But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first.
The outcry against the work was deafening: churchmen and
dissenters rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison,
chairman of the committee of Convocation appointed to examine it,
uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and a
zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, deposed
and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given over to Satan."
On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned with "answers,"
some of these being especially injurious to the cause they were
intended to serve, and none more so than sundry efforts by the
bishops themselves. One of the points upon which they attacked him
was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus to the hare
chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this Prof. Hitzig, of
Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time, remarked: "Your
bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock of Europe. Every
Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus is really the
hare;... every zoologist knows that it does not chew the cud."[[351]]

On Colenso's return to Natal, where many of the clergy and laity
who felt grateful for his years of devotion to them received him
with signs of affection, an attempt was made to ruin these
clergymen by depriving them of their little stipends, and to
terrify the simple-minded laity by threatening them with the same
"greater excommunication" which had been inflicted upon their
bishop. To make the meaning of this more evident, the vicar-general
of the Bishop of Cape Town met Colenso at the door of his own
cathedral, and solemnly bade him "depart from the house of God as
one who has been handed over to the Evil One." The sentence of
excommunication was read before the assembled faithful, and they
were enjoined to treat their bishop as "a heathen man and a
publican." But these and a long series of other persecutions
created a reaction in his favour.

There remained to Colenso one bulwark which his enemies found
stronger than they had imagined--the British courts of justice. The
greatest efforts were now made to gain the day before these courts,
to humiliate Colenso, and to reduce to beggary the clergy who
remained faithful to him; and it is worthy of note that one of the
leaders in preparing the legal plea of the com mittee against him
was Mr. Gladstone.

But this bulwark proved impregnable: both the Judicial Committee of
the Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's favour.
Not only were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him of his
salary, but their excommunication of him was made null and void;
it became, indeed, a subject of ridicule, and even a man so
nurtured in religious sentiment as John Keble confessed and
lamented that the English people no longer believed in
excommunication. The bitterness of the defeated found vent in the
utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had excommunicated
Colenso--Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town"--who denounced the
judgment as "awful and profane," and the Privy Council as "a
masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the English Church."
Even Wilberforce, careful as he was to avoid attacking anything
established, alluded with deep regret to "the devotion of the
English people to the law in matters of this sort."

Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence of
the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England and
America, was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and various
dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains were taken
to root out his reputation: it was declared that he had merely
stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by wholesale, and
peddled them out in England at retail; the fact being that, while
he used all the sources of information at his command, and was
large-minded enough to put himself into relations with the best
biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was singularly
independent in his judgment, and that his investigations were of
lasting value in modifying Continental thought. Kuenen, the most
distinguished of all his contemporaries in this field, modified, as
he himself declared, one of his own leading theories after reading
Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less
eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English
scholar for original suggestions.[[352]]

But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He
was socially ostracized--more completely even than Lyell had been
after the publication of his _Principles of Geology_ thirty years
before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison
Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had been
defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who turned
against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a true
ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and people,
of all books in the world, Spinoza's _Tractatus_. A large part of the
English populace was led to regard him as an "infidel," a
"traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean being"; servants
left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart were let
loose upon him"; and one of the favourite amusements of the period
among men of petty wit and no convictions was the devising of
light ribaldry against him.[[353]]

In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of whom
has connected his name with it permanently.

First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of
Oxford. The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been
honoured throughout the world for his efforts in the suppression of
the slave trade, he had been rapidly advanced in the English
Church, and was at this time a prelate of wide influence. He was
eloquent and diplomatic, witty and amiable, always sure to be with
his fellow-churchmen and polite society against uncomfortable
changes. Whether the struggle was against the slave power in the
United States, or the squirearchy in Great Britain, or the
evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views promulgated by the
_Essayists and Reviewers_, he was always the suave spokesman of those
who opposed every innovator and "besought him to depart out of
their coasts." Mingling in curious proportions a truly religious
feeling with care for his own advancement, his remarkable power in
the pulpit gave him great strength to carry out his purposes, and
his charming facility in being all things to all men, as well as
his skill in evading the consequences of his many mistakes, gained
him the sobriquet of "Soapy Sam." If such brethren of his in the
episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn and Tait might claim to be in
the apostolic succession, Wilberforce was no less surely in the
succession from the most gifted and eminently respectable Sadducees
who held high preferment under Pontius Pilate.

By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached
the sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and
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."[[355]]

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.[[356]]

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.[[359]]

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.[[362]]

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.[[364]]

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."[[364b]]

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."[[365]]

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.[[367]]

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."[[368]]

Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting
Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was
to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the
foremost scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the most
conservative of those whose opinions were entitled to weight had
made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable, there was
fanatical opposition to any change. The _Syllabus of Errors_ put
forth by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other documents issued
from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties of this needed
transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman Catholic scholars
skilfully explained away the obstacles thus created, others
published works insisting upon the most extreme views as to the
verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In the Church of England
various influential men took the same view. Dr. Baylee, Principal
of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture "every
scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its histories and
narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy. Its words and
phrases have a grammatical and philological accuracy, such as is
possessed by no human composition." In 1861 Dean Burgon preached in
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as follows: "No, sirs, the Bible
is the very utterance of the Eternal: as much God's own word as if
high heaven were open and we heard God speaking to us with human
voice. Every book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely.
Inspiration is not a difference of degree, but of kind. The Bible
is filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God; the books of
it and the words of it and the very letters of it."

In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must either
receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny the
veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ as a
teacher of divine truth."

As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in the
Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral,
used in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that the authority
of Christ himself, and therefore of Christianity, must rest on the
old view of the Old Testament; that, since the founder of
Christianity, in divinely recorded utterances, alluded to the
transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to Noah's ark
and the Flood, and to the sojourn of Jonah in the whale, the
biblical account of these must be accepted as historical, or that
Christianity must be given up altogether.

In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the
Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no
argument could be more fraught with peril to the interest which the
gifted preacher sought to serve.

In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to the
newer biblical studies were heard; and from America, especially
from the college at Princeton, came resounding echoes. As an
example of many may be quoted the statement by the eminent Dr.
Hodge that the books of Scripture "are, one and all, in thought and
verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly the work of
God, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine authority all that
God meant to convey without human additions and admixtures"; and
that "infallibility and authority attach as much to the verbal
expression in which the revelation is made as to the matter of the
revelation itself."

But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant
Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took
strong hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as
orthodox: Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith,
Moore, Haupt, Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though
most of them were opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other
authorities of their respective churches, they were manfully
supported by the more intellectual clergy and laity. The greater
universities of the country ranged themselves on the side of these
men; persecution but intrenched them more firmly in the hearts of
all intelligent well-wishers of Christianity. The triumphs won by
their opponents in assemblies, synods, conventions, and conferences
were really victories for the nominally defeated, since they
revealed to the world the fact that in each of these bodies the
strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought which alone
can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of thinkers;
no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have been
won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.

And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most
powerful aid to the new school of biblical research.


       V. YICTORY 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.[[371]]

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."[[374]]

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.[[376]]

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."[[378]]

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.[[384]]

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.[[385]]

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."[[386]]

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.[[388]]

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.[[390]]

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."[[391]]

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.[[392]]


        VI. RECONSTRUCTIVE FORCE OF SCIENTIFIC CRITICISM.

For all this dissolving away of traditional opinions regarding our
sacred literature, there has been a cause far more general and
powerful than any which has been given, for it is a cause
surrounding and permeating all. This is simply the atmosphere of
thought engendered by the development of all sciences during the
last three centuries.

Vast masses of myth, legend, marvel, and dogmatic assertion, coming
into this atmosphere, have been dissolved and are now dissolving
quietly away like icebergs drifted into the Gulf Stream. In earlier
days, when some critic in advance of his time insisted that Moses
could not have written an account embracing the circumstances of
his own death, it was sufficient to answer that Moses was a
prophet; if attention was called to the fact that the great early
prophets, by all which they did and did not do, showed that there
could not have existed in their time any "Levitical code," a
sufficient answer was "mystery"; and if the discrepancy was noted
between the two accounts of creation in Genesis, or between the
genealogies or the dates of the crucifixion in the Gospels, the
cogent reply was "infidelity." But the thinking world has at last
been borne by the general development of a scientific atmosphere
beyond that kind of refutation.

If, in the atmosphere generated by the earlier developed sciences,
the older growths of biblical interpretation have drooped and
withered and are evidently perishing, new and better growths have
arisen with roots running down into the newer sciences. Comparative
Anthropology in general, by showing that various early stages of
belief and observance, once supposed to be derived from direct
revelation from heaven to the Hebrews, are still found as arrested
developments among various savage and barbarous tribes; Comparative
Mythology and Folklore, by showing that ideas and beliefs regarding
the Supreme Power in the universe are progressive, and not less in
Judea than in other parts of the world; Comparative Religion and
Literature, by searching out and laying side by side those main
facts in the upward struggle of humanity which show that the
Israelites, like other gifted peoples, rose gradually, through
ghost worship, fetichism, and polytheism, to higher theological
levels; and that, as they thus rose, their conceptions and
statements regarding the God they worshipped became nobler and
better--all these sciences are giving a new solution to those
problems which dogmatic theology has so long laboured in vain to
solve. While researches in these sciences have established the fact
that accounts formerly supposed to be special revelations to Jews
and Christians are but repetitions of widespread legends dating
from far earlier civilizations, and that beliefs formerly thought
fundamental to Judaism and Christianity are simply based on ancient
myths, they have also begun to impress upon the intellect and
conscience of the thinking world the fact that the religious and
moral truths thus disengaged from the old masses of myth and legend
are all the more venerable and authoritative, and that all individual
or national life of any value must be vitalized by them.[[394]]

If, then, modern science in general has acted powerfully to
dissolve away the theories and dogmas of the older theologic
interpretation, it has also been active in a reconstruction and
recrystallization of truth; and very powerful in this
reconstruction have been the evolution doctrines which have grown
out of the thought and work of men like Darwin and Spencer.

In the light thus obtained the sacred text has been transformed:
out of the old chaos has come order; out of the old welter of
hopelessly conflicting statements in religion and morals has come,
in obedience to this new conception of development, the idea of a
sacred literature which mirrors the most striking evolution of
morals and religion in the history of our race. Of all the sacred
writings of the world, it shows us our own as the most beautiful
and the most precious; exhibiting to us the most complete religious
development to which humanity has attained, and holding before us
the loftiest ideals which our race has known. Thus it is that, with
the keys furnished by this new race of biblical scholars, the way
has been opened to treasures of thought which have been
inaccessible to theologians for two thousand years.

As to the Divine Power in the universe: these interpreter's have
shown how, beginning with the tribal god of the Hebrews--one among
many jealous, fitful, unseen, local sovereigns of Asia Minor--the
higher races have been borne on to the idea of the just Ruler of
the whole earth, as revealed by the later and greater prophets of
Israel, and finally to the belief in the Universal Father, as best
revealed in the New Testament. As to man: beginning with men after
Jehovah's own heart--cruel, treacherous, revengeful--we are borne
on to an ideal of men who do right for right's sake; who search
and speak the truth for truth's sake; who love others as
themselves. As to the world at large: the races dominant in
religion and morals have been lifted from the idea of a "chosen
people" stimulated and abetted by their tribal god in every sort of
cruelty and injustice, to the conception of a vast community in
which the fatherhood of God overarches all, and the brotherhood of
man permeates all.

Thus, at last, out of the old conception of our Bible as a
collection of oracles--a mass of entangling utterances, fruitful in
wrangling interpretations, which have given to the world long and
weary ages of "hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness"; of
fetichism, subtlety, and pomp; of tyranny bloodshed, and solemnly
constituted imposture; of everything which the Lord Jesus Christ
most abhorred--has been gradually developed through the centuries,
by the labours, sacrifices, and even the martyrdom of a long
succession of men of God, the conception of it as a sacred
literature--a growth only possible under that divine light which
the various orbs of science have done so much to bring into the
mind and heart and soul of man--a revelation, not of the Fall of
Man, but of the Ascent of Man--an exposition, not of temporary
dogmas and observances, but of the Eternal Law of
Righteousness--the one upward path for individuals and for nations.
No longer an oracle, good for the "lower orders" to accept, but to
be quietly sneered at by "the enlightened"--no longer a fetich,
whose defenders must be persecuters, or reconcilers, or
"apologists"; but a most fruitful fact, which religion and science
may accept as a source of strength to both.

[End.]

