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.(487)
(487) Of Pusey's extreme devotion to his view of the book of Daniel,
there is a curious evidence in a letter to Stanley in the second volume
of the latter's Life and Letters. For the views referred to in Lux
Mundi, see pp. 345-357; also, on the general subject, Bishop Ellicott's
Christus Comprobator.
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 Encyclopaedia 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.