is;;] POETRY OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 401 



us in criticising and appreciating human writings. The 

 Reformation, with its profounder apprehension of the 

 idea of the Word, opened a new era in biblical study. 

 The Word of God, as conceived by Luther, is no longer 

 the abstract imparting of intellectual truth, but the 

 personal message of God s love in Christ, to which the 

 saints of all ages return the equally personal answer of 

 faith. Thus the whole truths of revelation are at once 

 brought down from the unreal world of intelligibilia into 

 the sphere of true and personal human life. The Word 

 descends into history, comes near to man in his daily needs, 

 and opens up to him the very heart of God in utterances 

 that speak straight home to every one who is taught of 

 the Spirit. This implies that the Word of God is given 

 to us in the natural language of mankind, and is to be 

 studied by the same methods of exegesis as we apply to 

 any other ancient book. Thus in the hands of the earlier 

 Reformers the science of biblical interpretation assumed 

 a new aspect. The allegorical sense that great incubus 

 of mediaeval exegesis was cast aside, and the Bible 

 history was laid hold of with a new and vivid interest, 

 which bore remarkable fruit in the social and political, as 

 well as in the purely religious development of the Protest 

 ant nations. Nor was the recognition of the genuine 

 human character of the sacred history all that was gained. 

 The beginnings at least of an historical interpretation of 

 prophecy are to be found in Luther s prefaces to the 

 German Bible. And, above all, a decisive step towards 

 a right appreciation of the human aspects of the Old 

 Testament poetry is taken by the great Reformer in the 

 preface to the Psalter of 1531, where the Psalms are mainly 

 considered, not as supernatural doctrine, but as the truly 

 human utterance of the inmost heart of the Old Testa 

 ment saints. But in this point, as in many others, the 

 first promise of the Reformation was not fulfilled in the 

 sequel. The spiritual insight that supplied a just point 

 of view required to be supported by a scientific construc- 



26 



