But, despite theological faculties, prince-bishops, and even popes, the new current of thought increased in strength and volume, and into it at the end of the eighteenth century came important contributions from two sources widely separated and most dissimilar.
The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was the work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had antic.i.p.ated some of those ideas of an evolutionary process in nature and in literature which first gained full recognition nearly three quarters of a century after him; but his greatest service in the field of biblical study was his work, at once profound and brilliant, The Spirit of Hebrew Poetry. In this field he eclipsed Bishop Lowth. Among other things of importance, he showed that the Psalms were by different authors and of different periods--the bloom of a great poetic literature.
Until his time no one had so clearly done justice to their sublimity and beauty; but most striking of all was his discussion of Solomon"s Song.
For over twenty centuries it had been customary to attribute to it mystical meanings. If here and there some man saw the truth, he was careful, like Aben Ezra, to speak with bated breath.
The penalty for any more honest interpretation was seen, among Protestants, when Calvin and Beza persecuted Castellio, covered him with obloquy, and finally drove him to starvation and death, for throwing light upon the real character of the Song of Songs; and among Catholics it was seen when Philip II allowed the pious and gifted Luis de Leon, for a similar offence, to be thrown into a dungeon of the Inquisition and kept there for five years, until his health was utterly shattered and his spirit so broken that he consented to publish a new commentary on the song, "as theological and obscure as the most orthodox could desire."
Here, too, we have an example of the efficiency of the older biblical theology in fettering the stronger minds and in stupefying the weaker.
Just as the book of Genesis had to wait over two thousand years for a physician to reveal the simplest fact regarding its structure, so the Song of Songs had to wait even longer for a poet to reveal not only its beauty but its character. Commentators innumerable had interpreted it; St. Bernard had preached over eighty sermons on its first two chapters; Palestrina had set its most erotic parts to sacred music; Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, from Origen to Aben Ezra and from Luther to Bossuet, had uncovered its deep meanings and had demonstrated it to be anything and everything save that which it really is. Among scores of these strange imaginations it was declared to represent the love of Jehovah for Israel; the love of Christ for the Church; the praises of the Blessed Virgin; the union of the soul with the body; sacred history from the Exodus to the Messiah; Church history from the Crucifixion to the Reformation; and some of the more acute Protestant divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany and to the Peace of Pa.s.sau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how really competent reasoners could thus argue without laughing in each other"s faces, after the manner of Cicero"s augurs. Herder showed Solomon"s Song to be what the whole thinking world now knows it to be--simply an Oriental love-poem.
But his frankness brought him into trouble: he was bitterly a.s.sailed.
Neither his n.o.ble character nor his genius availed him. Obliged to flee from one pastorate to another, he at last found a happy refuge at Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean Paul, and thence he exercised a powerful influence in removing noxious and parasitic growths from religious thought.
It would hardly be possible to imagine a man more different from Herder than was the other of the two who most influenced biblical interpretation at the end of the eighteenth century. This was Alexander Geddes--a Roman Catholic priest and a Scotchman. Having at an early period attracted much attention by his scholarship, and having received the very rare distinction, for a Catholic, of a doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, he began publishing in 1792 a new translation of the Old Testament, and followed this in 1800 with a volume of critical remarks. In these he supported mainly three views: first, that the Pentateuch in its present form could not have been written by Moses; secondly, that it was the work of various hands; and, thirdly, that it could not have been written before the time of David. Although there was a fringe of doubtful theories about them, these main conclusions, supported as they were by deep research and cogent reasoning, are now recognised as of great value. But such was not the orthodox opinion then. Though a man of sincere piety, who throughout his entire life remained firm in the faith of his fathers, he and his work were at once condemned: he was suspended by the Catholic authorities as a misbeliever, denounced by Protestants as an infidel, and taunted by both as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost." Of course, by this taunt was meant nothing more than that he dissented from sundry ideas inherited from less enlightened times by the men who just then happened to wield ecclesiastical power.
But not all the opposition to him could check the evolution of his thought. A line of great men followed in these paths opened by Astruc and Eichhorn, and broadened by Herder and Geddes. Of these was De Wette, whose various works, especially his Introduction to the Old Testament, gave a new impulse early in the nineteenth century to fruitful thought throughout Christendom. In these writings, while showing how largely myths and legends had entered into the Hebrew sacred books, he threw especial light into the books Deuteronomy and Chronicles. The former he showed to be, in the main, a late priestly summary of law, and the latter a very late priestly recast of early history. He had, indeed, to pay a penalty for thus aiding the world in its march toward more truth, for he was driven out of Germany, and obliged to take refuge in a Swiss professorship; while Theodore Parker, who published an English translation of his work, was, for this and similar sins, virtually rejected by what claimed to be the most liberal of all Christian bodies in the United States.
But contributions to the new thought continued from quarters whence least was expected. Gesenius, by his Hebrew Grammar, and Ewald, by his historical studies, greatly advanced it.
To them and to all like them during the middle years of the nineteenth century was st.u.r.dily opposed the colossus of orthodoxy--Hengstenberg. In him was combined the haughtiness of a Prussian drill-sergeant, the zeal of a Spanish inquisitor, and the flippant brutality of a French orthodox journalist. Behind him stood the gifted but erratic Frederick William IV--a man admirably fitted for a professorship of aesthetics, but whom an inscrutable fate had made King of Prussia. Both these rulers in the German Israel arrayed all possible opposition against the great scholars labouring in the new paths; but this opposition was vain: the succession of acute and honest scholars continued: Vatke, Bleek, Reuss, Graf, Kayser, Hupfeld, Delitzsch, Kuenen, and others wrought on in Germany and Holland, steadily developing the new truth.
Especially to be mentioned among these is Hupfeld, who published in 1853 his treatise on The Sources of Genesis. Accepting the Conjectures which Astruc had published just a hundred years before, he established what has ever since been recognised by the leading biblical commentators as the true basis of work upon the Pentateuch--the fact that THREE true doc.u.ments are combined in Genesis, each with its own characteristics.
He, too, had to pay a price for letting more light upon the world. A determined attempt was made to punish him. Though deeply religious in his nature and aspirations, he was denounced in 1865 to the Prussian Government as guilty of irreverence; but, to the credit of his n.o.ble and true colleagues who trod in the more orthodox paths--men like Tholuck and Julius Muller--the theological faculty of the University of Halle protested against this persecuting effort, and it was brought to naught.
The demonstrations of Hupfeld gave new life to biblical scholarship in all lands. More and more clear became the evidence that throughout the Pentateuch, and indeed in other parts of our sacred books, there had been a fusion of various ideas, a confounding of various epochs, and a compilation of various doc.u.ments. Thus was opened a new field of thought and work: in sifting out this literature; in rearranging it; and in bringing it into proper connection with the history of the Jewish race and of humanity.
Astruc and Hupfeld having thus found a key to the true character of the "Mosaic" Scriptures, a second key was found which opened the way to the secret of order in all this chaos. For many generations one thing had especially puzzled commentators and given rise to ma.s.ses of futile "reconciliation": this was the patent fact that such men as Samuel, David, Elijah, Isaiah, and indeed the whole Jewish people down to the Exile, showed in all their utterances and actions that they were utterly ignorant of that vast system of ceremonial law which, according to the accounts attributed to Moses and other parts of our sacred books, was in full force during their time and during nearly a thousand years before the Exile. It was held "always, everywhere, and by all," that in the Old Testament the chronological order of revelation was: first, the law; secondly, the Psalms; thirdly, the prophets. This belief continued unchallenged during more than two thousand years, and until after the middle of the nineteenth century.
Yet, as far back as 1835, Vatke at Berlin had, in his Religion of the Old Testament, expressed his conviction that this belief was unfounded.
Reasoning that Jewish thought must have been subject to the laws of development which govern other systems, he arrived at the conclusion that the legislation ascribed to Moses, and especially the elaborate paraphernalia and composite ceremonies of the ritual, could not have come into being at a period so rude as that depicted in the "Mosaic"
accounts.
Although Vatke wrapped this statement in a mist of Hegelian metaphysics, a sufficient number of watchmen on the walls of the Prussian Zion saw its meaning, and an alarm was given. The chroniclers tell us that "fear of failing in the examinations, through knowing too much, kept students away from Vatke"s lectures." Naturally, while Hengstenberg and Frederick William IV were commanding the forces of orthodoxy, Vatke thought it wise to be silent.
Still, the new idea was in the air; indeed, it had been divined about a year earlier, on the other side of the Rhine, by a scholar well known as acute and thoughtful--Reuss, of Strasburg. Unfortunately, he too was overawed, and he refrained from publishing his thought during more than forty years. But his ideas were caught by some of his most gifted scholars; and, of these, Graf and Kayser developed them and had the courage to publish them.
At the same period this new master key was found and applied by a greater man than any of these--by Kuenen, of Holland; and thus it was that three eminent scholars, working in different parts of Europe and on different lines, in spite of all obstacles, joined in enforcing upon the thinking world the conviction that the complete Levitical law had been established not at the beginning, but at the end, of the Jewish nation--mainly, indeed, after the Jewish nation as an independent political body had ceased to exist; that this code had not been revealed in the childhood of Israel, but that it had come into being in a perfectly natural way during Israel"s final decay--during the period when heroes and prophets had been succeeded by priests. Thus was the historical and psychological evolution of Jewish inst.i.tutions brought into harmony with the natural development of human thought; elaborate ceremonial inst.i.tutions being shown to have come after the ruder beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, yielded on all sides.
The lead in the new epoch thus opened was taken by Kuenen. Starting with strong prepossessions in favour of the older thought, and even with violent utterances against some of the supporters of the new view, he was borne on by his love of truth, until his great work, The Religion of Israel, published in 1869, attracted the attention of thinking scholars throughout the world by its arguments in favour of the upward movement.
From him now came a third master key to the mystery; for he showed that the true opening point for research into the history and literature of Israel is to be found in the utterances of the great prophets of the eighth century before our era. Starting from these, he opened new paths into the periods preceding and following them. Recognising the fact that the religion of Israel was, like other great world religions, a development of higher ideas out of lower, he led men to bring deeper thinking and wider research into the great problem. With ample learning and irresistible logic he proved that Old Testament history is largely mingled with myth and legend; that not only were the laws attributed to Moses in the main a far later development, but that much of their historical setting was an afterthought; also that Old Testament prophecy was never supernaturally predictive, and least of all predictive of events recorded in the New Testament. Thus it was that his genius gave to the thinking world a new point of view, and a masterly exhibition of the true method of study. Justly has one of the most eminent divines of the contemporary Anglican Church indorsed the statement of another eminent scholar, that "Kuenen stood upon his watch-tower, as it were the conscience of Old Testament science"; that his work is characterized "not merely by fine scholarship, critical insight, historical sense, and a religious nature, but also by an incorruptible conscientiousness, and a majestic devotion to the quest of truth."
Thus was established the science of biblical criticism. And now the question was, whether the Church of northern Germany would accept this great gift--the fruit of centuries of devoted toil and self-sacrifice--and take the lead of Christendom in and by it.
The great curse of Theology and Ecclesiasticism has always been their tendency to sacrifice large interests to small--Charity to Creed, Unity to Uniformity, Fact to Tradition, Ethics to Dogma. And now there were symptoms throughout the governing bodies of the Reformed churches indicating a determination to sacrifice leadership in this new thought to ease in orthodoxy. Every revelation of new knowledge encountered outcry, opposition, and repression; and, what was worse, the ill-judged declarations of some unwise workers in the critical field were seized upon and used to discredit all fruitful research. Fortunately, a man now appeared who both met all this opposition successfully, and put aside all the half truths or specious untruths urged by minor critics whose zeal outran their discretion. This was a great constructive scholar--not a destroyer, but a builder--Wellhausen. Reverently, but honestly and courageously, with clearness, fulness, and convicting force, he summed up the conquests of scientific criticism as bearing on Hebrew history and literature. These conquests had reduced the vast structures which theologians had during ages been erecting over the sacred text to shapeless ruin and rubbish: this rubbish he removed, and brought out from beneath it the reality. He showed Jewish history as an evolution obedient to laws at work in all ages, and Jewish literature as a growth out of individual, tribal, and national life. Thus was our sacred history and literature given a beauty and high use which had long been foreign to them. Thereby was a vast service rendered immediately to Germany, and eventually to all mankind; and this service was greatest of all in the domain of religion.(476)
(476) For Lowth, see the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, D. D., Professor of the Interpretation of the Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, Founders of the Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, pp. 3, 4.
For Astruc"s very high character as a medical authority, see the Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicales, Paris, 1820; it is significant that at first he concealed his authorship of the Conjectures. For a brief statement, see Cheyne; also Moore"s introduction to Bacon"s Genesis of Genesis; but for a statement remarkably full and interesting, and based on knowledge at first hand of Astruc"s very rare book, see Curtiss, as above. For Michaelis and Eichorn, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese; also Cheyne and Moore. For Isenbiehl, see Reusch, in Allg. deutsche Biographie. The texts cited against him were Isaiah vii, 14, and Matt.
i, 22, 23. For Herder, see various historians of literature and writers in exegesis, and especially Pfleiderer, Development of Theology in Germany, chap. ii. For his influence, as well as that of Lessing, see Beard"s Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For a brief comparison of Lowth"s work with that of Herder, see Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 377.
For examples of interpretations of the Song of Songs, see Farrar, as above, p. 33. For Castellio (Chatillon), his antic.i.p.ation of Herder"s view of Solomon"s Song, and his persecution by Calvin and Beza, which drove him to starvation and death, see Lecky, Rationalism, etc., vol. ii, pp. 46-48; also Bayle"s Dictionary, article Castalio; also Montaigne"s Essais, liv,. i, chap. x.x.xiv; and especially the new life of him by Buisson. For the persecution of Luis de Leon for a similar offence, see Ticknor, History of Spanish Literature, vol. ii, pp. 41, 42, and note. For a remarkably frank acceptance of the consequences flowing from Herder"s view of it, see Sanday, Inspiration, pp. 211, 405.
For Geddes, see Cheyne, as above. For Theodore Parker, see his various biographies, pa.s.sim. For Reuss, Graf, and Kuenen, see Cheyne, as above; and for the citations referred to, see the Rev. Dr. Driver, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, in The Academy, October 27, 1894; also a note to Wellhausen"s article Pentateuch in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
For a generous yet weighty tribute to Kuenen"s method, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iii, chap. ii. For the view of leading Christian critics on the book of Chronicles, see especially Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, pp. 495 et seq.; also Wellhausen, as above; also Hooykaas, Oort, and Kuenen, Bible for Learners. For many of the foregoing, see also the writings of Prof. W. Robertson Smith; also Beard"s Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For Hupfield and his discovery, see Cheyne, Founders, etc., as above, chap. vii; also Moore"s Introduction.
For a justly indignant judgment of Hengstenberg and his school, see Canon Farrar, as above, p. 417, note; and for a few words throwing a bright light into his character and career, see C. A. Briggs, D. D., Authority of Holy Scripture, p. 93. For Wellhausen, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iii, chap. ii. For an excellent popular statement of the general results of German criticism, see J. T. Sunderland, The Bible, Its Origin, Growth, and Character, New York and London, 1893.
III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.
The science of biblical criticism was, as we have seen, first developed mainly in Germany and Holland. Many considerations there, as elsewhere, combined to deter men from opening new paths to truth: not even in those countries were these the paths to preferment; but there, at least, the st.u.r.dy 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 mult.i.tude of splendid prizes for plausibility, for sophistry, or for silence displayed before the ecclesiastical vision in England. In the frugal homes of North German and Dutch professors and pastors high thinking on these great subjects went steadily on, and the "liberty of teaching," which is the glory of the northern Continental universities, while it did not secure honest thinkers against vexations, did at least protect them against the persecutions which in other countries would have thwarted their studies and starved their families.(477)
(477) As to the influence of Kant on honest thought in Germany, see Pfleiderer, as above, chap. i.
In England the admission of the new current of thought was apparently impossible. The traditional system of biblical interpretation seemed established on British soil forever. It was knit into the whole fabric of thought and observance; it was protected by the most justly esteemed hierarchy the world has ever seen; it was intrenched behind the bishops"
palaces, the cathedral stalls, the professors" chairs, the country parsonages--all these, as a rule, the seats of high endeavour and beautiful culture. The older thought held a controlling voice in the senate of the nation; it was dear to the hearts of all cla.s.ses; it was superbly endowed; every strong thinker seemed to hold a brief, or to be in receipt of a retaining fee for it. As to preferment in the Church, there was a cynical aphorism current, "He may hold anything who will hold his tongue."(478)
(478) For an eloquent and at the same time profound statement of the evils flowing from the "moral terrorism" and "intellectual tyrrany"
at Oxford at the period referred to, see quotation in Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 371.
For the alloy of interested motives among English Church dignitiaries, see the pungent criticism of Bishop Hampden by Canon Liddon, in his Life of Pusey, vol. i, p. 363.
Yet, while there was inevitably much alloy of worldly wisdom in the opposition to the new thought, no just thinker can deny far higher motives to many, perhaps to most, of the ecclesiastics who were resolute against it. The evangelical movement incarnate in the Wesleys had not spent its strength; the movement begun by Pusey, Newman, Keble, and their compeers was in full force. The aesthetic reaction, represented on the Continent by Chateaubriand, Manzoni, and Victor Hugo, and in England by Walter Scott, Pugin, Ruskin, and above all by Wordsworth, came in to give strength to this barrier. Under the magic of the men who led in this reaction, cathedrals and churches, which in the previous century had been regarded by men of culture as mere barbaric ma.s.ses of stone and mortar, to be masked without by cla.s.sic colonnades and within by rococo work in stucco and papier mache, became even more beloved than in the thirteenth century. Even men who were repelled by theological disputations were fascinated and made devoted reactionists by the newly revealed beauties of medieval architecture and ritual.(479)
(479) A very curious example of this insensibility among persons of really high culture is to be found in American literature toward the end of the eighteenth century. Mrs. Adams, wife of John Adams, afterward President of the United States, but at that time minister to England, one of the most gifted women of her time, speaking, in her very interesting letters from England, of her journey to the seash.o.r.e, refers to Canterbury Cathedral, seen from her carriage windows, and which she evidently did not take the trouble to enter, as "looking like a vast prison." So, too, about the same time, Thomas Jefferson, the American plenipotentiary in France, a devoted lover of cla.s.sical and Renaissance architecture, giving an account of his journey to Paris, never refers to any of the beautiful cathedrals or churches upon his route.
The centre and fortress of this vast system, and of the reaction against the philosophy of the eighteenth century, was the University of Oxford.
Orthodoxy was its vaunt, and a special exponent of its spirit and object of its admiration was its member of Parliament, Mr. William Ewart Gladstone, who, having begun his political career by a laboured plea for the union of church and state, ended it by giving that union what is likely to be a death-blow. The mob at the circus of Constantinople in the days of the Byzantine emperors was hardly more wildly orthodox than the mob of students at this foremost seat of learning of the Anglo-Saxon race during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The Moslem students of El Azhar are hardly more intolerant now than these English students were then. A curious proof of this had been displayed just before the end of that period. The minister of the United States at the court of St. James was then Edward Everett. He was undoubtedly the most accomplished scholar and one of the foremost statesmen that America had produced; his eloquence in early life had made him perhaps the most admired of American preachers; his cla.s.sical 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 Ma.s.sachusetts; 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 ma.s.s 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical 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 cla.s.sical works are necessarily to be taken at what may be termed their face value.