RELATIONS OF NEW TESTAMENT SCIENCE 571 



literary class. The biblical critic is not an art taster. Matthew Arnold 

 has indeed entered our field, but as an amateur. We higher critics 

 are not concerned with the history of literature, but of religion; 

 and we treat the canonical books as sources for that history. They 

 are to us an expression of the leading type of spiritual life in its pro- 

 gressive phases. The rank and station of each element of our science, 

 and of the science as a whole, is measured by its service to this end. 

 Introduction the higher criticism, analytical and constructive 

 is subsidiary, as truly as the lower. Criticism exists for interpretation, 

 and interpretation for the sake of the history of religious thought 

 and life, for that is the "word of God." The revelation of God is 

 not in the letter, but in the life; and because the life cannot be 

 isolated, but is a spiritual evolution of the race, therefore we find our 

 point of contact with kindred sciences in the field of the history of 

 religion, the phenomenology of spiritual life. 



The development of the higher criticism, so distinctive a feature 

 of the century just closed, cutting quietly away the whole ground of 

 contention from what we used to designate the " conflict of science and 

 religion," has been in this aspect simply a removal of misunder- 

 standings. The gradual adoption of the historical point of view has 

 brought the Bible into the field of science without withdrawing it 

 from that of devotion. 



For what we found true of the term "criticism" is true in still 

 higher degree of the term "interpretation." Its history during 

 the past half-century has been one of immeasurable enlargement. 

 From having been almost exclusively grammatical and philological, 

 often minutely verbal, exegesis has become historical. From apolo- 

 getic it has become objective. At first context was disregarded; 

 then it was seen to be essential to the historical sense; then the idea 

 was widened. Now we no longer mean by context merely the next 

 phrase or adjoining sentence. Not the whole book or author's 

 works includes it all. The context which throws fullest light upon 

 the meaning is the whole complex of contemporary life and thought, 

 its inheritance from the past, its problems, its aspirations, its pre- 

 possessions, its whole mode of looking at things. So exegesis too has 

 found God's world not a world of isolation. It is incomplete without 

 the history and sciences once called "profane." "Continuity," 

 "evolution," have become watchwords in this field also. 



It may be an independent phenomenon; it may be an effect of 

 the Zeitgeist thus to broaden New Testament science, compelling 

 it to interconnect itself with kindred studies and find its place in the 

 general stream of the history of religion. Such, at all events, is the 

 fact, to our immeasurable uplift and inspiration. The age which saw 

 the rise of the higher criticism could not fail to give us, as it did, 

 our first great histories of New Testament times, and of Jewish 



