9. In New Testament criticism, though the strict critical method of Strauss’s first book was not faithfully followed, critical research went on continuously; and the school of F. C. Baur of Tübingen in particular imposed a measure of rational criticism on theologians in general. Apart from Strauss, Baur was probably the ablest Christian scholar of his day. Always lamed by his professionalism, he yet toiled endlessly to bring scientific method into Christian research. His Paulus, der Apostel Jesu Christi, 1845; Kritische Untersuchungen über die Kanonischen Evangelien, 1847; and Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853, were epoch-marking works, which recast so radically, in the name of orthodoxy, the historical conception of Christian origins, that he figured as the most unsettling critic of his time after Strauss. With his earlier researches in the history of the first Christian sects and his history of the Church, they constitute a memorable mass of studious and original work. In the case of the Tübingen school as of every other there was “reaction,” with the usual pretence by professional orthodoxy that the innovating criticism had been disposed of; but no real refutation has ever taken place. Where Baur reduced the genuine Pauline epistles to four, the last years of the century witnessed the advent of Van Manen, who, following up earlier suggestions, wrought out the thesis that the epistles are all alike supposititious. This may or may not hold good; but there has been no restoration of traditionary faith among the mass of open-minded inquirers. Such work as Zeller’s Contents and Origin of the Acts of the Apostles (1854), produced in Baur’s circle, has substantially held its ground; and such a comparatively “safe” book of the next generation as Weizsäcker’s Apostolic Age (Eng. tr. of 2nd ed. 1893) leaves no doubt as to the untrustworthiness of the Acts. Thus at the close of the century the current professional treatises indicated a “Christianity” stripped not only of all supernaturalism, and therefore of the main religious content of the historic creed, but even of credibility as regards large parts of the non-supernaturalist narratives of its sacred books. The minute analysis and collocation of texts which has occupied so much of critical industry has but made clearer the extreme precariousness of every item in the records. The amount of credit for historicity that continues to be given to them is demonstrably unjustifiable on scientific grounds; and the stand for a “Christianity without dogma” is more and more clearly seen to be an economic adjustment, not an outcome of faithful criticism.
10. The movement of Biblical and other criticism in Germany has had a significant effect on the supply of students for the theological profession. The numbers of Protestant and Catholic theological students in all Germany have varied as follows:—Protestant: 1831, 4,147; 1851, 1,631; 1860, 2,520; 1876, 1,539; 1882–83, 3,168. Catholic: 1831, 1,801; 1840, 866; 1850, 1,393; 1860, 1,209; 1880, 619.[152] Thus, under the reign of reaction which set in after 1848 there was a prolonged recovery; and again since 1876 the figures rise for Protestantism through financial stimulus. When, however, we take population into account, the main movement is clear. In an increasing proportion, the theological students come from the rural districts (69·4 in 1861–70), the towns furnishing ever fewer;[153] so that the conservative measures do but outwardly and formally affect the course of thought; the clergy themselves showing less and less inclination to make clergymen of their sons.[154] Even among the Catholic population, though that has increased from ten millions in 1830 to sixteen millions in 1880, the number of theological students has fallen from eleven to four per 100,000 inhabitants.[155] Thus, after many “reactions” and much Bismarckism, the Zeit-Geist in Germany was still pronouncedly skeptical in all classes in 1881,[156] when the church accommodation in Berlin provided only two per cent. of the population, and even that provision outwent the demand.[157] And though there have been yet other alleged reactions since, and the imperial influence is zealously used for orthodoxy, a large proportion of the intelligent workers in the towns remain socialistic and freethinking; and the mass of the educated classes remain unorthodox in the teeth of the socialist menace. Reactionary professors can make an academic fashion: the majority of instructed men remain tacitly naturalistic.
Alongside of the inveterate rationalism of modern Germany, however, a no less inveterate bureaucratism preserves a certain official conformity to religion. University freedom does not extend to open and direct criticism of the orthodox creed. On the other hand, the applause won by Virchow in 1877 on his declaration against the doctrine of evolution, and the tactic resorted to by him in putting upon that doctrine the responsibility of Socialist violence, are instances of the normal operation of the lower motives against freedom in scientific teaching.[158] The pressure operates in other spheres in Germany, especially under such a regimen as the present. Men who never go to church save on official occasions, and who have absolutely no belief in the Church’s doctrine, nevertheless remain nominally its adherents;[159] and the Press laws make it peculiarly difficult to reach the common people with freethinking literature, save through Socialist channels. Thus the Catholic Church is perhaps nowhere—save in Ireland and the United States—more practically influential than in nominally “Protestant” Germany, where it wields a compact vote of a hundred or more in the Reichstag, and can generally count on well-filled churches as beside the half-empty temples of Protestantism.
Another circumstance partly favourable to reaction is the simple maintenance of all the old theological chairs in the universities. As the field of scientific work widens, and increasing commerce raises the social standard of comfort, men of original intellectual power grow less apt to devote themselves to theological pursuits even under the comparatively free conditions which so long kept German Biblical scholarship far above that of other countries. It can hardly be said that men of the mental calibre of Strauss, Baur, Volkmar, and Wellhausen continue to arise among the specialists in their studies. Harnack, the most prominent German Biblical scholar of our day, despite his great learning, creates no such impression of originality and insight, and, though latterly forced forward by more independent minds, exhibits often a very uncritical orthodoxy. Thus it is à priori possible enough that the orthodox reactions so often claimed have actually occurred, in the sense that the experts have reverted to a prior type. A scientifically-minded “theologian” in Germany has now little official scope for his faculty save in the analysis of the Hebrew Sacred Books and the New Testament documents as such; and this has been on the whole very well done, short of the point of express impeachment of the historic delusion; but there is a limit to the attraction of such studies for minds of a modern cast. Thus there is always a chance that chairs will be filled by men of another type.
11. On a less extensive scale than in Germany, critical study of the sacred books made some progress in England, France, and America in the first half of the century; though for a time the attention even of the educated world was centred much more upon the Oxford “tractarian” religious reaction than upon the movement of rationalism. The reaction, associated mainly with the name of John Henry Newman, was rather against the political Erastianism and æsthetic apathy of the Whig type of Christian than against German or other criticism, of which Newman knew little. But against the attitude of those moderate Anglicans who were disposed to disestablish the Church in Ireland and to modernize the liturgy somewhat, the language of the “Tracts for the Times” is as authoritarian and anti-rationalistic as that of Catholics denouncing freethought. Such expressions as “the filth of heretical novelty”[160] are meant to apply to anything in the nature of innovation; the causes at stake are ritual and precedent, the apostolic succession and the status of the priest, not the truth of revelation or the credibility of the scriptures. The third Tract appeals to the clergy to “resist the alteration of even one jot or tittle” of the liturgy; and concerning the burial service the line of argument is: “Do you pretend you can discriminate the wheat from the tares? Of course not.” All attempts even to modify the ritual are an “abuse of reason”; and the true believer is adjured to stand fast in the ancient ways.[161] At a pinch he is to “consider what Reason says; which surely, as well as Scripture, was given us for religious ends”;[162] but the only “reason” thus recognized is one which accepts the whole apparatus of revelation. Previous to and alongside of this single-minded reversion to the ideals of the Dark Ages—a phenomenon not unconnected with the revival of romanticism by Scott and Chateaubriand—there was going on a movement of modernism, of which one of the overt traces is Milman’s History of the Jews (1829), a work to-day regarded as harmless even by the orthodox, but sufficient in its time to let Newman see whither religious “Liberalism” was heading.
Other and later researches dug much deeper into the problems of religious historiography. The Unitarian C. C. Hennell produced an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), so important for its time as to be thought worth translating into German by Strauss; and this found a considerable response from the educated English public of its day. In the preface to his second edition (1841) Hennell spoke very plainly of “the large and probably increasing amount of unbelief in all classes around us”; and made the then remarkably courageous declarations that in his experience “neither deism, pantheism, nor even atheism indicates modes of thought incompatible with uprightness and benevolence”; and that “the real or affected horror which it is still a prevailing custom to exhibit towards their names would be better reserved for those of the selfish, the cruel, the bigot, and other tormentors of mankind.” It was in the circle of Hennell that Marian Evans, later to become famous as George Eliot, grew into a rationalist in despite of her religious temperament; and it was she who, when Hennell’s bride gave up the task, undertook the toil of translating Strauss’s Leben Jesu—though at many points she “thought him wrong.”[163] In the churches he had of course no overt acceptance. At this stage, English orthodoxy was of such a cast that the pious Tregelles, himself fiercely opposed to all forms of rationalism, had to complain that the most incontrovertible corrections of the current text of the New Testament were angrily denounced.[164]
In the next generation Theodore Parker in the United States, developing his critical faculty chiefly by study of the Germans, at the cost of much obloquy forced some knowledge of critical results and a measure of theistic or pantheistic rationalism on the attention of the orthodox world; promoting at the same time a semi-philosophic, semi-ethical reaction against the Calvinistic theology of Jonathan Edwards, theretofore prevalent among the orthodox of New England. In the old country a number of writers developed new movements of criticism from theistic points of view. F. W. Newman, the scholarly brother of John Henry,[165] produced a book entitled The Soul (1849), and another, Phases of Faith (1853), which had much influence in promoting rationalism of a rather rigidly theistic cast. R. W. Mackay in the same period published two learned treatises, A Sketch of the Rise and Progress of Christianity (1854), notably scientific in method for its time; and The Progress of the Intellect as Exemplified in the Religious Development of the Greeks and Hebrews (1850), which won the admiration of Buckle; “George Eliot” translated Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity (1854) under her own name, Marian Evans; and W. R. Greg, one of the leading publicists of his day, put forth a rationalist study of The Creed of Christendom: Its Foundations Contrasted with its Superstructure (1850), which has gone through many editions and is still reprinted. In 1864 appeared The Prophet of Nazareth, by Evan Powell Meredith, who had been a Baptist minister in Wales. The book is a bulky prize essay on the theme of New Testament eschatology, which develops into a deistic attack on the central Christian dogma and on gospel ethics. Another zealous theist, Thomas Scott, whose pamphlet-propaganda on deistic lines had so wide an influence during many years, produced an English Life of Jesus (1871), which, though less important than the works of Strauss and less popular than those of Renan, played a considerable part in the disintegration of the traditional faith among English churchmen. Still the primacy in critical research on scholarly lines lay with the Germans; and it was the results of their work that were co-ordinated, from a theistic standpoint,[166] in the anonymous work, Supernatural Religion (1874–77), a massive and decisive performance, too powerful to be disposed of by the episcopal and other attacks made upon it.[167] Since its assimilation the orthodox or inspirationist view of the gospels has lost credit among competent scholars even within the churches. The battleground is now removed to the problem of the historicity of the ostensible origins of the cult; and scholarly orthodoxy takes for granted many positions which fifty years ago were typical of “German rationalism.”
12. In France systematic criticism of the sacred books recommenced in the second half of the century with such writings as those of P. Larroque (Examen Critique des doctrines de la religion chrétienne, 1860); Gustave d’Eichthal (Les Évangiles, ptie. i, 1863); and Alphonse Peyrat (Histoire élémentaire et critique de Jésus, 1864); whereafter the rationalistic view was applied with singular literary charm, if with imperfect consistency, by Renan in his series of seven volumes on the origins of Christianity, and with more scientific breadth of view by Ernest Havet in his Christianisme et ses Origines (1872, etc.). Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863) especially has been read throughout the civilized world. It has been quite justly pronounced, by German and other critics, a romance; but no other “life” properly so called has been anything else, Strauss’s first Life being an analysis rather than a construction; and the epithet was but an unwitting avowal that to accept the gospels, barring miracles, as biography—which is what Renan did—is to be committed to the unhistorical. He began by accepting the fourth as equipollent with the synoptics; and upon this Strauss in his second Life confidently called for a recantation, which came in due course. But Renan, in his fitful way, had critical glimpses which were denied to Strauss—for instance, as to the material of the Sermon on the Mount. The whole series of the Origines, which wound up with Marc Aurèle (1882), has a similar fluctuating value, showing on the whole a progressive critical sense. The Saint Paul, for example, at the close suddenly discards the traditional view previously accepted in Les Apôtres, and recognizes that the ministry of Paul can have been no more than a propaganda of small conventicles, whose total membership throughout the Empire could not have been above a thousand. But Renan’s total service consisted rather in a highly artistic and winning application of rational historical methods to early Christian history, with the effect of displacing the traditionist method, than in any lasting or comprehensive solution of the problem of the origins. Havet’s survey is both corrective and complementary to his. Renan’s influence on opinion throughout the world, however, was enormous, were it only because he was one of the most finished literary artists of his time.