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Chapter 20 - From the Divine Oracles to the Higher Criticism
The Closing Struggle
The storm aroused by Essays and Reviews had not yet subsided when
a far more serious tempest burst upon the English theological world.
In 1862 appeared a work entitled The Pentateuch and the Book of
Joshua Critically Examined its author being Colenso, Anglican
Bishop of Natal, in South Africa. He had formerly been highly
esteemed as fellow and tutor at Cambridge, master at Harrow, author
of various valuable text-books in mathematics; and as long as he
exercised his powers within the limits of popular orthodoxy he was
evidently in the way to the highest positions in the Church: but
he chose another path. His treatment of his subject was reverent,
but he had gradually come to those conclusions, then so daring, now
so widespread among Christian scholars, that the Pentateuch, with
much valuable historical matter, contains much that is
unhistorical; that a large portion of it was the work of a
comparatively late period in Jewish history; that many passages in
Deuteronomy could only have been written after the Jews settled in
Canaan; that the Mosaic law was not in force before the captivity;
that the books of Chronicles were clearly written as an
afterthought, to enforce the views of the priestly caste; and that
in all the books there is much that is mythical and legendary.
Very justly has a great German scholar recently adduced this work
of a churchman relegated to the most petty of bishoprics in one of
the most remote corners of the world, as a proof "that the problems
of biblical criticism can no longer be suppressed; that they are in
the air of our time, so that theology could not escape them even if
it took the wings of the morning and dwelt in the uttermost parts
of the sea."
The bishop's statements, which now seem so moderate, then aroused
horror. Especial wrath was caused by some of his arithmetical
arguments, and among them those which showed that an army of six
hundred thousand men could not have been mobilized in a single
night; that three millions of people, with their flocks and herds,
could neither have obtained food on so small and arid a desert as
that over which they were said to have wandered during forty years,
nor water from a single well; and that the butchery of two hundred
thousand Midianites by twelve thousand Israelites, "exceeding
infinitely in atrocity the tragedy at Cawnpore, had happily only
been carried out on paper." There was nothing of the scoffer in
him. While preserving his own independence, he had kept in touch
with the most earnest thought both among European scholars and in
the little flock intrusted to his care. He evidently remembered
what had resulted from the attempt to hold the working classes in
the towns of France, Germany, and Italy to outworn beliefs; he had
found even the Zulus, whom he thought to convert, suspicious of the
legendary features of the Old Testament, and with his clear
practical mind he realized the danger which threatened the English
Church and Christianity - the danger of tying its religion and
morality to interpretations and conceptions of Scripture more and
more widely seen and felt to be contrary to facts. He saw the
especial peril of sham explanations, of covering up facts which
must soon be known, and which, when revealed, must inevitably bring
the plain people of England to regard their teachers, even the most
deserving, as "solemnly constituted impostors" - ecclesiastics
whose tenure depends on assertions which they know to be untrue.
Therefore it was that, when his catechumens questioned him
regarding some of the Old Testament legends, the bishop determined
to tell the truth. He says: "My heart answered in the words of the
prophet, 'Shall a man speak lies in the name of the Lord?' I
determined not to do so."
But none of these considerations availed in his behalf at first.
The outcry against the work was deafening: churchmen and
dissenters rushed forward to attack it. Archdeacon Denison,
chairman of the committee of Convocation appointed to examine it,
uttered a noisy anathema. Convocation solemnly condemned it; and a
zealous colonial bishop, relying upon a nominal supremacy, deposed
and excommunicated its author, declaring him "given over to Satan."
On both sides of the Atlantic the press groaned with "answers,"
some of these being especially injurious to the cause they were
intended to serve, and none more so than sundry efforts by the
bishops themselves. One of the points upon which they attacked him
was his assertion that the reference in Leviticus to the hare
chewing its cud contains an error. Upon this Prof. Hitzig, of
Leipsic, one of the best Hebrew scholars of his time, remarked: "Your
bishops are making themselves the laughing-stock of Europe. Every
Hebraist knows that the animal mentioned in Leviticus is really the
hare;... every zoologist knows that it does not chew the cud."
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 committee against him
was Mr. Gladstone.
But this bulwark proved impregnable: both the Judicial Committee of
the Privy Council and the Rolls Court decided in Colenso's favour.
Not only were his enemies thus forbidden to deprive him of his
salary, but their excommunication of him was made null and void;
it became, indeed, a subject of ridicule, and even a man so
nurtured in religious sentiment as John Keble confessed and
lamented that the English people no longer believed in
excommunication. The bitterness of the defeated found vent in the
utterances of the colonial metropolitan who had excommunicated
Colenso - Bishop Gray, "the Lion of Cape Town" - who denounced the
judgment as "awful and profane," and the Privy Council as "a
masterpiece of Satan" and "the great dragon of the English Church."
Even Wilberforce, careful as he was to avoid attacking anything
established, alluded with deep regret to "the devotion of the
English people to the law in matters of this sort."
Their failure in the courts only seemed to increase the violence of
the attacking party. The Anglican communion, both in England and
America, was stirred to its depths against the heretic, and various
dissenting bodies strove to show equal zeal. Great pains were taken
to root out his reputation: it was declared that he had merely
stolen the ideas of rationalists on the Continent by wholesale, and
peddled them out in England at retail; the fact being that, while
he used all the sources of information at his command, and was
large-minded enough to put himself into relations with the best
biblical scholarship of the Continent, he was singularly
independent in his judgment, and that his investigations were of
lasting value in modifying Continental thought. Kuenen, the most
distinguished of all his contemporaries in this field, modified, as
he himself declared, one of his own leading theories after reading
Colenso's argument; and other Continental scholars scarcely less
eminent acknowledged their great indebtedness to the English
scholar for original suggestions.
But the zeal of the bishop's enemies did not end with calumny. He
was socially ostracized - more completely even than Lyell had been
after the publication of his Principles of Geology thirty years
before. Even old friends left him, among them Frederick Denison
Maurice, who, when himself under the ban of heresy, had been
defended by Colenso. Nor was Maurice the only heretic who turned
against him; Matthew Arnold attacked him, and set up, as a true
ideal of the work needed to improve the English Church and people,
of all books in the world, Spinoza's Tractatus. A large part of the
English populace was led to regard him as an "infidel," a
"traitor," an "apostate," and even as "an unclean being"; servants
left his house in horror; "Tray, Blanche, and Sweetheart were let
loose upon him"; and one of the favourite amusements of the period
among men of petty wit and no convictions was the devising of
light ribaldry against him.
In the midst of all this controversy stood three men, each of whom
has connected his name with it permanently.
First of these was Samuel Wilberforce, at that time Bishop of
Oxford. The gifted son of William Wilberforce, who had been
honoured throughout the world for his efforts in the suppression of
the slave trade, he had been rapidly advanced in the English
Church, and was at this time a prelate of wide influence. He was
eloquent and diplomatic, witty and amiable, always sure to be with
his fellow-churchmen and polite society against uncomfortable
changes. Whether the struggle was against the slave power in the
United States, or the squirearchy in Great Britain, or the
evolution theory of Darwin, or the new views promulgated by the
Essayists and Reviewers, he was always the suave spokesman of those
who opposed every innovator and "besought him to depart out of
their coasts." Mingling in curious proportions a truly religious
feeling with care for his own advancement, his remarkable power in
the pulpit gave him great strength to carry out his purposes, and
his charming facility in being all things to all men, as well as
his skill in evading the consequences of his many mistakes, gained
him the sobriquet of "Soapy Sam." If such brethren of his in the
episcopate as Thirlwall and Selwyn and Tait might claim to be in
the apostolic succession, Wilberforce was no less surely in the
succession from the most gifted and eminently respectable Sadducees
who held high preferment under Pontius Pilate.
By a curious coincidence he had only a few years before preached
the sermon when Colenso was consecrated in Westminster Abbey, and
one passage in it may be cited as showing the preacher's gift of
prophecy both hortatory and predictive. Wilberforce then said to
Colenso: "You need boldness to risk all for God - to stand by the
truth and its supporters against men's threatenings and the
devil's wrath;... you need a patient meekness to bear the galling
calumnies and false surmises with which, if you are faithful, that
same Satanic working, which, if it could, would burn your body,
will assuredly assail you daily through the pens and tongues of
deceivers and deceived, who, under a semblance of a zeal for Christ,
will evermore distort your words, misrepresent your motives, rejoice
in your failings, exaggerate your errors, and seek by every poisoned
breath of slander to destroy your powers of service."
Unfortunately, when Colenso followed this advice his adviser became
the most untiring of his persecutors. While leaving to men like the
Metropolitan of Cape Town and Archdeacon Denison the noisy part of
the onslaught, Wilberforce was among those who were most zealous in
devising more effective measures.
But time, and even short time, has redressed the balance between
the two prelates. Colenso is seen more and more of all men as a
righteous leader in a noble effort to cut the Church loose from
fatal entanglements with an outworn system of interpretation;
Wilberforce, as the remembrance of his eloquence and of his
personal charm dies away, and as the revelations of his indiscreet
biographers lay bare his modes of procedure, is seen to have left,
on the whole, the most disappointing record made by any Anglican
prelate during the nineteenth century.
But there was a far brighter page in the history of the Church of
England; for the second of the three who linked their names with
that of Colenso in the struggle was Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of
Westminster. His action during this whole persecution was an honour
not only to the Anglican Church but to humanity. For his own
manhood and the exercise of his own intellectual freedom he had
cheerfully given up the high preferment in the Church which had
been easily within his grasp. To him truth and justice were more
than the decrees of a Convocation of Canterbury or of a
Pan-Anglican Synod; in this as in other matters he braved the
storm, never yielded to theological prejudice, from first to last
held out a brotherly hand to the persecuted bishop, and at the most
critical moment opened to him the pulpit of Westminster Abbey.
The third of the high ecclesiastics of the Church of England whose
names were linked in this contest was Thirlwall. He was undoubtedly
the foremost man in the Church of his time - the greatest
ecclesiastical statesman, the profoundest historical scholar, the
theologian of clearest vision in regard to the relations between
the Church and his epoch. Alone among his brother bishops at this
period, he stood "four square to all the winds that blew," as
during all his life he stood against all storms of clerical or
popular unreason. He had his reward. He was never advanced beyond
a poor Welsh bishopric; but, though he saw men wretchedly inferior
constantly promoted beyond him, he never flinched, never lost heart
or hope, but bore steadily on, refusing to hold a brief for
lucrative injustice, and resisting to the last all reaction and
fanaticism, thus preserving not only his own self-respect but the
future respect of the English nation for the Church.
A few other leading churchmen were discreetly kind to Colenso,
among them Tait, who had now been made Archbishop of Canterbury;
but, manly as he was, he was somewhat more cautious in this matter
than those who most revere his memory could now wish.
In spite of these friends the clerical onslaught was for a time
effective; Colenso, so far as England was concerned, was
discredited and virtually driven from his functions. But this
enforced leisure simply gave him more time to struggle for the
protection of his native flock against colonial rapacity and to
continue his great work on the Bible.
His work produced its effect. It had much to do with arousing a new
generation of English, Scotch, and American scholars. While very
many of his minor statements have since been modified or rejected,
his main conclusion was seen more and more clearly to be true.
Reverently and in the deepest love for Christianity he had made the
unhistorical character of the Pentateuch clear as noonday.
Henceforth the crushing weight of the old interpretation upon
science and morality and religion steadily and rapidly grew less
and less. That a new epoch had come was evident, and out of many
proofs of this we may note two of the most striking.
For many years the Bampton Lectures at Oxford had been considered
as adding steadily and strongly to the bulwarks of the old
orthodoxy. If now and then orthodoxy had appeared in danger from
such additions to the series as those made by Dr. Hampden, these
lectures had been, as a rule, saturated with the older traditions
of the Anglican Church. But now there was an evident change. The
departures from the old paths were many and striking, until at
last, in 1893, came the lectures on Inspiration by the Rev. Dr.
Sanday, Ireland Professor of Exegesis in the University of Oxford.
In these, concessions were made to the newer criticism, which at an
earlier time would have driven the lecturer not only out of the
Church but out of any decent position in society; for Prof. Sanday
not only gave up a vast mass of other ideas which the great body of
churchmen had regarded as fundamental, but accepted a number of
conclusions established by the newer criticism. He declared that
Kuenen and Wellhausen had mapped out, on the whole rightly, the
main stages of development in the history of Hebrew literature; he
incorporated with approval the work of other eminent heretics; he
acknowledged that very many statements in the Pentateuch show "the
naive ideas and usages of a primitive age." But, most important of
all, he gave up the whole question in regard to the book of Daniel.
Up to a time then very recent, the early authorship and predictive
character of the book of Daniel were things which no one was
allowed for a moment to dispute. Pusey, as we have seen, had proved
to the controlling parties in the English Church that Christianity
must stand or fall with the traditional view of this book; and now,
within a few years of Pusey's death, there came, in his own
university, speaking from the pulpit of St. Mary's whence he had so
often insisted upon the absolute necessity of maintaining the older
view, this professor of biblical criticism, a doctor of divinity,
showing conclusively as regards the book of Daniel that the
critical view had won the day; that the name of Daniel is only
assumed; that the book is in no sense predictive, but was written,
mainly at least, after the events it describes; that "its author
lived at the time of the Maccabean struggle"; that it is very
inaccurate even in the simple facts which it cites; and hence that
all the vast fabric erected upon its predictive character is baseless.
But another evidence of the coming in of a new epoch was even
more striking.
To uproot every growth of the newer thought, to destroy even every
germ that had been planted by Colenso and men like him, a special
movement was begun, of which the most important part was the
establishment, at the University of Oxford, of a college which
should bring the old opinion with crushing force against the new
thought, and should train up a body of young men by feeding them
upon the utterances of the fathers, of the medieval doctors, and of
the apologists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and
should keep them in happy ignorance of the reforming spirit of the
sixteenth and the scientific spirit of the nineteenth century.
The new college thus founded bore the name of the poet most widely
beloved among high churchmen; large endowments flowed in upon it;
a showy chapel was erected in accordance throughout with the
strictest rules of medieval ecclesiology. As if to strike the
keynote of the thought to be fostered in the new institution, one
of the most beautiful of pseudo-medieval pictures was given the
place of honour in its hall; and the college, lofty and gaudy,
loomed high above the neighbouring modest abode of Oxford science.
Kuenen might be victorious in Holland, and Wellhausen in Germany,
and Robertson Smith in Scotland - even Professors Driver, Sanday,
and Cheyne might succeed Dr. Pusey as expounders of the Old
Testament at Oxford - but Keble College, rejoicing in the favour of
a multitude of leaders in the Church, including Mr. Gladstone,
seemed an inexpugnable fortress of the older thought.
But in 1889 appeared the book of essays entitled Lux Mundi, among
whose leading authors were men closely connected with Keble College
and with the movement which had created it. This work gave up
entirely the tradition that the narrative in Genesis is a
historical record, and admitted that all accounts in the Hebrew
Scriptures of events before the time of Abraham are mythical and
legendary; it conceded that the books ascribed to Moses and Joshua
were made up mainly of three documents representing different
periods, and one of them the late period of the exile; that "there
is a considerable idealizing element in Old Testament history";
that "the books of Chronicles show an idealizing of history" and
"a reading back into past records of a ritual development which is
really later," and that prophecy is not necessarily predictive -
"prophetic inspiration being consistent with erroneous
anticipations." Again a shudder went through the upholders of
tradition in the Church, and here and there threats were heard; but
the Essays and Reviews fiasco and the Colenso catastrophe were
still in vivid remembrance. Good sense prevailed: Benson,
Archbishop of Canterbury, instead of prosecuting the authors,
himself asked the famous question, "May not the Holy Spirit make
use of myth and legend?" and the Government, not long afterward,
promoted one of these authors to a bishopric.
In the sister university the same tendency was seen. Robertson
Smith, who had been driven out of his high position in the Free
Church of Scotland on account of his work in scriptural research,
was welcomed into a professorship at Cambridge, and other men, no
less loyal to the new truths, were given places of controlling
influence in shaping the thought of the new generation.
Nor did the warfare against biblical science produce any different
results among the dissenters of England. In 1862 Samuel Davidson,
a professor in the Congregational College at Manchester, published
his Introduction to the Old Testament. Independently of the
contemporary writers of Essays and Reviews, he had arrived in a
general way at conclusions much like theirs, and he presented the
newer view with fearless honesty, admitting that the same research
must be applied to these as to other Oriental sacred books, and
that such research establishes the fact that all alike contain
legendary and mythical elements. A storm was at once aroused;
certain denominational papers took up the matter, and Davidson was
driven from his professorial chair; but he laboured bravely on, and
others followed to take up his work, until the ideas which he had
advocated were fully considered.
So, too, in Scotland the work of Robertson Smith was continued even
after he had been driven into England; and, as votaries of the
older thought passed away, men of ideas akin to his were gradually
elected into chairs of biblical criticism and interpretation.
Wellhausen's great work, which Smith had introduced in English
form, proved a power both in England and Scotland, and the articles
upon various books of Scripture and scriptural subjects generally,
in the ninth edition of the Encyclopæ dia Britannica, having been
prepared mainly by himself as editor or put into the hands of
others representing the recent critical research, this very
important work of reference, which had been in previous editions so
timid, was now arrayed on the side of the newer thought, insuring
its due consideration wherever the English language is spoken.
In France the same tendency was seen, though with striking
variations from the course of events in other countries - variations
due to the very different conditions under which biblical students
in France were obliged to work. Down to the middle of the
nineteenth century the orthodoxy of Bossuet, stiffly opposing the
letter of Scripture to every step in the advance of science, had
only yielded in a very slight degree. But then came an event
ushering in a new epoch. At that time Jules Simon, afterward so
eminent as an author, academician, and statesman, was quietly
discharging the duties of a professorship, when there was brought
him the visiting card of a stranger bearing the name of "Ernest
Renan, Student at St. Sulpice." Admitted to M. Simon's library,
Renan told his story. As a theological student he had devoted
himself most earnestly, even before he entered the seminary, to the
study of Hebrew and the Semitic languages, and he was now obliged,
during the lectures on biblical literature at St. Sulpice, to hear
the reverend professor make frequent comments, based on the
Vulgate, but absolutely disproved by Renan's own knowledge of
Hebrew. On Renan's questioning any interpretation of the lecturer,
the latter was wont to rejoin: "Monsieur, do you presume to deny
the authority of the Vulgate - the translation by St. Jerome,
sanctioned by the Holy Ghost and the Church? You will at once go
into the chapel and say 'Hail Mary' for an hour before the image
of the Blessed Virgin."
"But," said Renan to Jules Simon, "this has now become very
serious; it happens nearly every day, and, mon Dieu! Monsieur, I
can not spend all my time in saying, Hail Mary, before the statue
of the Virgin." The result was a warm personal attachment between
Simon and Renan; both were Bretons, educated in the midst of the most
orthodox influences, and both had unwillingly broken away from them.
Renan was now emancipated, and pursued his studies with such effect
that he was made professor at the College de France. His Life of
Jesus, and other books showing the same spirit, brought a tempest
upon him which drove him from his professorship and brought great
hardships upon him for many years. But his genius carried the day,
and, to the honour of the French Republic, he was restored to the
position from which the Empire had driven him. From his pen finally
appeared the Histoire du Peuple Israel, in which scholarship broad,
though at times inaccurate in minor details, was supplemented by an
exquisite acuteness and a poetic insight which far more than made
good any of those lesser errors which a German student would have
avoided. At his death, in October, 1892, this monumental work had
been finished. In clearness and beauty of style it has never been
approached by any other treatise on this or any kindred subject: it
is a work of genius; and its profound insight into all that is of
importance in the great subjects which he treated will doubtless
cause it to hold a permanent place in the literature not only of
the Latin nations but of the world.
An interesting light is thrown over the history of advancing
thought at the end of the nineteenth century by the fact that this
most detested of heresiarchs was summoned to receive the highest
of academic honours at the university which for ages had been
regarded as a stronghold of Presbyterian orthodoxy in Great Britain.
In France the anathemas lavished upon him by Church authorities
during his life, their denial to him of Christian burial, and their
refusal to allow him a grave in the place he most loved, only
increased popular affection for him during his last years and
deepened the general mourning at his death.
In spite of all resistance, the desire for more light upon the
sacred books penetrated the older Church from every side.
In Germany, toward the close of the eighteenth century, Jahn,
Catholic professor at Vienna, had ventured, in an Introduction to
Old Testament Study, to class Job, Jonah, and Tobit below other
canonical books, and had only escaped serious difficulties by ample
amends in a second edition.
Early in the nineteenth century, Herbst, Catholic professor at
Tubingen, had endeavoured in a similar Introduction to bring modern
research to bear on the older view; but the Church authorities
took care to have all passages really giving any new light
skilfully and speedily edited out of the book.
Later still, Movers, professor at Breslau, showed remarkable gifts
for Old Testament research, and much was expected of him; but his
ecclesiastical superiors quietly prevented his publishing any
extended work.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century much the same
pressure has continued in Catholic Germany. Strong scholars have
very generally been drawn into the position of "apologists" or
"reconcilers," and, when found intractable, they have been driven
out of the Church.
The same general policy had been evident in France and Italy, but
toward the last decade of the century it was seen by the more
clear-sighted supporters of the older Church in those countries
that the multifarious "refutations" and explosive attacks upon
Renan and his teachings had accomplished nothing; that even
special services of atonement for his sin, like the famous "Triduo"
at Florence, only drew a few women, and provoked ridicule among the
public at large; that throwing him out of his professorship and
calumniating him had but increased his influence; and that his
brilliant intuitions, added to the careful researches of German and
English scholars, had brought the thinking world beyond the reach
of the old methods of hiding troublesome truths and crushing
persistent truth-tellers.
Therefore it was that about 1890 a body of earnest Roman Catholic
scholars began very cautiously to examine and explain the biblical
text in the light of those results of the newer research which
could no longer be gainsaid.
Among these men were, in Italy, Canon Bartolo, Canon Berta, and
Father Savi, and in France Monseigneur d'Hulst, the Abbé Loisy,
professor at the Roman Catholic University at Paris, and, most
eminent of all, Professor Lenormant, of the French Institute, whose
researches into biblical and other ancient history and literature
had won him distinction throughout the world. These men, while
standing up manfully for the Church, were obliged to allow that
some of the conclusions of modern biblical criticism were well
founded. The result came rapidly. The treatise of Bartolo and the
great work of Lenormant were placed on the Index; Canon Berta was
overwhelmed with reproaches and virtually silenced; the Abbe Loisy
was first deprived of his professorship, and then ignominiously
expelled from the university; Monseigneur d'Hulst was summoned to
Rome, and has since kept silence.
The matter was evidently thought serious in the higher regions of
the Church, for in November, 1893, appeared an encyclical letter by
the reigning Pope, Leo XIII, on The Study of Sacred Scripture. Much
was expected from it, for, since Benedict XIV in the last century,
there had sat on the papal throne no Pope intellectually so
competent to discuss the whole subject. While, then, those devoted
to the older beliefs trusted that the papal thunderbolts would
crush the whole brood of biblical critics, votaries of the newer
thought ventured to hope that the encyclical might, in the language
of one of them, prove "a stupendous bridge spanning the broad abyss
that now divides alleged orthodoxy from established science."
Both these expectations were disappointed; and yet, on the whole,
it is a question whether the world at large may not congratulate
itself upon this papal utterance. The document, if not apostolic,
won credit as "statesmanlike." It took pains, of course, to insist
that there can be no error of any sort in the sacred books; it even
defended those parts which Protestants count apocryphal as
thoroughly as the remainder of Scripture, and declared that the
book of Tobit was not compiled of man, but written by God. His
Holiness naturally condemned the higher-criticism, but he dwelt at
the same time on the necessity of the most thorough study of the
sacred Scriptures, and especially on the importance of adjusting
scriptural statements to scientific facts. This utterance was
admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation by both
sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of
view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope
has shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over the
troubled waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained from
condemning any of the greater results of modern critical study that
the main English defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father
Clarke, did not hesitate publicly to admit a multitude of such
results - results, indeed, which would shock not only Italian and
Spanish Catholics, but many English and American Protestants.
According to this interpreter, the Pope had no thought of denying
the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the plurality of
sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of
Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of
St. Mark's Gospel is spurious; and, as regards the whole
encyclical, the distinguished Jesuit dwelt significantly on the
power of the papacy at any time to define out of existence any
previous decisions which may be found inconvenient. More than that,
Father Clarke himself, while standing as the champion of the most
thorough orthodoxy, acknowledged that, in the Old Testament,
"numbers must be expected to be used Orientally," and that "all
these seventies and forties, as, for example, when Absalom is said
to have rebelled against David for forty years, can not possibly be
meant numerically"; and, what must have given a fearful shock to
some Protestant believers in plenary inspiration, he, while
advocating it as a dutiful Son of the Church, wove over it an
exquisite web with the declaration that "there is a human element
in the Bible pre-calculated for by the Divine."
Considering the difficulties in the case, the world has reason to
be grateful to Pope Leo and Father Clarke for these utterances,
which perhaps, after all, may prove a better bridge between the old
and the new than could have been framed by engineers more learned
but less astute. Evidently Pope Leo XIII is neither a Paul V nor an
Urban VIII, and is too wise to bring the Church into a position
from which it can only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges
as those by which it was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by
such a tortuous policy as that by which it writhed out of the old
doctrine regarding the taking of interest for money.
In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and Berta
and Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in which
the Pope issued this encyclical, there is every reason to hope that
the path has been paved over which the Church may gracefully recede
from the old system of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate
the main results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never
had a better opportunity to play at the game of "beggar my neighbour"
and to drive the older Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.
In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new went
on. In the middle years of the century the first adequate effort in
behalf of the newer conception of the sacred books was made by
Theodore Parker at Boston. A thinker brave and of the widest
range, - a scholar indefatigable and of the deepest sympathies with
humanity, - a man called by one of the most eminent scholars in the
English Church "a religious Titan," and by a distinguished French
theologian "a prophet," he had struggled on from the divinity
school until at that time he was one of the foremost biblical
scholars, and preacher to the largest regular congregation on the
American continent. The great hall in Boston could seat four
thousand people, and at his regular discourses every part of it was
filled. In addition to his pastoral work he wielded a vast
influence as a platform speaker, especially in opposition to the
extension of slavery into the Territories of the United States, and
as a lecturer on a wide range of vital topics; and among those whom
he most profoundly influenced, both politically and religiously,
was Abraham Lincoln. During each year at that period he was heard
discussing the most important religious and political questions in
all the greater Northern cities; but his most lasting work was in
throwing light upon our sacred Scriptures, and in this he was one
of the forerunners of the movement now going on not only in the
United States but throughout Christendom. Even before he was fairly
out of college his translation of De Wette's Introduction to the
Old Testament made an impression on many thoughtful men; his sermon
in 1841 on The Transient and Permanent in Christianity marked the
beginning of his great individual career; his speeches, his
lectures, and especially his Discourse on Matters pertaining to
Religion, greatly extended his influence. His was a deeply
devotional nature, and his public Prayers exercised by their
touching beauty a very strong religious influence upon his
audiences. He had his reward. Beautiful and noble as were his life
and his life-work, he was widely abhorred. On one occasion of
public worship in one of the more orthodox churches, news having
been received that he was dangerously ill, a prayer was openly made
by one of the zealous brethren present that this arch-enemy might
be removed from earth. He was even driven out from the Unitarian
body. But he was none the less steadfast and bold, and the great
mass of men and women who thronged his audience room at Boston and
his lecture rooms in other cities spread his ideas. His fate was
pathetic. Full of faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his
labours, he retired to Italy, and died there at the darkest period
in the history of the United States - when slavery in the state and
the older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely and forever
triumphant. The death of Moses within sight of the promised land
seems the only parallel to the death of Parker less than six months
before the publication of Essays and Reviews and the election of
Abraham Lincoln to the presidency, of the United States.
But here it must be noted that Parker's effort was powerfully
aided by the conscientious utterances of some of his foremost
opponents. Nothing during the American struggle against the slave
system did more to wean religious and God-fearing men and women
from the old interpretation of Scripture than the use of it to
justify slavery. Typical among examples of this use were the
arguments of Hopkins, Bishop of Vermont, a man whose noble
character and beautiful culture gave him very wide influence in all
branches of the American Protestant Church. While avowing his
personal dislike to slavery, he demonstrated that the Bible
sanctioned it. Other theologians, Catholic and Protestant, took the
same ground; and then came that tremendous rejoinder which echoed
from heart to heart throughout the Northern States: "The Bible
sanctions slavery? So much the worse for the Bible." Then was
fulfilled that old saying of Bishop Ulrich of Augsburg: "Press not
the breasts of Holy Writ too hard, lest they yield blood rather
than milk."
Yet throughout Christendom a change in the mode of interpreting
Scripture, though absolutely necessary if its proper authority was
to be maintained, still seemed almost hopeless. Even after the
foremost scholars had taken ground in favour of it, and the most
conservative of those whose opinions were entitled to weight had
made concessions showing the old ground to be untenable, there was
fanatical opposition to any change. The Syllabus of Errors put
forth by Pius IX in 1864, as well as certain other documents issued
from the Vatican, had increased the difficulties of this needed
transition; and, while the more able-minded Roman Catholic scholars
skilfully explained away the obstacles thus created, others
published works insisting upon the most extreme views as to the
verbal inspiration of the sacred books. In the Church of England
various influential men took the same view. Dr. Baylee, Principal
of St. Aidan's College, declared that in Scripture "every
scientific statement is infallibly accurate; all its histories and
narrations of every kind are without any inaccuracy. Its words and
phrases have a grammatical and philological accuracy, such as is
possessed by no human composition." In 1861 Dean Burgon preached in
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, as follows: "No, sirs, the Bible
is the very utterance of the Eternal: as much God's own word as if
high heaven were open and we heard God speaking to us with human
voice. Every book is inspired alike, and is inspired entirely.
Inspiration is not a difference of degree, but of kind. The Bible
is filled to overflowing with the Holy Spirit of God; the books of
it and the words of it and the very letters of it."
In 1865 Canon MacNeile declared in Exeter Hall that "we must either
receive the verbal inspiration of the Old Testament or deny the
veracity, the insight, the integrity of our Lord Jesus Christ as a
teacher of divine truth."
As late as 1889 one of the two most eloquent pulpit orators in the
Church of England, Canon Liddon, preaching at St. Paul's Cathedral,
used in his fervour the same dangerous argument: that the authority
of Christ himself, and therefore of Christianity, must rest on the
old view of the Old Testament; that, since the founder of
Christianity, in divinely recorded utterances, alluded to the
transformation of Lot's wife into a pillar of salt, to Noah's ark
and the Flood, and to the sojourn of Jonah in the whale, the
biblical account of these must be accepted as historical, or that
Christianity must be given up altogether.
In the light of what was rapidly becoming known regarding the
Chaldean and other sources of the accounts given in Genesis, no
argument could be more fraught with peril to the interest which the
gifted preacher sought to serve.
In France and Germany many similar utterances in opposition to the
newer biblical studies were heard; and from America, especially
from the college at Princeton, came resounding echoes. As an
example of many may be quoted the statement by the eminent Dr.
Hodge that the books of Scripture "are, one and all, in thought and
verbal expression, in substance, and in form, wholly the work of
God, conveying with absolute accuracy and divine authority all that
God meant to convey without human additions and admixtures"; and
that "infallibility and authority attach as much to the verbal
expression in which the revelation is made as to the matter of the
revelation itself."
But the newer thought moved steadily on. As already in Protestant
Europe, so now in the Protestant churches of America, it took
strong hold on the foremost minds in many of the churches known as
orthodox: Toy, Briggs, Francis Brown, Evans, Preserved Smith,
Moore, Haupt, Harper, Peters, and Bacon developed it, and, though
most of them were opposed bitterly by synods, councils, and other
authorities of their respective churches, they were manfully
supported by the more intellectual clergy and laity. The greater
universities of the country ranged themselves on the side of these
men; persecution but intrenched them more firmly in the hearts of
all intelligent well-wishers of Christianity. The triumphs won by
their opponents in assemblies, synods, conventions, and conferences
were really victories for the nominally defeated, since they
revealed to the world the fact that in each of these bodies the
strong and fruitful thought of the Church, the thought which alone
can have any hold on the future, was with the new race of thinkers;
no theological triumphs more surely fatal to the victors have been
won since the Vatican defeated Copernicus and Galileo.
And here reference must be made to a series of events which, in the
second half of the nineteenth century, have contributed most
powerful aid to the new school of biblical research.
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