Fellow of Exeter, and Lowth (1710-87) had been Professor of Poetry in the university. Kennicott's second dissertation in 1759' resulted in a subscription of nearly £10,000 for the collation of Hebrew MSS. throughout Europe, the results of which were embodied in his great Hebrew Bible (1776-80).2 Lowth's scholarship was of a finer type. He could not, indeed, reach the point of view of the great German critic and philosopher, Herder; he dealt with the form instead of the ideas of Hebrew poetry; and he believed that Hebrew was the language of Paradise. But he gave an important impulse to Old Testament study. He planned a new translation of the prophetic books, and himself issued a volume on Isaiah, with an important preliminary dissertation X and ample notes; and like Archbishop Secker he made some valuable corrections both of the Hebrew text and of the Authorised Version somewhat in the fashion of the classical scholarship of his day. From this country the work of Mill, Bentley, and Lowth became known in Germany. Through Bengel and Wetstein New Testament study was carried on to the days of Griesbach; and Lowth's lectures were translated and annotated by the great orientalist, J. D. Michaelis of Göttingen.

1 Written after Secker, then Bishop of Oxford, had urged him to undertake a regular collation of MSS.

The familiar censure soon appeared at Oxford: such efforts, it was alleged, led men to value the letter rather than the spirit of the Bible.

* In 1778; he had been translated from the see of Oxford to that of London in 1777.

* For an account of proposals for a new version of the Scriptures, and further detail concerning critical labour on the text, see Lect. II.

Thither in 1785 went a young Cambridge scholar, Herbert Marsh (1757-1839), who repaid some of the debt which he owed to Michaelis by publishing in 1793 a translation of the first volume of his teacher's Introduction to the New Testament, with notes and dissertations. Other volumes followed; and the last, published in 1801, contained a striking dissertation on the origin and composition of the first three Gospels from Marsh's own pen. Every intelligent reader of the Gospels now knows how complicated are the facts, both of resemblance and difference, which require explanation. Marsh's conception of the processes by which the several Gospels reached their present form through successive stages of elaboration, was in the highest degree intricate; and the methods of literary analysis which he employed were wholly incompatible with the current evangelical conceptions. In some Remarks,' published anonymously, Dr. Randolph, Bishop of Oxford, condemned Marsh's researches as 'derogating from the character of the sacred books, and injurious to Christianity as fostering a spirit of scepticism.' That was not, indeed, the judgment of his own university. When he became Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity in 1807, and introduced the novel practice of delivering his lectures in English instead of in Latin, the audiences were so large that it was necessary to use the University Church, and townsmen as well as graduates listened to them with rapture.' Marsh, on his side, had some suspicion of the Evangelicals. He opposed the formation of a branch of the Bible

·

Society in Cambridge because it sanctioned a union. with Dissenters, and also encouraged the circulation of the Scriptures unaccompanied by the liturgy. The prayer-book must be set beside the Bible as the interpretation of the Church: the eighty-seven questions for curates, which he afterwards drew up for the use of his diocese (he was consecrated Bishop

of Llandaff in 1816, and in three years was translated XX to Peterborough), were known as a 'trap to catch Calvinists.'

II.

No successor was bold enough to adventure further on the path which Marsh had opened. 'That investigation,' it was caustically observed by Mr. Mark Pattison in 1860, 'introduced by a bishop and professor of divinity, has scarcely yet attained a footing in the English Church; but it is excluded not from a conviction of its barrenness, but from a fear that it might prove too fertile in results.' In 1825, however, appeared an anonymous translation of Schleiermacher's Essay on the Gospel of St. Luke, with an introductory account by the translator of the controversy respecting the origin of the first three Gospels since Bishop Marsh's dissertation,-an admirable survey in which one solitary English name appeared amid the German throng. The author was a Cambridge graduate, afterwards to become the historian of Greece and the bishop of St. David's, Connop Thirlwall (1791-1875). The book made an

1 Essays and Reviews, p. 262.

epoch in the history of English theology,' says the editor of his letters, the late Bishop Perowne. For the introduction frankly asserted (p. 11) that the 'doctrine of inspiration once universally prevalent in the Christian Church, according to which the sacred writers were merely passive organs or instruments of the Holy Spirit'. . . had 'been so long abandoned that it would now be waste of time to attack it.' The operation of the Spirit must be sought, not in any temporary intellectual changes wrought in its subjects, but in the continued presence and action of what is most vital and essential in Christianity itself (p. 19). The English reader was accordingly invited to consider without alarm the treatment of the early chapters of the Gospel as mingled with poetry rather than as the continuous record of actual fact. Compare Luke with Matthew, and the narratives of the birth and infancy of Jesus show no single point in common, except that the nativity took place at Bethlehem. They were not mutually supplemental; on the contrary, the corresponding members of the two successions almost entirely excluded each other. The temptation became a parable. To suppose that it was even a figurative representation of what took place inwardly in Christ, was repudiated as an outrage: 'had he entertained, even in the most transient manner, thoughts of such a nature, he would have ceased to be Christ' (p. 57). It is needless to pursue the critic through the whole gospel-story. At every turn the narrative is studied in connexion with

the parallels in Matthew and Mark for the purpose of determining sources, accounting for peculiarities of handling, and tracing the influences which have brought it into its present shape. The 'historical method,' for which Priestley pleaded, is here unflinchingly applied, subject, however, to the limitations of imperfectly developed critical theories, and the want of definite tests and principles of evidence.

The progress of German criticism not unnaturally excited alarm in a country which hardly realised that it had itself supplied in the previous century some of the leading impulses. Thirlwall had found it necessary to rebuke a Bampton lecturer for denouncing the theology of a people whose very language he did not know. The Regius Professor of divinity at Oxford, Dr. Lloyd, too great a scholar to fall into so gross an abuse, urged upon a young fellow of Oriel the desirability of 'learning something about these German critics.' Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800-82) set himself at once to learn German,' and spent nearly two years (1825-7) at Göttingen, Berlin, and Bonn. He studied under Eichhorn and Schleiermacher; he made friends with Tholuck and Neander. And not only did he devote himself with extraordinary assiduity to Arabic and Syriac, he further undertook an important and laborious work arising out of the lectures on 'The State of Protestantism in Germany,' delivered at Cambridge in 1825 by the Rev. Hugh James Rose. Pusey's views were finally

1

Only two persons were said to know it in Oxford, Life, vol. i., p. 72. 'On this controversy see the Life, vol. i., chap. viii.

C