NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 449 



book of Daniel. Happily, though, the Ptolemaic astronomy and 

 witchcraft, and the Genesis legends of Creation, and the prophe- 

 cies regarding Antichrist, and the early date of the book of Daniel 

 have now been relegated to the limbo of delusions, Christianity 

 has but come forth the stronger. 



Nothing seemed less likely than that such a vast intrenched 

 camp as that of which Oxford was the center could be carried by 

 an effort proceeding from a few isolated German and Dutch 

 scholars. Yet it was the unexpected which occurred ; and it is 

 instructive to note that, even at the period when the champions 

 of the older thought were to all appearance impregnably in- 

 trenched in England, a way had been opened into their citadel, 

 and that the most effective agents in preparing it were really the 

 very men in the universities and cathedral chapters who had 

 most distinguished themselves by uncompromising and intolerant 

 orthodoxy. 



A rapid survey of the history of general literary criticism at 

 that epoch will reveal this fact fully. During the last decade 

 of the seventeenth century there had taken place the famous con- 

 troversy over the Letters of Phalaris, in which, against Charles 

 Boyle and his supporters at Oxford, was pitted Richard Bentley 

 at Cambridge, who insisted that the letters were spurious. In the 

 series of battles royal which followed, although Boyle, aided by 

 Atterbury, afterward so noted for his mingled ecclesiastical and 

 political intrigues, had gained a temporary triumph by wit and 

 humor, Bentley's final attack had proved irresistible. Drawing 

 from the stores of his wonderfully wide and minute knowledge, 

 he showed that the letters could not have been written in the 

 time of Phalaris proving this by an exhibition of their style, 

 which could not then have been in use, of their reference to 

 events which had not then taken place, and of a mass of consid- 

 erations which no one but a scholar almost miraculously gifted 

 could have marshaled so fully. The controversy had attracted 

 attention not only in England but throughout Europe. With 

 Bentley's reply it had ended. In spite of public applause at 

 Atterbury 's wit, scholars throughout the world acknowledged 

 Bentley's victory: he was recognized as the foremost classical 

 scholar of his time; the mastership of Trinity, which he ac- 

 cepted, and the Bristol bishopric, which he rejected, were his 

 formal reward. 



Although in his new position as head of the greatest college in 

 England, he went to extreme lengths on the orthodox side in bib- 

 lical theology, consenting even to support the doctrine that the 

 Hebrew punctuation was divinely inspired, this was as nothing 

 compared with the influence of the system of criticism which he 

 introduced into English studies of classical literature in preparing 



VOL. XLVII. 36 



