Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

VICTORY OF THE SCIENTIFIC AND LITERARY METHODS. 301
Mundi regarding scriptural myths and legends have been
already mentioned.
Significant also has been the increasing reprobation in
the Church itself of the profound though doubtless unwit-
ting immoralities of reconcilers. The castigation which followed
the exploits of the greatest of these in our own time
Mr. Gladstone, at the hands of Prof. Huxley did much
to complete a work in which such eminent churchmen as
Stanley, Farrar, Sanday, Cheyne, Driver, and Sayce had
rendered good service.
Typical among these evidences of a better spirit
in con-
troversy has been the treatment of the question regarding
mistaken quotations from the Old Testament in the New,
and especially regarding quotations by Christ himself. For
a time this was apparently the most difficult of all matters
dividing the two forces ; but though here and there appear
champions of tradition, like the Bishop of Gloucester, effectual
resistance to the new view has virtually ceased ; in one
way
or another the most conservative authorities have ac-
cepted the undoubted truth revealed by a simple scientific
method. Their arguments have indeed been varied. While
some have fallen back upon Le Clerc's contention that
" Christ did not come to teach criticism to the Jews," and
others upon Paley's argument that the Master shaped his
statements in accordance with the ideas of his time, others
have taken refuge in scholastic statements among them
that of Irenaeus regarding "a quiescence of the divine
word," or the somewhat startling explanation by sundry
recent theologians that "our Lord emptied himself of his
Godhead."*
Nor should there be omitted a tribute to the increasing
* For Matthew Arnold, see, besides his Literature and Dogma, his St. Paul
and Protestantism. As to the quotations in the New Testament from the Old, see
Toy, Quotations in the Newjrestament^ i88g, p. 72 ; also Kuenen, The Prophets
anaProphecy in Israel. For Le Clerc's mode of dealing with the argument regard-
ing quotations from the Old Testament in the New, see earlier parts of the present
chapter. For Paley's mode, see his Evidences, part
scholastic expressions from Irenaeus and others, see Gore, Bampton Lectures, 1891,
especially note on p. 267. For a striking passage on the general subject, see B. W.
Bacon, Genesis of Genesis, p. 33, ending with the words, " We must decline to stake
the authority of Jesus Christ on a question of literary criticism."
iii, chapter iii. For the more