Note 149 — Chapter XXI · FREETHOUGHT IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Old Testament criticism, nevertheless, has in the last generation been much developed, after having long missed some of the first lines of advance. After Colenso’s rectification of the fundamental error as to the historicity of the narrative of the Pentateuch, so long and so obstinately persisted in by the German specialists in contempt of Voltaire, the “higher criticism” proceeded with such substantial certainty on the scientific lines of Kuenen and Wellhausen that, whereas Professor Robertson Smith had to leave the Free Church of Scotland in 1881149 for propagating Kuenen’s views, before the century was out Canons of the English Church were doing the work with the acquiescence of perhaps six clergymen out of ten; and American preachers were found promoting an edition of the Bible which exhibited some of the critical results to the general reader. Heresy on this score had “become merchandise.” Nevertheless, the professional tendency to compromise (a result of economic and other pressures) keeps most of the ecclesiastical critics far short of the outspoken utterances of M. M. Kalisch, who in his Commentary on Leviticus (1867–72) repudiates every vestige of the doctrine of inspiration.150 Later clerical critics, notably Canon Driver, use language on that subject which cannot be read with critical respect.151 But among students at the end of the century the orthodox view was practically extinct. Whereas the defenders of the faith even a generation before habitually stood to the “argument from prophecy,” the conception of prophecy as prediction has now become meaningless as regards the so-called Mosaic books; and the constant disclosure of interpolations and adaptations in the others has discredited it as regards the “prophets” themselves. For the rest, much of the secular history still accepted is tentatively reduced to myth in the Geschichte Israels of Hugo Winckler (1895–1900). The peculiar theory of Dr. Cheyne is no less “destructive.”