CONCEliNlNG THE COMPOSITION OF HOLY SCRIPTURE. 175 



Testament Criticism (p. 2), attributes it to English deism of the 

 eigliteenth century, which found so many apt disciples in 

 Germany. " It was not merely," he says, "a new constructive 

 stage of German theoretic theology and a keener psychological 

 investigation for which deism helped to prepare the way, but 

 also a great movement which has in our own day become in a 

 strict literal sense, international, concerned with the literary 

 and historical criticism of the Scriptures." This movement 

 had as one of its earliest promoters in Germany Professor J. G. 

 Eichhorn, of Jena and Gottiiigen (a.d. 1752-1827), who, as 

 Canon Cheyne says, wrote in his Introduction to the Old 

 Testament, " My greatest trouble I had to bestow on a hitherto 

 unworked field — on the investigation of the inner nature of the 

 several writings of the Old Testament with the help of the 

 Higher Criticism " ; upon which the Canon remarks, By 

 'higher criticism' he means the analysis of a book into its 

 earlier and its later elements." It is by this name, now more 

 widely applied, that the modern development of this movement 

 is best known, and if its ancestry be correctly represented, it 

 may without disrespect be admitted that it will hardly be com- 

 mended to devout English Christians by its connection with 

 the notorious deists Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke, Collins and 

 Toland, Woolston and Tom Paine. 



Let us, however, overlook as far as possible any discredit 

 which it may derive from its unibrtunate ancestry — nothing 

 and nobody can be held responsible for his ancestry — and pass 

 on to consider some of its leading principles. 



1. The Principle of Composite Authorship. 

 Eichhorn's work may be said to have started with an 

 endeavour to account for the Book of Genesis upon this 

 principle. He supposed it to consist mainly of two authors, 

 one of whom has been termed the " Jehovistic " and the other 

 the " Elohistic." But the theory did not originate with Eich- 

 horn. Some fifty years earlier Jean Astruc, a French physician, 

 had noticed that although the liook of Genesis relates through- 

 out to events which transpired before the Divine name in its 

 full form of " Jehovah " had been assigned to the use of the 

 Israelites through Moses (Exodus vi, o), yet both that name 

 and " Elolnm " appear in the said Book. Jean Astruc there- 

 fore published a volume in 1753 a.d. entitled Conjectures sur 

 les m6moires Origiuaux clont il paroit que Moyse sest servit pour 

 composer le livix de la Genese. But the conjectures of Jean 

 Astruc have become the "assured conclusions" of the higher 



