Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

CONTINUED GROWTH OF SCIENTIFIC INTERPRETATION. 341
of Latin Christianity received as certainly one of the most
valuable, and no less certainly the most attractive, of all
Church histories ever written.
The two great English histories of Greece that by Thirl-
wall, which was finished, and that by Grote, which was be-
gun, in the middle years of the nineteenth century came in
to strengthen this new development. By application of the
critical method to historical sources, by pointing out more
and more fully the inevitable part played by myth and legend
in early chronicles, by displaying more and more clearly the
ease with which interpolations of texts, falsifications of state-
ments, and attributions to pretended authors were made,
they paved the way still further toward a just and fruitful
study of sacred literature.*
Down to the middle of the nineteenth century the traditionally
orthodox side of English scholarship, while it had
not been able to maintain any effective quarantine against
Continental criticism of classical literature, had been able to
keep up barriers fairly strong against
Continental discus-
sions of sacred literature. But in the second half of the
nineteenth century these barriers were broken at many
points, and, the stream of German thought being united
* For Mr. Gladstone's earlier opinion, see his Church and State, and Macaulay's
review of it. For Pusey, see Mozley, Ward, Newman's Apologia, Dean Church,
etc., and especially his Life, by Liddon. Very characteristic touches are given in
vol. i, showing the origin of many of his opinions (see letter on p. 184). For the
scandalous treatment of Mr. Everett by the clerical mob at Oxford, see a rather
jaunty account of the preparations and of the whole performance in a letter written
at the time from Oxford by the late Dean Church, in The Life and Letters of Dean
Church, London, 1894, pp. 40, 41. For a brief but excellent summary of the char-
acter and services of Everett, see J. F. Rhodes's History of the United States from
the Compromise of i8jo. New York, 1893, vol. i, pp. 291 ei se^. For a succinct and
brilliant history of the Bentley-Boyle controversy, see Macaulay's article on Bentley
in the Encyclopcedia Britannica ; also Beard's Hibbert Lectures for 1893, pp. 344,
345 ; also Dissertation in Bentley's works, edited by Dyce, London, 1836, vol. i,
especially the preface. For Wolf, see his Prolegomena ad Homerum, Halle, 1795 ;
for its effects, see the admirable brief statement in Beard, as above, p. 345. For
Niebuhr, see his Roman History, translated by Hare and Thirlwall, London, 1828 ;
also Beard, as above. For Milman's view, see, as a specimen, his History of the
Jews, last edition, especially pp. 15-27. For a noble tribute to his character, see
the preface to Lecky's History of European Morals. For Thirlwall, see his His-
to,y of Greece, passim ; also his letters ; also his Charge of the Bishop of St David's,
1863.