Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

BEGINNINGS OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION,
and mind of Lessing ;
319
he brought them to bear in his treatise
on the Education of the World, as well as in his drama, Nathan
the Wise, and both these works have spoken with power to
every generation since.
In France, also, came the same healthful evolution of
thought. For generations scholars had known that multitudes
of errors had crept into the sacred text. Robert Stephens
had found over two thousand variations in the oldest
manuscripts of the Old Testament, and in 1633 Jean Morin,
a priest of the Oratory, pointed out clearly many of the most
glaring of these. Seventeen 3'ears later, in spite of the most
earnest Protestant efforts to suppress his work, Cappellus
gave forth his Critica Sacra, demonstrating not onl}- that the
vowel pointing of Scripture was not divinely inspired, but
that the Hebrew text itself, from which the modern transla-
tions were made, is full of errors due to the carelessness, ignorance,
and doctrinal zeal of early scribes, and that there
had clearly been no miraculous preservation of the " original
autographs " of the sacred books.
While orthodox France was under the uneasiness and
alarm thus caused, appeared a Critical History of the Old
Testament by Richard Simon, a priest of the Oratory, He
was a thoroughly religious man and an acute scholar, whose
whole purpose was to develop truths which he believed
healthful to the Church and to mankind. But he denied that
Moses was the author of the Pentateuch, and exhibited the
internal evidence, now so well known, that the books were
composed much later by various persons, and edited later
still. He also showed that other parts of the Old Testament
had been compiled from older sources, and attacked the timehonoured
theory that Hebrew was the primitive language of
mankind. The whole character of his book was such that in
these it days would pass, on the whole, as conservative and
orthodox it ; had been approved by the censor in 1678, and
printed, when the table of contents and a page of the preface
were shown to Bossuet. The great bishop and theologian
was instantly aroused he ; pronounced the work " a mass of
impieties and a bulwark of irreligion his biographer tells
us that, although it was Holy Thursda}^ the bishop, in spite
of the solemnity of the day, hastened at once to the Chancel-
" ;