Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/167

Rh ; and yet we find the great Florentine apostle and martyr absolutely tied fast to the old system of allegorical interpretation. The autograph notes of his sermons, still preserved in his cell at San Marco, show this abundantly. Thus we find him attaching to the creation of grasses and plants on the third day an allegorical connection with the "multitude of the elect" and with the "sound doctrines of the Church"; and to the creation of land animals on the sixth day a similar relation to "the Jewish people" and to "Christians given up to things earthly."

The revival of learning in the fifteenth century seemed likely to undermine the older structure.

Then it was that Lorenzo Valla brought to bear on biblical research, for the first time, the spirit of modern criticism. By truly scientific methods he proved the famous Letter of Christ to Abgarus a forgery; the Donation of Constantine, one of the great foundations of the ecclesiastical power in temporal things, a fraud; and the creed attributed to the apostles a creation which post-dated them by several centuries. Of even more permanent influence was his work upon the New Testament, in which he initiated the modern method of comparing manuscripts to find what the sacred text really is. At an earlier or later period he would doubtless have paid for his temerity with his life; fortunately, just at that time, the ruling pontiff and his contemporaries cared much for literature and little for orthodoxy, and from their palaces he could bid defiance to the Inquisition.

While Valla thus initiated biblical criticism south of the Alps, a much greater man began a more fruitful work in northern Europe. Erasmus, with his edition of the New Testament, stands at the source of that great stream of modern research and thought which is doing so much to undermine and dissolve away the vast fabric of patristic and scholastic interpretation.

Yet his efforts to purify the scriptural text seemed at first to encounter insurmountable difficulties, and one of these may stimulate reflection. He had found, what some others had found before him, that the famous verse in the first chapter of the First