mend the newer views on the Scriptures to the conservative circles of America and particularly to the members of the Presbyterian Church who occupied so large a place in the educational life of the country. He was the leading authority on the history of the Westminster Assembly which framed the Presbyterian standards. In his treatise Whither (1889) he is at great pains to show that the doctrine of inerrancy of Scripture is a modern development of orthodox opinion, and that it was with careful forethought that the Assembly refrained from committing itself and the Church to any specific doctrine of inspiration or to the statement that the Bible is the Word of God. It had proclaimed indeed that the Bible was the only infallible rule of faith and practice but refused to extend its authority beyond the moral and religious sphere. "The Church ought to be in advance of the Confession. But the Confession is in advance of the Church so that the children of the Puritans must first advance to the high mark of their own standards before they can go beyond them into the higher reaches of Christian theology." His own temper was conservative in a very high degree. He rejoiced that he was essentially at one with historic Christendom. At the end of his life he occupied the chair of Irenics at the Seminary which proved so loyal to him, and as a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church gave much of his energy to the reunion of Christendom. Moreover, the field upon which he chiefly laboured in his six student years in Germany and in the Seminary was the Old Testament. And although he frankly admitted that "in every department of Biblical study we come upon errors," it was with questions of Old Testament literature that he was primarily concerned. The application of the canons of criticism to the New Testament was fortunately deferred. The figure of Jesus, indeed, was first brought into the realm of criticism in America by his utterances in regard to the Old Testament books which were under discussion. The Bible was discovered by the American public to be literature by way of the Old Testament. It was, however, no literary interest which impelled the discovery, but rather the deepest loyalty to religious truth. With the same fearless loyalty to fact with which Hodge faced hell, did Briggs and his fellows descry errors in a book which they held to be the repository of eternal truth. 'Whither, p. 296.

To claim beforehand that inspiration or any such divine process must be this or that, that it must have certain characteristics, is to venture beyond our limits. In all humility, instead of dictating what God should do, let us inquire reverently what God has done,— in what form concretely the revelation of His will has come to men. All a priori definition of inspiration is not only unscientific but irreverent, presumptuous, lacking in the humility with which we should approach a divine, supernatural fact.

So speaks another who later was the object of heresy proceedings in the Presbyterian Church, Professor Llewelyn J. Evans of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. 1

Now although the discovery of errors in Scripture, of pseudepigraphs in the Old Testament, of unfulfillable prophecies, the asseveration of which occupied so prominent a place in the trial of Briggs, of authors separated by centuries within the confines of the Pentateuch alone, of false ascriptions of late laws to the holy but dimming figure of Moses, have undoubtedly helped us to regard the Bible as primarily a product of human literary and religious genius, they have also gradually changed both the conception of the place of the Bible in our religion and of our religion itself. We find these changes emerging even in the pages of Briggs.

If a man use it [the Bible] as a means of grace, it is of small importance what he may think of its inspiration. If it bring him to the presence of the living God and give him a personal acquaintance with Jesus Christ, that is its main purpose. They [the Scriptural errors] intimate that the authority of God and His gracious discipline transcend the highest possibilities of human speech or human writing, and that the religion of Jesus Christ is not only the religion of the Bible, but the religion of personal communion with the living God.2

The beginning at least of the profound change in a man's religion which comes about through the change in his religious authority is delicately portrayed by Professor William N. Clarke (1841-1912) of Colgate College. Professor Clarke's theological books have been the most popular attempt of our period to pre

• See his Biblical Scholarship and Inspiration, 1891, pp. 12, 13, 20. 2 The Bible, Church and Reason, 1892, pp. 82, 117.

serve in systematic form the essentials of historic Christianity without inhospitality to modern science and criticism. In his Sixty Years with the Bible (1909) he writes:

I have described the change by saying that I passed on from using the Bible in the light of its statements to using it in the light of its principles. At first I said, The Scriptures limit me to this; later I said, The Scriptures open my way to this. As for the Bible, I am not bound to work all its statements into my system; nay, I am bound not to work them all in; for some of them are not congenial to the spirit of Jesus and some express truths in forms which cannot be of permanent validity.

Popular interest in the authority of the Bible was prepared for by the appearance of the Revised Version of the Bible just a decade before the dramatic trial of Charles A. Briggs. Thirtyfour of the leading Hebrew and Greek scholars of America united with sixty-seven Englishmen in this great undertaking, which Philip Schaff, the chairman of the American revisers, declared to be "the noblest monument of Christian union and co-operation in this nineteenth century." After a laborious toil of eight years, during which "no sectarian question was ever raised," the New Testament was given to the public. "The rapidity and extent of its sale surpassed all expectations and are without a parallel in the history of the book-trade. The New Testament appeared in 1881 and the Old Testament in 1885. Although one of the Old Testament revisers took pains to say in his Companion to the Revised Old Testament that "they have no fellowship with that disposition which of late years has appeared among some who profess and call themselves Christians to speak lightly of the Scriptures as a partial and imperfect record of revelation," and although the Old Testament Committee was presided over by Professor Wm. H. Green of Princeton Seminary and the New Testament Committee by ex-President Theodore D. Woolsey of Yale College, both eminently conservative scholars, the mere publication of a new translation of the Scriptures, founded upon a revised Hebrew and Greek text, prepared the public mind for some modification of the concept of infallibility which had possessed it hitherto. The printing of the Bible in paragraphs like other books-instead of in the oracular verses-and the appearance

of portions of the Old Testament in poetic form helped greatly in convincing the plain people of the country that the Bible was to be subsumed under the genus literature rather than kept as a sacred oracle in mysterious isolation.

Nor did the fact that the most brilliant attacks upon the infallibility of the Bible and many of its ablest defences originated in Germany militate against the progress of the newer thought in America as much as might have been expected. Our scholars felt themselves dependent upon European thought. Providentially, too, German theological scholarship had been introduced to American minds by the presence and fecundity of Philip Schaff (1819-93), a man of most conservative temper, who, in an amazing number of volumes, chiefly in the domain of Church History, had commended the thoroughness and sanity of German research to the American public from his chair in Wittenberg, Pennsylvania, and later in Union Theological Seminary, New York..

It cannot be said that during the period under consideration American scholarship contributed anything of material value to the higher criticism of the Bible. It has to its credit the great New Testament Lexicon (1893) of Professor J. Henry Thayer of Andover Seminary and the equally pre-eminent Hebrew Lexicon (1891) edited by President Francis Brown of Union Seminary, assisted by Professor Briggs of Union and Professor Driver of Oxford. But in the higher discipline its work was of a more mediating and imitative character. Few of our leading scholars took an unyielding attitude to the spirit of the times. Manfully and with unassuming temper, Green of Princeton defended the ancient opinions in a debate with President Harper of the University of Chicago and later in his books, The Higher Criticism of the Pentateuch (1895), The Unity of the Book of Genesis (1895), and General Introduction to the Old Testament (1898). With the exception of more searching work by still living scholars, still fewer of our writers took radical ground. Here we may mention only the lucid books of Orello Cone of St. Lawrence University, Levi L. Paine's suggestive Evolution of Trinitarianism (1900) with its appendix challenging the apostolic authorship of the fourth Gospel, and particularly Edward H. Hall's Papias and his Contemporaries (1899), which connects the Gospel of John with the Gnostic

movement of the second century. The majority of our scholars took a moderately progressive stand. As the pregnant debate approached the New Testament, American scholarship maintained largely a dignified silence but refused to move the previous question. The most substantial contribution of our scholars in the whole field of Biblical literature is probably Ezra Abbot's Authorship of the Fourth Gospel (1880), which, while it defends the widely disputed apostolic authorship of the book, admits the cogency of opposing opinion and the discrepancies between the fourth Gospel and the other three. George P. Fisher, Professor of Church History in the Yale Divinity School and author of a very usable History of the Christian Church, sensed the vital import of the criticism of the gospels and devoted the greater part of his careful and well-poised works on The Supernatural Origin of Christianity (1870) and Grounds of Theistic and Christian Belief (1883) to a vigorous and able defence of the historicity of the gospels. But while doing so with full conviction, he is clear-sighted enough to declare:

The Bible is one thing and Christianity is another. The religion of Christ, in the right signification of these terms, is not to be confounded with the Scriptures, even of the New Testament. The point of view from which the Bible, in its relation to Christianity, is looked on as the Koran appears to devout Mohammedans, is a mistaken one. The entire conception, according to which the energies of the Divine Being, as exerted in the Christian revelation, are thought to have been concentrated on the production of a book is a misconception and one that is prolific of error.

Or as T. T. Munger, Professor Fisher's neighbour in New Haven, has it in his notable essay on the New Theology: "It [the Bible] is not a revelation but is a history of a revelation; it is a chosen and indispensable means of the redemption of the world, but it is not the absolute means,—that is in the Spirit."” While Marvin R. Vincent is right in saying that "Germany furnishes the most and the best," our theologians have maintained an open mind in the study of the book upon which their whole discipline rests.

One reason, then, for the waning prestige of theology is the fact that its source of authority can no longer be regarded as lying in a class apart from all other works of the human