NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 735 



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 Testa- 

 ment but of the New. It has also shown, by the comparative 

 study of literatures, the process by which some books were com- 

 piled and recompiled, adorned with beautiful utterances, strength- 

 ened 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 disen- 

 gaged 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 proba- 

 bility 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 de- 

 stroyed 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 as- 

 signed 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 narra- 

 tive. 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 nat- 

 ural literary development.* 



* Among the newer English works on the canon of Scripture, especially as regards the 

 Old Testament, see Ryle in work cited. As to the evidences of frequent mutilations of the 

 New Testament text, as well as of frequent charge of changing texts made against each 

 other by early Christian writers, see Reuss, History of the New Testament, vol. ii, 362. 

 For a reverent and honest treatment of some of the discrepancies and contradictions which 

 are absolutely irreconcilable, see Crooker, as above ; also Matthew Arnold, Literature and 

 Dogma. 



