220 EEV. JOHN TUCKWELL_, M.R.A.S., ON ARCHJ:OLOGY AND 



book trade. It was only incidental to this general movement, 

 at first, that attention began to be directed to the contents of 

 Holy Scripture. Then in the fifteenth century came the 

 invention of printing. 



It has often been affirmed as an apology for certain modern 

 views of Scripture that, at the Eeformation, men discovered 

 that the Church's claim to infallibility was invalid, but feeling 

 the need of some infallible basis on which to ground their faith, 

 invented the theory of an infallible Book. Was this so ? 

 Was it not rather the rediscovery of the Book which 

 gave militant effect to the intellectual and moral shock 

 which mankind was beginning to experience at the Church's 

 condition and claims ? It was the use of a manuscript 

 copy of the Scriptures that shed the light upon the mind of 

 J ohn Wycliffe — the morning star of the Reformation." It was 

 the publication of the Greek text of the New Testament and his 

 scholarly Latin translation and their circulation in the universi- 

 ties and among the learned and noble that caused it to be said 

 that " Erasmus laid the egg which Luther hatched." It was 

 the perusal of the ISTew Testament which first set free and then 

 set on fire the great prophetic soul of Martin Luther. It was 

 with the Book in their hands, as the final Court of Appeal, that 

 the Eeformers fought and won their battles, and whatever value 

 they attached to it as the standard of Christian Truth they 

 attached to it from the very beginning. Nothing, therefore, 

 could be more remote from the true history of the conflict than 

 the supposition that the degree of inspiration the Eeformers 

 attached to it, whether they were right or wrong, was an after- 

 thought. 



What happened was this. After the Eeformation, when 

 freedom of thought and speech could no longer be suppressed, 

 the contestants over the subject of supernatural religion came 

 from all sides into the arena. Lecky, in his History of Rational- 

 ism, writing of " the moral chaos that followed the death of 

 Louis XIY.," says of Voltaire and Eousseau that the object of 

 these writers was not to erect a new system of positive religion, 

 but rather to remove those systems which then existed and to 

 prove the adequacy of natural religion to the moral wants of 

 mankind. The first of these tasks was undertaken especially 

 by Voltaire. The second was more congenial to the mind of 

 Eousseau." The Christian apologist had to face this new 

 condition of things, and in Germany, as Canon Cheyne admits 

 in his Founders of Old Testariient Criticism, a party arose under 

 the influence of eighteenth-century Deism which adopted that 



