Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/311

Rh happy refuge at Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean Paul, and thence he exercised a powerful influence in liberating human thought.

It would hardly be possible to imagine a man more different from Herder than was the other of the two who most influenced biblical interpretation at the end of the eighteenth century. This was Alexander Geddes, a Roman Catholic priest and a Scotchman. Having at an early period attracted much attention by his scholarship, and having received the very rare distinction, for a Catholic, of a doctorate from the University of Aberdeen, he began publishing in 1792 a new translation of the Old Testament, and followed this in 1800 with a volume of critical remarks. In these he supported mainly three views: first, that the Pentateuch in its present form could not have been written by Moses; secondly, that it was the work of various hands; and, thirdly, that it could not have been written before the time of David. Although there was a fringe of doubtful theories about them, these main conclusions, supported as they were by deep research and cogent reasoning, are now recognized as of great value. But such was not the orthodox opinion then. Though a man of sincere piety, who throughout his entire life remained firm in the faith of his fathers, he and his work were at once condemned; he was suspended by the Catholic authorities as a misbeliever, denounced by Protestants as an infidel, and taunted by both as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost." Of course, by this taunt was meant nothing more than that he dissented from sundry ideas inherited from less enlightened times by the men who just then happened to wield ecclesiastical power. But not all the opposition to him could check the evolution of his thought.

A line of great men followed in these paths opened by Astruc and Eichhorn, and broadened by Herder and Geddes. Of these was De Wette, who, early in the nineteenth century, showed to the world how largely poetical myths and legends had entered into the formation of the Hebrew sacred books, and whose Introduction to the Old Testament gave a new impulse to fruitful thought throughout Christendom. He had, indeed, to pay a penalty for thus aiding the world in its march toward more truth; he was driven out of Germany, obliged to take refuge in a Swiss professorship; and Theodore Parker, who published an English translation of his work, was, for this and similar sins, virtually rejected by what claimed to be the most liberal of all Christian bodies in the United States.

But contributions to the new thought continued from quarters whence least was to be expected. Gesenius, by his Hebrew Grammar, and Ewald, by his historical studies, greatly advanced it.

To them and to all like them during the middle years of the