1 So
Biblical study, having its headquarters in the uni-
versity, has been fearless and aggressive to a degree
wholly beyond the reach of other Protestant lands.

Hence, the conservative wing of the critical move-
ment had far less power either for attack or defence
than it has with us. Yet it had considerable power.
And in the early years of the reaction against Baur,
it put forward a kind of scholarship that took a deep
though insecure and troubled pleasure in the revival
of the kind of knowledge that passed current after
the fourth century. Thus Tischendorf, justly famous
in the history of text-criticism, left his proper work
to speak a word on the Higher Criticism that should
bring controversy to an end. In his book entitled
When were the Gospels Written? he went the whole
length of the ancient tradition, asserting that the Revival of
Apostle John closed and settled the New Testament E!faltra~
Canon.2 Thiersch, another apologete for the ancient views,
traditions, accepted them in every detail, just as they
passed over from the fourth century to the fifth. The
New Testament Canon was practically constituted and
bounded in the first century; and the doubts of the
second and third centuries concerning certain books
were due, not to uncertainty, but to extreme care and
caution.3 Guericke4 and Wieseler5 defended the
tradition in a more moderate spirit than Tischendorf
and Thiersch, yet on the same lines. Hoffman, head
of the " Erlangen School," set up against Baur's central

1 Eeuss, L'figlise et rficole, 1854.

2 Tischendorf, Wann wurden unsere Evangelien verfasst ?
2e Auf., 1865.

8 Thiersch, Versuch zur Herstellung d. histor. Standpunktes
fur die Kritik der neutest. Schriften, 1845.
* Guericke, Einleitung i. d. N. T., 1854.
6 Wieseler, C. G., Chronologic des apostol, Zeitalt., 1848.

1G2 HISTORY OF THE HIGHEE CRITICISM

Scholars
who be-
long to no
" School."

thought a conception equally dogmatic. Baur carried
into the New Testament the Hegelian idea of develop-
ment through contrariety; and where he could not find
a way for his conception he made one by main force.
Against this idea of development, Hoffmann set up
the thought of an organic unity of. revelation unfold-
ing itself in divers'ways at divers times. His concep-
tion was quite as true as Baur's, but, as he used it,
quite as arbitrary in its interference with history. It
always brought him, often by ingenious and winding
ways, into agreement with the traditions.1

Baur's central conception was opposed by other
scholars, who differed widely from the group just
described. They cannot be called conservatives, being
altogether too free in their methods, too independent
of the traditions. They are mentioned at this point,
not because they belonged to any" School," but because,
chronologically, they come within Baur's own period.
Furthermore, they serve to remind us that we are
dealing with a vast movement, partly literary, partly
theological, partly religious. Naturally and inevi-
tably, the crisis of 1835 called out every shade and
variety of opinion. We make use of the division into
schools not so much for the amount of ground it accu-
rately covers, as for the reason that, in dealing with
a vast literature, some sort of clew through the maze
is indispensable.

De Wette, in the fifth edition of his Introduction
(1847), set himself in opposition to Baur. His cool,
clear head guarded him from philosophical as well
as from dogmatic contagion. Ewald, a great scholar,
but a born fighter, vehemently assailed Baur's idea
of development through a fundamental antithesis

1 Hoffmann, Bleek-Mangold, pp. 41, 42; Baur, Christ. Kirchc,
pp. 411, 412.

THE SCHOOLS

163

between Petrinism and Paulinism.1 Reuss, a true
master in the Bible-work of our century, went his
own way, independent both of Baur and the traditional
view. Unlike Ewald, he saw a truth in Baur's central
conception, doing justice to the differences between
Jewish Christianity and Paul. At the same time, by
his conception of Christ he made Christianity practi-
cally catholic from the beginning. Hence, in his con-
clusions he found himself near most of the traditional
positions.2

The school of Schleiermacher got the name of
"mediating" because it sought, or seemed to seek,
the middle ground between the critical and the con-
servative tendencies.8 Schleiermacher did not live to
see the violent precipitation of opinion that followed
1835 (|1834). He was altogether too many-sided a
man to belong to any school.4 He was free in his

1 Ewald, Die dreiersten Evangelien, 1850 ; Die Sendschreiben.
d. Ap. Paulus, 1857 ; DieJohan. Schriften, 1861. Work summed
up in Vols. VI and VII of his Volk Israel.

2 Reuss, Histoire d. I. Theol. chretienne, etc., 1852-1864;
Gesch. d. heiligen Schrift N. T., 5th ed., 1874 (tr. 1884). One
of the best scholars of our century, singularly independent and
cool-headed.

8 The name " mediating school " is not wholly fair. It sug-
gests a conscious, almost self-conscious, attempt to find a via
media; whereas the members of the "school" were, on the
whole, as sincerely devoted to the truth, as the members of the
"critical" school. It is not worth the while of men outside
Germany to perpetuate the odium scholasticum and criticum
which has sometimes been strongly in evidence in Germany.

* "Es ist vielleicht nicht ein Theolog, welcher durchaus mit
Schleiermacher ubereinstimmt," says Gieseler in Kirchenge-
schichte, V, pp. 241, 242. Hase well says that the Professor and
the Pastor supplemented each other in him (Kirchengeschichte,
p. 395), — something that cannct be said of many Germans.
To those who would know the inner life of Germany it is as
necessary to know Schleiermacher as to know Kant.

School of
Schleier-
macher.

164 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Christianity
and Christ.

Two

elements
in Schlei-
ermacher.

attitude toward the New Testament books. Besides,
he affirmed the dogmatic insignificance of the Virgin
Birth and the bodily resurrection of our Lord. Yet
the " mediating school " rightly claims him as its head.
For in Schleiermacher the two main needs of our cen-
tury, the religious and the scientific, undertook to
settle their differences. His heart was with the
Pietism of the eighteenth century. And through his
heart he learned what Christianity is. Christianity
is Christ — the historical Christ. The one idea that
conveys permanent meaning to the Christian Church
is the idea that the ideal of the divine life does not
lie ahead, as a bare duty for the race, but lies behind
us and beneath us as an historical achievement. The
divine life was perfectly realised in the human life
of Christ: realised within the human, not injuring
its integrity, doing no hurt to its rights. This idea
is the everlasting content of the Christian conscious-
ness, which has known from the beginning, without
a break, that Christ is its creator, and which finds in
the New Testament a trustworthy book of witness to
Christ's character and work.

In his thought, Schleiermacher was, in the fullest
sense, a man of our time. He was all alive with
the passionate desire to know, to get at the original
forms of life and mind. On the mental side he was
born a Greek, just as, on the emotional side, he was
born a Christian. The religious and the scientific
moods mingled in him most deeply and subtly. Pos-
sibly, he is the most representative man of our century.

Through the union of head and heart he worked out
of the fundamental heresy of the eighteenth century,
— its separation of the ideal and the historical.1 And,

1 Christ. Glaube (1851), §§ 10, 11, 93; Nitzsch, Evangel.
Dogmatik (1892), p. 33 ; Reuss, Hist, of the N. T.. II, pp. 608,
609.

THE SCHOOLS 165

in principle, he had seen and overcome the main con-
clusions of Strauss and Baur before they were broached.
At the same time, by his mental strength and vigour,
he opened wide the door into a fresh examination of The funda-
the sources of our religion. Pietism and rationalism, {^."s^of
even as they worked together in Seniler, so they eighteenth
worked together in him, but after an incomparably luy>
deeper fashion. And so, when 1835 sounded the call
to arms, the scholars who would fain pay in full the
bond signed at the Reformation, took from Schleier-
macher their text and their inspiration.

From this school came the Church historian, Nean- "The heart
der. His famous saying, "The heart makes the theologian."
theologian," expressed his point of view.1 Easy as
it is to distort and misapply the saying, none the less
it contains a thought which has great weight, not
merely for the theologian, but for the critic. The
New Testament is, in the supreme sense, a book of
religious feeling. Baur judged it from the standpoint
of the speculative idea. As a result, not only did he
misread many parts of it, he also mistook its spirit
and method. For religious feeling does not communi-
cate itself by speculation as the idea does, but chiefly
by the contagion of enthusiasm. It is not an affair
of the school ; it is a popular movement. Its literary
products do not smell of the lamp.2 Its conclusions
are reached not so much by logical processes as through
the divining power of practical needs.8 And it follows
from this that a critic trained as Baur, and as many
a critic since his day has been trained, in a purely
philosophic and academic way, might be a poor judge

1 Schaff, Germany, Its Universities, etc., p. 273 ; Baur, Christ.
Kirc.he, p. 385.

2 With the possible exception of the Ep. to the Hebrews.

8 The practical line along which St. Paul works up to his
great Christological position in Phil. 2. 1-6, is a good example.

16G HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Battle over
the Fourth
Gospel.

Members
of school.

— spite of strong analytic powers — of some things
very material to a just and all-round view of the New
Testament. Like to like is a good rule in interpreta-
tion. And it may fairly be doubted whether a critic
whose knowledge of religion is well-nigh wholly liter-
ary and doctrinaire is likely to be a satisfactory judge
of a book like the Fourth Gospel. Can a Russian
understand the history of Magua Charta?1

To gauge the work of the school of Schleiermacher,
the Tubingen school must be kept in mind. Baur's
great hypothesis was either the point of view or the
point of attack for all the New Testament scholars.
The so-called " tendency " theory, the position that the
historical books of the New Testament are not so
much historical as dogmatic, was naturally the chief
offence to those who stood anywhere near the tradi-
tional view of Christianity. And inasmuch as the
Fourth Gospel was assessed by Baur as the extreme
case of "tendency," — it being, in fact, a theological
romance, — around it the fiercest fighting raged.
Indeed, without going far astray, one might take the
history of the Johannine question as a vertical cut
through the entire history of New Testament study
since its turning-point.2

Bleek (t 1859) was a devoted pupil of Schleiermacher,
and his master said of him that he had the charism of
" Introduction," of historical insight into the problems
and connections of Biblical study.8 The word was

1 Compare Freeman, Methods of Historical Study (1886),
p. 289.

2 Watkins, Fourth Gospel.

3 Bleek, Introduction to N. T. (tr. 1879). In his mental
quality he resembled Bretschneider, De Wette, and other schol-
ars of an earlier period, who were content oftentimes to reach
a probability (K. J. Nitzsch in Realencycl. (1897), p. 256).
"Probability '* went out of fashion when Baur came in.

TEE SCHOOLS 167

well said. For Bleek is one of the sanest and sound-
est scholars of our century. He defended the Fourth
Gospel with special zeal. He adhered to the traditions
concerning the New Testament Canon almost in block.
Yet he was fair-minded to a high degree. Lechler,
unlike Bleek, whose Biblical studies were well
advanced before Baur came above the horizon, was
conceived, and born, and bred in mental opposition to
the Tubingen school. Hence, perhaps, a certain men-
tal impetuosity, which he shared with the scholars of
his time. Baur introduced hypotheses of the grand
style into New Testament studies, and made them the
order of the day for his friends and foes alike.
Lechler accepts from Baur the idea that the Pauline
doctrine is the dominating point in the Apostolic
age; but finds in it nothing but a clear expression of
the teaching of the Twelve. By the help of this con-
ception, he achieves a view of Apostolic development
which keeps close to the traditional lines ; at the same
time, he is hardly inferior to Baur in the art of hear-
ing grass grow in the Holy Land.1 More recently,
Weiss has used a conception practically identical with
Lechler's, but with a far larger fund of exact know-
ledge and with a better-balanced judgment.2

The school of Eitschl succeeded the school of School of
Schleierrnacher in theology, and, in some measure, in Rltschl-
criticism. Its founder began his career in the school
of Baur.8 From it he got his start, learning how to
put the main question. Down to the Reformation, as
we have seen, the Church and the Bible were treated
as inseparable parts of one mystical body of truth —
the whole of it lifted above the level of reason, beyond

1 Lechler, Apostolic and Post-Apostolic Times, 1851, tr. 1886.

2 Bernhard Weiss, Einldtung i. d. N. T., 2e Auf., 1889.
8 Bleek-Maugold, pp. 51, 52 ; Ritschl's Leben.

168 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

the reach of questions, and, consequently, put out of
touch with history. The Reformation tore the idea of
the Church away from the idea of Scripture and threw
it to reason to be investigated and discussed. But
Relation of the Bible still held its head high above reason and
SibieChand llistory- Tlie eighteenth century broke down its
guard, by decomposing the ancient conception of
inspiration. For a while the study of the Canon was
pursued along literary lines. Then Baur led the way
into the study of the New Testament as the record
and product of an historical movement. And now the
ideas of the Church and Bible, long separated, came
together again. It is seen that the Church and the
Canon grew up together. Baur, overusing the fact
of strife within the Apostolic Church and staying
himself upon certain phenomena of the second cen-
tury,1 derived the origin of the Church from the
impassioned Judaism of the Twelve. Hence, in order
to account for our existing New Testament, — it being
almost wholly non- Jewish and Catholic, — he needed
a long course of years after the fall of Jerusalem in
the year 70.

" Origin of Kitschl learned from Baur how to put the question.
In 1850 he published a book entitled The Origin of the
Old Catholic Church.2 The title is luminous. If we
would understand the rise of our New Testament
Scriptures, we must understand the rise of the Old
Catholic Church, or the Church of the second century.
In the second edition of his book (1857) Ritschl broke
completely away from Baur's explanation.8 The
Christianity of the second century resulted from the
popularisation of Paulinism. Paulinism, therefore,

1 Estimate of Pseudo-Clementine literature in Church History
of First Three Centuries.

2 Ritschl, Die Entstehung der altkatholischen Kirche, 1850.
8 Ritschl had precursors (Bleek- Mangold, pp. 46, 47).

THE SCHOOLS 169

not Judaism, was the real foundation of the Old Catho-
lic Church. Herewith Baur's hypothesis was hit
in a vital part. The " tendency " idea henceforward
fluttered away with a wounded wing. For, however
marked the differences between Paul and the Twelve,
they are substantially one.

Keuss said, in criticism of Baur's theory, that devel-
opments may be parallel; that they are not neces-
sarily successive. The point of the saying is here; a
great religious and social revolution is inevitably
many-sided. Baur ended by putting the New Testa-
ment literature on the rack, in order to force it into
conformity with a rigid conception of development.1
But life is infinitely larger than logic, and the Chris- Life and
tian life of the first century will not support Baur's glc'
interpretation of its literature. Eitschl, starting as
a member of the Tubingen school, as free as Baur
himself from " entangling alliances " with the tradi-
tional scheme of knowledge about the New Testament
books, attacked the great hypothesis upon purely his-
torical grounds. He so far overcame it that substan-
tial modifications became necessary, if the hypothesis
was to retain any scholarly standing.

This much secured, equally substantial modifica- Modification
tions of Baur's chronology of New Testament litera-
ture must follow. Harnack's declarations regarding
the Tubingen school are, possibly, a trifle sweeping.2
His affirmation that the chronologic framework within
which the traditions placed the New Testament books
is correct in nearly every particular, has, perhaps, too
imposing an air of finality.8 But he is within bounds

1 Cf , Hegel's handling of the history of philosophy (Zeller,
Philosophie der Griechen (4e Auf., 1876), I, pp. 8-11).

2 Chronologic, etc., p. ix. Holtzmann's criticism is essentially
just (Einleitung, pp. 205-207).

8 Chronologie, p. x. The cries of joy with which England

170 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

when he affirms that the relative mental and spiritual
unity of the New Testament would not have been pos-
sible, had not its various books been written within a
comparatively short period. This " was the Achilles'
heel in Baur's construction of Apostolic history."1

and America saluted Harnack's proclamation gave melancholy
proof of the nervous condition of the Churches.

1 Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach are men whom it is impossible
to group under any of the heads used above, without doing se-
rious injustice to their neighbours. Taken together, however,
they constitute a phenomenon of which our subject must take
serious account. They are a notable mental symptom. In both
of them the human swallowed the divine. " Anthropology is
the secret of theology," was Feuerbach's text. Jesus and Paul
are dramatic creations, was Bruno Bauer's thesis. As indicat-
ing a current of feeling deep and strong in our day, they are
significant. Cf. Feuerbach with Comte. Hoffding, Hist, of
Modern Philosophy (tr. 1890), II, pp. 272-293 ; Baur, Christ.
Kirche, pp. 390-394 ; Schmidt, Gesch. d. deutschen Lit., Ill, pp.
271-290.

CHAPTER X

THE HISTORICAL SPIRIT IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDY1

THE one solid and certain gain of criticism is that
the study of the New Testament has entered, once for
all, the historical stage. Other things are in doubt.
Touching the specific questions broached since 1750,
it is not safe or wise to say that we have got down to
the bottom facts. We have shaped no final judgments.
Our most assured results do not rise higher than a
very strong probability. One thing, however, is
secure. The Sacred Books are being studied as thor-
oughly human books. And they are being studied in
the historical spirit.

The sense of fact has triumphed over the dogma of
infallibility in all its forms. It was impossible, as
long as that dogma held its ground, for the original
facts of sacred history, the original thought and
feeling of the men of the Bible, to come into view.
Infallibility, whether Biblical or ecclesiastical, is an
arrangement whereby the definitions of a later time,
assuming a fictitious finality, draw upon the credit of
a sacred past to pay their debts to reason. The Sacred
Books were indeed exalted on high. No man dared
question them. They were above examination. The

1 Droysen, Principles of History, tr. by Andrews ; Gervinus,
Grundzuge der Historik, 1837 ; Briggs, The Study of the Holy
Scriptures, 1899; Baur, F. C., Die Epochen d. kirchlichen Ge-
schichtschreibung, 1852 ; Freeman, Methods of Historical Study,
1886 ; Bernheim, Handbuch d. histor. Methode.

171

The histori-
cal spirit the
chief gain.

Sense of
fact and
dogma of
infallibility.

172 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

devout student of the ancient days said, regarding
them, that they were like a great river, on whose edge
the little child may play, and in whose depths the
elephant, the mightiest of living creatures, loses his
footing. And he spoke the truth. For the Scriptures,
the books of witness to the saving unity of the divine
life, are level with the highest human praise.

But the Scriptures paid a heavy price for their
alleged infallibility. They were insured against fear-
less reason, against scientific curiosity. From what
source, though, issued the insurance? Not from
themselves. In the last resort, it came from the
infallibility of the Church. And so, in order to find
a safe asylum, the Bible must hand over the keys of
interpretation to a monasticised, clerical establish-
ment heading up in a Pope. By so doing, however,
the Bible disowns its own history. Monks and mys-
tics did not write it. And all the monks and mystics
put together cannot find the heart of its mystery.
The Bible, to be rightly interpreted, must have the
power of the keys in its own hands. It will not pay
the price which the attribute of infallibility demands.
It prefers to be examined, to be questioned, to take
its chances with a fearless reason.

Outlying. Now, the essence of reason is the imperative and

authoritative feeling of outlying facts. In the form
of psychology reason deals with the processes of mind.
In the form of science it deals with the universe
besetting the mind. In the form of philosophy it
deals with the final questions to which experience,
taken largely, gives rise. But in every form reason,
if it be lively and forth putting, consists in an impera-
tive sense of facts lying out beyond the received and
established explanations, and in the feeling of authori-
tative obligation to know the facts as they are in
themselves. Consequently, the dogma of infallibility,

HISTORICAL SPIRIT 173

if it be anything more than a legal fiction or a pious

epithet, if it be taken seriously, is foreign to reason.

By ascribing an unnatural and impossible finality to

established interpretations, it keeps the outlying facts

of revelation from exercising due pressure upon the

mind of the Church. At the same time, it is foreign

to the character of revelation; for, when followed Reason

home, it turns the human author of the Sacred Books fatio

out of doors, leaving the Divine Author in exclusive opposed to

possession. So reason and the Bible have conspired

to make the sense of fact supreme over the dogmatic

needs of the Church establishment.

This is our great and permanent gain. It cannot
be taken away from us. The conditions of the time
safeguard it.1 The scientific motive and the religious
motive are united in their devotion to this end. The
historical spirit, in New Testament study, the spirit
whose sole concern is the being and scope of the origi-
nal facts and thought of Apostolic history, — the origi-
nal text of our Lord's life and words, — has taken the
sceptre and cannot be dethroned. The New Testament
books are no longer to be studied in the dogmatic mood.2

1 The contrast between our age and that wherein the principle
of Tradition found a free field is as broad as it can well be. Our
commerce is vast. The race is throwing all its accumulations of
experience into one collection. Ideas and impressions are in
eager competition. The study of religion is comparative. The
body of facts within our ken is steadily and rapidly growing,
and every increase of data deepens our feeling for the facts
that are pressing forward into knowledge. Reason is forced
to keep open house. Hypotheses cannot maintain a fixed form.

2 The work of Robinson might be taken as typical. He sought
to strip off the false skin of " topographical tradition long since
fastened upon the Holy Land by foreign ecclesiastics and
monks" (Biblical Researches, 1841, I, pp. vii, viii). In just
the same way criticism has stripped from the N. T. books the
false skin of ecclesiastical tradition and theory fastened upon
them by a later time.

174 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Idea of de-
velopment.

Ancient in-
terpretation
lacked it.

The idea of evolution has come in the train of the
historical spirit.1 The need of it was not nearly so
great in the field of the New Testament as it was in
the field of the Old. There are considerable elements
in the Old Testament which belong to early and out-
grown stages of religious experience. The Fathers,
wholly lacking our idea, could not make their presence
in Scripture intelligible save by the help of the alle-
gorical interpretation. Without allegory they must
needs have rejected the divine authorship of the Old
Testament. Evolution makes allegory needless. The
things which so greatly troubled the Fathers become
for us intelligible as parts of the divine schooling of
Israel.

No such need ever existed in New Testament study ;
for the New Testament contains no Levitical and
primitive elements. None the less, when we consider
the matter more from a general and less from a spe-
cific point of view, the profits of the New Testament
are as great as those of the Old. There is a mental
movement and change amongst the men of the New
Testament. But under the old categories or habits
of thought, change was irreconcilable with the divine.
The divine, as such, was always conceived to be immu-
table. Hence, the divine self -revelation could not
realise itself in a truly historical way : for history
necessarily involves change.

The history of heresy makes some strange bedfel-
lows. The fundamental error of the eighteenth cen-
tury was its disbelief in the capacity of the historical

1 The idea of evolution, like the true conception of language
and grammar, took shape outside the field of Biblical study.
Yet the Biblical doctrine of the Kingdom of God is one of the
main causes of the conception ; for evolution was a social pro-
gramme before it became a scientific hypothesis. The idea is
not a trespasser upon the Biblical field.

HISTORICAL SPIRIT 175

to take in the ideal, and in the ability or disposition
of the ideal to possess and pervade the historical.
This error tinged all thought regarding revelation.
Kant's view was as deeply discoloured by it as Tom
Paine's. Now, so far as the forms of thought go, this
root-error is identical with the implicit premise of
the ancient Church. If we were to classify theo-
logians by the way in which their minds work, rather
than by the specific forms which their theological sys-
tems assume and the objects of devotion on which
their minds rest, we might discover that the deistic
thought of the eighteenth century has an alarming
family likeness to patristic orthodoxy. For the latter
is no more able than the former to think together the
idea of a divine revelation and the conception of a
genuine historical movement.

Practically, the Bible-students of ancient times
were forced to choose between the idea of revelation
and the idea of history. Now, devout men, when
driven to a choice like that, will not hesitate for a
moment. They will sacrifice the history in order to
save the revelation. So with the Fathers. They did
not purposely belittle, far less reject, the historical.
Origen must needs have gone mad before he could
consciously lower the significance of the historical and
human Saviour. But the simple truth is, that they
could not, with all the good intentions in the world,
keep themselves true to that conception of revelation
which the Bible itself contains. The mental life of
antiquity gave them no help toward overcoming the
apparent antipathy between the ideal and the histori-
cal. On the contrary, the thought-forms of the period
fostered the difficulty.1 Against its will, the Bible-

1 Aristotle, seeking to correct the one-sidedness of Plato's
idealism and so build a bridge from " being " to " becoming,"
struck out the theory of evolution. It is the supreme evidence

176 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

History and
revelation
could not
be made to
square.

The idea of
development
brings them
together.

study of antiquity caused revelation and history to
spring apart.

By the help of the idea of evolution revelation and
history become congenial. For the conception of being
and the fact of change are reconciled. In antiquity
they could not meet. So the worthful, the divine,
was identified with the unchangeable. But in the
modern view the worthful and the changeable are
organic to each other; we cannot conceive of a law
that does not express itself in movement and growth.
So we are enabled, by the mental habits of the time,
to drive the old heresy out of consciousness. To our
thinking, revelation is so far from being suspicious of
history that it demands it. Thus the Divine Author
of Scripture takes the human author to be his prophet
and interpreter.1

The reign of allegory is ended. The patristic Bible-
student could not get out from under its power. He
could not think of the changeable except as the pro-
fane and unworthful. Only the unchanging could be
divine. And so he conceived the Scriptures as all of
one piece from Genesis to the Apocalypse, as being
one solid block of inspired truth. What he found
in any part of the Bible, he could find in all parts.

of his genius. But Aristotle was ages ahead of his time. Greek
thought, taken in bulk, was far from helping the Christian con-
sciousness to reconcile the ideal and the historical. It was in
truth a severe handicap. Greek speculation as a body cared
almost nothing for history.

1 The belief in evolution has become the personal equation of
our day. Hence the student needs to be on guard against it ;
for if one looks long enough, one always finds what one expects
to find. In the contemporary knowledge of the N. T. there is a
considerable surplusage which the facts never suggested and
which they will not sustain. The chief part of it is the product
of new-fangled "psychology" on the one hand and an over-
worked idea of evolution on the other.

HISTORICAL SPIRIT 177

The deepest truths of the New Testament stood out
everywhere in the Old. The Old was level with the
New. But to bring it level, no way would serve,
except the way of allegory. As long as men thought
of the divine as the absolutely unchangeable, there
was no other road to take. Now, we have seen that
the allegorical principle, once adopted, would have
let loose a chaos of interpretations, unless a dogmatic
tradition had bridled it. But the dogmatic tradition,
to be efficient, required a great clerical establishment
to work it. Then this establishment, to make the
sacred text give answers that squared with its needs,
had to use the allegorical method which it had under-
taken to bridle. So the allegorical principle remained
in full force.

The modern student, thanks to the historical spirit Allegorical
and to the great conception that comes in its train, H"^1/16
rids himself of allegory, without doing injury to the overcome,
divine character of Scripture. If he be as reverent
as he is critical, he will do the kind of 'work that the
great scholars of the ancient Church would have
rejoiced to do, had the mental apparatus of their times
permitted it. He is giving the Bible the highest pos-
sible honour. Through his labours, the sacred text
has come at last to its rights. It is being studied and
known as it is in itself, and interpreted along the
interior lines of its own meaning and purpose.

The historical spirit has registered its results under
various departments, or "disciplines." Each of them,
in its own way, pays tribute to the new ideal of New
Testament study. For example, "Introduction."
As to its scope, opinions differ. But there is no dif-
ference as to its aim and method. It is historical;
that is, it undertakes to set the Sacred Books within
the frame of their time and place. There has been
some dispute in Germany touching the claims of one

178 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

Conception
of Introduc-
tion.

New Testa-
ment theol-
ogy.

and another scholar upon the title to the first use of
the conception.1 The dispute is not altogether
becoming to the dignity of scholarship. The concep-
tion of Introduction as historical was the product
of the time rather than the work of any individual.
The word needed only to be spoken, in order to be uni-
versally approved. Indeed, it has become so much a
matter of course that, possibly, we shall drop the
adjective "historical" in the title of our Introduc-
tions.2 The aim of our Introduction is instinc-
tively non-dogmatic. It has no traditions to drill into
the student. Its one purpose is to find the New Tes-
tament books at home within the circumstances that
caused their conception and occasioned their birth.8

Again, the theology of the New Testament marks
the triumph of the historical over the dogmatic spirit.
From the date of Origen's treatise on theology down
to the eighteenth century, systematic divinity was
universally assumed to be one and the selfsame thing
with the theology of the Scriptures. This was
inevitable. Just as long as a dogmatic tradition,
taking itself in good faith as infallible, filled and
ruled the whole mind of the Church, it was impossible
for the idea of a material difference between the estab-
lished opinion of the day and the thought of the
Scripture to find entrance. But when Tradition broke
down and dogmatic divinity lost standing before

1 Credner (1836), Hupfeld ( Ueber Begriff u. Methode der sog.
bib. Einl., 1844), Bleek (Introduction, I, p. 1 ; Sleek-Mangold^
p. 5) , and Reuss have claims upon it.

2 Weiss, Einleitung i. d. N. T., p. 19, n. 1 ; Reuss, Hist, of
N. T.,I, pp. 1,2.

8 If the student will read what Cassiodorus has to say about
the N. T. books, and then, at the same sitting, read some mod-
ern primer like Bennett's Primer of the Bible or Dodd's Intro-
duction, he will realise how broad is the gulf between the sixth
century and our own.

HISTORICAL SPIRIT

179

reason, men were enabled to enteitain the idea that
the theology of the men of the Bible must be under-
stood and stated as if the theology of Tradition had
never been dreamed of.1

So, too, the form of study entitled "The Apostolic "The Apos-
Age " has humanised the ancient conception of the
Canon. That conception, after the fourth century,
brought the New Testament before the mind's eye as
a mystical total, with no suggestion of movement or
change, the light of the divine so flooding it that the
light of the human was obliterated even as the sun in
his strength obliterates the stars. But " the Apostolic
Age " brings the New Testament literature before us
as the outgrowth of and the witness to a life that was
rich in human expression and sympathised with great
historical movements.

And so, in every way, the stage of New Testament Christianity
study, into which we have entered, is inspired, if not debt"! ltS
dominated, by the historical spirit. And as the total Christ,
result, that past which for the Christian Church is
the sacred and authoritative past, — the person and
mind of Christ, the experience and interpretation of
the Apostles, — is rising before our eyes in its proper
shape and its pristine beauty. The debt of Chris-
tianity to Christ, that debt which the Nicene Church
contracted, the mediaeval Church postponed, and the
Reformation Church promised to pay, is being paid.
We are seeking to know our Lord according to his
own mind.

1 The Reformation, in its earliest days, pledged Christianity
to this study. Luther's wrath against metaphysics. Calvin's
purpose to correct theology by sound Bible-study ("Jean Cal-
vin au Lecteur," preface to Institution de la Religion Chresti-
enne, 1560). But the pledge did not begin to be kept until the
eighteenth century.

CHAPTER XI

Periods in
history of
interpre-
tation.

200A.D.—

Reforma-
tion.

THE INSPIRATION OF CRITICISM l

THE history of the interpretation of the New Tes-
tament has two periods. The first is the credal or
dogmatic period, stretching from the year 200 2 —
when, speaking roughly, the Christian Bible was
formed by binding the New Testament books into one
body with the Old Testament — to the Reformation.
In the early part of this period, a splendid system of
theology was shaped, the doctrine of Tradition took
form, and the Creeds became the mental constitution
of the Church. In the later part, Tradition found a
free field for its development. The conception of infal-
libility, the stress of the times, the triumph of the
Papacy, conspired to drive a certain view of inspira-
tion, a certain set of opinions about the Sacred Books,
deep into the Christian consciousness — apparently,
almost as deep as life. Meanwhile, Biblical study
had created a vast literature. Indeed, to comment on
Holy Scripture was the most serious occupation of
high-minded men. But the study was altogether dog-
matic and devotional. The established opinions about

1 Fairbairn, The Place of Christ in Modern Theology ;
Cheyne, The Hallowing of Criticism; Seebohm, Colet (in
Oxford Reformers, 3d ed.); Fichte, Ideal of a Scholar; Salmon,
Infallibility; lleuss, Hist, of the Canon of the Holy Scriptures,
2d ed., tr. 1891 (especially the last chapter, entitled " Criticism
and the Church ").

a Harnack, Das N. T. urn d. J. 200, 1889.

180

THE INSPIRATION OF CRITICISM 181

the Bible were accepted as final. It entered no man's
thought to suggest that the facts of Scripture were at
odds with Tradition. No one dreamed that it was
necessary to go behind Tradition, in order to find the
Word of God.

The second period reaches from the Reformation to Reformation
our own day. The Protestants of the sixteenth and ^j£" r owu
seventeenth centuries were, for the most part, no less
dogmatic than the mediseval scholars. But by setting
the idea of an infallible Bible at swords' points with
the idea of an infallible Church, they effectually shat-
tered the unity and authority of Tradition. The Bible
came into direct contact with consciousness. The
critical principle was established. It was only a
question of time when the Scriptures must speak for
themselves. And time did not tarry. The eighteenth
century, the hinge in the history of interpretation,
threw theology and Tradition into bankruptcy. A
new kind of authority appeared, the authority of facts,
— the facts of Nature and the facts of history. To
see things as they are in themselves, without regard
to inherited opinions about things, became a supreme
mental obligation. The entire mental process, no
matter what the object on which the mind acted,
became critical.

The Bible, having broken away from the protection First-hand

and imprisonment of Tradition, must needs submit study and

Knowledge,
itself to fearless, first-hand study. The Church

authority which, in the thirteenth century, had said
to reason, " Thus far but no farther ! " no longer stood
on guard. The Bible, speaking for itself, must speak
to reason. Bible-study becomes direct. Criticism is
the order of the day. It enters, as a new ideal, into
the life of the Church.

Those words are not strained. By an ideal we mean Criticism a
a vision of life that sets us upon a journey, through new ideal<

182 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

duty, into a promised land of peace and power. And,
in all soberness, unless the direct or critical study of
the Scriptures is in our age a duty, then we may safely
say that history, having lost the power to speak and
teach, is dumb upon all the questions that touch us to
the quick. Criticism is a necessity imposed upon the
mind of the Church — upon the Christian conscious-
ness, if we prefer the phrase — by the very constitu-
tion of the Church cooperating with the methods and
apparatus of our time. Dogmatic speculation was the
prime duty of the Church in the Nicene age. In no
other way could the Christian reason have real con-
versation and commerce with the organised know-
ledge of the Mediterranean world; for that was
philosophical and speculative.1 But the organised
knowledge of our age is scientific ; its method is criti-
cal; its objects, the original facts of Nature and His-
tory; the consequence, an unsparing examination of
all hypotheses, whether they date from day before
yesterday or the most venerable antiquity. The
Church, then, if she would have commerce with our
time, even as the ancient Church had commerce with
the ancient time, must take criticism with profound
seriousness. Coquetry will not do. Even a left-
handed marriage between authority and interpretation
will not serve. Criticism is her prime duty. Through
the duty lies the road to peace and power.

The sins of critics no more impair the authority of
criticism than the sins of Churchmen impair the right
of the Church to exist. It were easy, if it were worth
our while, to draw up a catalogue of sins. Critics
have set up cliques for purposes of mutual admiration.

1 Make all allowance for the splendid scientific work of Alex-
andria, yet this remains true. The mood of the great body of
earnest men was not scientific but philosophical. Windelband,
Hist, of Philosophy, pt. 2, ch. 2.

THE INSPIRATION OF CRITICISM 183

They have known too much. They have gone a-whor-
ing after new things. They have invented a modern
heresy — the heresy of contemporaneity. But enough
of that, and more than enough. To what purpose is
it to dwell upon the sins of individual critics, when
it has been proved that criticism is a saving necessity
laid upon us by the Lord of the Church? With or
without our will, we must follow him.

The honour of Christ is at stake.1 The act whereby Honour of
the Reformation exalted the Bible above Tradition Clirist<
was one with the act whereby the Christian conscious-
ness declared that there should be no vicar of Christ
save Christ himself. The doctrine of justification
through faith was proclaimed with one breath, and in
the next the sovereignty and clearness of Holy Scrip-
ture.2 That the soul should cast itself upon the
Saviour's care, and that the Saviour's book should Evangelical
be brought close to the common life, and opened to criticism"1
the reading and the study of the laity, were things
that went together. The direct knowledge of his
person could not be separated from the free and first-
hand study of his book. His right to be his own vicar
drew after it the right of the Bible to be its own inter-
preter.3 He who is for us the embodied Word of God

1 As early as Wiclif the knowledge of Scripture was conse-
crated to the honour of Christ.

Lechler, Wiclif, I, pp. 469-473; II, pp. 265-267. Bengel
repeatedly associated his Bible-work with the Saviour's honour.
It is also to be observed that the eighteenth century, which laid
the foundations of criticism, at the same time brought the
humanity of our Lord into prominence. Dorner, Person
Christi. (1853), II, pp. 907-915.

2 Kaftan, Truth of the Christian Religion, Div. 1, ch. 3 ;
Lipsius, Dogmatik (1893), pp. 139, 141-143, 149, 151, 155, 156.

3 The Protestant doctrine regarding the " clearness " of Scrip-
ture did not mean that the Scripture could be mastered without
study. What was really at stake was the right to study. Were

184 HISTOEY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

"Critical"
and " devo-
tional."

Devotional
element in
criticism.

cannot be understood, according to his own mind,
apart from a Bible-study that draws its inspiration
and its strength from devotion to him, while it takes
its methods from the historical spirit of our age.

Our study of the New Testament, therefore, ceasing
to be dogmatic, has become historical and critical.
But it need not, for that reason, cease to be devo-
tional. "Critical" and "devotional" are adjectives
which may live together quite as happily as "dog-
matic "and "devotional."1 The Word of God need
not be less helpful, less rich in spiritual suggestion,
because we know it in its history. We may gain a
critical knowledge of nature without losing our sense
of nature's beauty. The knowledge that the ground
lines of the landscape are the result of a certain order
of rock formation need not permanently impair the
landscape's power to set us free from the cares that
harass the unity of life. For a while that may be the
case. But in the end the beauty will be more pervad-
ing and compelling because through it the earth tells
the story of her struggles. Even so, the beauty of
God's Word may be impaired for a time by our ana-
lytical study of the sources. But in the end its power
to cheer our hearts and strengthen our purpose shall
be the greater, by reason of our deeper knowledge of
the history through which the being and beauty of
God have been revealed.

The very word "criticism," objectionable as it
sounds to many, contains, when rightly taken, a
deeply devotional element. For, to the student, it is

the laity to have the right of free Bible-study and free speech ?
Or was the Bible to be kept within the Tradition of the Church,
— Tradition being a clerical monopoly ?

1 Leonardo da Vinci was not the less an artist by reason of
his knowledge of anatomy. The antithesis between the critical
and the devotional moods is not inherent.

THE INSPIRATION OF CRITICISM 185

a steady reminder that he must be on guard against
reading his own thoughts into God's Word. The
Bible-student of the old days, in good faith, carried
into the Scriptures every conception that was dear to
him, no matter where it came from. Thus Philo
dressed Moses in the clothes of Plato and Aristotle.
Thus the Popes transformed Peter the fisherman into
the prince of the earth. In many ways the sacred
text lay at the mercy of the devout interpreter. But
the critical conception of the Scriptures makes the
student reverent of the rights of the text. He is gov-
erned by the desire to know the original feeling and
thought of the men of the Bible. He has a resolute
purpose to permit no need of his own soul, no neces-
sity of the Church, to force him one inch beyond the
opinion which the text itself has given him. Surely,
this is to give the highest possible honour to the
Scriptures. Surely, if it can be said of any kind of
consecrated work that to labour is to pray, then it
may be said of patient, reverent, and fearless criticism.

Criticism has its inspiration. The credal period The inspira- /
was inspired. Without it we should not have had our *-°°of cntl"

('ism.

Bible. Without it we should not have had that com-
mon Christian consciousness which is the foundation
of the idealising forces of our time. Our own critical
age is no less inspired. For, without the historical
interpretation, the Bible would cease to be our book
of witness to the creative and saving unity of the
divine life. We cannot go backward. The road into
the Middle Ages is no thoroughfare of the Christian
reason. At best, it is a by-path. In the stress and
strain of the coming days, many, no doubt, will walk
therein. None the less, it is a by-path. We know,
unless History has wholly deceived us, we know that
God's highway runs through a deeper, a more truly
critical study of his Word,

186 HISTORY OF THE HIGHER CRITICISM

England and It may be that England and America, now that Ger-
Ainerica. many has marked out the road, have a work to do that
Germany has not been able to do. The isolation of
the academic life, necessary as it has been to the free-
dom of research, may have entailed a sort of blindness
to some important aspects of the Scriptures. Pos-
sibly, the English and American scholars may see,
through the grace of circumstance, what the German
scholar has not seen.1

Criticism It may be that the social movement of our age,

and the while it brings in its train some grave dangers to

SOCltll I110VG"

ment. sound thought,2 shall bring a great blessing. The

central idea of the Scriptures is the Kingdom of God.
The dogmatic movement of the ancient and mediaeval
Church, going along with a deepening affection for
the monastic ideal, sorely obscured that idea. But in
our time it has shone forth afresh.3 And it is pos-

1 The Bible as a grand total may be waiting for a class of
scholars who shall stand closer to the collective religious life
both in its practical needs and in its social action. In England
and America the pulpit and the chair are very close together,
the result being that critical courage and thoroughness are
harder to get. The scholar is apt to pay a heavy price for his
freedom. Along with this goes the fact that the necessity of
popularising the results of criticism is more pressing. At the
same time, the situation is more nervous. The gain, however,
is that the scholar has the chance to get an instinctive sense of
the nature of religion on its collective and social side. This may
fit him to appreciate certain undiscovered aspects of those Sacred
Books, which are the products and records, not of a school, but
of a religious community.

2 Sociology is a great help to sound theology, but a poor, if
not perilous, substitute for it. Did we not know that the pres-
ent is the preparation for a better future, we should look upon
the low ebb of speculative interest in the Churches as a bad
sign. In many a case already the critical passion, lacking specu-
lation, has slipped into naturalism.

8 Lipsius, DogmaUk, pp. 822, 840 ; Nitzsch, Dogmatik, p. 26.

THE INSPIRATION OF CRITICISM 187

sible that the social movement may bring us into a
common mood with the Bible, so that we shall be able
to study it with instinctive sympathy.1

However that may be, we know our duty. The
Word of God has been unbound, set free from the
shackles that human opinion had put upon it. The
scholar will strengthen himself with the prayer that,
through his work, the Word of the Lord may have
free course and be glorified (2 Thess. 3:1); so that the
Bible may commend itself to reasoning and reverent
men as God's book of final values for all who would
live nobly.

1 Cheyne, Jeremiah. His Life and Times, p. 12.

INDEX

Allegory: opposed to historical
nature of revelation, 30; uni-
versal tendency in ancient
days, 31; overcome, 177, 178.

"Apostolic Age": significance
of the title, 179.

Augustine: opinions concerning
relation of the Church to the
Bible, 33, n. 1.

Authority: an authoritative in-
terpretation necessary in an-
tiquity, 32 ; its quality not in
keeping with Scripture, 45-49;
involves the Church in self-
contradiction, 50-52.

Bauer, B., 170, n. 1.

Baur, F. C., 127; ushers in the
new principle in criticism, 128 ;
idea of conflict in primitive
Christianity, 129-130.

Bede, 43, n. 2.

Bengel, 91-92.

Bible : not passive in the critical
process, 17-19 ; its own charac-
ter a main cause, 20-26; the
Church's standard, 27; not a
sacerdotal book, 28-29; iso-
lated, 38-41 ; first-hand knowl-
edge of Scriptures not possible
in Middle Ages, 44; growing
reverence for Scripture, 50, 53 ;
conflict with Tradition, 51, 54;
its own interpreter, 75-76 ;
thrown open to observation,
89 ; isolation overcome, 103 ;
supremacy of Scriptures de-

189

mands historical interpreta-
tion, 105.

Bible-study: since second cen-
tury, 9 ; part of higher culture,
3-4.

Bleek, 166-167.

Boniface VIII states the claims
of the Papacy, 55.

Bradford, 75.

Bretschneider, 105, n. 2, 114.

Canon : relation to Bible-study,
10, n. 1 ; above investigation,
42; becomes the subject of
historical study, 103-104.

Cassiodorus, 41, n. 1.

Change, idea of : had no place in
ancient view of Scriptures, 42,
100.

Chillingworth, 63.

Christ, person of: the Saviour
and his book, 25; historical
study of our time contrasted
with speculation of Nicene Age,
144-145 ; honour of Christ and
criticism, 150-151, 179, 183.

Church, relation to Scripture,
17-19, 27, 32-34, 53.

Colet defends literal interpreta-
tion, 63.

Comte, 146.

Conservatism : that of Germany
contrasted with conservatism
in England and America, 159-
161.

Credner, 114.

Criticism : waste attending it, 8 ;

190

INDEX

view taken of history, 10-11 ;
another name for Bible-study,
13 ; definition, 14-15, 29, 81, 84 ;
relation to interpretation, Hi,
n. 1, 105; two elements in
obligation of criticism, 61-68;
relation to Protestantism, 94;
criticism of history and criti-
cism of "sources," 12(3, 149-152;
criticism and the social move-
ment, 186.

Deists : their attack on Protestant
doctrine of inspiration, 90.

De Wette, 110-111.

Differences of opinion in N. T.
not seen by ancient church, 23-
24; brought out in eighteenth
century, 103.

Dogma, decline of, 2, 85.

Du Perron, 80.

Education : history of, in rela-
tion to the history of criticism,
70, 97.

Eighteenth century: contrasted
with Middle Ages, 77-79 ; criti-
cism born, 80; precipitation-
point in history of Occident, 87 ;
central point in history of criti-
cism, 88, 108-109.

England : not a leader in higher
criticism, 95-96.

Erasmus, 72.

Erigena, 50.

Evolution: idea of, 1, 174; medi-
ates between idea of history
and idea of revelation, 175-
176.

Ewald, 162.

Feuerbach, 170.

" Fragmeutists," 158.

Genuineness, question of, takes
the place of the question of
inspiration, 92, n. 2.

Germany, part played by, in his-
tory of criticism, 94-97, 137-
138.

Gieseler, 114.

Greek : knowledge of, in Middle
Ages, 43; in sixteenth century,
72.

Guericke, 161.

Harnack, 169-170.

Hebrew : ignorance of, in Middle
Ages, 43 ; comes again into use,
72, 75.

Hegel, relation to critical move-
ment, 119-121.

Herder humanises the Scriptures,
108.

"Higher Criticism": insignifi-
cance of term "higher," 12-
13.

Hilgenfeld, 157.

Historical scepticism, 79.

Historical spirit : new kind of
piety, 5, n. 1; significance for
Bible-study, 171 ff.

Hoffmann, 161-162.

Holzmann, 98, 157.

Hooker, 71.

" Humanities " : their direct con-
tact with Scripture the begin-
ning of criticism, 102.

Humanity, idea of, in old theol-
ogy, 115-116; in eighteenth
century, 116-117; bearing on
criticism, 118-119.

Humanity of Christ : relation to
the human authors of Scrip-
ture, 24-25.

Ideal : its relation to the histori-
cal, 87, 164, 174-175.

Illusion of a purely critical pro-
cess, 138-139.

Infallibility : infallibility of
Scriptures necessitates infalli-
bility of the Church, 35 ; results
in interpretation, 29; iufalH-

INDEX

191

bility of Church as insurance
against exegetical chaos, 30;
centralised by Rome, 35 ; disso-
lution in eighteenth century,
87 ; opposed both to revelation
and to reason, 173.

Inspiration: ancient idea drove
the human authors out of Scrip-
ture, 29, 34; gave unity to
older Bible-study, 111-112 ;
periods in history, 91, n. 1;
decay of ancient conception
permits human authors of
Scripture to be seen, 103.

Inspiration of criticism, 180 ff.

Interpretation : historical inter-
pretation demanded by Refor-
mation, 104; made possible by
eighteenth century, 105; peri-
ods in history, 180-181.

" Introduction," 177-178.

Irenseus, his conception of the
Gospels contrasted with the
modern, 106, n. 1.

Jerome, 39-40.

" Jewish Christianity " in N. T. :
discovered, 95, n. 1, 103; ex-
ploited by Baur, 129-130.

Laity, the : they put an end to
the clerical monopoly of inter-
pretation, 54; help on the
breach between Bible and Tra-
dition, 52-59 ; rights of, 66-67 ;
lay movement in theology, 81-
84.

Lechler, 167.

Luther, 64, 93, n. 2.

Mental competition, part played
by it in history of criticism,
36-38, 86.

Michaelis, 105-106.

Middle Ages, conditions favour-
ing the authority of Tradition,
36-38.

Motives of Bible-study, the
scientific, 3; the religious, 4;
conflict, 6; union, 7.

Neander, 165.

Nicene Age, primary work not

Biblical scholarship, 100.
Niebuhr, 79, 88.
"N. T. Theology," 178.

Papacy: centralises Tradition,
36, 45, 53 ; holds powers of keys
to interpretation of Scripture,
55-56.

Paulus, 149.

Pfleiderer, 157.

Philo, 31.

Plato, estimate of teaching power
of books, 26.

Problems : ancient idea of in-
spiration made them impossi-
ble, 106; appear in eighteenth
century, 106-108.

Reading of Scriptures: in four-
teenth century, 74 ; in sixteenth
century, 75.

Reason: concordat with author-
ity, 69 ; independence, 78.

Reformation: an act of con-
science, 62 ; discounts tradition,
62; entails direct Bible-study
and historical interpretation,
64-65; inconsistent, 72-73.

Renaissance: exalted lay learn-
ing, 70; demanded original
texts, 71-72.

Reuchlin, 72.

Reuss, 163.

Ritschl, school of, 167-169.

Schleiermacher, 114-115, 163-164;

school of, 165-167.
"Schools," 153-154.
Semler: his life typical, 101;

work, 102-105 ; contrasted with

Baur, 131.

192

INDEX

Simon, 91, 99-100.

" Sources," 141.

Specialism, evils of, 16, n. 1.

State, the: helps to shatter tradi-
tion, 54, n. 1; its rise brings
with it lay authority and privi-
lege, 60.

Strauss, 122-124; forces life of
Christ to the front, 125 ; dealing
with supernatural, 149-150.

Strauss and Baur : result of their
work, 138, 140.

Tendencies in criticism, 133, 146-
150.

"Tendency," Baur's theory of,
142-144, 155-156.

Text : demand for original texts,
71-72 ; doctrinal consequences
of " variants," 90-91 ; criticism
of text precedes " Higher Criti-
cism," 89-90.

Theology, in modern university,
98.

Thiersch, 161.

Toland, 95, n. 1.

Tradition : fixed interpretation,
in relation to the canon, 31 ;
necessary to ancient church,
30, 32; conditions favouring,
36-38 ; makes direct approach
to Word of God impossible, 56 ;
breach between Tradition and
Scriptures, 57.

Translation of Scriptures, 66

Tubingen school, 154-158

Ullmann, 126.

University, part of, in history of
criticism, 97-98.

Vatke, 121.

Vulgate, supremacy of, 43.

Weiss, 167.
Weisse, 126.
Weizsacker, 157.
Wetstein, 92, n. 2.

New Testament Handbooks

EDITED BY

SHAILER MATHEWS

Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation,
University of Chicago

Arrangements are made for the following volumes, and the publishers
will, on request, send notice of the issue of each volume as it appears and
each descriptive circular sent out later; such requests for information
should state whether address is permanent or not : —

The History of the Textual Criticism of the
New Testament

Prof. MARVIN R. VINCENT, Professor of New Testament Exegesis,
Union Theological Seminary. \_Now ready.

Professor Vincent's contributions to the study of the New Testament rank him
among the first American exegetes. His most recent publication is " A Critical
and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistles to the Phihppians and to Philemon "
{International Critical Commentary), which was preceded by a " Students'
New Testament Handbook," " Word Studies in the New Testament," and
others.

The History of the Higher Criticism of the
New Testament

Prof. HENRY S. NASH, Professor of New Testament Interpretation,
Cambridge Divinity School. [A'ow ready.

Of Professor Nash's "Genesis of the Social Conscience," The Outlook said: " The
results of Professor Nash's ripe thought are presented in a luminous, compact,
and often epigrammatic style. The treatment is at once masterful and helpful,
and the book ought to be a quickening influence of the highest kind; it surely
will establish the fame of its author as a profound thinker, one from whom we
have a right to expect future inspiration of a kindred sort."

Introduction to the Books of the New Testament

Prof. B. WISNER BACON, Professor of New Testament Interpretation,
Yale University. \_In Press.

Professor Bacon's works in the field of Old Testament criticism include " The
Triple Tradition of Exodus," and " The Genesis of Genesis," a study of the
documentary sources of the books of Moses. In the field of New Testament
study he has published a number of brilliant papers, the most recent of which is
" The Autobiography of Jesus," in the American journal of Theology.

The History of New Testament Times in Palestine

Prof. SHAILER MATHEWS, Professor of New Testament History and
Interpretation, The University of Chicago. \_Now ready.

The Congregationalist says of Prof. Shailer Mathews's recent work, " The Social
Teaching of Jesus" : "Re-reading deepens the impression that the author is
scholarly, devout, awake to all modern thought, and yet conservative and pre-
eminently sane. If, after reading the chapters dealing with Jesus' attitude
toward man, society, the family, the state, and wealth, the reader will not agree
with us in this opinion, we greatly err as prophets."

The Life of Paul

Prof. RUSH RHEES, President of the University of Rochester.

Professor Rhees is well known from his series of " Inductive Lessons " contributed
to the Sunday School Times. His " Outline of the Life of Paul," privately
printed, has had a flattering reception from New Testament scholars.

The History of the Apostolic Age

Dr. C. W. VOTAW, Instructor in New Testament Literature, The
University of Chicago.

Of Dr. Votaw's " Inductive Study of the Founding of the Christian Church," Modern
Church, Edinburgh, says: "No fuller analysis of the later books of the New
Testament could be desired, and no better programme could be offered for their
study, than that afforded in the scheme of fifty lessons on the Founding of the
Christian Church, by Clyde W. Votaw. It is well adapted alike for practical
and more scholarly students of the Bible."

The Teaching of Jesus

Prof. GEORGE B. STEVENS, Professor of Systematic Theology, Yale

University.

Professor Stevens's volumes upon " The Johannine Theology," " The Pauline The-
ology," as well as his recent volume on " The Theology of the New Testament,"
have made him probably the most prominent writer on biblical theology in
America. His new volume will be among the most important of his works.

The Biblical Theology of the New Testament

Prof. E. P. GOULD, Professor of New Testament Interpretation, Prot-
estant Episcopal Divinity School, Philadelphia.

Professor Gould's Commentaries on the Gospel of Mark (in the International Criti-
cal Commentary') and the Epistles to the Corinthians (in the American Com-
mentary') are critical and exegetical attempts to supply those elements which
are lacking in existing works of the same general aim and scope. \_Now ready.

The Teaching of Jesus and Modern Social Problems

Prof. FRANCIS G. PEABODY, Professor of Christian Ethics, Harvard
University.

Professor Peabody's public lectures, as well as his addresses to the students of
Harvard University, touch a wide range of modern problems. The many read-
ers of his "Mornings in the College Chapel " and his published studies upon
social and religious topics, will welcome this new work.

The History of Christian Literature until Eusebius

Prof. J. W. PLATNKR, Professor of Early Church History, Harvard

University.

Professor Platner's work will not only treat the writings of the early Christian
writers, but will also treat of the history of the New Testament Canon.

OTHERS TO FOLLOW

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

The Social Teachings of Jesus

AN ESSAY IN CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY

SHAILER MATHEWS, A.M.

Professor of New Testament History and Interpretation in
the University of Chicago

i2rno. Cloth. $1.50

Outlook :

" Such a study is sure to be useful, and if the reader sometimes feels
that the Jesus here presented has the spirit of which the world for the
most part approves rather than that which brings its persecution, he
will with renewed interest turn to the words of Jesus as narrated in the
four Gospels."

Christian Index :

" We commend Professor Mathews's book to all interested in matters
sociological, exegetical, and to all Christians who desire to know the
will of their Lord and Master."

Congregationalist :

" The author is scholarly, devout, awake to all modern thought, and
yet conservative and preeminently sane."

The Evangel :

" Professor Mathews gives the thoughtful reader a veritable feast in
this essay in Christian Sociology. It is well thought out and carefully
written. ... It is surely an able book, worthy of careful perusal, and
gives promise of exerting a permanent influence upon Christian thought
and life."

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

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Genesis of the Social Conscience.

HENRY SYLVESTER NASH,

Professor in the Episcopal Theological School,
Cambridge, Mass.

THE RELATION BETWEEN THE ESTABLISHMENT OF CHRISTIAN-
1TY IN EUROPE AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION.

Crown 8vo. Cloth. Price $1.50.

THE OUTLOOK.

" To the world's stock of good books Professor Nash has added one
which is not the work of a clever summarizer only, but that of a clear
and forceful originator. Perhaps not since the publication of Mr. Kidd's
volume has a more genuinely popular sociological work appeared. . . .

The results of Professor Nash's ripe thought are presented in a
luminous, compact, and often epigrammatic style. The treatment is at
once masterful and helpful, and the book ought to be a quickening
influence of the highest kind; it surely will establish the fame of its
author as a profound thinker, one from whom we have a right to expect
future inspiration of a kindred sort. . . .

Through a multitude of original and brilliant metaphors, similes,
and illustrations, succeeding one another sometimes in almost bewilder-
ing number, Professor Nash leads us step by step in the retrospect of
the history of man's individualization. . . ."

NEW UNITY.

" The book is a novelty. It is an interesting experiment. It is worth
writing and therefore worth the reading. Professor Nash undertakes
to demonstrate the moral thread in history. He follows this moral line
alone. It is in order to show the rise and growth of the social con-
science. . . . The style of the book is crisp; but it is never dull."
E. P. P.

THE CRITIC.

"The pages glitter with bright sayings; there are many attractive
passages. The book is more than a tacit protest against the material-
istic explanation of history."

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY,

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK.
I

Ethics and Revelation

HENRY S. NASH

Professor in the Episcopal Theological School at Cambridge.
Author of" Genesis of the Social Conscience"

i2mo. Cloth. $1.50

Nashville Banner :

"The author goes into the work with an earnestness,
breadth, and intelligence that gives great interest to what
he has to say."

Charleston News and Courier:

" The value and significance of Professor Nash's lectures
lie chiefly in the advanced ground which he takes up with
regard to the authority of the Bible and the Church in the
matter of religious and social ethics. He begins by the
assertion that the Bible marks out the road along which
conscience must travel if it would treat our life on earth
with abiding seriousness. But he is careful to show that
the Bible should be seen and regarded in the light of
history."

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

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