Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/312

 nineteenth century was sturdily opposed the colossus of orthodoxy, Hengstenberg. In him were combined the haughtiness of a Prussian drill-sergeant, the zeal of a Spanish inquisitor, and the flippant brutality of an ultra-orthodox journalist. Behind him stood the gifted but erratic Frederick William IV, a man admirably fitted for the professorship of æsthetics, but whom an inscrutable fate had made King of Prussia. Both these rulers in the German Israel arrayed all possible opposition against the great scholars laboring in the new paths. But this opposition was vain; the succession of acute and honest scholars continued: Vatke, Bleek, Reuss, Graf, Hupfeld, Delitzsch, Kuenen, and others wrought on in Germany and Holland, steadily developing the new truth.

Especially to be mentioned among these is Hupfeld, who published in 1853 his treatise on The Sources of Genesis. Accepting the "Conjectures" which Astruc had published just a hundred years before, he established what has ever since been recognized by the leading biblical commentators as the main basis of work upon the Pentateuch—the fact that three main documents are combined in Genesis, each with its own characteristics. He, too, had to pay a price for letting more light upon the world. A determined attempt was made to punish him. Though deeply religious in his nature and aspirations, he was denounced in 1865 to the Prussian Government as guilty of irreverence; but, to the credit of his noble and true colleagues who trod in the more orthodox paths, men like Tholuck and Julius Müller, the theological faculty of the University of Halle protested against this persecuting effort, and it was brought to naught.

The demonstrations of Hupfeld gave new life to biblical scholarship in all lands, but most important among the newer contributions was that made by Reuss and Graf. The former had developed it by a sort of intuition, but in his timidity had withheld it from publication for nearly fifty years, and he only made it known when Graf's courage strengthened his own.

These men penetrated the reason for a fact which had long puzzled commentators and given rise to masses of futile debate; namely, the fact that such great men as Samuel, David, Elijah, and Isaiah, and indeed the whole Jewish people from Joshua to the exile, showed in all their utterances and actions that they were unacquainted with the Levitical system. These scholars solved the problem by demonstrating that the Law and Ceremonial Code, which the theological world up to that time had so generally believed to have been established at a vastly earlier period, were really the product of a later epoch in Jewish history. Thus was the historical evolution of Jewish institutions brought into harmony with the natural development of human thought;