NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 737 



But for all this dissolving away of the traditional opinions 

 regarding our sacred literature, there has been a cause far more 

 general and powerful than any which has been given, for it is a 

 cause surrounding and permeating all. This is simply the atmos- 

 phere of thought engendered by the development of all sciences 

 during the last three centuries. 



Vast masses of myth, legend, marvel, and dogmatic assertion, 

 coming into this atmosphere, have been dissolved and are now 

 dissolving quietly away like icebergs drifted into the Gulf 

 Stream. In earlier days, when some critic in advance of his time 

 insisted that Moses could not have written an account embracing 

 the circumstances of his own death, it was sufficient to answer 

 that Moses was a prophet ; if attention was called to the fact that 

 the great early prophets, by all which they did and did not do, 

 showed that there could not have existed in their time any 

 " Levitical code," a sufficient answer was " mystery " ; and if 

 the discrepancy was noted between the two accounts of crea- 

 tion in Genesis, or between the genealogies or the dates of the 

 crucifixion in the Gospels, the cogent reply was "infidelity." 

 But the thinking world has at last been borne by the general 

 development of a scientific atmosphere beyond that kind of refu- 

 tation. 



If, in the atmosphere generated by the earlier developed sci- 

 ences, the older growths of biblical interpretation have drooped 

 and withered and are evidently perishing, new and better growths 

 with roots running down into the newer sciences have arisen. 

 Comparative mythology and folklore, comparative religion and 

 literature, by searching out and laying side by side the main 

 facts in the upward struggle of humanity in various old seats 

 of civilization, are giving a new interpretation of these great 

 problems which dogmatic theology has long labored in vain to 

 solve. Thus, while they have established the fact that accounts 

 formerly supposed to be special revelations to Jews and Chris- 

 tians are but repetitions of widespread legends dating from far 

 earlier civilizations, and that beliefs formerly thought funda- 

 mental to Judaism and Christianity are simply based on an- 

 cient myths, they have also begun to impress upon the intel- 

 lect and conscience of the thinking world the fact that the 



tions in the New Testament, 1889, p. 72 ; also Kuenen, The Prophets and Prophecy in 

 Israel. For Le Clerc's mode of dealing with the argument regarding quotations from the 

 Old Testament in the New, see earlier parts of the present chapter. For Paley's mode, see 

 his Evidences, Part III, chapter iii. For the more scholastic expressions from Irenseus and 

 others, see Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891, especially note on p. 267. For a striking pas- 

 sage on the general subject, see B. W. Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, p. 33, ending with the 

 words, " We must decline to stake the authority of Jesus Christ on a question of literary 

 criticism." 



vol. xltii. 60 



