NEW CHAPTERS IN THE WARFARE OF SCIENCE. 297 



France lias ever produced, did his best to crush Simon. In Ger- 

 many, Wasmuth, professor first at Rostock and afterward at Kiel, 

 hurled his " Vindicise " at the innovators. Yet at this very mo- 

 ment the battle was clearly won ; the arguments of Capellus were 

 irrefragable, and, despite the commands of bishops, the outcries of 

 theologians and the sneering of critics, his application of strictly 

 scientific observation and reasoning carried the day. 



Yet a casual observer, long after the fate of the battle was 

 really settled, might have supposed that it was still in doubt. As 

 is not unusual in theologic controversies, attempts were made to 

 galvanize the dead doctrine into the appearance of life. Famous 

 among these attempts was that made as late as the beginning of 

 the eighteenth century by two Bremen theologians, Hase and 

 Iken. They put forth a compilation in two huge folios simul- 

 taneously at Leyden and Amsterdam, prominent in which work 

 is the treatise on The Integrity of Scripture, by Johann Andreas 

 Danzius, Professor of Oriental Languages and Senior Member of 

 the Philosophical Faculty of Jena. To preface it, there was a 

 formal and fulsome approval by three eminent professors of the- 

 ology at Leyden. With great fervor the author pointed out that 

 "religion itself depends absolutely on the infallible inspiration, 

 both verbal and literal, of the Scripture text " ; and with impas- 

 sioned eloquence he assailed the blasphemers who dared question 

 the divine origin of the Hebrew points. But this was really the 

 last great effort. That the case was lost is seen by the fact that 

 Danzius felt obliged to use other missiles than arguments, and 

 especially to call his opponents hard names. From this period 

 the old sacred theory as to the origin of the Hebrew points may 

 be considered as dead and buried. 



But the war was soon to be waged on a wider and far more 

 important field. The inspiration of the Hebrew punctuation 

 having been given up, the great orthodox body fell back upon 

 the remainder of the theory, and intrenched this more strongly 

 than ever the theory that the Hebrew language was the first of 

 all languages, spoken by the Almighty, given by him to Adam, 

 transmitted through Noah to the world after the Deluge, and 

 that the confusion of tongues was the origin of all the other lan- 

 guages of the earth. In giving account of this new phase of the 

 struggle, it is well to go back a little. From the revival of learn- 

 ing and the Reformation had come the renewed study of Hebrew 

 in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and thus the sacred doc- 

 trine regarding the divine origin of the Hebrew language received 

 additional authority. All the early Hebrew grammars, from that 

 of Reuchlin down, assert the divine origin and miraculous claims 

 of Hebrew. It is constantly mentioned as " the sacred tongue " 

 sancta lingua. In 1506 Reuchlin, though himself persecuted by a 



