A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

criticism was applied to the initial problems of Old Testament history. The investigation lagged strangely. Starting from the clues given by Hobbes, Spinoza, and Simon, and above all by the suggestion of Astruc (1753) as to the twofold element implied in the God-names Jehovah and Elohim, it had proceeded, for sheer lack of radical skepticism, on the assumption that the Pentateuchal history was true. On this basis, modern Old Testament criticism of a professional kind may be said to have been founded by Eichhorn, who hoped by a quasi-rationalistic method to bring back unbelievers to belief. [1801] Of his successors, some, like Ilgen, were ahead of their time; some, like De Wette, failed to make progress in their criticism; some, like Ewald, remained always arbitrary; and some of the ablest and most original, as Vatke, failed to coördinate fully their critical methods and results. [1802] Thus, despite all the German activity, little sure progress had been made, apart from discrimination of sources, between the issue of the Critical Remarks on the Hebrew Scriptures of the Scotch Catholic priest, Dr. Geddes, in 1800, and the publication of the first part of the work of Bishop Colenso on The Pentateuch (1862). This, by the admission of Kuenen, who had begun as a rather narrow believer, [1803] corrected the initial error of the German specialists by applying to the narrative the common-sense tests suggested long before by Voltaire. [1804] That academic scholarship thus wasted two generations in its determination to adhere to the "reverent" method, and in its aversion to the "irreverence" which proceeded on the simple power to see facts, is a sufficient comment on the Kantian doctrine that it was the business of scholars to adapt the sacred books to popular needs. Tampering with the judgment of their flocks, the German theologians injured their own. As of old, part of the explanation lay in the malignant resistance of orthodoxy to every new advance. We have seen how Strauss's appointment to a chair at Zürich was met by Swiss pietism. The same spirit sought to revert, even in "intellectually free" Germany, to its old methods of repression. The authorities of Berlin discussed with Neander the propriety of suppressing Strauss's Leben Jesu; [1805] and after a time those who shared his views were excluded even from philosophical chairs. [1806] Later, the brochure in which Edgar Bauer defended his brother Bruno against his opponents (1842) was seized by the police; and in the following year, for publishing The Strife of Criticism with Church and State, the same writer was sentenced to four years' imprisonment. In private life, persecution was carried on in the usual ways; and the virulence of the theological resistance recalled the palmy days of Lutheran polemics. In the sense that the mass of orthodoxy held its ground for the time being, the attack failed. Naturally the most advanced and uncompromisingly scientific positions were least discussed, the stress of dispute going on around the criticism which modified without annihilating the main elements in the current creed, or that which did the work of annihilation on a popular level of thought. Only in our day is German "expert" criticism beginning openly to reckon with propositions fairly and fully made out by German writers of three or more generations back. Thus in 1781 Corodi in his Geschichte des Chiliasmus dwelt on the pre-Hebraic origins of the belief in angels, in immortality, and heaven and hell, and on the Persian derivation of the Jewish seven archangels; Wegscheider in 1819 in his Institutes of Theology indicated further connections of the same order, and cited pagan parallels to the virgin-birth; J. A. L. Richter in the same year pointed to Indian and Persian precedents for the Logos and many other Christian doctrines; and several other writers, Strauss included, pointed to both Persian and Babylonian influences on Jewish theology and myth. [1807] The mythologist and Hebraist F. Korn (who wrote as "F. Nork"), in a series of learned and vigorous but rather loosely speculative works, [1808] indicated many of the mythological elements in Christianity, and endorsed many of the astronomical arguments of Dupuis, while holding to the historicity of Jesus. [1809] When even these theses were in the main ignored, more mordant doctrine was necessarily burked. Such subversive criticism of religious history as Ghillany's Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842), insisting that human sacrifice had been habitual in early Jewry, and that ritual cannibalism underlay the paschal eucharist, found even fewer students prepared to appreciate it than did the searching ethico-philosophical criticism passed on the Christian creed by Feuerbach. F. Daumer, [1810] who in 1842 published a treatise on the same lines as Ghillany's (Der Feuer und Molochdienst), and followed it up in 1847 with another on the Christian mysteries, nearly as drastic, wavered later in his rationalism and avowed his conversion to a species of faith. Hence a certain setback for his school. In France the genial German revolutionist and exile Ewerbeck published, under the titles of Qu'est ce que la Religion? and Qu'est ce que la Bible? (1850), two volumes of very freely edited translations from Feuerbach, Daumer, Ghillany, Lützelberger (on the simple humanity of Jesus), and Bruno Bauer, avowing that after vainly seeking a publisher for years he had produced the books at his own expense. He had, however, so mutilated the originals as to make the work ineffectual for scholars, without making it attractive to the general public; and there is nothing to show that his formidable-looking arsenal of explosives had much effect on contemporary French thought, which developed on other lines. Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of advance. After Colenso's rectification of the fundamental error as to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt of Voltaire, the "higher criticism" proceeded with such substantial certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that, whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of Scotland in 1881 [1811] for propagating Kuenen's views, before the century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this score had "become merchandise." Nevertheless, the professional tendency to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867-72) repudiates every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration. [1812] Later clerical critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which cannot be read with critical respect. [1813] But among students at the end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to the "argument from prophecy," the conception of prophecy as prediction has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others has discredited it as regards the "prophets" themselves. For the rest, much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895-1900). The peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less "destructive."