NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 293 



tion of the World, as well as in his drama, Nathan the Wise, and 

 both these works have spoken with power to every generation 

 since. 



In France, also, came the same healthful evolution of thought. 

 For generations scholars here and there had known that multi- 

 tudes of errors had crept into the sacred text. Robert Stephens 

 had found over two thousand variations in the oldest manu- 

 scripts of the Old Testament, and in 1633 Jean Morin, a priest of 

 the Oratory, pointed out clearly many of the most glaring of 

 these. Seventeen years later, in spite of the most earnest Protes- 

 tant efforts to suppress his work, Cappellus gave forth his Crit- 

 ica Sacra, demonstrating not only that the vowel pointing of 

 Scripture was not divinely inspired, but that the Hebrew text it- 

 self, from which the modern translations were made, is full of 

 errors due to the carelessness, ignorance, and doctrinal zeal of 

 early scribes, and that there had clearly been no miraculous pres- 

 ervation of the " original autographs " of the sacred books. 



While orthodox France was under the uneasiness and alarm 

 thus caused, appeared a Critical History of the Old Testament by 

 Richard Simon, a priest of the Oratory. He was a thoroughly 

 religious man, and an acute scholar, whose whole purpose was to 

 develop truths which he believed healthful to the Church and to 

 mankind. But he denied that Moses was the author of the Pen- 

 tateuch, and exhibited the internal evidence, now so well known, 

 that the books were composed much later by various persons, 

 and edited later still. He also showed that other parts of the Old 

 Testament had been compiled from older sources, and attacked 

 the time-honored theory that Hebrew was the primitive language 

 of mankind. The whole character of his book was such that in 

 these days it would pass, on the whole, as conservative and or- 

 thodox ; it had been approved by the censor in 1678, and printed, 

 when the table of contents and a page of the preface were shown 

 to Bossuet. The great bishop and theologian was instantly 

 aroused ; he pronounced the work " a mass of impieties and a bul- 

 wark of irreligion " ; his biographer tells us that, although it was 

 Holy Thursday, the bishop, in spite of the solemnity of the day, 

 hastened at once to the Chancellor Le Tellier, secured an order to 

 stop the publication of the book, and to burn the whole edition of 

 it. Fortunately, a few copies were rescued, and a few years later 

 the work found a new publisher in Holland ; yet not until there 

 had been attached to it, evidently by some Protestant divine of 

 authority, an essay warning the reader against its dangerous doc- 

 trines. Two years later a translation was published in England. 



This first work of Simon was followed by others, in which he 

 sought, in the interest of scriptural truth, to throw a new and 

 purer light upon our sacred literature ; but Bossuet proved im- 



