and there, but which first appeared full blown and consistently carried through in the Commentary of Dr. Paulus* did not long survive in its first vigour. It perished under blows received from many quarters; for, not to speak of a reviving faith in the hearts of many, that God could do more than man could understand, even the children of this world directed against it the keenest shafts of their ridicule. Every philologist, nay every man who believed that language had any laws, was its natural enemy, for it stood only by the violation of all these laws. Even the very advance of unbelief was fatal to it, for in it there was a slight lingering respect to the Word of God; moved by which respect it sought forcibly to bring that Word into harmony with its theory, as a better alternative than the renouncing the authority of that Word altogether. But when men arose, who did not shrink from the other alternative, who had no desire to hold by that Word at all, then there was nothing to hinder them from at once coming back to the common-sense view of the subject, and one which no art could long succeed in concealing, namely that these Evangelists did intend to record supernatural events. Those to whom the Scriptures were no authority had at least this advantage, that they were not under the temptation to twist and pervert them, so to bring them into apparent accordance with their systems.

This scheme of interpretation, thus assailed from so many sides, and being merely artificial, quickly succumbed. And now, even in the land of its birth, it has entirely perished; on the one side a deeper faith, on the other a more rampant unbelief, have encroached on and wholly swallowed up the territory which it occupied. It is indeed so little the form in which an assault on Revelation will ever again clothe itself, and may be so entirely regarded as one of the cast-off garments of unbelief, now despised and trodden under foot even of those who once glorified themselves in it, that I have not

alluded, save very slightly and passingly, to it in the body of my book. Once or twice I have noticed its curiosities of interpretation, its substitutions, as they have been happily termed, of philological for historical wonders. The reader who is curious to see how Dr. Paulus and his compeers arrived at the desired result of exhausting the narrative of its miraculous element, will find specimens in the notes upon the feeding of the five thousand, and the finding of the stater in the fish's mouth.

7. THE HISTORICO-CRITICAL. (WOOLSTON, STRAUSS.)

The last assault upon the miracles is that which may be not unfitly termed the historico-critical. It affirms that they are so full of contradictions, psychological and other improbabilities, discrepancies between the accounts of one Evangelist and another, that upon close handling they crumble to pieces, and are unable to stand as history. Among the English deists of the last century, Woolston especially addressed himself in this way to the undermining the historic credit of these narratives. He was brought to this evil work in a singular way, and abides a mournful example of the extremes whither spite and mortified vanity would carry a weak man, though, as all testimonies concur in acknowledging, at one time of estimable conversation, and favourably known for his temperate life, his charity to the poor, and other evidences of an inward piety. Born in 1669, and educated at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Sidney, he first attracted unfavourable notice by a certain crack-brained enthusiasm for the allegorical interpretation of Scripture, which he carried to all lengths. Whether he owed this to the works of Philo and Origen, or whether he only strengthened and nourished an already existing predilection by the study of their writings, is not exactly clear; but it had become a sort of "fixed idea" in his mind. At first, although just offence was taken at more than one publication of his, in which his allegorical system was carried out at

the expence apparently of the historic truth of the Scripture, yet as it was not considered that he meant any mischief, as it was not likely that he would exert any very wide influence, he was suffered to follow his own way, unvisited by any serious censures from the higher authorities of the Church. Meeting however with opposition in many quarters, and unable to carry the clergy with him, he broke out at last in unmeasured invectives against them, and in a virulent pamphlet styled them "slaves of the letter," "Baal-priests," "blind leaders of the blind," and was on account of this pamphlet deprived of his fellowship (1721).

*

From this time it seemed as if an absolute fury possessed him not merely the Church, but Christianity itself, was the object of his attack. Whether his allegorical system of interpretation had indeed ended, as it was very likely to do, in depriving him of all faith in God's Word, and he retained his professed veneration for its spiritual meaning only that he might, under shelter of that, more securely advance to the assault of its historical foundations, or whether he did still retain this in truth, it was now at any rate only subordinate and subservient to his purposes of revenge. To these he was ready to offer up every other consideration. When then in that great controversy which was raging in the early part of the last century, the defenders of revealed religion entrenched themselves behind the miracles, as defences from which they could never be driven, as being irrefragable proofs of the divine origin of Christianity, Woolston undertook, by the engines of his allegorical interpretation, to dislodge them from these also, and with this aim published his notorious Letters on the Miracles*. It is his manner in these

* In his Letter to the Rev. Dr. Bennett upon this question, Whether the Quakers do not the nearest of any other sect resemble the primitive Christians in principle and practices. By Aristobulus. London, 1720.

+ These six Letters, first published as separate pamphlets between 172729, had an immense circulation, and were read with the greatest avidity. Voltaire, who was in England just at the time of their publication, says that

to take certain miracles which Christ did, or which were wrought in relation of him, two or three in a letter, and he then seeks to shew that, understood in their literal sense, they contain such extravagancies, contradictions, and the like, that we can never suppose that Christ actually did them, or that the Evangelists, as honest men, men who had the credit of their Lord at heart, intended to record them as having been actually wrought, or desired us to receive them otherwise than as allegories, spiritual truths clothed in the form of historic events. The enormous difference between himself and

thirty thousand copies of them were sold, and that large packets of them were forwarded to the American colonies. In the copy I am using, the different letters range from the third to the sixth edition, and this almost immediately after their first publication. Indeed, Swift, in his lines on his own death, written 1731, speaks of something much more than this, and quite consents with Voltaire's account of the immense popularity which they enjoyed. He makes Lintot, the bookseller, say,

"Here's Woolston's tracts, the twelfth edition,

"Tis read by every politician:

The county members when in town

To all their boroughs send them down:

You never met a thing so smart;

The courtiers have them all by heart;" &c.

Their circulation was so great, and their mischief so wide, that above sixty answers were published within a very short period. Gibson, then Bishop of London, addressed five pastoral letters to his diocese against them; and other chief divines of England, as Sherlock, Pearce, Smallbrooke, found it needful to answer them. Of the replies which I have seen, SMALLBROOKE's (Bishop of St. David's) Vindication of our Saviour's Miracles, 1729, is the most learned and the best. But one cannot help being painfully struck upon this and other occasions with the exceeding poverty and feebleness of the antideistical literature of England in that day of need; the low grounds which it occupies; the little enthusiasm which the cause awakened in its defenders. With regard to Woolston himself, the paltry shifts with which he sought to evade the consequences of his blasphemy, and there is an infinite meanness in the way in which he professes, while blaspheming against the works of Christ, to be only assailing them in the letter that he may vindicate them in the spirit,-this and other such poor evasions failed to protect him from the pains and penalties of the law. He was fined twenty-five pounds for each of his Letters, sentenced to be imprisoned for a year, and was not to be released till he could find sureties for his good behavour. These he was not able to procure, and he died in prison in 1731.

those early Church writers, to whom he appeals, and whose views he professes to be only re-asserting,-a difference of which it is impossible that he could have been ignorant,—is this: they said, This history, being real, has also a deeper ideal sense; he upon the contrary, Since it is impossible that this history can be real, therefore it must have a spiritual significance. They build upon the establishment of the historic sense, he upon its ruins*.

When he wants to utter grosser blasphemies than in his own person he dares, or than would befit the standing point which he has assumed from whence to assault Revelation, he introduces a Jewish rabbi, and suffers him to speak without restraint, himself only observing, "This is what an adversary might say; to these accusations we Christians expose ourselves so long as we cleave to the historic letter; we only can escape from thence by forsaking that, and holding fast the allegorical meaning alone." I shall not (as it is not needful) offend the Christian reader by the reproduction of any of his coarser ribaldry, which has sufficient cleverness to have made it mischievous enough, but will endeavour to shew by a single example the manner in which he seeks to make weak points in the Scripture narratives. He is dealing with the miracle of the man sick of the palsy, who was let through the broken roof of the house where Jesus was, and thereupon healed. (Mark ii. 1-12.) But how, he asks, should there have been such a crowd to hear Jesus preach at Capernaum, where he was so well known and so little admired? and then,

* Their canon was ever this, which Gregory the Great uttered when he said (Hom. 40 in Evang.): Tunc namque allegoriæ fructus suaviter carpitur, cùm prius per historiam in veritatis radice solidatur; and they abound in such earnest warnings as this of Augustine's: Ante omnia tamen, fratres, hoc in nomine Dei admonemus ut quando auditis exponi Sacras Scripturas narrantes quæ gesta sunt, priùs illud quod lectum est credatis sic gestum quomodo lectum est, ne subtracto fundamento rei gestæ, quasi in aëre quæretis ædificare. Compare what he says on the history of Jonah, Ep. 102, qu. 6, § 33.

T. M.

G