GERMANISM." 



147 



' the same/ but simply ' in the same category."* " But Hegel 

 goes further than this, and even when he laid down his 

 postulate, he was either talking downright nonsense or enunciating 

 the simplest of truisms. I may leave this part of my paper by 

 saying that, if this is the best German philosophy can give us 

 on the most important and most fundamental of all subjects, 

 what security can we feel in its power to touch the heart and 

 guide the conscience on any subject whatever ? 



The real truth, is that if we take German criticism and German 

 theology for generations past, we find no real breadth of view, 

 no genuine discovery, but only one-sided research and negative 

 theology.* The true scientific critic of Scripture must start 

 ivith facts. He must admit, for example, that the Bible, though 

 written by many authors, and at various times, is, and has long 

 been, the Book of all books. No other can approach it, far less 



* surpass it. Its literary merits are as varied and remarkable 

 as its moral power, and only the extreme dexterity with which 

 the German critic can divert his readers from these facts, by 

 throwing dust into his neighbours' eyes, can keep him above 



- water any longer. Nor can he prevent us from seeing, if we 

 care to look for it3 the fact that there is one message throughout 



* Mr. Harold Wiener, whose voice has been heard in our discussions, 

 has lately said, " The documentary and evolutionary theories of German 

 criticism," — he is speaking of the Old Testament — " were based on three 

 main props, indifference to the facts of textual history, the scantiness of 

 the archaeological materials, and absence of the most rudimentary training 

 in legal methods." The one point bearing on reUgion in which Germans 

 have done their best work has been the textual criticism of the New 

 Testament. It is just the point where German unwearied patience and 

 minute attention to detail is likely to tell. But even there, Tischendorf's 

 partiality for the MS. which he himself discovered, as well as the craving 

 for novelty in which the Grerman Professor so often indulges, has injured his 

 reputation. The " Western text," which he and his followers brought into 

 vogue, is now thought over here to have been the text generally accepted 

 throughout the world, until a new departure took place about the time of the 

 Nicene controversy. It will be found, I believe, that at both the Ancient 

 Universities a considerable, though by no means slavish, reaction is taking 

 place in the direction of the TexUis ReceptiLS. It is only fair to add that 

 philology owes Grimm's Law to the care and diligence of the Germans in 

 matters of detail. What was mere guess work, and as such ridiculed by the 

 wits, became, after this discovery of the wearing down of certain consonants 

 in language through long periods of time, a science, because it was compared 

 with the facts, and found to correspond with them. This is an instance 

 where attention to detail was not inconsistent with principles capable of 

 broad appUcation. It is in a clear insight into principles that Germans are 

 8o often at fault. 



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