OMENTAL RESEARCH BREASTED 411 



high mission than the dramatic power with which Lawrie's immortal 

 bronze discloses the simple and dauntless figure of Galileo confront- 

 ing theological dogma with the majestic facts of the universe. 



From Galileo's struggle with the church to Huxley's debate with 

 Gladstone, the heavy guns of natural science have dealt tradition 

 one destructive blow after another. It has been under this destruc- 

 tive attack at the hands of natural science that historical criticism 

 has grown up in modern times since Niebuhr. Indeed it has been no 

 accident that in our own country the first serious discussion of the 

 Old Testament narratives in Genesis and Exodus was written by 

 Thomas Cooper, who was the associate of Priestley in the discovery 

 of oxygen. Cooper was Thomas Jefferson's appointee as first presi- 

 dent of the new University of Virginia; but in the Virginia of 

 that period the social feeling against Cooper for having assailed the 

 literalistic interpretation of the Old Testament was so strong that 

 Jefferson was unable to secure his induction into office. Jefferson's 

 influence, however, secured Cooper's appointment as president of the 

 University of South Carolina, w^here public opinion was at first not 

 so strong against him as in Virginia. It is interesting to note that 

 before the end of the twenties, that is less than a century ago, con- 

 servative sentiment was strong enough to bring about Cooper's dis- 

 missal from the university, although his personal popularity was 

 such that he was promptly appointed to codify the laws of the State, 

 and the first legal code of the State of South Carolina was edited by 

 this gifted representative of natural science and historical criticism. 

 The merciless critical scalpel which had not spared Hebrew tra- 

 dition was equally unsparing in its treatment of the cherished clas- 

 sical heritage from Greece and Eome. The tales of Romulus and Re- 

 mus, the Trojan War and the entire cycle of legends which were linked 

 with it, were shorn away. A critical attitude of universal negation 

 arose. It included the whole Mediterranean and oriental world: 

 Rome, Greece, Hebrews, Babylonians, Assyrians, and Egyptians. 

 Historical criticism would not allow that early man at the beginning 

 of the age of writing had ever heard and transmitted an echo from 

 earlier ages, which, because they possessed no writing, could only 

 send on their story in the form of oral traditions. This attitude of 

 the historical critic may be compared with that of an observer who 

 stands on a mountain peak, and looking off across a distant land- 

 scape to a dim horizon shrouded in mists and cloud, insists that the 

 intermittent glimpses of mountain profiles which vaguely emerge 

 on the far-away skyline can not correspond to any reality. In short, 

 without ever having been himself on the ground to investigate, he 

 denies the existence of the phantom mountains on the horizon. 



