226 THE ET. REV. BISHOP J. E. C. WELLDON, D.D., ON 



doubt that science in its loftiest flights, no less than art, demands 

 the exercise of the imaginative faculty. The literary criticism 

 of which I am speaking found its proper home in Germany ; for 

 the Germans, as Madame de Stael long ago saw, are more 

 keenly addicted to theories, and more strongly affected by them, 

 than any other European nation. ^Yolf set to work upon the dis- 

 solution and reconstruction of the Iliad and the Odyssey. He 

 broke up each of these poems into a number of disjointed ballads; 

 then he recombined them in the name of Homer ; but his Homer 

 was no more than a mere name. The extraordinary effect of 

 ^Yolf's treatise was due to its coincidence with the new 

 spirit or temper of literary science. Then Niebuhr followed suit 

 by attempting to re-write all the early chapters of Roman history. 

 He believed himself capable of discriminating between truth and 

 falsehood in that history. He traced it backwards to a number of 

 ballads corresponding with the ^Volfian ballads or rhapsodies, such 

 ballads as Macaulay tried to reproduce in his well-known Lays 

 of Ancient Eome. How far Xiebuhr attained success or failed 

 in attaining it is still an open question ; but it is probable 

 that the reaction against his conclusions has been stronger than 

 against his methods of arriving at them. Still the history of 

 ancient Eome according to Xiebuhr is not the traditional history, 

 but something widely different, and that something determined by 

 literary criticism acting upon the principles of natural science. 



Time passed, and it brought the inevitable consequence. The 

 spirit of re-writing poetry or history passed from Homer and 

 Livy to the Bible, and especially to the Old Testament. In its 

 first rept^esentatives, men like Eichhorn and Ewald, it assumed a 

 form of reasonable moderation; but the transition from them to 

 Wellhausen and ^Yeizacker marks its progress towards extrava- 

 gance ; for as it acquired fresh courage, it aimed at re -writing, 

 I might almost say at inverting, the history of the Jews. There 

 was really no limit to its audacitv. It was not content with 

 splitting books like the Pentateuch or Hexateuch into fragments 

 after the manner of "Wolf's ballads; but at the hands of such a 

 critic as the late Dr. Cheyne it aspired to fix the dates not only 

 of particular books, but of particular chapters and even verses 

 in the same book. Dr. Cheyne 's method of treating the Psalter 

 and the prophetical books falls little short of insanity. Germany 

 was the centre of the new critical school, which somehow arro- 

 gated to itself the title of the higher criticism ; and in Germany 

 itself the centre of the school was Tiibino^en. Nobody denies 

 the industry or the acumen of Ferdinand Christian Baur. But 

 nobody to-day, I think, accepts his theory of the PauHne epistles. 

 Yet the professors of Holland and Switzerland could not or would 

 not lag behind the professors of Germany. Leyden and Zurich 

 became the rivals of Tiibingen. The zenith or the nadir of literary 



