Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/303

Rh For about four centuries the learned world followed the prudent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, expressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt with promptly. Carlstadt was, for this and other troublesome ideas, suppressed with the applause of the Protestant Church, and the book of Maes was placed by the older Church on the Index.

The new truth appeared but dimly here and there until the middle of the next century, when Hobbes, in his Leviathan, and La Peyrère, in his Preadamites, took it up and developed it still further. The result came speedily. Hobbes, for this and other sins, was put under the ban, even by the political party which sorely needed him, and was regarded generally as an outcast; while La Peyrère, for this and other heresies, was thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of Mechlin, and kept there until he fully retracted; his book was refuted by seven theologians within a year after its appearance, and within a generation thirty-six elaborate answers to it had appeared. The Parliament of Paris ordered it to be burned by the hangman.

In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far greater than any of these—the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of Spinoza. Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into the subject. Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he summed up all with judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could not have been the author of the Pentateuch in the form then existing; that there had been glosses and revisions; that the biblical books had grown up as a literature; that, though great truths are to be found in them, and they are to be regarded as a divine revelation, the old claims of inerrancy for them can not be maintained; that in studying them men had been misled by mistaking human conceptions for divine meanings; that, while prophets have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been the dowry of the Jewish people alone; that to look for exact knowledge of natural and spiritual phenomena in the sacred books is an utter mistake; and that the narratives of the Old and New Testaments,