dumbness a sudden effect of paralysis; the celestial glory revealed to the shepherds was simply a lantern; the baptismal dove a real dove casually present; the temptation an internal cogitation or trance continuing for an indefinite time, etc. The insufficiency of such explanations could not long be concealed; and even Eichhorn, the father of Biblical Euhemerism, occasionally felt obliged to have recourse to other views, as where, in treating of the Creation and Fall, he abandoned his earlier idea of distorted history in order to admit in these instances the mythical embodying of a thought. In short, the rationalistic compromise intended to reconcile philosophy and history in reality satisfied neither. De Wette, one of the most powerful advocates of the mythical as opposed to the semi-mythical or rationalistic treatment of the Old Testament, thus expresses himself on the subject: "The so-called 'natural' mode of explanation is incompatible with the admitted fact of the narrative being the only source of our acquaintance with the events therein represented as supernatural. Beyond this representation we cannot go; we must either receive or reject it; and are certainly not justified in inventing a natural course of circumstances as to which the narrative is silent. It is unwarrantable to refer to poetry the dress in which the events are clothed, while reserving the events as historical; we ought rather to treat both alike, either accepting them as fact, or giving up the whole to poetry and mythus. If, for instance, rejecting the literal account of God's covenant with Abraham, we assume an historical basis in the shape of a dream, vision, or thought naturally occurring to Abraham's mind, it may be asked what ground apart from the narrative disclaimed we have for any such assumption; and whether it were not far more natural and consistent with analogy to suppose the visionary covenant to have been afterwards suggested by the event as an appropriate incident in the life of the Patriarch? If indeed we possessed, in addition to

the Biblical narrative, some other historical account to check the errors of the former, we might then be able to separate the historical essence from assumed embellishments and transformations; as, for instance, in the case of the death of Herod Agrippa, where in addition to the account in Acts we have Josephus. But since in most cases we have no such controlling accounts, the critic who without any sure criterium to guide him pretends to separate truth from falsehood in a narrative in which both are promiscuously blended, only deludes himself and his readers with a tissue of vague and vain hypothesis."

As Applied to the New Testament.

These considerations shewed the necessity of a more thorough adoption of mythical theory, wholly giving up the suspected narrative as fact, but restoring it to history as a record of opinion; not indeed in the arbitrary manner of the allegorist, but as an unpremeditated phenomenon, growing up with the regularity and certainty of nature. Spinoza, in so many ways the father of free thought, was in this respect too the pioneer of later opinion. It was he who first raised a warning voice against mingling our own fancies and feelings with Scripture,1 and against assuming as a preliminary principle that belief in its veracity which ought to be accepted only as the issue of careful enquiry. He also particularly insisted that instead of following the absurd practice of taking the Bible as a whole, as if it had only one author, and arbitrarily explaining one part out of another, we ought, if really wishing to understand it, to study each part separately: a suggestion which, though anticipated by the good sense of Luther, and subsequently advocated by Calixt, was never really and heartily acted on until the recent times of the Tübingen School. But Spi2 Preface, ibid.

1 Theol. Pol., chap. vii.

noza went further. Although generally agreeing with the deists, he differed from them in acknowledging the perfect sincerity and truthfulness of the Bible writers; and, holding the human mind itself to be the source of all real revelation and knowledge, he went far to identify its forms of utterance as psychological necessities reducible to law. In speaking of miracles, he was thus led to anticipate the theory of mythical interpretation. "We must not," he says, "be misled by false explanations of miracle into the idea that Scripture contains what is repugnant to natural light. Men rarely recount a thing as it really happened ; they mingle their own opinions and judgments with it; especially when they see or hear anything striking by its novelty or surpassing ordinary comprehension. In histories and chronicles men relate rather their opinions about things than the things themselves; and the same event assumes quite a different aspect when told by different persons." Semler, who in many ways gave official sanction to the opinions of Spinoza, partially adopted the mythical view, in regard, for instance, to the stories of Esther and Sampson; Herder considered the theory of the early death of the beloved of heaven to be exemplified in the case of Enoch as well as in those of the Greek heroes beloved by Aurora; Eichhorn followed in the same path, which was further pursued by Gabler, Schelling, and others, who eventually adopted, without any superstitious reservation, the general principle of Heyne-"A mythis omnis priscorum hominum cum historia tum philosophia procedit." In 1820, G. L. Bauer published a "Hebrew Mythology of the Old and New Testaments," in which he attributes the reluctance to recognize a mythical character in Scripture to misconception of the nature of mythus, as if it implied intentional falsehood; or else to a remnant of that superstitious hallucination as to inspiration which was itself mythical. Bauer, it is true, made but a limited use of mythus in regard to the New Testament-as, for example,

in the accounts of the infancy; but ere long the closing events of the career of Jesus-as the ascension-were similarly treated; at last consistency prevailed, and a vein of mythus was discovered throughout.

One of the chief hindrances to this discovery had been the belief in the cotemporaneous, or nearly cotemporaneous, character of the New Testament accounts, concurrently with the notion that great length of time as well as a thoroughly ignorant and barbarous age entirely destitute of written records, are the indispensable conditions for the rise and propagation of mythus; whereas, in the time of Jesus, the so-called mythical age had seemingly long terminated, and writing had become common. Even in regard to the Old Testament the mythical view was not heartily accepted until the idea of the cotemporary character of the records had been relinquished, and the annalist was supposed to contemplate his subject through the dim mist of intervening ages. Schelling, however, perceived that mythi spring up among the vulgar very readily and quickly, in spite of the cotemporaneous existence of written documents; and that in all ages, however polished the surface of society, the memory of celebrated men is apt to receive amplifications of a more or less marvellous nature from popular tradition. Gabler, in a paper on this subject, remarked, that all antiquity is relative; that although, compared with Judaism, Christianity is young, still its origin is old and obscure enough to allow a certain fabulous haze to be cast over the history of its founder. And indeed cotemporaneous mythi are far from uncommon. The traveller Kohl mentions one of very modern growth, in reference to the burning of the Kremlin; and Mr. Grote notices a tragical but utterly gratuitous story about Lord Byron which was circulated by his cotemporary Goethe. Indeed legendary matter is ever forming and circulating in obscure corners, just as granite is believed to be even now crystallising in the bowels of the earth.

How often, with all our modern assistances of science and publicity, do we fancy ourselves strictly veracious, when really only uttering an erroneous opinion. How intimate and constant in human expression is the union of truth and falsehood, how difficult, how impossible, owing to the relative nature of our knowledge, the statement of pure unadulterated fact! How often do we even now speak of "miraculous escapes" and "providential interpositions," phrases unconsciously inherited from a time when these interferences were sincerely and universally believed. Among the illiterate Jews of the age of Jesus traditional misrepresentation was comparatively easy; and we must not, says Strauss, allow ourselves to be misled by exalted conceptions of the literary culture of the Augustan age; for as the sun illumines the mountain summits long before it penetrates the recesses of the valleys and ravines, the populace of the time were helplessly unenlightened, and the cultivated minds of Greece and Rome stood on an eminence which was far from having been reached in Galilee and Judæa. In a state of mental excitement, especially of religious excitement, a short time suffices among uneducated persons to invest with a halo of the marvellous even well known occurrences. The early Jewish Christians, whose peculiar distinction was the religious enthusiasm styled "the gift of the Spirit," were eminently disposed to create out of their impressions of the Old Testament or otherwise symbolical scenes, such as those of the temptation and transfiguration; and though it is not to be imagined that these accounts were deliberately invented and fashioned by an individual who wrote them down exactly as he would a poem, still in a congenial soil and under circumstances of natural aptitude such narratives would grow as it were spontaneously in untraceable channels of tradition, until they obtained consistency, and acquired a claim to be incorporated in the gospels. The cotemporaneous existence