Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

I
CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. 3^3
III. THE CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC
INTERPRETATION.
The science of biblical criticism was, as we have seen,
first developed mainly in Germany and Holland. Many
considerations there, as elsewhere, combined to deter men
from opening new paths to truth ; not even in those coun-
tries were these the paths to preferment; but there, at least,
the sturdy Teutonic love of truth for truth's sake, strengthened
by the Kantian ethics, found no such obstacles as in
other parts of Europe. Fair investigation of biblical sub-
jects had not there been extirpated, as in Italy and Spain ;
nor had it been forced into channels which led nowhither,
as in France and southern Germany ;
nor
were men who
might otherwise have pursued it dazzled and drawn away
from it by the multitude of splendid prizes for plausibility,
for sophistry, or for silence displayed before the ecclesiastical
vision in England. In the frugal homes of North German
and Dutch professors and pastors high thinking on
these great subjects went steadily on, and the " liberty of
teaching," which is the glory of the northern Continental
universities, while it did not secure honest thinkers against
vexations, did at least protect them against the persecutions
which in other countries would have thwarted their studies
and starved their families.*
In England the admission of the new current of thought
was apparently impossible. The traditional system of bib-
lical interpretation seemed established on British soil for-
Driver, Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament, pp. 495 et seq. ; also
Wellhausen, as above ; also Hooykaas, Oort, and Kuenen, Bible for Learners.
For many of the foregoing, see also the writings of Prof. W. Robertson Smith ;
also Beard's Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For Hupfeld and his discovery, see
Cheyne, Founders, etc., as above, chap, vii ; also Moore's Introduction. For a
justly indignant judgment of Hengstenberg and his school, see Canon Farrar, as
above, p. 417, note ; and for a few words throwing a bright light into his char-
acter and career, see C. A. Briggs, D. D., Authority of Holy Scripture, p. 93.
Wellhausen, see Pfleiderer, as above, book iii, chap. ii. For an excellent popular
statement of the general results of German criticism, see J. T. Sunderland, The
Bible : Its Origin, Growth, and Character, New York and London, 1893.
* As to the influence of Kant on honest thought in Germany, see Pfleiderer, as
above, chap. i.
For