276 THE VERY REV. H. WACE, D.D., ON THE OLD TESTAMENT 



other subjects, such as the Homeric poerns. the French Chansons 

 de Geste, the Salic Law, the interpretation of Livy, or the story 

 of Lancelot du Lac. M. Naville, he says, " in asserting his 

 views, in constructing his theories, has not only been doing the 

 work of a biblical exegete, according to his right and his duty, 

 but he has also, with a skilful and bold movement, replaced the 

 study of the Old Testament in the true path of the historical 

 method." The criticism" of the last century, he observes, 

 consisted in taking ancient documents very much by themselves, 

 in a sort of isolation, without investigating their relation to the 

 contemporary conditions in which they were writtea ; it dwelt 

 on the contradictions in these documents, their, improbabilities, 

 their anachronisms, their historical or geographical inaccuracies, 

 and thereupon they were condemned ; that is, they were declared 

 not to belong to the date to which tradition assigned them, they 

 were denied to the author whose name they bore, and attributed 

 to some later author, or to various writers who had conspired to 

 fabricate them." This method was applied to the Homeric 

 poems, to the Song of Roland, the early works of Livy, and the 

 Salic law. " From one end of history to the other, from the 

 Genesis of Moses to the romances of ancient France, contemporary 

 documents entered on a process of decomposition." But, he 

 says, a new method commenced about 1880, under the impulse 

 of the eminent historian Fustel de Coulanges, who urged historians 

 not to criticise ancient texts according to their apparent literary 

 structure, " but subject to an examination of the events and 

 the places to which they were related." The consequence, he 

 says, has been that the Odyssey has been shown by M. Victor 

 Berard to exhibit a marvellous accuracy in its description of 

 the scenes of the voyage of Ulysses, and to be in conformity with 

 the political condition of the Mediterranean nine or ten centuries 

 before the Christian era. A like result has followed this historical 

 treatment of the Song of Roland. " After the unique author of 

 the Odyssey, behold the unique author of our national poem," 

 and so on. 



" This, then," says M. Jullian, " is what M. Naville has done 

 for Moses and Genesis. I state again that this is no 

 matter of orthodoxy, or revelation, or faith ; it is simply a work 

 of pure and noble science, before which we must bow our heads." 

 M. Naville, he says, has in the first place had regard to the 

 memorials of antiquity which are contemporary with Moses, in 



