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A HISTORY OF THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE WITH THEOLOGY IN CHRISTENDOM
BY
ANDREW DICKSON WHITE
LL.D. (YALE), L.H.D. (COLUMBIA), PH.DR. (JENA)
LATE PRESIDENT AND PROFESSOR OF HISTORY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY
TWO VOLUMES COMBINED
NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1898
COPYRIGHT, 1896
BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
To the Memory of
EZRA CORNELL
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK.
Thoughts that great hearts once broke for, we
Breathe cheaply in the common air.--LOWELL
Dicipulus est prioris posterior dies.--PUBLIUS SYRUS
Truth is the daughter of Time.--BACON
The Truth shall make you free.--ST. JOHN, viii, 32.
Full text is available at multiple locations on the internet:
This barrier is already weakened; it is widely decayed, in many places thin, and everywhere treacherous; but it is, as a whole, so broad, so crystallized about old boulders, so imbedded in shallows, so wedged into crannies on either shore, that it is a great danger. The waters from thousands of swollen streamlets above are pressing behind it; wreckage and refuse are piling up against it; every one knows that it must yield. But there is danger that it may resist the pressure too long and break suddenly, wrenching even the granite quays from their foundations, bringing desolation to a vast population, and leaving, after the subsidence of the flood, a widespread residue of slime, a fertile breeding-bed for the germs of disease.
But the patient mujiks are doing the right thing. The barrier, exposed more and more to the warmth of spring by the scores of channels they are making, will break away gradually, and the river will flow on beneficent and beautiful.
My work in this book is like that of the Russian mujiks on the Neva. I simply try to aid in letting the light of historical truth into that decaying mass of outworn thought which attaches the modern world to medieval conceptions of Christianity, and which still lingers among us -- a most serious barrier to religion and morals, and a menace to the whole normal evolution of society.
For behind this barrier also the flood is rapidly rising -- the flood of increased knowledge and new thought; and this barrier also, though honeycombed and in many places thin, creates a danger -- danger of a sudden breaking away, distressing and calamitous, sweeping before it not only outworn creeds and noxious dogmas, but cherished principles and ideals, and even wrenching out most precious religious and moral foundations of the whole social and political fabric.
My hope is to aid -- even if it be but a little -- in the gradual and healthful dissolving away of this mass of unreason, that the stream of "religion pure and undefiled" may flow on broad and clear, a blessing to humanity.
And now a few words regarding the evolution of this book.
It is something over a quarter of a century since I labored with Ezra Cornell in founding the university which bears his honored name.
Our purpose was to establish in the State of New York an institution for advanced instruction and research, in which science, pure and applied, should have an equal place with literature; in which the study of literature, ancient and modern, should be emancipated as much as possible from pedantry; and which should be free from various useless trammels and vicious methods which at that period hampered many, if not most, of the American universities and colleges.
We had especially determined that the institution should be under the control of no political party and of no single religious sect, and with Mr. Cornell's approval I embodied stringent provisions to this effect in the charter.
It had certainly never entered into the mind of either of us that in all this we were doing anything irreligious or unchristian. Mr. Cornell was reared a member of the Society of Friends; he had from his fortune liberally aided every form of Christian effort which he found going on about him, and among the permanent trustees of the public library which he had already founded, he had named all the clergymen of the town -- Catholic and Protestant. As for myself, I had been bred a churchman, had recently been elected a trustee of one church college, and a professor in another; those nearest and dearest to me were devoutly religious; and, if I may be allowed to speak of a matter so personal to myself, my most cherished friendships were among deeply religious men and women, and my greatest sources of enjoyment were ecclesiastical architecture, religious music, and the more devout forms of poetry. So far from wishing to injure Christianity, we both hoped to promote it; but we did not confound religion with sectarianism, and we saw in the sectarian character of American colleges and universities, as a whole, a reason for the poverty of the advanced instruction then given in so many of them.
It required no great acuteness to see that a system of control which, in selecting a Professor of Mathematics or Language or Rhetoric or Physics or Chemistry, asked first and above all to what sect or even to what wing or branch of a sect he belonged, could hardly do much to advance the moral, religious, or intellectual development of mankind.
The reasons for the new foundation seemed to us, then, so cogent that we expected the cooperation of all good citizens, and anticipated no opposition from any source,
As I look back across the intervening years, I know not whether to be more astonished or amused at our simplicity.
Opposition began at once. In the State Legislature it confronted us at every turn, and it was soon in full blaze throughout the State -- from the good Protestant bishop who proclaimed that all professors should be in holy orders, since to the Church alone was given the command, "Go, teach all nations," to the zealous priest who published a charge that Goldwin Smith -- a profoundly Christian scholar -- had come to Cornell in order to inculcate the "infidelity of the Westminster Review"; and from the eminent divine who went from city to city denouncing the "atheistic and pantheistic tendencies" of the proposed education, to the perfervid minister who informed a denominational synod that Agassiz, the last great opponent of Darwin, and a devout theist, was "preaching Darwinism and atheism" in the new institution.
As the struggle deepened, as hostile resolutions were introduced into various ecclesiastical bodies, as honored clergymen solemnly warned their flocks first against the "atheism," then against the "infidelity," and finally against the "indifferentism "of the university, as devoted pastors endeavored to dissuade young men from matriculation, I took the defensive, and, in answer to various attacks from pulpits and religious newspapers, attempted to allay the fears of the public. "Sweet reasonableness" was fully tried. There was established and endowed in the university perhaps the most effective Christian pulpit, and one of the most vigorous branches of the Christian Association, then in the United States; but all this did nothing to ward off the attack. The clause in the charter of the university forbidding it to give predominance to the doctrines of any sect, and above all the fact that much prominence was given to instruction in various branches of science, seemed to prevent all compromise, and it soon became clear that to stand on the defensive only made matters worse. Then it was that there was borne in upon me a sense of the real difficulty -- the antagonism between the theological and scientific view of the universe and of education in relation to it; therefore it was that, having been invited to deliver a lecture in the great hall of the Cooper Institute at New York, I took as my subject The Battlefields of Science, maintaining this thesis which follows:
In all modern history, interfere with science in the supposed interest of religion, no matter how conscientious such interference may have been, has resulted in the direst evils both to religion and to science, and invariably; and, on the other hand, all untrammelled scientific investigation, no matter how dangerous to religion some of its stages may have seemed for the time to be, has invariably resulted in the highest good both of religion and of science.
The lecture was next day published in the New York
Tribune at the request of Horace Greeley, its editor, who
was also one of the Cornell University trustees. As a result of
this widespread publication and of sundry attacks which it
elicited, I was asked to maintain my thesis before various
university associations and literary clubs; and I shall always
remember with gratitude that among those who stood by me and
presented me on the lecture platform with words of approval and
cheer was my revered instructor, the Rev. Dr. Theodore Dwight
Woolsey, at that time President of Yale College.
My lecture grew -- first into a couple of magazine articles, and
then into a little book called The Warfare of
Science, for which, when republished in England, Prof. John
Tyndall wrote a preface.
Sundry translations of this little book were published, but the
most curious thing in its history is the fact that a very friendly
introduction to the Swedish translation was written by a Lutheran
bishop.
Meanwhile Prof, John W. Draper published his book on The
Conflict between Science and Religion, a work of great
ability, which, as I then thought, ended the matter, So far as my
giving it further attention was concerned.
But two things led me to keep on developing my own work in this
field: First, I had become deeply interested in it, and could not
refrain from directing my observation and study to it; secondly,
much as I admired Draper's treatment of the questions involved,
his point of view and mode of looking at history were different
from mine.
He regarded the struggle as one between Science and Religion. I
believed then, and am convinced now, that it was a struggle
between Science and Dogmatic Theology.
More and more I saw that it was the conflict between two epochs
in the evolution of human thought -- the theological and the
scientific.
So I kept on, and from time to time published New Chapters in the
rene as mag of Science magazine articles in The Popular
Science Monthly. This was done under many difficulties. For
twenty years, as President of Cornell University and Professor of
History in that institution, I was immersed in the work of its
early development. Besides this, I could not hold myself entirely
aloof from public affairs, and was three times sent by the
Government of the United States to do public duty abroad: first as
a commissioner to Santo Domingo, in 1870; afterward as minister to
Germany, in 1879; finally, as minister to Russia, in 1892; and was
also called upon by the State of New York to do considerable labor
in connection with international exhibitions at Philadelphia and
at Paris. I was also obliged from time to time to throw off by
travel the effects of overwork.
The variety of residence and occupation arising from these causes
may perhaps explain some peculiarities in this book which might
otherwise puzzle my reader.
While these journeyings have enabled me to collect materials over
a very wide range -- in the New World, from Quebec to Santo
Domingo and from Boston to Mexico, San Francisco, and Seattle, and
in the Old World from Trondhjem to Cairo and from St. Petersburg
to Palermo -- they have often obliged me to write under
circumstances not very favorable: sometimes on an Atlantic
steamer, sometimes on a Nile boat, and not only in my, own library
at Cornell, but in those of Berlin, Helsingfors, Munich, Florence,
and the British Museum. This fact will explain to the benevolent
reader not only the citation of different editions of the same
authority in different chapters, but some iterations which in the
steady quiet of my own library would not have been made.
It has been my constant endeavor to write for the general reader,
avoiding scholastic and technical terms as much as possible and
stating the truth simply as it presents itself to me.
That errors of omission and commission will be found here and
there is probable -- nay, certain; but the substance of the book
will, I believe, be found fully true. I am encouraged in this
belief by the fact that, of the three bitter attacks which this
work in its earlier form has already encountered, one was purely
declamatory, objurgatory, and hortatory, and the others based upon
ignorance of facts easily pointed out.
And here I must express my thanks to those who have aided me.
First and above all to my former student and dear friend, Prof.
George Lincoln Burr, of Cornell University, to whose
contributions, suggestions, criticisms, and cautions I am most
deeply indebted; also to my friends U.G. Weatherly, formerly
Travelling Fellow of Cornell, and now Assistant Professor in the
University of Indiana, -- Prof. and Mrs. Earl Barnes and Prof.
William H. Hudson, of Stanford University, -- and Prof. E. P.
Evans, formerly of the University of Michigan, but now of Munich,
for extensive aid in researches upon the lines I have indicated to
them, but which I could never have prosecuted without their
cooperation. In libraries at home and abroad they have all worked
for me most effectively, and I am deeply grateful to them.
This book is presented as a sort of Festschrift -- a tribute to
Cornell University as it enters the second quarter-century of its
existence, and probably my last tribute.
The ideas for which so bitter a struggle was made at its
foundation have triumphed. Its faculty, numbering over one hundred
and fifty; its students numbering but little short of two
thousand; its noble buildings and equipment; the munificent gifts,
now amounting to millions of dollars, which it has received from
public-spirited men and women; the evidences of public confidence
on all sides; and, above all, the adoption of its cardinal
principles and main features by various institutions of learning
in other States, show this abundantly. But there has been a
triumph far greater and wider. Everywhere among the leading modern
nations the same general tendency is seen. During the
quarter-century, just past the control of public instruction, not
only in America but in the leading nations of Europe, has passed
more and more from the clergy to the laity. Not only are the
presidents of the larger universities in the United States, with
but one or two exceptions, laymen, but the same thing is seen in
the old European strongholds of metaphysical theology. At my first
visit to Oxford and Cambridge, forty years ago, they were entirely
under ecclesiastical control. Now, all this is changed. An eminent
member of the present British Government has recently said, "A
candidate for high university position is handicapped by holy
orders." I refer to this with not the slightest feeling of
hostility toward the clergy, for I have none; among them are many
of my dearest friends; no one honors their proper work more than
I; but the above fact is simply noted as proving the continuance
of that evolution which I have endeavored to describe in this
series of monographs -- an evolution, indeed, in which the warfare
of Theology against Science has been one of the most active and
powerful agents. My belief is that in the field left to them --
their proper field -- the clergy will more and more, as they cease
to struggle against scientific methods and conclusions, do work
even nobler and more beautiful than anything they have heretofore
done. And this is saying much. My conviction is that Science,
though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on
biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand
with Religion; and that, although theological control will
continue to diminish, Religion, as seen in the recognition of "a
Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for
righteousness," and in the love of God and of our neighbor, will
steadily grow stronger and stronger, not only in the American
institutions of learning but in the world at large. Thus may the
declaration of Micah as to the requirements of Jehovah, the
definition by St. James of "pure religion and undefiled," and,
above all, the precepts and ideals of the blessed Founder of
Christianity himself, be brought to bear more and more effectively
on mankind.
I close this preface some days after its first lines were
written. The sun of spring has done its work on the Neva the great
river flows tranquilly on, a blessing and a joy; the mujiks are
forgotten.
A.D.W.
Legation of the United States, St. Petersburg, April 14, 1894.
P.S. -- Owing to a wish to give more thorough revision to some
parts of my work, it has been withheld from the press until the
present date. Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y., August 15, 1895.
The science of biblical criticism was,
as we have seen, first developed mainly in Germany and Holland.
Many considerations there, as elsewhere, combined to deter men
from opening new paths to truth: not even in those countries were
these the paths to preferment; but there, at least, the sturdy
Teutonic love of truth for truth's sake, strengthened by the
Kantian ethics, found no such obstacles as in other parts of
Europe. Fair investigation of biblical subjects had not there been
extirpated, as in Italy and Spain; nor had it been forced into
channels which led nowhither, as in France and southern Germany;
nor were men who might otherwise have pursued it dazzled and drawn
away from it by the multitude of splendid prizes for plausibility,
for sophistry, or for silence displayed before the ecclesiastical
vision in England. In the frugal homes of North German and Dutch
professors and pastors high thinking on these great subjects went
steadily on, and the "liberty of teaching," which is the glory of
the northern Continental universities, while it did not secure
honest thinkers against vexations, did at least protect them
against the persecutions which in other countries would have
thwarted their studies and starved their families.
In England the admission of the new current of thought was
apparently impossible. The traditional system of biblical
interpretation seemed established on British soil forever. It was
knit into the whole fabric of thought and observance; it was
protected by the most justly esteemed hierarchy the world has ever
seen; it was intrenched behind the bishops' palaces, the cathedral
stalls, the professors' chairs, the country parsonages--all these,
as a rule, the seats of high endeavour and beautiful culture. The
older thought held a controlling voice in the senate of the
nation; it was dear to the hearts of all classes; it was superbly
endowed; every strong thinker seemed to hold a brief, or to be in
receipt of a retaining fee for it. As to preferment in the Church,
there was a cynical aphorism current, "He may hold anything who
will hold his tongue."
Yet, while there was inevitably much alloy of worldly wisdom in
the opposition to the new thought, no just thinker can deny far
higher motives to many, perhaps to most, of the ecclesiastics who
were resolute against it. The evangelical movement incarnate in
the Wesleys had not spent its strength; the movement begun by
Pusey, Newman, Keble, and their compeers was in full force. The
aesthetic reaction, represented on the Continent by Chateaubriand,
Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin,
Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to
this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction,
cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been
regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric masses of stone and
mortar, to be masked without by classic colonnades and within by
rococo work in stucco and _papier mache_, became even more beloved
than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by
theological disputations were fascinated and made devoted
reactionists by the newly revealed beauties of medieval
architecture and ritual.
The centre and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction
against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the
University of Oxford. Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special
exponent of its spirit and object of its admiration was its member
of Parliament, Mr, William Ewart Gladstone, who, having begun his
political career by a laboured plea for the union of church and
state, ended it by giving that union what is likely to be a
death-blow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in the days of
the Byzantine emperors was hardly more wildly orthodox than the
mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the
Anglo-Saxon race during the middle decades of the nineteenth
century. The Moslem students of El Azhar are hardly more
intolerant now than these English students were then. A curious
proof of this had been displayed just before the end of that
period. The minister of the United States at the court of St.
James was then Edward Everett. He was undoubtedly the most
accomplished scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that
America had produced; his eloquence in early life had made him
perhaps the most admired of American preachers; his classical
learning had at a later period made him Professor of Greek at
Harvard; he had successfully edited the leading American review,
and had taken a high place in American literature; he had been ten
years a member of Congress; he had been again and again elected
Governor of Massachusetts; and in all these posts he had shown
amply those qualities which afterward made him President of
Harvard, Secretary of State of the United States, and a United
States Senator. His character and attainments were of the highest,
and, as he was then occupying the foremost place in the diplomatic
service of his country, he was invited to receive an appropriate
honorary degree at Oxford. But, on his presentation for it in the
Sheldonian Theatre, there came a revelation to the people he
represented, and indeed to all Christendom: a riot having been
carefully prepared beforehand by sundry zealots, he was most
grossly and ingeniously insulted by the mob of undergraduates and
bachelors of art in the galleries and masters of arts on the
floor; and the reason for this was that, though by no means
radical in his religious opinions, he was thought to have been in
his early life, and to be possibly at that time, below what was
then the Oxford fashion in belief, or rather feeling, regarding
the mystery of the Trinity.
At the centre of biblical teaching at Oxford sat Pusey, Regius
Professor of Hebrew, a scholar who had himself remained for a time
at a German university, and who early in life had imbibed just
enough of the German spirit to expose him to suspicion and even to
attack. One charge against him at that time shows curiously what
was then expected of a man perfectly sound in the older Anglican
theology. He had ventured to defend holy writ with the argument
that there were fishes actually existing which could have
swallowed the prophet Jonah. The argument proved unfortunate. He
was attacked on the scriptural ground that the fish which
swallowed Jonah was created for that express purpose. He, like
others, fell back under the charm of the old system: his ideas
gave force to the reaction: in the quiet of his study, which,
especially after the death of his son, became a hermitage, he
relapsed into patristic and medieval conceptions of Christianity,
enforcing them from the pulpit and in his published works. He now
virtually accepted the famous dictum of Hugo of St. Victor--that
one is first to find what is to be believed, and then to search
the Scriptures for proofs of it. His devotion to the main features
of the older interpretation was seen at its strongest in his
utterances regarding the book of Daniel. Just as Cardinal
Bellarmine had insisted that the doctrine of the incarnation
depends upon the retention of the Ptolemaic astronomy; just as
Danzius had insisted that the very continuance of religion depends
on the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation; just as Peter
Martyr had made everything sacred depend on the literal acceptance
of Genesis; just as Bishop Warburton had insisted that
Christianity absolutely depends upon a right interpretation of the
prophecies regarding Antichrist; just as John Wesley had insisted
that the truth of the Bible depends on the reality of witchcraft;
just as, at a later period, Bishop Wilberforce insisted that the
doctrine of the Incarnation depends on the "Mosaic" statements
regarding the origin of man; and just as Canon Liddon insisted
that Christianity itself depends on a literal belief in Noah's
flood, in the transformation of Lot's wife, and in the sojourn of
Jonah in the whale: so did Pusey then virtually insist that
Christianity must stand or fall with the early date of the book of
Daniel. Happily, though the Ptolemaic astronomy, and witchcraft,
and the Genesis creation myths, and the Adam, Noah, Lot, and Jonah
legends, and the divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation, and the
prophecies regarding Antichrist, and the early date of the book of
Daniel have now been relegated to the limbo of ontworn beliefs,
Christianity has but come forth the stronger.
Nothing seemed less likely than that such a vast intrenched camp
as that of which Oxford was the centre could be carried by an
effort proceeding from a few isolated German and Dutch scholars.
Yet it was the unexpected which occurred; and it is instructive to
note that, even at the period when the champions of the older
thought were to all appearance impregnably intrenched in England,
a way had been opened into their citadel, and that the most
effective agents in preparing it were really the very men in the
universities and cathedral chapters who had most distinguished
themselves by uncompromising and intolerant orthodoxy.
A rapid survey of the history of general literary criticism at
that epoch will reveal this fact fully. During the last decade of
the seventeenth century there had taken place the famous
controversy over the _Letters of Phalaris_, in which, against
Charles Boyle and his supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard
Bentley at Cambridge, who insisted that the letters were spurious.
In the series of battles royal which followed, although Boyle,
aided by Atterbury, afterward so noted for his mingled
ecclesiastical and political intrigues, had gained a temporary
triumph by wit and humour, Bentley's final attack had proved
irresistible. Drawing from the stores of his wonderfully wide and
minute knowledge, he showed that the letters could not have been
written in the time of Phalaris--proving this by an exhibition of
their style, which could not then have been in use, of their
reference to events which had not then taken place, and of a mass
of considerations which no one but a scholar almost miraculously
gifted could have marshalled so fully. The controversy had
attracted attention not only in England but throughout Europe.
With Bentley's reply it had ended. In spite of public applause at
Atterbury's wit, scholars throughout the world acknowledged
Bentley's victory: he was recognised as the foremost classical
scholar of his time; the mastership of Trinity, which he accepted,
and the Bristol bishopric, which he rejected, were his formal
reward.
Although, in his new position as head of the greatest college in
England, he went to extreme lengths on the orthodox side in
biblical theology, consenting even to support the doctrine that
the Hebrew punctuation was divinely inspired, this was as nothing
compared with the influence of the system of criticism which he
introduced into English studies of classical literature in
preparing the way for the application of a similar system to _all_
literature, whether called sacred or profane.
Up to that period there had really been no adequate criticism of
ancient literature. Whatever name had been attached to any ancient
writing was usually accepted as the name of the author: what texts
should be imputed to an author was settled generally on authority.
But with Bentley began a new epoch. His acute intellect and
exquisite touch revealed clearly to English scholars the new
science of criticism, and familiarized the minds of thinking men
with the idea that the texts of ancient literature must be
submitted to this science. Henceforward a new spirit reigned among
the best classical scholars, prophetic of more and more light in
the greater field of sacred literature. Scholars, of whom Porson
was chief, followed out this method, and though at times, as in
Porson's own case, they were warned off, with much loss and
damage, from the application of it to the sacred text, they kept
alive the better tradition.
A hundred years after Bentley's main efforts appeared in Germany
another epoch-making book--Wolf's _Introduction to Homer_. In this
was broached the theory that the _Iliad_ and _Odyssey_ are not the
works of a single great poet, but are made up of ballad literature
wrought into unity by more or less skilful editing. In spite of
various changes and phases of opinion on this subject since Wolf's
day, he dealt a killing blow at the idea that classical works are
necessarily to be taken at what may be termed their face value.
More and more clearly it was seen that the ideas of early
copyists, and even of early possessors of masterpieces in ancient
literature, were entirely different from those to which the modern
world is accustomed. It was seen that manipulations and
interpolations in the text by copyists and possessors had long
been considered not merely venial sins, but matters of right, and
that even the issuing of whole books under assumed names had been
practised freely.
In 1811 a light akin to that thrown by Bentley and Wolf upon
ancient literature was thrown by Niebuhr upon ancient history. In
his _History of Rome_ the application of scientific principles to
the examination of historical sources was for the first time
exhibited largely and brilliantly. Up to that period the
time-honoured utterances of ancient authorities had been, as a
rule, accepted as final: no breaking away, even from the most
absurd of them, was looked upon with favour, and any one presuming
to go behind them was regarded as troublesome and even as
dangerous.
Through this sacred conventionalism Niebuhr broke fearlessly,
and, though at times overcritical, he struck from the early
history of Rome a vast mass of accretions, and gave to the world a
residue infinitely more valuable than the original amalgam of
myth, legend, and chronicle.
His methods were especially brought to bear on students' history
by one of the truest men and noblest scholars that the English
race has produced--Arnold of Rugby--and, in spite of the
inevitable heavy conservatism, were allowed to do their work in
the field of ancient history as well as in that of ancient
classical literature.
The place of myth in history thus became more and more
understood, and historical foundations, at least so far as
_secular_ history was concerned, were henceforth dealt with in a
scientific spirit. The extension of this new treatment to _all_
ancient literature and history was now simply a matter of time.
Such an extension had already begun; for in 1829 had appeared
Milman's _History of the Jews_. In this work came a further
evolution of the truths and methods suggested by Bentley, Wolf,
and Niebuhr, and their application to sacred history was made
strikingly evident. Milman, though a clergyman, treated the
history of the chosen people in the light of modern knowledge of
Oriental and especially of Semitic peoples. He exhibited sundry
great biblical personages of the wandering days of Israel as
sheiks or emirs or Bedouin chieftains; and the tribes of Israel as
obedient then to the same general laws, customs, and ideas
governing wandering tribes in the same region now. He dealt with
conflicting sources somewhat in the spirit of Bentley, and with
the mythical, legendary, and miraculous somewhat in the spirit of
Niebuhr. This treatment of the history of the Jews, simply as the
development of an Oriental tribe, raised great opposition. Such
champions of orthodoxy as Bishop Mant and Dr. Faussett straightway
took the field, and with such effect that the _Family Library_, a
very valuable series in which Milman's history appeared, was put
under the ban, and its further publication stopped. For years
Milman, though a man of exquisite literary and lofty historical
gifts, as well as of most honourable character, was debarred from
preferment and outstripped by ecclesiastics vastly inferior to him
in everything save worldly wisdom; for years he was passed in the
race for honours by divines who were content either to hold briefs
for all the contemporary unreason which happened to be popular, or
to keep their mouths shut altogether. This opposition to him
extended to his works. For many years they were sneered at,
decried, and kept from the public as far as possible.
Fortunately, the progress of events lifted him, before the
closing years of his life, above all this opposition. As Dean of
St. Paul's he really outranked the contemporary archbishops: he
lived to see his main ideas accepted, and his _History of Latin
Christianity_ received as certainly one of the most valuable, and
no less certainly the most attractive, of all Church histories
ever written.
The two great English histories of Greece--that by Thirlwall,
which was finished, and that by Grote, which was begun, in the
middle years of the nineteenth century--came in to strengthen this
new development. By application of the critical method to
historical sources, by pointing out more and more fully the
inevitable part played by myth and legend in early chronicles, by
displaying more and more clearly the ease with which
interpolations of texts, falsifications of statements, and
attributions to pretended authors were made, they paved the way
still further toward a just and fruitful study of sacred
literature.
Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the traditionally
orthodox side of English scholarship, while it had not been able
to maintain any effective quarantine against Continental criticism
of classical literature, had been able to keep up barriers fairly
strong against Continental discussions of sacred literature. But
in the second half of the nineteenth century these barriers were
broken at many points, and, the stream of German thought being
united with the current of devotion to truth in England, there
appeared early in 1860 a modest volume entitled _Essays and
Reviews_. This work discussed sundry of the older theological
positions which had been rendered untenable by modern research,
and brought to bear upon them the views of the newer school of
biblical interpretation. The authors were, as a rule, scholars in
the prime of life, holding influential positions in the
universities and public schools. They were seven--the first being
Dr. Temple, a successor of Arnold at Rugby; and the others, the
Rev. Dr. Rowland Williams, Prof. Baden Powell, the Rev. H. B.
Wilson, Mr. C. W. Goodwin, the Rev. Mark Pattison, and the Rev.
Prof. Jowett--the only one of the seven not in holy orders being
Goodwin. All the articles were important, though the first, by
Temple, on _The Education of the world_, and the last, by Jowett,
on _The Interpretation of Scripture_, being the most moderate,
served most effectually as entering wedges into the old tradition.
At first no great attention was paid to the book, the only notice
being the usual attempts in sundry clerical newspapers to
pooh-pooh it. But in October, 1860, appeared in the _Westminster
Review_ an article exulting in the work as an evidence that the
new critical method had at last penetrated the Church of England.
The opportunity for defending the Church was at once seized by no
less a personage than Bishop Wilberforce, of Oxford, the same who
a few months before had secured a fame more lasting than enviable
by his attacks on Darwin and the evolutionary theory. His first
onslaught was made in a charge to his clergy. This he followed up
with an article in the _Quarterly Review_, very explosive in its
rhetoric, much like that which he had devoted in the same
periodical to Darwin. The bishop declared that the work tended
"toward infidelity, if not to atheism"; that the writers had been
"guilty of criminal levity"; that, with the exception of the essay
by Dr. Temple, their writings were "full of sophistries and
scepticisms." He was especially bitter against Prof. Jowett's
dictum, "Interpret the Scripture like any other book"; he insisted
that Mr. Goodwin's treatment of the Mosaic account of the origin
of man "sweeps away the whole basis of inspiration and leaves no
place for the Incarnation"; and through the article were scattered
such rhetorical adornments as the words "infidel," "atheistic,"
"false," and "wanton." It at once attracted wide attention, but
its most immediate effect was to make the fortune of _Essays and
Reviews_, which was straightway demanded on every hand, went
through edition after edition, and became a power in the land. At
this a panic began, and with the usual results of panic--much
folly and some cruelty. Addresses from clergy and laity, many of
them frantic with rage and fear, poured in upon the bishops,
begging them to save Christianity and the Church: a storm of abuse
arose: the seven essayists were stigmatized as "the seven
extinguishers of the seven lamps of the Apocalypse," "the seven
champions _not_ of Christendom." As a result of all this pressure,
Sumner, Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the last of the old,
kindly, bewigged pluralists of the Georgian period, headed a
declaration, which was signed by the Archbishop of York and a long
list of bishops, expressing pain at the appearance of the book,
but doubts as to the possibility of any effective dealing with it.
This letter only made matters worse. The orthodox decried it as
timid, and the liberals denounced it as irregular. The same
influences were exerted in the sister island, and the Protestant
archbishops in Ireland issued a joint letter warning the faithful
against the "disingenuousness" of the book. Everything seemed to
increase the ferment. A meeting of clergy and laity having been
held at Oxford in the matter of electing a Professor of Sanscrit,
the older orthodox party, having made every effort to defeat the
eminent scholar Max Miller, and all in vain, found relief after
their defeat in new denunciations of _Essays and Reviews_.
Of the two prelates who might have been expected to breast the
storm, Tait, Bishop of London, afterward Archbishop of Canterbury,
bent to it for a period, though he soon recovered himself and did
good service; the other, Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, bided
his time, and, when the proper moment came, struck most effective
blows for truth and justice.
Tait, large-minded and shrewd, one of the most statesmanlike of
prelates, at first endeavoured to detach Temple and Jowett from
their associates; but, though Temple was broken down with a load
of care, and especially by the fact that he had upon his shoulders
the school at Rugby, whose patrons had become alarmed at his
connection with the book, he showed a most refreshing courage and
manliness. A passage from his letters to the Bishop of London runs
as follows: "With regard to my own conduct I can only say that
nothing on earth will induce me to do what you propose. I do not
judge for others, but in me it would be base and untrue." On
another occasion Dr. Temple, when pressed in the interest of the
institution of learning under his care to detach himself from his
associates in writing the book, declared to a meeting of the
masters of the school that, if any statements were made to the
effect that he disapproved of the other writers in the volume, he
should probably find it his duty to contradict them. Another of
these letters to the Bishop of London contains sundry passages of
great force. One is as follows: "Many years ago you urged us from
the university pulpit to undertake the critical study of the
Bible. You said that it was a dangerous study, but indispensable.
You described its difficulties, and those who listened must have
felt a confidence (as I assuredly did, for I was there) that if
they took your advice and entered on the task, you, at any rate,
would never join in treating them unjustly if their study had
brought with it the difficulties you described. Such a study, so
full of difficulties, imperatively demands freedom for its
condition. To tell a man to study, and yet bid him, under heavy
penalties, come to the same conclusions with those who have not
studied, is to mock him. If the conclusions are prescribed, the
study is precluded." And again, what, as coming from a man who has
since held two of the most important bishoprics in the English
Church, is of great importance: "What can be a grosser
superstition than the theory of literal inspiration? But because
that has a regular footing it is to be treated as a good man's
mistake, while the courage to speak the truth about the first
chapter of Genesis is a wanton piece of wickedness."
The storm howled on. In the Convocation of Canterbury it was
especially violent. In the Lower House Archdeacon Denison insisted
on the greatest severity, as he said, "for the sake of the young
who are tainted, and corrupted, and thrust almost to hell by the
action of this book." At another time the same eminent churchman
declared: "Of all books in any language which I ever laid my hands
on, this is incomparably the worst; it contains all the poison
which is to be found in Tom Paine's _Age of Reason_, while it has
the additional disadvantage of having been written by clergymen."
Hysterical as all this was, the Upper House was little more
self-contained. Both Tait and Thirlwall, trying to make some
headway against the swelling tide, were for a time beaten back by
Wilberforce, who insisted on the duty of the Church to clear
itself publicly from complicity with men who, as he said, "gave up
God's Word, Creation, redemption, and the work of the Holy Ghost."
The matter was brought to a curious issue by two
prosecutions--one against the Rev. Dr. Williams by the Bishop of
Salisbury, the other against the Rev. Mr. Wilson by one of his
clerical brethren. The first result was that both these authors
were sentenced to suspension from their offices for a year. At
this the two condemned clergymen appealed to the Queen in Council.
Upon the judicial committee to try the case in last resort sat the
lord chancellor, the two archbishops, and the Bishop of London;
and one occurrence now brought into especial relief the power of
the older theological reasoning and ecclesiastical zeal to close
the minds of the best of men to the simplest principles of right
and justice. Among the men of his time most deservedly honoured
for lofty character, thorough scholarship, and keen perception of
right and justice was Dr. Pusey. No one doubted then, and no one
doubts now, that he would have gone to the stake sooner than
knowingly countenance wrong or injustice; and yet we find him at
this time writing a series of long and earnest letters to the
Bishop of London, who, as a judge, was hearing this case, which
involved the livelihood and even the good name of the men on
trial, pointing out to the bishop the evil consequences which must
follow should the authors of _Essays and Reviews_ be acquitted,
and virtually beseeching the judges, on grounds of expediency, to
convict them. Happily, Bishop Tait was too just a man to be thrown
off his bearings by appeals such as this.
The decision of the court, as finally rendered by the lord
chancellor, virtually declared it to be no part of the duty of the
tribunal to pronounce any opinion upon the book; that the court
only had to do with certain extracts which had been presented.
Among these was one adduced in support of a charge against Mr.
Wilson--that he denied the doctrine of eternal punishment. On this
the court decided that it did "not find in the formularies of the
English Church any such distinct declaration upon the subject as
to require it to punish the expression of a hope by a clergyman
that even the ultimate pardon of the wicked who are condemned in
the day of judgment may be consistent with the will of Almighty
God." While the archbishops dissented from this judgment, Bishop
Tait united in it with the lord chancellor and the lay judges.
And now the panic broke out more severely than ever. Confusion
became worse confounded. The earnest-minded insisted that the
tribunal had virtually approved _Essays and Reviews_; the cynical
remarked that it had "dismissed hell with costs." An alliance was
made at once between the more zealous High and Low Church men, and
Oxford became its headquarters: Dr. Pusey and Archdeacon Denison
were among the leaders, and an impassioned declaration was posted
to every clergyman in England and Ireland, with a letter begging
him, "for the love of God," to sign it. Thus it was that in a very
short time eleven thousand signatures were obtained. Besides this,
deputations claiming to represent one hundred and thirty-seven
thousand laymen waited on the archbishops to thank them for
dissenting from the judgment. The Convocation of Canterbury also
plunged into the fray, Bishop Wilberforce being the champion of
the older orthodoxy, and Bishop Tait of the new. Caustic was the
speech made by Bishop Thirlwall, in which he declared that he
considered the eleven thousand names, headed by that of Pusey,
attached to the Oxford declaration "in the light of a row of
figures preceded by a decimal point, so that, however far the
series may be advanced, it never can rise to the value of a single
unit."
In spite of all that could be done, the act of condemnation was
carried in Convocation.
The last main echo of this whole struggle against the newer mode
of interpretation was heard when the chancellor, referring to the
matter in the House of Lords, characterized the ecclesiastical act
as "simply a series of well-lubricated terms--a sentence so oily
and saponaceous that no one can grasp it; like an eel, it slips
through your fingers, and is simply nothing."
The word "saponaceous" necessarily elicited a bitter retort from
Bishop Wilberforce; but perhaps the most valuable judgment on the
whole matter was rendered by Bishop Tait, who declared, "These
things have so effectually frightened the clergy that I think
there is scarcely a bishop on the bench, unless it be the Bishop
of St. David's [Thirlwall], that is not useless for the purpose of
preventing the widespread alienation of intelligent men."
During the whole controversy, and for some time afterward, the
press was burdened with replies, ponderous and pithy, lurid and
vapid, vitriolic and unctuous, but in the main bearing the
inevitable characteristics of pleas for inherited opinions
stimulated by ample endowments.
The authors of the book seemed for a time likely to be swept out
of the Church. One of the least daring but most eminent, finding
himself apparently forsaken, seemed, though a man of very tough
fibre, about to die of a broken heart; but sturdy English sense at
last prevailed. The storm passed, and afterward came the still,
small voice. Really sound thinkers throughout England, especially
those who held no briefs for conventional orthodoxy, recognised
the service rendered by the book. It was found that, after all,
there existed even among churchmen a great mass of public opinion
in favour of giving a full hearing to the reverent expression of
honest thought, and inclined to distrust any cause which subjected
fair play to zeal.
The authors of the work not only remained in the Church of
England, but some of them have since represented the broader
views, though not always with their early courage, in the highest
and most influential positions in the Anglican Church.
In 1862 appeared a work entitled _The Pentateuch and the Book of
Joshua Critically Examined_ its author being Colenso, Anglican
Bishop of Natal, in South Africa. He had formerly been highly
esteemed as fellow and tutor at Cambridge, master at Harrow,
author of various valuable text-books in mathematics; and as long
as he exercised his powers within the limits of popular orthodoxy
he was evidently in the way to the highest positions in the
Church: but he chose another path. His treatment of his subject
was reverent, but he had gradually come to those conclusions, then
so daring, now so widespread among Christian scholars, that the
Pentateuch, with much valuable historical matter, Contains much
that is unhistorical; that a large portion of it was the work of a
comparatively late period in Jewish history; that many passages in
Deuteronomy could only have been written after the Jews settled in
Canaan; that the Mosaic law was not in force before the captivity;
that the books of Chronicles were clearly written as an
afterthought, to enforce the views of the priestly caste; and that
in all the books there is much that is mythical and legendary.
Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced this work
of a churchman relegated to the most petty of bishoprics in one of
the most remote corners of the world, as a proof "that the
problems of biblical criticism can no longer be suppressed; that
they are in the air of our time, so that theology could not escape
them even if it took the wings of the morning and dwelt in the
uttermost parts of the sea."
The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused
horror. Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical
arguments, and among them those which showed that an army of six
hundred thousand men could not have been mobilized in a single
night; that three millions of people, with their flocks and herds,
could neither have obtained food on so small and arid a desert as
that over which they were said to have wandered during forty
years, nor water from a single well; and that the butchery of two
hundred thousand Midianites by twelve thousand israelites,
"exceeding infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, had
happily only been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the
scoffer in him. While preserving his own independence, he had kept
in touch with the most earnest thought both among European
scholars and in the little flock intrusted to his care. He
evidently remembered what had resulted from the attempt to hold
the working classes in the towns of France, Germany, and Italy to
outworn beliefs; he had found even the Zulus, whom he thought to
convert, suspicious of the legendary features of the Old
Testament, and with his clear practical mind he realized the
danger which threatened the English Church and Christianity--the
danger of tying its religion and morality to interpretations and
conceptions of Scripture more and more widely seen and felt to be
contrary to facts. He saw the especial peril of sham explanations,
of covering up facts which must soon be known, and which, when
revealed, must inevitably bring the plain people of England to
regard their teachers, even the most deserving, as "solemnly
constituted impostors"--ecclesiastics whose tenure depends on
assertions which they know to be untrue. Therefore it was that,
when his catechumens questioned him regarding some of the Old
Testament legends, the bishop determined to tell the truth. He
says: "My heart answered in the words of the prophet, `Shall a man
speak lies in the name of the Lord?' I determined not to do so."
But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first.
The outcry against the work was deafening: churchmen and
dissenters rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison,
chairman of the committee of Convocation appointed to examine it,
uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and a
zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, deposed
and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given over to
Satan." On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned with
"answers," some of these being especially injurious to the cause
they were intended to serve, and none more so than sundry efforts
by the bishops themselves. One of the points upon which they
attacked him was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus to
the hare chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this Prof.
Hitzig, of Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time,
remarked: "Your bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock
of Europe. Every Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in
Leviticus is really the hare;... every zoologist knows that it
does not chew the cud."
On Colenso's return to Natal, where many of the clergy and laity
who felt grateful for his years of devotion to them received him
with signs of affection, an attempt was made to ruin these
clergymen by depriving them of their little stipends, and to
terrify the simple-minded laity by threatening them with the same
"greater excommunication" which had been inflicted upon their
bishop. To make the meaning of this more evident, the
vicar-general of the Bishop of Cape Town met Colenso at the door
of his own cathedral, and solemnly bade him "depart from the house
of God as one who has been handed over to the Evil One." The
sentence of excommunication was read before the assembled
faithful, and they were enjoined to treat their bishop as "a
heathen man and a publican." But these and a long series of other
persecutions created a reaction in his favour.
There remained to Colenso one bulwark which his enemies found
stronger than they had imagined--the British courts of justice.
The greatest efforts were now made to gain the day before these
courts, to humiliate Colenso, and to reduce to beggary the clergy
who remained faithful to him; and it is worthy of note that one of
the leaders in preparing the legal plea of the com mittee against
him was Mr. Gladstone.
But this bulwark proved impregnable: both the Judicial Committee
of the Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's
favour. Not only were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him of
his salary, but their excommunication of him was made null and
void; it became, indeed, a subject of ridicule, and even a man so
nurtured in religious sentiment as John Keble confessed and
lamented that the English people no longer believed in
excommunication. The bitterness of the defeated found vent in the
utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had excommunicated
Colenso--Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town"--who denounced the
judgment as "awful and profane," and the Privy Council as "a
masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the English
Church." Even Wilberforce, careful as he was to avoid attacking
anything established, alluded with deep regret to "the devotion of
the English people to the law in matters of this sort."
Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence
of the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England
and America, was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and
various dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains
were taken to root out his reputation: it was declared that he had
merely stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by
wholesale, and peddled them out in England at retail; the fact
being that, while he used all the sources of information at his
command, and was large-minded enough to put himself into relations
with the best biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was
singularly independent in his judgment, and that his
investigations were of lasting value in modifying Continental
thought. Kuenen, the most distinguished of all his contemporaries
in this field, modified, as he himself declared, one of his own
leading theories after reading Colenso's argument; and other
Continental scholars scarcely less eminent acknowledged their
great indebtedness to the English scholar for original
suggestions.
But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He
was socially ostracized--more completely even than Lyell had been
after the publication of his _Principles of Geology_ thirty years
before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison
Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had been
defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who turned
against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a true
ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and people,
of all books in the world, Spinoza's _Tractatus_. A large part of
the English populace was led to regard him as an "infidel," a
"traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean being"; servants
left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart were let
loose upon him"; and one of the favourite amusements of the period
among men of petty wit and no convictions was the devising of
light ribaldry against him.
In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of
whom has connected his name with it permanently.
First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of
Oxford. The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been
honoured throughout the world for his efforts in the suppression
of the slave trade, he had been rapidly advanced in the English
Church, and was at this time a prelate of wide influence. He was
eloquent and diplomatic, witty and amiable, always sure to be with
his fellow-churchmen and polite society against uncomfortable
changes. Whether the struggle was against the slave power in the
United States, or the squirearchy in Great Britain, or the
evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views promulgated by the
_Essayists and Reviewers_, he was always the suave spokesman of
those who opposed every innovator and "besought him to depart out
of their coasts." Mingling in curious proportions a truly
religious feeling with care for his own advancement, his
remarkable power in the pulpit gave him great strength to carry
out his purposes, and his charming facility in being all things to
all men, as well as his skill in evading the consequences of his
many mistakes, gained him the sobriquet of "Soapy Sam." If such
brethren of his in the episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn and Tait
might claim to be in the apostolic succession, Wilberforce was no
less surely in the succession from the most gifted and eminently
respectable Sadducees who held high preferment under Pontius
Pilate.
By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached
the sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and
one passage in it may be cited as showing the preacher's gift of
prophecy both hortatory and predictive. Wilberforce then said to
Colenso: "You need boldness to risk all for God--to stand by the
truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the
devil's wrath;... you need a patient meekness to bear the galling
calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that
same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your body,
will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of
deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of a zeal for
Christ, will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your
motives, rejoice in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and
seek by every poisoned breath of slander to destroy your powers of
service."
Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice his adviser
became the most untiring of his persecutors. While leaving to men
like the Metropolitan of Cape Town and Archdeacon Denison the
noisy part of the onslaught, Wilberforce was among those who were
most zealous in devising more effective measures.
But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance between
the two prelates. Colenso is seen more and more of all men as a
righteous leader in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from
fatal entanglements with an outworn system of interpretation;
Wilberforce, as the remembrance of his eloquence and of his
personal charm dies away, and as the revelations of his indiscreet
biographers lay bare his modes of procedure, is seen to have left,
on the whole, the most disappointing record made by any Anglican
prelate during the nineteenth century.
But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of
England; for the second of the three who linked their names with
that of Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean
of Westminster. His action during this whole persecution was an
honour not only to the Anglican Church but to humanity. For his
own manhood and the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he
had cheerfully given up the high preferment in the Church which
had been easily within his grasp. To him truth and justice were
more than the decrees of a Convocation of Canterbury or of a
Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he braved the
storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to last
held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the
most critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster
Abbey.
The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England
whose names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall. He was
undoubtedly the foremost man in the Church of his time--the
greatest ecclesiastical statesman, the profoundest historical
scholar, the theologian of clearest vision in regard to the
relations between the Church and his epoch. Alone among his
brother bishops at this period, he stood "four square to all the
winds that blew," as during all his life he stood against all
storms of clerical or popular unreason. He had his reward. He was
never advanced beyond a poor Welsh bishopric; but, though he saw
men wretchedly inferior constantly promoted beyond him, he never
flinched, never lost heart or hope, but bore steadily on, refusing
to hold a brief for lucrative injustice, and resisting to the last
all reaction and fanaticism, thus preserving not only his own
self-respect but the future respect of the English nation for the
Church.
A few other leading churchmen were discreetly kind to Colenso,
among them Tait, who had now been made Archbishop of Canterbury;
but, manly as he was, he was somewhat more cautious in this matter
than those who most revere his memory could now wish.
In spite of these friends the clerical onslaught was for a time
effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was
discredited and virtually driven from his functions. But this
enforced leisure simply gave him more time to struggle for the
protection of his native flock against colonial rapacity and to
continue his great work on the Bible.
His work produced its effect. It had much to do with arousing a
new generation of English, Scotch, and American scholars. While
very many of his minor statements have since been modified or
rejected, his main conclusion was seen more and more clearly to be
true. Reverently and in the deepest love for Christianity he had
made the unhistorical character of the Pentateuch clear as
noonday. Henceforth the crushing weight of the old interpretation
upon science and morality and religion steadily and rapidly grew
less and less. That a new epoch had come was evident, and out of
many proofs of this we may note two of the most striking.
For many years the Bampton Lectures at Oxford had been considered
as adding steadily and strongly to the bulwarks of the old
orthodoxy. If now and then orthodoxy had appeared in danger from
such additions to the series as those made by Dr. Hampden, these
lectures had been, as a rule, saturated with the older traditions
of the Anglican Church. But now there was an evident change. The
departures from the old paths were many and striking, until at
last, in 1893, came the lectures on _Inspiration_ by the Rev. Dr.
Sanday, Ireland Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford.
In these, concessions were made to the newer criticism, which at
an earlier time would have driven the lecturer not only out of the
Church but out of any decent position in society; for Prof. Sanday
not only gave up a vast mass of other ideas which the great body
of churchmen had regarded as fundamental, but accepted a number of
conclusions established by the newer criticism. He declared that
Kuenen and Wellhausen had mapped out, on the whole rightly, the
main stages of development in the history of Hebrew literature; he
incorporated with approval the work of other eminent heretics; he
acknowledged that very many statements in the Pentateuch show "the
naive ideas and usages of a primitive age." But, most important of
all, he gave up the whole question in regard to the book of
Daniel. Up to a time then very recent, the early authorship and
predictive character of the book of Daniel were things which no
one was allowed for a moment to dispute. Pusey, as we have seen,
had proved to the controlling parties in the English Church that
Christianity must stand or fall with the traditional view of this
book; and now, within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in
his own university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence
he had so often insisted upon the absolute necessity of
maintaining the older view, this professor of biblical criticism,
a doctor of divinity, showing conclusively as regards the book of
Daniel that the critical view had won the day; that the name of
Daniel is only assumed; that the book is in no sense predictive,
but was written, mainly at least, after the events it describes;
that "its author lived at the time of the Maccabean struggle";
that it is very inaccurate even in the simple facts which it
cites; and hence that all the vast fabric erected upon its
predictive character is baseless.
But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even
more striking.
To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even
every germ that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a
special movement was begun, of which the most important part was
the establishment, at the University of Oxford, of a college which
should bring the old opinion with crushing force against the new
thought, and should train up a body of young men by feeding them
upon the utterances of the fathers, of the medieval doctors, and
of the apologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and
should keep them in happy ignorance of the reforming spirit of the
sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century.
The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet most
widely beloved among high churchmen; large endowments flowed in
upon it; a showy chapel was erected in accordance throughout with
the strictest rules of medieval ecclesiology. As if to strike the
keynote of the thought to be fostered in the new institution, one
of the most beautiful of pseudo-medieval pictures was given the
place of honour in its hall; and the college, lofty and gaudy,
loomed high above the neighbouring modest abode of Oxford science.
Kuenen might be victorious in Holland, and Wellhausen in Germany,
and Robertson Smith in Scotland--even Professors Driver, Sanday,
and Cheyne might succeed Dr. Pusey as expounders of the Old
Testament at Oxford--but Keble College, rejoicing in the favour of
a multitude of leaders in the Church, including Mr. Gladstone,
seemed an inexpugnable fortress of the older thought.
But in 1889 appeared the book of essays entitled _Lux Mundi_,
among whose leading authors were men closely connected with Keble
College and with the movement which had created it. This work gave
up entirely the tradition that the narrative in Genesis is a
historical record, and admitted that all accounts in the Hebrew
Scriptures of events before the time of Abraham are mythical and
legendary; it conceded that the books ascribed to Moses and Joshua
were made up mainly of three documents representing different
periods, and one of them the late period of the exile; that "there
is a considerable idealizing element in Old Testament history";
that "the books of Chronicles show an idealizing of history" and
"a reading back into past records of a ritual development which is
really later," and that prophecy is not necessarily predictive--
"prophetic inspiration being consistent with erroneous
anticipations." Again a shudder went through the upholders of
tradition in the Church, and here and there threats were heard;
but the _Essays and Reviews_ fiasco and the Colenso catastrophe
were still in vivid remembrance. Good sense prevailed: Benson,
Archbishop of Canterbury, instead of prosecuting the authors,
himself asked the famous question, "May not the Holy Spirit make
use of myth and legend?" and the Government, not long afterward,
promoted one of these authors to a bishopric.
In the sister university the same tendency was seen. Robertson
Smith, who had been driven out of his high position in the Free
Church of Scotland on account of his work in scriptural research,
was welcomed into a professorship at Cambridge, and other men, no
less loyal to the new truths, were given places of controlling
influence in shaping the thought of the new generation.
Nor did the warfare against biblical science produce any
different results among the dissenters of England. In 1862 Samuel
Davidson, a professor in the Congregational College at Manchester,
published his _Introduction to the Old Testament_. Independently
of the contemporary writers of _Essays and Reviews_, he had
arrived in a general way at conclusions much like theirs, and he
presented the newer view with fearless honesty, admitting that the
same research must be applied to these as to other Oriental sacred
books, and that such research establishes the fact that all alike
contain legendary and mythical elements. A storm was at once
aroused; certain denominational papers took up the matter, and
Davidson was driven from his professorial chair; but he laboured
bravely on, and others followed to take up his work, until the
ideas which he had advocated were fully considered.
So, too, in Scotland the work of Robertson Smith was continued
even after he had been driven into England; and, as votaries of
the older thought passed away, men of ideas akin to his were
gradually elected into chairs of biblical criticism and
interpretation. Wellhausen's great work, which Smith had
introduced in English form, proved a power both in England and
Scotland, and the articles upon various books of Scripture and
scriptural subjects generally, in the ninth edition of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, having been prepared mainly by himself
as editor or put into the hands of others representing the recent
critical research, this very important work of reference, which
had been in previous editions so timid, was now arrayed on the
side of the newer thought, insuring its due consideration wherever
the English language is spoken.
In France the same tendency was seen, though with striking
variations from the course of events in other
countries--variations due to the very different conditions under
which biblical students in France were obliged to work. Down to
the middle of the nineteenth century the orthodoxy of Bossuet,
stiffly opposing the letter of Scripture to every step in the
advance of science, had only yielded in a very slight degree. But
then came an event ushering in a new epoch. At that time Jules
Simon, afterward so eminent as an author, academician, and
statesman, was quietly discharging the duties of a professorship,
when there was brought him the visiting card of a stranger bearing
the name of "Ernest Renan, Student at St. Sulpice." Admitted to M.
Simon's library, Renan told his story. As a theological student he
had devoted himself most earnestly, even before he entered the
seminary, to the study of Hebrew and the Semitic languages, and he
was now obliged, during the lectures on biblical literature at St.
Sulpice, to hear the reverend professor make frequent comments,
based on the Vulgate, but absolutely disproved by Renan's own
knowledge of Hebrew. On Renan's questioning any interpretation of
the lecturer, the latter was wont to rejoin: "Monsieur, do you
presume to deny the authority of the Vulgate--the translation by
St. Jerome, sanctioned by the Holy Ghost and the Church? You will
at once go into the chapel and say `Hail Mary' for an hour before
the image of the Blessed Virgin."
"But," said Renan to Jules Simon, "this has now become very
serious; it happens nearly every day, and, _mon Dieu_! Monsieur, I
can not spend _all_ my time in saying, Hail Mary, before the
statue of the Virgin." The result was a warm personal attachment
between Simon and Renan; both were Bretons, educated in the midst
of the most orthodox influences, and both had unwillingly broken
away from them.
Renan was now emancipated, and pursued his studies with such
effect that he was made professor at the College de France. His
_Life of Jesus_, and other books showing the same spirit, brought
a tempest upon him which drove him from his professorship and
brought great hardships upon him for many years. But his genius
carried the day, and, to the honour of the French Republic, he was
restored to the position from which the Empire had driven him.
From his pen finally appeared the _Histoire du Peuple Israel_, in
which scholarship broad, though at times inaccurate in minor
details, was supplemented by an exquisite acuteness and a poetic
insight which far more than made good any of those lesser errors
which a German student would have avoided. At his death, in
October, 1892, this monumental work had been finished. In
clearness and beauty of style it has never been approached by any
other treatise on this or any kindred subject: it is a work of
genius; and its profound insight into all that is of importance in
the great subjects which he treated will doubtless cause it to
hold a permanent place in the literature not only of the Latin
nations but of the world.
An interesting light is thrown over the history of advancing
thought at the end of the nineteenth century by the fact that this
most detested of heresiarchs was summoned to receive the highest
of academic honours at the university which for ages had been
regarded as a stronghold of Presbyterian orthodoxy in Great
Britain.
In France the anathemas lavished upon him by Church authorities
during his life, their denial to him of Christian burial, and
their refusal to allow him a grave in the place he most loved,
only increased popular affection for him during his last years and
deepened the general mourning at his death.
In spite of all resistance, the desire for more light upon the
sacred books penetrated the older Church from every side.
In Germany, toward the close of the eighteenth century, Jahn,
Catholic professor at Vienna, had ventured, in an _Introduction to
Old Testament Study_, to class Job, Jonah, and Tobit below other
canonical books, and had only escaped serious difficulties by
ample amends in a second edition.
Early in the nineteenth century, Herbst, Catholic professor at
Tubingen, had endeavoured in a similar _Introduction_ to bring
modern research to bear on the older view; but the Church
authorities took care to have all passages really giving any new
light skilfully and speedily edited out of the book.
Later still, Movers, professor at Breslau, showed remarkable
gifts for Old Testament research, and much was expected of him;
but his ecclesiastical superiors quietly prevented his publishing
any extended work.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century much the same
pressure has continued in Catholic Germany. Strong scholars have
very generally been drawn into the position of "apologists" or
"reconcilers," and, when found intractable, they have been driven
out of the Church.
The same general policy had been evident in France and Italy, but
toward the last decade of the century it was seen by the more
clear-sighted supporters of the older Church in those countries
that the multifarious "refutations" and explosive attacks upon
Renan and his teachings had accomplished nothing; that even
special services of atonement for his sin, like the famous
"_Triduo_" at Florence, only drew a few women, and provoked
ridicule among the public at large; that throwing him out of his
professorship and calumniating him had but increased his
influence; and that his brilliant intuitions, added to the careful
researches of German and English scholars, had brought the
thinking world beyond the reach of the old methods of hiding
troublesome truths and crushing persistent truth-tellers.
Therefore it was that about 1890 a body of earnest Roman Catholic
scholars began very cautiously to examine and explain the biblical
text in the light of those results of the newer research which
could no longer be gainsaid.
Among these men were, in Italy, Canon Bartolo, Canon Berta, and
Father Savi, and in France Monseigneur d'Hulst, the Abb Loisy,
professor at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most
eminent of all, Professor Lenormant, of the French Institute,
whose researches into biblical and other ancient history and
literature had won him distinction throughout the world. These
men, while standing up manfully for the Church, were obliged to
allow that some of the conclusions of modern biblical criticism
were well founded. The result came rapidly. The treatise of
Bartolo and the great work of Lenormant were placed on the
_Index_; Canon Berta was overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually
silenced; the Abbe Loisy was first deprived of his professorship,
and then ignominiously expelled from the university; Monseigneur
d'Hulst was summoned to Rome, and has since kept silence.
The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of
the Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter
by the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on _The Study of Sacred
Scripture_. Much was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in
the last century, there had sat on the papal throne no Pope
intellectually so competent to discuss the whole subject. While,
then, those devoted to the older beliefs trusted that the papal
thunderbolts would crush the whole brood of biblical critics,
votaries of the newer thought ventured to hope that the encyclical
might, in the language of one of them, prove "a stupendous bridge
spanning the broad abyss that now divides alleged orthodoxy from
established science."
Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole,
it is a question whether the world at large may not congratulate
itself upon this papal utterance. The document, if not apostolic,
won credit as "statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist
that there can be no error of any sort in the sacred books; it
even defended those parts which Protestants count apocryphal as
thoroughly as the remainder of Scripture, and declared that the
book of Tobit was not compiled of man, but written by God. His
Holiness naturally condemned the higher-criticism, but he dwelt at
the same time on the necessity of the most thorough study of the
sacred Scriptures, and especially on the importance of adjusting
scriptural statements to scientific facts. This utterance was
admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation by both
sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of
view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope
has shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over
the troubled waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained
from condemning any of the greater results of modern critical
study that the main English defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit
Father Clarke, did not hesitate publicly to admit a multitude of
such results--results, indeed, which would shock not only Italian
and Spanish Catholics, but many English and American Protestants.
According to this interpreter, the Pope had no thought of denying
the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the plurality of
sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of
Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of
St. Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole
encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the
power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any
previous decisions which may be found inconvenient. More than
that, Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the
most thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament,
"numbers must be expected to be used Orientally," and that "all
these seventies and forties, as, for example, when Absalom is said
to have rebelled against David for forty years, can not possibly
be meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful shock
to some Protestant believers in plenary inspiration, he, while
advocating it as a dutiful Son of the Church, wove over it an
exquisite web with the declaration that "there is a human element
in the Bible pre-calculated for by the Divine."
Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to
be grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances,
which perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the
old and the new than could have been framed by engineers more
learned but less astute. Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a Paul
V nor an Urban VIII, and is too wise to bring the Church into a
position from which it can only be extricated by such ludicrous
subterfuges as those by which it was dragged out of the Galileo
scandal, or by such a tortuous policy as that by which it writhed
out of the old doctrine regarding the taking of interest for
money.
In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and
Berta and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in
which the Pope issued this encyclical, there is every reason to
hope that the path has been paved over which the Church may
gracefully recede from the old system of interpretation and
quietly accept and appropriate the main results of the higher
criticism. Certainly she has never had a better opportunity to
play at the game of "beggar my neighbour" and to drive the older
Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.
In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new
went on. In the middle years of the century the first adequate
effort in behalf of the newer conception of the sacred books was
made by Theodore Parker at Boston. A thinker brave and of the
widest range,--a scholar indefatigable and of the deepest
sympathies with humanity,--a man called by one of the most eminent
scholars in the English Church "a religious Titan," and by a
distinguished French theologian "a prophet," he had struggled on
from the divinity school until at that time he was one of the
foremost biblical scholars, and preacher to the largest regular
congregation on the American continent. The great hall in Boston
could seat four thousand people, and at his regular discourses
every part of it was filled. In addition to his pastoral work he
wielded a vast influence as a platform speaker, especially in
opposition to the extension of slavery into the Territories of the
United States, and as a lecturer on a wide range of vital topics;
and among those whom he most profoundly influenced, both
politically and religiously, was Abraham Lincoln. During each year
at that period he was heard discussing the most important
religious and political questions in all the greater Northern
cities; but his most lasting work was in throwing light upon our
sacred Scriptures, and in this he was one of the forerunners of
the movement now going on not only in the United States but
throughout Christendom. Even before he was fairly out of college
his translation of De Wette's _Introduction to the Old Testament_
made an impression on many thoughtful men; his sermon in 1841 on
_The Transient and Permanent in Christianity_ marked the beginning
of his great individual career; his speeches, his lectures, and
especially his _Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion_,
greatly extended his influence. His was a deeply devotional
nature, and his public Prayers exercised by their touching beauty
a very strong religious influence upon his audiences. He had his
reward. Beautiful and noble as were his life and his life-work, he
was widely abhorred. On one occasion of public worship in one of
the more orthodox churches, news having been received that he was
dangerously ill, a prayer was openly made by one of the zealous
brethren present that this arch-enemy might be removed from earth.
He was even driven out from the Unitarian body. But he was none
the less steadfast and bold, and the great mass of men and women
who thronged his audience room at Boston and his lecture rooms in
other cities spread his ideas. His fate was pathetic. Full of
faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his labours, he retired
to Italy, and died there at the darkest period in the history of
the United States--when slavery in the state and the older
orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever triumphant.
The death of Moses within sight of the promised land seems the
only parallel to the death of Parker less than six months before
the publication of _Essays and Reviews_ and the election of
Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, of the United States.
But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully
aided by the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost
opponents. Nothing during the American struggle against the slave
system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women
from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to
justify slavery. Typical among examples of this use were the
arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man whose noble
character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence in
all branches of the American Protestant Church. While avowing his
personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible
sanctioned it. Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took
the same ground; and then came that tremendous rejoinder which
echoed from heart to heart throughout the Northern States: "The
Bible sanctions slavery? So much the worse for the Bible." Then
was fulfilled that old saying of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg: "Press
not the breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield blood
rather than milk."
Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting
Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was
to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the
foremost scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the most
conservative of those whose opinions were entitled to weight had
made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable, there was
fanatical opposition to any change. The _Syllabus of Errors_ put
forth by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other documents
issued from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties of this
needed transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman Catholic
scholars skilfully explained away the obstacles thus created,
others published works insisting upon the most extreme views as to
the verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In the Church of
England various influential men took the same view. Dr. Baylee,
Principal of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture
"every scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its
histories and narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy.
Its words and phrases have a grammatical and philological
accuracy, such as is possessed by no human composition." In 1861
Dean Burgon preached in Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as
follows: "No, sirs, the Bible is the very utterance of the
Eternal: as much God's own word as if high heaven were open and we
heard God speaking to us with human voice. Every book is inspired
alike, and is inspired entirely. Inspiration is not a difference
of degree, but of kind. The Bible is filled to overflowing with
the Holy Spirit of God; the books of it and the words of it and
the very letters of it."
In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must
either receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny
the veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ
as a teacher of divine truth."
As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in
the Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's
Cathedral, used in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that
the authority of Christ himself, and therefore of Christianity,
must rest on the old view of the Old Testament; that, since the
founder of Christianity, in divinely recorded utterances, alluded
to the transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to
Noah's ark and the Flood, and to the sojourn of Jonah in the
whale, the biblical account of these must be accepted as
historical, or that Christianity must be given up altogether.
In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the
Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no
argument could be more fraught with peril to the interest which
the gifted preacher sought to serve.
In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to
the newer biblical studies were heard; and from America,
especially from the college at Princeton, came resounding echoes.
As an example of many may be quoted the statement by the eminent
Dr. Hodge that the books of Scripture "are, one and all, in
thought and verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly
the work of God, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine
authority all that God meant to convey without human additions and
admixtures"; and that "infallibility and authority attach as much
to the verbal expression in which the revelation is made as to the
matter of the revelation itself."
But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant
Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took
strong hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as
orthodox: Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith,
Moore, Haupt, Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though
most of them were opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other
authorities of their respective churches, they were manfully
supported by the more intellectual clergy and laity. The greater
universities of the country ranged themselves on the side of these
men; persecution but intrenched them more firmly in the hearts of
all intelligent well-wishers of Christianity. The triumphs won by
their opponents in assemblies, synods, conventions, and
conferences were really victories for the nominally defeated,
since they revealed to the world the fact that in each of these
bodies the strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought
which alone can have any hold on the future, was with the new race
of thinkers; no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the
victors have been won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and
Galileo.
And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in
the second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most
powerful aid to the new school of biblical research.
The more general conclusions which were thus given to biblical
criticism were all the more impressive from the fact that they had
been revealed by various groups of earnest Christian scholars
working on different lines, by different methods, and in various
parts of the world. Very honourable was the full and frank
testimony to these results given in 1885 by the Rev. Francis
Brown, a professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at New
York. In his admirable though brief book on Assyriology, starting
with the declaration that "it is a great pity to be afraid of
facts," he showed how Assyrian research testifies in many ways to
the historical value of the Bible record; but at the same time he
freely allowed to Chaldean history an antiquity fatal to the
sacred chronology of the Hebrews. He also cast aside a mass of
doubtful apologetics, and dealt frankly with the fact that very
many of the early narratives in Genesis belong to the common stock
of ancient tradition, and, mentioning as an example the cuneiform
inscriptions which record a story of the Accadian king Sargon--how
"he was born in retirement, placed by his mother in a basket of
rushes, launched on a river, rescued and brought up by a stranger,
after which he became king"--he did not hesitate to remind his
readers that Sargon lived a thousand years and more before Moses;
that this story was told of him several hundred years before Moses
was born; and that it was told of various other important
personages of antiquity. The professor dealt just as honestly with
the inscriptions which show sundry statements in the book of
Daniel to be unhistorical; candidly making admissions which but a
short time before would have filled orthodoxy with horror.
A few years later came another testimony even more striking.
Early in the last decade of the nineteenth century it was noised
abroad that the Rev. Professor Sayce, of Oxford, the most eminent
Assyriologist and Egyptologist of Great Britain, was about to
publish a work in which what is known as the "higher criticism"
was to be vigorously and probably destructively dealt with in the
light afforded by recent research among the monuments of Assyria
and Egypt. The book was looked for with eager expectation by the
supporters of the traditional view of Scripture; but, when it
appeared, the exultation of the traditionalists was speedily
changed to dismay. For Prof. Sayce, while showing some severity
toward sundry minor assumptions and assertions of biblical
critics, confirmed all their more important conclusions which
properly fell within his province. While his readers soon realized
that these assumptions and assertions of overzealous critics no
more disproved the main results of biblical criticism than the
wild guesses of Kepler disproved the theory of Copernicus, or the
discoveries of Galileo, or even the great laws which bear Kepler's
own name, they found new mines sprung under some of the most lofty
fortresses of the old dogmatic theology. A few of the statements
of this champion of orthodoxy may be noted. He allowed that the
week of seven days and the Sabbath rest are of Babylonian origin;
indeed, that the very word "Sabbath" is Babylonian; that there are
two narratives of Creation on the Babylonian tablets, wonderfully
like the two leading Hebrew narratives in Genesis, and that the
latter were undoubtedly drawn from the former; that the "garden of
Eden" and its mystical tree were known to the inhabitants of
Chaldea in pre-Semitic days; that the beliefs that woman was
created out of man, and that man by sin fell from a state of
innocence, are drawn from very ancient Chaldean-Babylonian texts;
that Assyriology confirms the belief that the book Genesis is a
compilation; that portions of it are by no means so old as the
time of Moses; that the expression in our sacred book, "The Lord
smelled a sweet savour" at the sacrifice made by Noah, is
"identical with that of the Babylonian poet"; that "it is
impossible to believe that the language of the latter was not
known to the biblical writer" and that the story of Joseph and
Potiphar's wife was drawn in part from the old Egyptian tale of
_The Two Brothers_. Finally, after a multitude of other
concessions, Prof. Sayce allowed that the book of Jonah, so far
from being the work of the prophet himself, can not have been
written until the Assyrian Empire was a thing of the past; that
the book of Daniel contains serious mistakes; that the so-called
historical chapters of that book so conflict with the monuments
that the author can not have been a contemporary of Nebuchadnezzar
and Cyrus; that "the story of Belshazzar's fall is not
historical"; that the Belshazzar referred to in it as king, and as
the son of Nehuchadnezzar, was not the son of Nebuchadnezzar, and
was never king; that "King Darius the Mede," who plays so great a
part in the story, never existed; that the book associates persons
and events really many years apart, and that it must have been
written at a period far later than the time assigned in it for its
own origin.
As to the book of Ezra, he tells us that we are confronted by a
chronological inconsistency which no amount of ingenuity can
explain away. He also acknowledges that the book of Esther
"contains many exaggerations and improbabilities, and is simply
founded upon one of those same historical tales of which the
Persian chronicles seem to have been full." Great was the
dissatisfaction of the traditionalists with their expected
champion; well might they repeat the words of Balak to Balaam, "I
called thee to curse mine enemies, and, behold, thou hast
altogether blessed them."
No less fruitful have been modern researches in Egypt. While, on
one hand, they have revealed a very considerable number of
geographical and archaeological facts proving the good faith of
the narratives entering into the books attributed to Moses, and
have thus made our early sacred literature all the more valuable,
they have at the same time revealed the limitations of the sacred
authors and compilers. They have brought to light facts utterly
disproving the sacred Hebrew date of creation and the main
framework of the early biblical chronology; they have shown the
suggestive correspondence between the ten antediluvian patriarchs
in Genesis and the ten early dynasties of the Egyptian gods, and
have placed by the side of these the ten antediluvian kings of
Chaldean tradition, the ten heroes of Armenia, the ten primeval
kings of Persian sacred tradition, the ten "fathers" of Hindu
sacred tradition, and multitudes of other tens, throwing much
light on the manner in which the sacred chronicles of ancient
nations were generally developed.
These scholars have also found that the legends of the plagues of
Egypt are in the main but natural exaggerations of what occurs
every year; as, for example, the changing of the water of the Nile
into blood--evidently suggested by the phenomena exhibited every
summer, when, as various eminent scholars, and, most recent of
all, Maspero and Sayce, tell us, "about the middle of July, in
eight or ten days the river turns from grayish blue to dark red,
occasionally of so intense a colour as to look like newly shed
blood." These modern researches have also shown that some of the
most important features in the legends can not possibly be
reconciled with the records of the monuments; for example, that
the Pharaoh of the Exodus was certainly not overwhelmed in the Red
Sea. As to the supernatural features of the Hebrew relations with
Egypt, even the most devoted apologists have become discreetly
silent.
Egyptologists have also translated for us the old Nile story of
_The Two Brothers_, and have shown, as we have already seen, that
one of the most striking parts of our sacred Joseph legend was
drawn from it; they have been obliged to admit that the story of
the exposure of Moses in the basket of rushes, his rescue, and his
subsequent greatness, had been previously told, long before
Moses's time, not only of King Sargon, but of various other great
personages of the ancient world; they have published plans of
Egyptian temples and copies of the sculptures upon their walls,
revealing the earlier origin of some of the most striking features
of the worship and ceremonial claimed to have been revealed
especially to the Hebrews; they have found in the _Egyptian Book
of the Dead_, and in various inscriptions of the Nile temples and
tombs, earlier sources of much in the ethics so long claimed to
have been revealed only to the chosen people in the Book of the
Covenant, in the ten commandments, and elsewhere; they have given
to the world copies of the Egyptian texts showing that the
theology of the Nile was one of various fruitful sources of later
ideas, statements, and practices regarding the brazen serpent, the
golden calf, trinities, miraculous conceptions, incarnations,
resurrections, ascensions, and the like, and that Egyptian
sacro-scientific ideas contributed to early Jewish and Christian
sacred literature statements, beliefs, and even phrases regarding
the Creation, astronomy, geography, magic, medicine, diabolical
influences, with a multitude of other ideas, which we also find
coming into early Judaism in greater or less degree from Chaldean
and Persian sources.
But Egyptology, while thus aiding to sweep away the former
conception of our sacred books, has aided biblical criticism in
making them far more precious; for it has shown them to be a part
of that living growth of sacred literature whose roots are in all
the great civilizations of the past, and through whose trunk and
branches are flowing the currents which are to infuse a higher
religious and ethical life into the civilizations of the
future.
But while archaeologists thus influenced enlightened opinion,
another body of scholars rendered services of a different
sort--the centre of their enterprise being the University of
Oxford. By their efforts was presented to the English-speaking
world a series of translations of the sacred books of the East,
which showed the relations of the more Eastern sacred literature
to our own, and proved that in the religions of the world the
ideas which have come as the greatest blessings to mankind are not
of sudden revelation or creation, but of slow evolution out of a
remote past.
The facts thus shown did not at first elicit much gratitude from
supporters of traditional theology, and perhaps few things brought
more obloquy on Renan, for a time, than his statement that "the
influence of Persia is the most powerful to which Israel was
submitted." Whether this was an overstatement or not, it was soon
seen to contain much truth. Not only was it made clear by study of
the Zend Avesta that the Old and New Testament ideas regarding
Satanic and demoniacal modes of action were largely due to Persian
sources, but it was also shown that the idea of immortality was
mainly developed in the Hebrew mind during the close relations of
the Jews with the Persians. Nor was this all. In the Zend Avesta
were found in earlier form sundry myths and legends which, judging
from their frequent appearance in early religions, grow naturally
about the history of the adored teachers of our race. Typical
among these was the Temptation of Zoroaster.
It is a fact very significant and full of promise that the first
large, frank, and explicit revelation regarding this whole subject
in form available for the general thinking public was given to the
English-speaking world by an eminent Christian divine and scholar,
the Rev. Dr. Mills. Having already shown himself by his
translations a most competent authority on the subject, he in 1894
called attention, in a review widely read, to "the now undoubted
and long since suspected fact that it pleased the Divine Power to
reveal some of the important articles of our Catholic creed first
to the Zoroastrians, and through their literature to the Jews and
ourselves." Among these beliefs Dr. Mills traced out very
conclusively many Jewish doctrines regarding the attributes of
God, and all, virtually, regarding the attributes of Satan. There,
too, he found accounts of the Miraculous Conception, Virgin Birth,
and Temptation of Zoroaster, As to the last, Dr. Mills presented a
series of striking coincidences with our own later account. As to
its main features, he showed that there had been developed among
the Persians, many centuries before the Christian era, the legend
of a vain effort of the arch-demon, one seat of whose power was
the summit of Mount Arezura, to tempt Zoroaster to worship
him,--of an argument between tempter and tempted,--and of
Zoroaster's refusal; and the doctor continued: "No Persian subject
in the streets of Jerusalem, soon after or long after the Return,
could have failed to know this striking myth." Dr. Mills then went
on to show that, among the Jews, "the doctrine of immortality was
scarcely mooted before the later Isaiah--that is, before the
captivity--while the Zoroastrian scriptures are one mass of
spiritualism, referring all results to the heavenly or to the
infernal worlds." He concludes by saying that, as regards the Old
and New Testaments, "the humble, and to a certain extent prior,
religion of the Mazda worshippers was useful in giving point and
beauty to many loose conceptions among the Jewish religious
teachers, and in introducing many ideas which were entirely new,
while as to the doctrines of immortality and resurrection--the
most important of all--it positively determined belief."
Even more extensive were the revelations made by scientific
criticism applied to the sacred literature of southern and eastern
Asia. The resemblances of sundry fundamental narratives and ideas
in our own sacred books with those of Buddhism were especially
suggestive.
Here, too, had been a long preparatory history. The discoveries
in Sanscrit philology made in the latter half of the eighteenth
century and the first half of the nineteenth, by Sir William
Jones, Carey, Wilkins, Foster, Colebrooke, and others, had met at
first with some opposition from theologians. The declaration by
Dugald Stewart that the discovery of Sanscrit was fraudulent, and
its vocabulary and grammar patched together out of Greek and
Latin, showed the feeling of the older race of biblical students.
But researches went on. Bopp, Burnouf, Lassen, Weber, Whitney, Max
Muller, and others continued the work during the nineteenth
century more and more evident became the sources from which many
ideas and narratives in our own sacred books had been developed.
Studies in the sacred books of Brahmanism, and in the institutions
of Buddhism, the most widespread of all religions, its devotees
outnumbering those of all branches of the Christian Church
together, proved especially fruitful in facts relating to general
sacred literature and early European religious ideas.
Noteworthy in the progress of this knowledge was the work of
Fathers Huc and Gabet. In 1839 the former of these, a French
Lazarist priest, set out on a mission to China. Having prepared
himself at Macao by eighteen months of hard study, and having
arrayed himself like a native, even to the wearing of the queue
and the staining of his skin, he visited Peking and penetrated
Mongolia. Five years later, taking Gabet with him, both disguised
as Lamas, he began his long and toilsome journey to the chief
seats of Buddhism in Thibet, and, after two years of fearful
dangers and sufferings, accomplished it. Driven out finally by the
Chinese, Huc returned to Europe in 1852, having made one of the
most heroic, self-denying, and, as it turned out, one of the most
valuable efforts in all the noble annals of Christian missions.
His accounts of these journevs, written in a style simple, clear,
and interesting, at once attracted attention throughout the world.
But far more important than any services he had rendered to the
Church he served was the influence of his book upon the general
opinions of thinking men; for he completed a series of revelations
made by earlier, less gifted, and less devoted travellers, and
brought to the notice of the world the amazing similarity of the
ideas, institutions, observances, ceremonies, and ritual, and even
the ecclesiastical costumes of the Buddhists to those of his own
Church.
Buddhism was thus shown with its hierarchy, in which the Grand
Lama, an infallible representative of the Most High, is surrounded
by its minor Lamas, much like cardinals; with its bishops wearing
mitres, its celibate priests with shaven crown, cope, dalmatic,
and censer; its cathedrals with clergy gathered in the choir; its
vast monasteries filled with monks and nuns vowed to poverty,
chastity, and obedience; its church arrangements, with shrines of
saints and angels; its use of images, pictures, and illuminated
missals; its service, with a striking general resemblance to the
Mass; antiphonal choirs; intoning of prayers; recital of creeds;
repetition of litanies; processions; mystic rites and incense; the
offering and adoration of bread upon an altar lighted by candles;
the drinking from a chalice by the priest; prayers and offerings
for the dead; benediction with outstretched hands; fasts,
confessions, and doctrine of purgatory--all this and more was now
clearly revealed. The good father was evidently staggered by these
amazing facts; but his robust faith soon gave him an explanation:
he suggested that Satan, in anticipation of Christianity, had
revealed to Buddhism this divinely constituted order of things.
This naive explanation did not commend itself to his superiors in
the Roman Church. In the days of St. Augustine or of St. Thomas
Aquinas it would doubtless have been received much more kindly;
but in the days of Cardinal Antonelli this was hardly to be
expected: the Roman authorities, seeing the danger of such plain
revelations in the nineteenth century, even when coupled with such
devout explanations, put the book under the ban, though not before
it had been spread throughout the world in various translations.
Father Huc was sent on no more missions.
Yet there came even more significant discoveries, especially
bearing upon the claims of that great branch of the Church which
supposes itself to possess a divine safeguard against error in
belief. For now was brought to light by literary research the
irrefragable evidence that the great Buddha--Sakya Muni
himself--had been canonized and enrolled among the Christian
saints whose intercession may be invoked, and in whose honour
images, altars, and chapels may be erected; and this, not only by
the usage of the medieval Church, Greek and Roman, but by the
special and infallible sanction of a long series of popes, from
the end of the sixteenth century to the end of the nineteenth--a
sanction granted under one of the most curious errors in human
history. The story enables us to understand the way in which many
of the beliefs of Christendom have been developed, especially how
they have been influenced from the seats of older religions; and
it throws much light into the character and exercise of papal
infallibility.
Early in the seventh century there was composed, as is now
believed, at the Convent of St. Saba near Jerusalem, a pious
romance entitled _Barlaam and Josaphat_--the latter personage, the
hero of the story, being represented as a Hindu prince converted
to Christianity by the former.
This story, having been attributed to St. John of Damascus in the
following century became amazingly popular, and was soon accepted
as true: it was translated from the Greek original not only into
Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic, but into every important
European language, including even Polish, Bohemian, and Icelandic.
Thence it came into the pious historical encyclopaedia of Vincent
of Beauvais, and, most important of all, into the _Lives of the
Saints_.
Hence the name of its pious hero found its way into the list of
saints whose intercession is to be prayed for, and it passed
without challenge until about 1590, when, the general subject of
canonization having been brought up at Rome, Pope Sixtus V, by
virtue of his infallibility and immunity against error in
everything relating to faith and morals, sanctioned a revised list
of saints, authorizing and directing it to be accepted by the
Church; and among those on whom he thus forever infallibly set the
seal of Heaven was included "_The Holy Saint Josaphat of India_,
whose wonderful acts St. John of Damascus has related." The 27th
of November was appointed as the day set apart in honour of this
saint, and the decree, having been enforced by successive popes
for over two hundred and fifty years, was again officially
approved by Pius IX in 1873. This decree was duly accepted as
infallible, and in one of the largest cities of Italy may to-day
be seen a Christian church dedicated to this saint. On its front
are the initials of his Italianized name; over its main entrance
is the inscription "_Divo Josafat_"; and within it is an altar
dedicated to the saint--above this being a pedestal bearing his
name and supporting a large statue which represents him as a
youthful prince wearing a crown and contemplating a crucifix.
Moreover, relics of this saint were found; bones alleged to be
parts of his skeleton, having been presented by a Doge of Venice
to a King of Portugal, are now treasured at Antwerp.
But even as early as the sixteenth century a pregnant fact
regarding this whole legend was noted: for the Portuguese
historian Diego Conto showed that it was identical with the legend
of Buddha. Fortunately for the historian, his faith was so robust
that he saw in this resemblance only a trick of Satan; the life of
Buddha being, in his opinion, merely a diabolic counterfeit of the
life of Josaphat centuries before the latter was lived or
written--just as good Abbe Huc saw in the ceremonies of Buddhism a
similar anticipatory counterfeit of Christian ritual.
There the whole matter virtually rested for about three hundred
years--various scholars calling attention to the legend as a
curiosity, but none really showing its true bearings--until, in
1859, Laboulaye in France, Liebrecht in Germany, and others
following them, demonstrated that this Christian work was drawn
almost literally from an early biography of Buddha, being
conformed to it in the most minute details, not only of events but
of phraseology; the only important changes being that, at the end
of the various experiences showing the wretchedness of the world,
identical with those ascribed in the original to the young Prince
Buddha, the hero, instead of becoming a hermit, becomes a
Christian, and that for the appellation of Buddha-- "Bodisat"--is
substituted the more scriptural name Josaphat.
Thus it was that, by virtue of the infallibility vouchsafed to
the papacy in matters of faith and morals, Buddha became a
Christian saint.
Yet these were by no means the most pregnant revelations. As the
Buddhist scriptures were more fully examined, there were disclosed
interesting anticipations of statements in later sacred books. The
miraculous conception of Buddha and his virgin birth, like that of
Horus in Egypt and of Krishna in India; the previous annunciation
to his mother Maja; his birth during a journey by her; the star
appearing in the east, and the angels chanting in the heavens at
his birth; his temptation--all these and a multitude of other
statements were full of suggestions to larger thought regarding
the development of sacred literature in general. Even the eminent
Roman Catholic missionary Bishop Bigandet was obliged to confess,
in his scholarly life of Buddha, these striking similarities
between the Buddhist scriptures and those which it was his mission
to expound, though by this honest statement his own further
promotion was rendered impossible. Fausboll also found the story
of the judgment of Solomon imbedded in Buddhist folklore; and Sir
Edwin Arnold, by his poem, _The Light of Asia_, spread far and
wide a knowledge of the anticipation in Buddhism of some ideas
which down to a recent period were considered distinctively
Christian. Imperfect as the revelations thus made of an evolution
of religious beliefs, institutions, and literature still are, they
have not been without an important bearing upon the newer
conception of our own sacred books: more and more manifest has
become the interdependence of all human development; more and more
clear the truth that Christianity, as a great fact in man's
history, is not dependent for its life upon any parasitic growths
of myth and legend, no matter how beautiful they may be.
No less important was the closer research into the New Testament
during the latter part of the nineteenth century. To go into the
subject in detail would be beyond the scope of this work, but a
few of the main truths which it brought before the world may be
here summarized.
By the new race of Christian scholars it has been clearly shown
that the first three Gospels, which, down to the close of the last
century, were so constantly declared to be three independent
testimonies agreeing as to the events recorded, are neither
independent of each other nor in that sort of agreement which was
formerly asserted. All biblical scholars of any standing, even the
most conservative, have come to admit that all three took their
rise in the same original sources, growing by the accretions sure
to come as time went on--accretions sometimes useful and often
beautiful, but in no inconsiderable degree ideas and even
narratives inherited from older religions: it is also fully
acknowledged that to this growth process are due certain
contradictions which can not otherwise be explained. As to the
fourth Gospel, exquisitely beautiful as large portions of it are,
there has been growing steadily and irresistibly the conviction,
even among the most devout scholars, that it has no right to the
name, and does not really give the ideas of St. John, but that it
represents a mixture of Greek philosophy with Jewish theology, and
that its final form, which one of the most eminent among recent
Christian scholars has characterized as "an unhistorical product
of abstract reflection," is mainly due to some gifted
representative or representatives of the Alexandrian school.
Bitter as the resistance to this view has been, it has during the
last years of the nineteenth century won its way more and more to
acknowledgment. A careful examination made in 1893 by a competent
Christian scholar showed facts which are best given in his own
words, as follows: "In the period of thirty years ending in 1860,
of the fifty great authorities in this line, _four to one_ were in
favour of the Johannine authorship. Of those who in that period
had advocated this traditional position, one quarter--and
certainly the very greatest--finally changed their position to the
side of a late date and non-Johannine authorship. Of those who
have come into this field of scholarship since about 1860, some
forty men of the first class, two thirds reject the traditional
theory wholly or very largely. Of those who have contributed
important articles to the discussion from about 1880 to 1890,
about _two to one_ reject the Johannine authorship of the Gospel
in its present shape--that is to say, while forty years ago great
scholars were _four to one in favour of_, they are now _two to one
against_, the claim that the apostle John wrote this Gospel as we
have it. Again, one half of those on the conservative side
to-day--scholars like Weiss, Beyschlag, Sanday, and
Reynolds--admit the existence of a dogmatic intent and an ideal
element in this Gospel, so that we do not have Jesus's thought in
his exact words, but only in substance."
In 1881 came an event of great importance as regards the
development of a more frank and open dealing with scriptural
criticism. In that year appeared the Revised Version of the New
Testament. It was exceedingly cautious and conservative; but it
had the vast merit of being absolutely conscientious. One thing
showed, in a striking way, ethical progress in theological
methods. Although all but one of the English revisers represented
Trinitarian bodies, they rejected the two great proof texts which
had so long been accounted essential bulwarks of Trinitarian
doctrine. Thus disappeared at last from the Epistle of St. John
the text of the Three Witnesses, which had for centuries held its
place in spite of its absence from all the earlier important
manuscripts, and of its rejection in later times by Erasmus,
Luther, Isaac Newton, Porson, and a long line of the greatest
biblical scholars. And with this was thrown out the other like
unto it in spurious origin and zealous intent, that interpolation
of the word "God" in the sixteenth verse of the third chapter of
the First Epistle to Timothy, which had for ages served as a
warrant for condemning some of the noblest of Christians, even
such men as Newton and Milton and Locke and Priestley and
Channing.
Indeed, so honest were the revisers that they substituted the
correct reading of Luke ii, 33, in place of the time-honoured
corruption in the King James version which had been thought
necessary to safeguard the dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus of
Nazareth. Thus came the true reading, "His _father_ and his
mother" instead of the old piously fraudulent words "_Joseph_ and
his mother."
An even more important service to the new and better growth of
Christianity was the virtual setting aside of the last twelve
verses of the Gospel according to St. Mark; for among these stood
that sentence which has cost the world more innocent blood than
any other--the words "He that believeth not shall be damned." From
this source had logically grown the idea that the intellectual
rejection of this or that dogma which dominant theology had
happened at any given time to pronounce essential, since such
rejection must bring punishment infinite in agony and duration, is
a crime to be prevented at any cost of finite cruelty. Still
another service rendered to humanity by the revisers was in
substituting a new and correct rendering for the old reading of
the famous text regarding the inspiration of Scripture, which had
for ages done so much to make our sacred books a fetich. By this
more correct reading the revisers gave a new charter to liberty in
biblical research.
Most valuable, too, have been studies during the latter part of
the nineteenth century upon the formation of the canon of
Scripture. The result of these has been to substitute something
far better for that conception of our biblical literature, as
forming one book handed out of the clouds by the Almighty, which
had been so long practically the accepted view among probably the
majority of Christians. Reverent scholars have demonstrated our
sacred literature to be a growth in obedience to simple laws
natural and historical; they have shown how some books of the Old
Testament were accepted as sacred, centuries before our era, and
how others gradually gained sanctity, in some cases only fully
acquiring it long after the establishment of the Christian Church.
The same slow growth has also been shown in the New Testament
canon. It has been demonstrated that the selection of the books
composing it, and their separation from the vast mass of spurious
gospels, epistles, and apocalytic literature was a gradual
process, and, indeed, that the rejection of some books and the
acceptance of others was accidental, if anything is accidental.
So, too, scientific biblical research has, as we have seen, been
obliged to admit the existence of much mythical and legendary
matter, as a setting for the great truths not only of the Old
Testament but of the New. It has also shown, by the comparative
study of literatures, the process by which some books were
compiled and recompiled, adorned with beautiful utterances,
strengthened or weakened by alterations and interpolations
expressing the views of the possessors or transcribers, and
attributed to personages who could not possibly have written them.
The presentation of these things has greatly weakened that sway of
mere dogma which has so obscured the simple teachings of Christ
himself; for it has shown that the more we know of our sacred
books, the less certain we become as to the authenticity of "proof
texts," and it has disengaged more and more, as the only valuable
residuum, like the mass of gold at the bottom of the crucible, the
personality, spirit, teaching, and ideals of the blessed Founder
of Christianity. More and more, too, the new scholarship has
developed the conception of the New Testament as, like the Old,
the growth of literature in obedience to law--a conception which
in all probability will give it its strongest hold on the coming
centuries. In making this revelation Christian scholarship has by
no means done work mainly destructive. It has, indeed, swept away
a mass of noxious growths, but it has at the same time cleared the
ground for a better growth of Christianity--a growth through which
already pulsates the current of a nobler life. It has forever
destroyed the contention of scholars like those of the eighteenth
century who saw, in the multitude of irreconcilable discrepancies
between various biblical statements, merely evidences of
priestcraft and intentional fraud. The new scholarship has shown
that even such absolute contradictions as those between the
accounts of the early life of Jesus by Matthew and Luke, and
between the date of the crucifixion and details of the
resurrection in the first three Gospels and in the fourth, and
other discrepancies hardly less serious, do not destroy the
historical character of the narrative. Even the hopelessly
conflicting genealogies of the Saviour and the evidently mythical
accretions about the simple facts of his birth and life are thus
full of interest when taken as a natural literary development in
obedience to the deepest religious feeling.
Among those who have wrought most effectively to bring the
leaders of thought in the English-speaking nations to this higher
conception, Matthew Arnold should not be forgotten. By poetic
insight, broad scholarship, pungent statement, pithy argument, and
an exquisitely lucid style, he aided effectually during the latter
half of the nineteenth century in bringing the work of specialists
to bear upon the development of a broader and deeper view. In the
light of his genius a conception of our sacred books at the same
time more literary as well as more scientific has grown widely and
vigorously, while the older view which made of them a fetich and a
support for unchristian dogmas has been more and more thrown into
the background. The contributions to these results by the most
eminent professors at the great Christian universities of the
English-speaking world, Oxford and Cambridge taking the lead, are
most hopeful signs of a new epoch. Very significant also is a
change in the style of argument against the scientific view.
Leading supporters of the older opinions see more and more clearly
the worthlessness of rhetoric against ascertained fact: mere
dogged resistance to cogent argument evidently avails less and
less; and the readiness of the more prominent representatives of
the older thought to consider opposing arguments, and to
acknowledge any force they may have, is certainly of good omen.
The concessions made in _Lux Mundi_ regarding scriptural myths and
legends have been already mentioned.
Significant also has been the increasing reprobation in the
Church itself of the profound though doubtless unwitting
immoralities of _reconcilers_. The castigation which followed the
exploits of the greatest of these in our own time--Mr. Gladstone,
at the hands of Prof. Huxley--did much to complete a work in which
such eminent churchmen as Stanley, Farrar, Sanday, Cheyne, Driver,
and Sayce had rendered good service.
Typical among these evidences of a better spirit in controversy
has been the treatment of the question regarding mistaken
quotations from the Old Testament in the New, and especially
regarding quotations by Christ himself. For a time this was
apparently the most difficult of all matters dividing the two
forces; but though here and there appear champions of tradition,
like the Bishop of Gloucester, effectual resistance to the new
view has virtually ceased; in one way or another the most
conservative authorities have accepted the undoubted truth
revealed by a simple scientific method. Their arguments have
indeed been varied. While some have fallen back upon Le Clerc's
contention that "Christ did not come to teach criticism to the
Jews," and others upon Paley's argument that the Master shaped his
statements in accordance with the ideas of his time, others have
taken refuge in scholastic statements--among them that of Irenaeus
regarding "a quiescence of the divine word," or the somewhat
startling explanation by sundry recent theologians that "our Lord
emptied himself of his Godhead."
Nor should there be omitted a tribute to the increasing courtesy
shown in late years by leading supporters of the older view.
During the last two decades of the present century there has been
a most happy departure from the older method of resistance, first
by plausibilities, next by epithets, and finally by persecution.
To the bitterness of the attacks upon Darwin, the Essayists and
Reviewers, and Bishop Colenso, have succeeded, among really
eminent leaders, a far better method and tone. While Matthew
Arnold no doubt did much in commending "sweet reasonableness" to
theological controversialists, Mr. Gladstone, by his perfect
courtesy to his opponents, even when smarting under their heaviest
blows, has set a most valuable example. Nor should the spirit
shown by Bishop Ellicott, leading a forlorn hope for the
traditional view, pass without a tribute of respect. Truly
pathetic is it to see this venerable and learned prelate, one of
the most eminent representatives of the older biblical research,
even when giving solemn warnings against the newer criticisms, and
under all the temptations of _ex cathedra_ utterance, remaining
mild and gentle and just in the treatment of adversaries whose
ideas he evidently abhors. Happily, he is comforted by the faith
that Christianitv will survive; and this faith his opponents fully
share.
Extract of Chapter XX: From The Divine Oracles To The Higher Criticism
From: III. The Continued Growth of Scientific Interpretation to
IV. The Closing Struggle.
III. The Continued Growth of Scientific Interpretation.
IV. The Closing Struggle.
III. The Continued Growth of Scientific Interpretation.
IV. The Closing Struggle.
The storm aroused by _Essays and Reviews_ had not yet subsided when a far
more serious tempest burst upon the English theological world.
V. VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY
METHODS.
While this struggle for the new truth was
going on in various fields, aid appeared from a quarter whence it
was least expected. The great discoveries by Botta and Layard in
Assyria were supplemented by the researches of Rawlinson, George
Smith, Oppert, Sayce, Sarzec, Pinches, and others, and thus it was
revealed more clearly than ever before that as far back as the
time assigned in Genesis to the creation a great civilization was
flourishing in Mesopotamia; that long ages, probably two thousand
years, before the scriptural date assigned to the migration of
Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees, this Chaldean civilization had
bloomed forth in art, science, and literature; that the ancient
inscriptions recovered from the sites of this and kindred
civilizations presented the Hebrew sacred myths and legends in
earlier forms--forms long antedating those given in the Hebrew
Scriptures; and that the accounts of the Creation, the Tree of
Life in Eden, the institution and even the name of the Sabbath,
the Deluge, the Tower of Babel, and much else in the Pentateuch,
were simply an evolution out of earlier Chaldean myths and
legends. So perfect was the proof of this that the most eminent
scholars in the foremost seats of Christian learning were obliged
to acknowledge it.
[Background as stated in A.D. White's 1895, "The Warfare Of Science With Theology"]
[Extracts about the book from other sources.]
[ASCII text of "Essays and Reviews"]
[Text of "Essays and Reviews" as Scanned JPGs from the original 1860 Publication]
["Notices of the Life of Professor Baden Powell"] |
[1891: The pedigree of the family of Powell compiled by Edgar Powell]
["The Powell Pedigree", published in 1894 by Edgar Powell, and revised in 1926.]
[The Powell Pedigree: 500 years of family history Prepared by Robin Baden Clay (6 February, 2001)]