556 OLD TESTAMENT 



whereas the treatment could hardly be made to include much more 

 than nomenclature and dates. More valuable, but at the same time 

 incomparably more difficult, would be a course upon what is cus- 

 tomarily called the philosophy of religion, but which should be 

 termed the biology of religion; upon the regularly recurring mani- 

 festations of the life of religion. The preparation for this, the actual 

 illustration and that is the most important part has long been 

 everywhere offered by Old Testament science, just because the Old 

 Testament is so exceptionally rich in most varied religious phenomena. 

 Here it is possible to penetrate to the depths, and to study the life 

 itself; something necessarily denied to one in the case of a sum- 

 marizing treatment of the whole field. Therefore as substitute, as 

 proxy for the general history of religion, as the science of one religion 

 outside of Christianity, which gives us the training to enter into the 

 mysteries of our own, Old Testament science will in the future more 

 firmly than in the past maintain its position within Christian theology. 

 But not alone in the relation of our department to the whole 

 organism of theology has there lately come a decided change; the 

 boundaries of the department itself have also been extended, and 

 the gap which separated it from its sister-discipline, New Testament 

 theology, has been closed. For the church the Old Testament was 

 only the collection of canonical books of the synagogue, because 

 they were alone believed to be inspired of God. Besides these, only 

 the so-called Apocrypha, taken from the LXX, enjoyed an esteem 

 which was variously graduated from a degree nearly equaling that 

 given to the Holy Scriptures down to a decided distrust and rejec- 

 tion. We know to-day that the belief in inspiration is nothing more 

 than an error to be sure, an easily explainable error a lifeless 

 form of the belief in revelation which is itself indispensable to religion ; 

 and we now know that divine revelation in the right sense, always 

 relative, always through human mediation, and in the most varied 

 shades of intensity, exercises its quickening influence through the 

 whole wide world. With this the barriers fall, and all the phenomena 

 of religion of the people of the Old Covenant, wherever set down, 

 become valuable material for Old Testament theology. This is 

 particularly true of the whole extra-canonical writings, which in 

 recent times have received such manifold and unexpected additions. 

 So far as these belong to pre-Christian Judaism, they fall to the share 

 of the Old Testament department, and thus appreciably enlarge the 

 field of our duties and of our tasks; indeed, they so greatly enlarge 

 it that we must ask ourselves whether we are in a position to meet 

 these increased demands without loss of thoroughness. But even 

 before the question is settled whether the blame for this is to be 

 laid to our incapacity or to our apathy, necessity comes to its own 

 rescue. All this extra-canonical literature belongs to the last pre- 



