296 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the thinking world now acknowledges, infinitely more important ; 

 it was, indeed, the most valuable single contribution ever made to 

 biblical study. But such was not the judgment of the world then. 

 While Lowth's book was covered with honor and its author pro- 

 moted from the bishopric of St. David's to that of London, and 

 even offered the primacy, Astruc and his book were covered with 

 reproach. Though, as an orthodox Catholic, he had mainly de- 

 sired to reassert the authorship of Moses against the argument of 

 Spinoza, he received no thanks on that account. Theologians of 

 all creeds sneered at him as a doctor of medicine who had blun- 

 dered beyond his province ; his fellow-Catholics in France bitterly 

 denounced him as a heretic, and in Germany the great Protestant 

 theologian, Michaelis, who had edited and exalted Lowth's work, 

 poured contempt over Astruc as an ignoramus. 



The case of Astruc is one of the many which show the wonder- 

 ful power of the older theological reasoning to close the strongest 

 minds against the clearest truths. The fact which he discovered 

 is now as definitely established as any in the whole range of lit- 

 erature or science. It has become as clear as the day, and yet for 

 two thousand years the minds of professional commentators, 

 Jewish and Christian, were powerless to detect it. Not until this 

 eminent physician applied to the subject a mind trained in mak- 

 ing scientific distinctions was it given to the world. 



It was, of course, not possible even for so eminent a scholar as 

 Michaelis to pooh-pooh down a discovery so pregnant ; and, curi- 

 ously enough, it was one of Michaelis's own scholars, Eichhorn, 

 who did the main work in bringing the new truth to bear upon 

 the world. He, with others, developed out of it the theory that 

 Genesis, and indeed the Pentateuch, is made up entirely of frag- 

 ments of old writings, mainly disjointed. But they did far more 

 than this. They impressed upon the thinking part of Christen- 

 dom the fact that the Bible is not a book, but a literature ; that 

 the style is not supernatural and unique, but simply the Oriental 

 style of the lands and times in which the books were written ; 

 and that they must be studied in the light of the modes of 

 thought and statement and the literary habits generally of 

 Oriental peoples. From Eichhorn's time the process which, by 

 historical, philological, and textual research, brings out the truth 

 regarding this literature has been known as "the higher criti- 

 cism." 



He was a deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his 

 efforts was the desire to bring back to the Church the educated 

 classes who had been repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy ; 

 but this only increased hostility to him. Opposition met him in 

 Germany at every turn, and in England Lloyd, Kegius Professor 

 of Hebrew at Cambridge, who sought patronage for a translation 



