Worship of God") containing a complete refutation and disclaimer of the proceedings of the Jewish or Bible God, and of which the ominous "Wolfenbüttel Fragments" published afterwards by Lessing, were but an inconsiderable specimen ! In short, the God of reason-as whispered by Lessing to Jacobi,-was the God of Spinoza; and with this the God of revelation was incompatible.-Luther asserted the contrariety of reason and revelation in the interests of revelation; Spinoza evaded the acknowledgment of absolute contrariety in order to protect the interests of philosophy; Bayle reasserted the contrariety in ostensible disparagement of reason, but really in the spirit of Voltaire; Reimarus wrote the irrevocable verdict that in the very interests of religion itself the irrationalities of the Bible must be seriously and absolutely rejected.

1 This hitherto unpublished work, of which MS. copies exist in Hamburg and Göttingen, began to be printed in Niedner's "Zeitschrift," but was suspended owing to the public indifference (see Herzog's Theol. Lexicon, 12, p. 609). A compendium has recently been edited by Strauss.

PART II.

SPECIAL ANTECEDENTS.

Origin of Historical Criticism.

THE process of enfranchisement and reconstruction, which has been followed to its virtual close in one direction in the preceding paragraphs, opened the way for a new course of enquiry in another. There remained the now for the first time possible task of reclaiming what had hitherto been an object of stupid wonder or of equally irrational contempt, as legitimate materials of history. The concessions as to inspiration, and the partial severance of the Bible from religious interests through the negations and distinctions of rationalism, made room for the further labours of the critic. The first necessity of criticism is freedom; and the first general restoration of a free atmosphere in religious matters is due to the Reformationitself a critical act, as condemning many preceding practices and traditions; and indeed every accession of knowledge is a verdict of previous incompetency,-every new revolution or discovery may be said to imply a judgment on the incompleteness and imperfection of the past, so that

"Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht."'1

But the first exercise of Protestant free judgment extended only to what was most obviously corrupt in immediate antecedents in favour of a projected return to the primitive Christian model; this model was assumed to be immediately

1 "The World's History is the World's Judgment."

and plainly discoverable in the writings of the New Testament; and the Bible generally was in great measure protected against impartial enquiry by the circumstance of its being itself taken as the indispensable basis of the newly asserted freedom, the very foundation of the Reformation itself. Professedly the sole criterium of the reformed faith was the "Word of God," as contained in the "prophetic and apostolic writings of the Old and New Testaments." But the German and Swiss Confessions, by omitting to specify the writings intended, virtually left open the right of ultimate adjudication to reason and conscience; and several Confessions, while adopting the Catholic or traditional list of books, claimed to take them not from church dictation, but from the "intrinsic testimony or persuasion" of the Holy Spirit. This encouraged considerable laxity in deciding the difficult problem as to what particular books should be considered as irrefragably divine; so that most of the early Reformers exercised to a certain extent the right of free judgment in separating the Apocrypha from the Old Testament, and the so called Antilegomena" or disputed writings from the New. It

1 Generally called in the language of the period the "inner witness;" or more particularly expressed in current Biblical phraseology as the principle of justification by faith only.

2 The books commonly placed among "Antilegomena" are Hebrews, James, 2nd Peter, Jude, 2nd and 3rd John, and Revelations. A very extensive and miscellaneous literature was current in primitive Christianity. Many books not now included in the New Testament, as Hermas and the Kerugma Petrou, were received with implicit reverence as inspired in local usage; while others now standing in the canon where doubted or rejected. Doctrinal controversies induced the necessity of exercising a choice among the writings, and of subjecting the fluctuations of usage to fixed limits; Eusebius of Cæsarea being the first who in the interests of ecclesiastical discipline seriously addressed himself to the task of forming a uniform code or canon (see Euseb. Hist. Ec. iii. 3 and 25). His mode of proceeding was to separate the existing literature into two principal divisions as suggested by custom and the practical preferences of the different churches. First, the universally admitted writings or "Homologoumena;" secondly, writings not so generally esteemed; the latter were again subdivided into "Antilegomena" or controverted writings; "Notha," writings which though not divine were not fraudulent; and thirdly, the aroma and Suggeß-the productions of literary fraud. The principle acted on by Eusebius and subsequently was not criticism, but tradition and usage. See Credner's History of the Canon, p. 202.

is notorious how Luther distinguished the fourth Gospel, together with the first Petrine and principal Pauline Epistles, as the only indispensable Scriptures; and how he stigmatised James, Hebrews, and Revelations, as repulsive to his feelings and offensive to the Christian spirit.

But these first attempts at criticism were crude and ineffectual. Stability and establishment were felt at the time to be far more pressing needs than historical truth or literary accuracy. A great reaction set in; the feeling which led the English church as well as the Council of Trent to a blind acquiescence in the traditional "Canon" became general; hesitation was thought excusable no longer; the Bible, instead of being the reflex and support of a living subjective idea, became the object of a stupid idolatry; the sacred text as traditionally given' was pronounced to be infallible and divine in its every word and letter; the distinction of deutero-canonical writings was dropped, and various subtle pretences were devised to conceal as much as possible the fact of its having ever existed. In fact only the obscurer impulses of the great movement had been hitherto felt. Practical abuses were far more readily obvious than impurities of belief. The belief in witchcraft and supernatural appearances generally was yet unchecked by physical discovery; intolerance was inculcated in the Catechism,3 and dancing and playgoing forbidden as breaches of the seventh commandment. The tyranny of prejudice is never so absolute as when it is unfelt. In the seventeenth century its influence was so insidiously prevalent that the very word, in the sense of anticipated judgments, was unfamiliar or unknown; Bacon

1 "Ut vulgo recepti sunt," says the English Article in regard to the books of the New Testament.

2 Thus it was said that the distinction referred, not to any doubt as to the authority of the books, but only as to the secondary authorship; not to a difference of worth, but only to relative antiquity, etc., etc. See Reuss' "History of the New Testament," secs. 339, 340.

3 See Luther's "Major Catechism,” above quoted, 2, 3, sect. 56.

uses for it the figurative term "idolatry;" meaning that superstitious worship or "apotheosis of error" which he calls "the plague spot of the intellect."

The sources of superstition are ignorance and fear; these in the Protestant mind clung round the notion of inspiration; and the first efforts of a really free criticism could of course proceed only from those who were either wholly or partially emancipated from its influence; either from philosophers, who acknowledged no Scripture control, or from Catholics, who admitted it only under certain limitations. Hence Richard Simon and Spinoza, the one a Catholic, the other a philosopher, were the fathers of Biblical criticism. Simon's critical histories of the Old and New Testaments, based on historical tradition as distinct from ecclesiastical, were the first general attempt to treat the Bible with adequate learning on the footing of a literary work; but they dwell almost exclusively on what is called external criticism; the history of the text, the versions, and the commentators; there is no thoroughly impartial appreciation of the contents of particular books, determining their history by the consecutive development of ideas. Simon's histories form an invaluable repository of those external "facts" which form the basis of the scriptural exegesis of Arminianism, and generally of the theology styled "rational," as opposed to the notions of plenary inspiration which in ordinary Protestantism excluded all enquiry. Simon treats the fanatical idea of the "inner witness" as the essential heresy of Protestantism; but then Catholic criticism is quite as liable to be marred by dogmatical restraint as that of Protestants by misdirected freedom. Simon's criticism is based on an enlarged theory of tradition; and this permitted a certain freedom in dealing with points which tradition had already controverted, such as the question of the "Antilegomena," the Hebrew original of Matthew, the interpolated "three witnesses" in 1 John v. 7-the difference between canonicity and authenticity,