The History of the Higher Criticism. 91 their own minds, but without an understanding truly Divine they can never form such an idea to themselves as the Deity had in creating it.” “If,” says Matthew Arnold, “you shut a number of men up to make study and learning the business of their lives, how many of them, from want of some discip line or other, seem to lose all balance of judgment, all com mon sense.” The learned professor of Assyriology at Oxford said that the investigation of the literary source of history has been a peculiarly German pastime. It deals with the writers and readers of the ancient Orient as if they were modern German professors, and the attempt to transform the ancient Israelites into somewhat inferior German compilers, proves a strange want of familiarity with Oriental modes of thought. (Sayce, “Early History of the Hebrews,” pages 108-112.) ANTI-SUPERNATURALJSTS. In the third place, the dominant men of the movement were men with a strong bias against the supernatural. This is not an ex-parte statement at all. It is simply a matter^ of fact, as we shall presently show. Some of the men who have been most distinguished as the leaders of the Higher Critical movement in Germany and Holland have been men who have no faith in the God of the Bible, and no faith in either the necessity or the possibility of a personal supernatural revela tion. The men who have been the voices of the movement, of whom the great majority, less widely known and less influential, have been mère echoes; the men who manufac tured the articles the others distributed, have been notoriously opposed to the miraculous. We must not be misunderstood. We distinctly repudiate the idea that all the Higher Critics were or are anti-super naturalists. Not so. The British-American School embraces within its ranks many earnest believers. What we do say, as we will presently show, is that the dominant minds which have
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