Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/753

Rh of some books and the acceptance of others was accidental, if anything is accidental.

So, too, scientific biblical research has, as we have seen, been obliged to admit the existence of much mythical and legendary matter, as a setting for the great truths, not only of the Old Testament but of the New. It has also shown, by the comparative study of literatures, the process by which some books were compiled and recompiled, adorned with beautiful utterances, strengthened or weakened by interpolations expressing the views of the possessors or transcribers, and assigned to personages who could not possibly have written them. The showing forth of these things has greatly weakened that sway of mere dogma which has so obscured the simple teachings of Christ himself; for it has shown that the more we know of our sacred books, the less certain we become as to the authenticity of proof texts, and it has disengaged more and more, as the only valuable residuum, like the mass of gold at the bottom of the crucible, the personality and general teaching and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity. More and more, too, the new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament as, like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to a divine law—a conception which in all probability will give it its strongest hold on the coming centuries. In making this revelation Christian scholarship has by no means done work mainly destructive. It has, indeed, swept away a mass of noxious growths, but it has at the same time cleared the ground for a better growth of Christianity—a growth through which already pulsates the current of a nobler life. It has forever destroyed the contention of scholars like those of the eighteenth century, who saw, in the multitude of irreconcilable discrepancies between various biblical statements, merely evidences of priest-craft and intentional fraud. The new scholarship has shown that even such absolute contradictions as that between the date assigned for the crucifixion in the first three Gospels and that given in the fourth, and other discrepancies hardly less serious, do not affect the historical character of the essential part of the narrative. Even the hopelessly conflicting genealogies of the Saviour and the evidently mythical accretions about the simple facts of his birth and life are thus full of interest when taken as a natural literary development.