NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 291 



For about four centuries the learned world followed the pru- 

 dent rabbi's advice, and then two noted scholars, one of them a 

 Protestant, the other a Catholic, revived his idea. The first of 

 these, Carlstadt, insisted that the authorship of the Pentateuch 

 was unknown and unknowable; the other, Andreas Maes, ex- 

 pressed his opinion in terms which would not now offend the 

 most orthodox, that the Pentateuch had been edited by Ezra, and 

 had received in the process sundry divinely inspired words and 

 phrases to clear the meaning. Both these innovators were dealt 

 with promptly. Carlstadt was, for this and other troublesome 

 ideas, suppressed with the applause of the Protestant Church, 

 and the book of Maes was placed by the older Church on the 

 Index. 



The new truth appeared but dimly here and there until the 

 middle of the next century, when Hobbes, in his Leviathan, and 

 La Peyrere, in his Preadamites, took it up and developed it still 

 further. The result came speedily. Hobbes, for this and other 

 sins, was put under the ban, even by the political party which 

 sorely needed him, and was regarded generally as an outcast ; 

 while La Peyrere, for this and other heresies, was thrown into 

 prison by the Grand Vicar of Mechlin, and kept there until he 

 fully retracted ; his book was refuted by seven theologians with- 

 in a year after its appearance, and within a generation thirty-six 

 elaborate answers to it had appeared. The Parliament of Paris 

 ordered it to be burned by the hangman. 



In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a man far 

 greater than any of these the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus of 

 Spinoza. Reverently but firmly he went much more deeply into 

 the subject. Suggesting new arguments and recasting the old, he 

 summed up all with judicial fairness, and showed that Moses could 

 not have been the author of the Pentateuch in the form then ex- 

 isting ; that there had been glosses and revisions ; that the biblical 

 books had grown up as a literature ; that, though great truths are 

 to be found in them, and they are to be regarded as a divine reve- 

 lation, the old claims of inerrancy for them can not be main- 

 tained ; that in studying them men had been misled by mistaking 

 human conceptions for divine meanings; that, while prophets 

 have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been the dowry 

 of the Jewish people alone ; that to look for exact knowledge of 

 natural and spiritual phenomena in the sacred books is an utter 

 mistake ; and that the narratives of the Old and New Testaments, 



account, Moore's introduction to the Genesis of Genesis, by B. W. Bacon, Hartford, 1893, 

 p. 23 ; also Curtiss, as above. For a full exhibition of the absolute incompatibility of these 

 texts with the Mosaic authorship, etc., see The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch, by 0. 

 A. Briggs, D. D., New York, 1893, especially chapter iv. 



