the zeal of Mr. Hartwell Horne, Dean Milman, and Mr. Maurice. The only "orthodox" names of any note in the particular branch of which we are now speaking are Delitzsch, Keil, and possibly Hävernick; and the first of these, the only writer of real power among them, is by no means rigorously conservative. The truth is, there are two distinct movements to which the term "orthodox reaction" has been applied. The first was by no means a reactionary movement. It was the religious tendency in criticism, which showed itself in the disciples of Schleiermacher; the emotional and subjective element of thought brought forward in opposition to the Hegelian method, which first created religious doctrine on an à priori basis, separated it, till the era of Strauss, from critical and historical study, and then systematised it as a body of objective divinity. This is the school which in one direction produced De Wette, and in the other Neander; from which, in fact, all the best German criticism has proceeded. But the later Berlin school, the true "orthodox reaction," is a very different thing. It is a semipolitical movement, strongly conservative, supported by the court-party, ultra-Lutheran, ecclesiastical, and even sacramental in its tendency. It silences criticism by church authority, as it wishes to silence political liberalism; and it has as yet produced no great names, unless perhaps that of Kurtz, in the world of letters. Some of our own religious journals which echo the cry of a German orthodox reaction would be somewhat surprised if they were told that they were cheering on the banner of the Kreuz Zeitung to victory.

Meanwhile a school of critical inquiry is rising in France. Strange to say, it began among the mysticism and excitement of a revival movement, and its German authors were such men as Schleiermacher and Tholuck, and not such as Tuch and De Wette. Its importance will not shrink in English eyes from the fact that its prominent leaders have been men of strong religious feeling. The Coleridge of France, if such an expression may be used, was Vinet, the celebrated divine of Lausanne. He had all Coleridge's determination, his strong subjectivity, his wonderful power of influencing others. Like him, he was a metaphysician among theologians; "conscience in harmony with revelation" was the one staple of his teaching. It was in virtue of his persistent assertion of individual liberty that he gained the almost patriarchal position which he so long held, and through which his name is now almost a household word among French Protestants: Gradually the seed of liberty which Vinet sowed grew up and began to yield fruit. On the orie hand, a Pressensé now bears the flag of an orthodoxy which is not narrow-minded, and such men as Astié, Arnaud, and Secretan are no unworthy followers. On the other, criticism and

scholarship have their representatives in Schérer, whose faithfulness to his principles cost him his professorship fourteen years ago; and Réville, the pastor of Rotterdam, whose articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes always seem to combine French elegance with German thoroughness. Reuss the historian is with him, and Colani the eloquent preacher of Strasbourg, and the younger Coquerel, and Nicolas the essayist; Renan can hardly be counted among the list. It is only a rising school, and has done but little as yet; and it is not without its faults. One sees a disposition to conquer all theology in one essay, an impatient eagerness for generalisation, which will sober down in time. Le voilà, le chameau, is too much the motto even of theology in France. It appears perhaps more than any where else in the spirit of true French eclecticism, which insures completeness of theory at the cost of elaborateness of proof. The references are constantly not verified; and, indeed, it is not always that there are any references to verify. But these are matters of detail. The French school, it cannot be doubted, will soon have made itself a name; and it has now the merit of being the only school of known theologians which does not habitually condescend to invective. One of its leaders declared in England not long ago, that the recriminations of English polemics were to him perfectly surprising, in contrast with the mutual forbearance with which such topics are usually treated by his countrymen.

As a deliberate attempt to found an English school of criticism the Essays and Reviews might have gained some credit if they had been content to tell the world only what it knew before. It had been found impossible to establish a Studien und Kritiken, an unsectarian journal of sacred criticism, in England with any prospect of a wide circulation. The authors of the new volume wished simply to make scriptural inquiries popular; and if they had but adopted a conciliatory tone, or had dressed heresy in orthodox language, they might have escaped the storm. Nothing is more clear from the recent controversies than that it is possible to advance liberal views in such a way that they shall seem perfectly commonplace. And there is, it is evident, in the public mind an instinct against meddling with science. Dictionary of the Bible escaped adverse criticism not because it was so well-meaning, but because it was so big. It was clearly not advisable to adopt a "platform" of confessed ignorance by taking up arms against some fifty of the leading Biblicists of the country. The divergence would have been made more painfully evident between the religion of the people and the religion of the men of science.

The

The fact is, that a destructive criticism is not enough. Englishmen must have some belief, and it is necessary to show them

that when the trust in Biblical infallibility is removed, there is something worth believing still. But it was necessary first to destroy. It will be no easy task even now to clear away the one great obstruction to criticism which age after age has heaped up. We are persuaded that the majority of critics have no idea of the extent to which the belief in an infallible record has spread, or the extent of time during which it has prevailed. It has been often said, and it has been said even in courts of law, that the belief of which we are speaking is a new one, unknown to the Reformers, and à fortiori unknown to the ages before them. After some study, we are convinced of the contrary. In spite of the looseness which prevailed in the usage of religious terms, it is certain that the schoolmen as a body considered that the Scriptures cannot err. Aquinas, Nicolaus de Lyrâ, and many others, though they do not state the doctrine in words, convey it implicitly in their writings. We are speaking, it will be observed, of infallibility, and not of inspiration; the one is a tangible property, capable of proof and disproof, and has been denied in later times by Baxter, Horsley, Tillotson, Paley, Whately, Thirlwall, and Heber; the other is an attribute which may vary in degree, which may be ascribed in some sense to ordinary men, which has even in its higher sense, that of a plenary and "special" inspiration of God, been applied by a canonising Pope to Thomas Aquinas himself. But once the Reformation movement began, Bibliolatry declined. "That Spirit," writes Erasmus, "who guided the minds of the apostles, allowed them to be ignorant of some things." It is needless to quote the views of Luther and other Reformers; it is evident that the struggle in favour of liberty, which overthrew the authority of the Church, also partially overthrew the superhuman authority of the Bible. That it has again revived, both in England and abroad, is to be attributed to the one vice of indolence, the fruitful parent of superstition. A very little study would have shown that holy men might sometimes be mistaken, as Ezekiel when he prophesied the utter destruction of Tyre. A week's candid searching of the Scriptures might bring any reader within reach of a hundred self-contradictions which render perfect accuracy chimerical, and it needed but a superficial knowledge to assure him that no one writer in the Bible, on any single occasion, lays claim to infallibility at all. And yet this strange belief up alike under the fostering care of the Church, and in the unfettered freedom of Nonconformity, and men, not contented with surrendering their lives to spiritual authority, performed as well the voluntary sacrifice of their intellects.

grew

It is curious to remark how easily, when the work of destruction is done, that of reconstruction commences. Since his first volume Dr. Colenso has practically changed his position.

Whether as a preface to a larger plan or not, he occupied himself at first entirely with disproof of the details of Exodus; in a few months he appeared again as the framer of a new theory of its composition. Valuable as his positive arguments are, it may be questioned whether he was not more useful in his negative. The public attention was aroused by a clear statement of certain incoherencies and impossibilities: there is some fear that, amid the hazardous and doubtful proofs of a special theory, the interest may slumber again. The minute analysis of the Psalms, for example, is a work which has not been attempted in England before; but it is one thing to lay before fifty thousand readers the plain fact that every critic knows, and another to ask their assent to minutia upon the import of which the critical world is divided. As a matter of fact, the argument for a Samuelic authorship of one of the original documents does not appear to us sufficiently cogent, however much we may admire the tact and learning which recommend it; and the main theory of the third volume, in like manner, seems probable, but not irresistible. Would it not have been better, for the present at all events, to have pursued the original line of demolition, even at the sacrifice of a reputation for thorough scholarship, and at the cost of the hostility which is sure to fasten most on the negative side of an argument? In his forthcoming volume of Genesis, it is to be presumed that Dr. Colenso will again revert to the simple and popular method which he can pursue with such skill. If our recommendation could have any weight, we should urge him first of all to devote his labour to the not inglorious task of convincing the public of a wide-spread error: when this is once thoroughly done, when once the character of the historic details is made plain to every one who will take the trouble to read and examine, let him then enter on the higher paths of criticism. Let him then bring his countrymen to understand that there may be some interest in the study of books which possess no supernatural protection from human frailty, and some profit to be derived from the history of a race whose writers and poets have something in common, even in their errors, with the writers and poets of our own.

At the head of this article is placed the name of a work which has lately appeared on the Old Testament. It is an expansion of a previous work by the same author, and it is the most complete which has yet been produced in this country. As a compendium of the opinions which have been held on the several books of the canon, and as an impartial judgment upon them, it will probably be for some years the most satisfactory within the reach of Englishmen. As far as we have been able to form an opinion, the merits of the book are very high, and especially in the purely literary part of the subject: the ques

tions of date, language, and authorship, are examined with great care and research, and the conclusions are clearly stated. The author devotes the greater part of the first volume to an elaborate examination of the Pentateuch. He himself places the date of the Elohist writer in the reign of Saul, and the Jehovist in that of Uzziah; and maintains the existence of a "junior Elohist" at about the time of Elisha. The composition of Deuteronomy, and the final editing of the five books, he places, with most critics, somewhere in the reign of Manasseh. The historical books are well treated as regards their sources and their relation to one another, though it might have been as well to dismiss the explanations of disputed passages in a book of the kind. The Psalms, again, require a more careful handling than the nature of Dr. Davidson's work could permit him; nor will the student be thoroughly satisfied with his treatises on the poetical books. But the examination of the prophets is excellently conducted, and but for the perplexities which render it impossible to place perfect reliance on the results of any criticism of the prophets, however sagacious, it might almost serve for a commentary to the general reader. It is hardly necessary to say that the author does not for a moment seek to disguise his obligation to the German scholars who have preceded him.

...

We have spoken in sincere commendation of the matter of the great part of Dr. Davidson's work. It is difficult to yield the same unqualified admiration to its style. In the first place, considering that the author is himself a convert to the views which he now professes, it might have been well if some of the conclusions at which he arrives were stated with a little more reserve. "Neither of these hypotheses is correct;" "to say that the. is to assert what is false,"such are some of the formulæ in which questions are disposed of. Very frequently the reasons are given for the judgment, and no doubt they are often very good ones; but the reader expects, in such a work as Dr. Davidson's, a little more of the student, and not quite so much of the prophet. Another fault which we have to find is to be referred to the circumstances of the author. A great part of Dr. Davidson's life has been spent in the midst of controversy, not to say persecution; and his book bears witness to the fact. There is a polemical tone running through it which constantly offends the ear. One is glad sometimes, in pursuing theological inquiries, to be able to dismiss from the mind the conviction that one's opponents must be very wicked men; and if the book before us does not always exactly state as much as this, it too frequently hints that they are very foolish ones. The author seems as if, with all his learning and ability, he could never quite remove from his mind the idea that he is fighting for a professorship. And if in any writer some calmness of argument