Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION.
317
enteenth century, when Hobbes, in his Leviathan, and La
Peyrere, in his Preadamites, took them up and developed
them still further. The result came speedily. Hobbes,
for this and other sins, was put under the ban, even by the
political party which sorely needed him, and was regarded
while La Peyrere, for this and other
generally as an outcast ;
heresies, was thrown into prison by the Grand Vicar of
Mechlin, and kept there until he fully retracted: his book
was refuted by seven theologians within a year after its
pearance,ap-
and within a generation thirty-six elaborate an-
swers to it had appeared : the Parliament of Paris ordered
it to be burned by the hangman.
In 1670 came an utterance vastly more important, by a
man far greater than any of these the Tractatus Theologico-
Politicus of Spinoza. Reverently but firmly he went much
more deeply into the subject. Suggesting new arguments
and recasting the old, he summed up all with judicial fair-
ness, and showed that Moses could not have been the author
of the Pentateuch in the form then ;
existing that there had
been glosses and revisions that the biblical ;
books had grown
truths are to be found
up as a literature ; that, though great
in them, and they are to be regarded as a divine revelation,
the old claims of inerrancy for them can not be maintained ;
that in studying them men had been misled by mistaking
human conceptions for divine meanings ; that, while prophets
have been inspired, the prophetic faculty has not been the
dowry of the Jewish people alone ; that to look for exact
in the sacred
and that the narratives of the Old
\ knowledge of natural and spiritual
books is an utter mistake ;
phenomena
J authorship
and New Testaments, while they surpass those of profane
history, differ among themselves not only in literary merit,
but in the value of the doctrines they inculcate. As to the
of the Pentateuch, he arrived at the conclusion
I that it was written long after Moses, but that Moses may
w have written some books from which it was compiled as,
, for
example, those which are mentioned in the Scriptures,
the Book of the Wars of God, the Book of the Covenant, and
and contradictions in
r the like and that the many repetitions
f the various books show a lack of careful editing as well as a
\ variety of original sources. Spinoza
then went on to throw