as author, must be harmonious. And in place of the allegorical interpretation came a set of types according to which everything in the Old Testament was made to foreshadow Christ.

The endeavour to emphasise the doctrinal parts of Scripture had one curious result. It became the fashion for teachers of theology to collect proof-texts out of the whole Bible and publish them with comments for the use of students. Sebastian Schmidt, of Strassburg, one of the ablest scholars of the seventeenth century, gave a course of lectures on the dicta probantia, and afterward published them under the title Collegium Biblicum. The example was followed by others, and may have given rise to the idea that there was, after all, a difference between dogmatic and biblical theology. The rise of rationalism, however, was probably more potent in turning thought to the real nature of the biblical books. The clear formulation of the distinction between biblical and dogmatic theology seems to be due to Gabler, whose essay on this subject was published in 1787.1 Gabler rightly made biblical theology an historic rather than a philosophical study. A considerable part of the theological work of the nineteenth century, especially in Germany, was devoted to the development of this thought; namely, that biblical theology belongs among the historical sciences.

The apprehension of the literature of the Hebrews as an historic source is what distinguishes our age from all that have preceded it. To the Jews the Bible was primarily a code of laws. The earnestness with which they have applied this code to their daily conduct is writ large on their whole later history. This point of view was to a certain extent overcome by the early Church under the leadership of the Apostle Paul. The Church, however, looked upon the documents of the Old Testament as so many predictions

1 De justo discrimine theologiæ biblicæ et dogmaticæ, regundisque recte utriusque finibus. I have not seen this essay, but it is cited by most of the writers on this subject.

of the salvation which was brought by Jesus Christ. This also was a one-sided view. Later, when stress was laid upon a correct philosophy of the universe, the Bible became the divinely inspired treatise on doctrine. The unnatural interpretations forced on the text by both these theories are well known. It is now clear that both theories did violence to the real nature of the Bible. What we now emphasise in describing this book is its character as religious literature; the Bible is the expression of the religious life of the Hebrew people. It is, therefore, a source of religious edification to the reader. This, to be sure, has always been known to devout souls. It was the merit of Pietism that it called men's attention afresh to this truth.

But the view of Pietism may easily lead to extravagancies. If these are to be guarded against they must be accompanied by an historical apprehension. As the Bible is something more than a collection of proof-texts for the dogmatician, so it is more than a series of comforting assurances for the believer. When by a correct exegesis we have discovered the meaning of the sentences which make up the book, we are still far from understanding the book. These sentences are somehow related to each other. They have an organic unity, or rather they express a single continuous life. We must therefore have some principle by which we can bring the isolated fragments into unity. This means that we must seek to discover the organic evolution of which they are the expression.

It follows logically that our science demands as a prerequisite what is known as the higher criticism. Criticism is simply examination of documents to determine their historical value. All our knowledge of antiquity comes to us in fragments. We have a bit of flint as evidence of what the oldest man was doing; we have a half-defaced inscription from which to discover the ideas which were current three thousand years ago; we have a pile of broken clay tablets from which to piece together the cosmology of the dwellers in the Euphrates Valley somewhere near the dawn

of history. Even the literature which has come down to us is only a fragment, and the Bible itself is a collection of such fragments. To understand them we must first get an idea of ancient literary methods. This means that we must rid ourself of the idea that authorship implies literary property. In our own time it is unwarrantable to take sections of a book and intersperse them with paragraphs from ano her source and thus make another book. But in ancient times there was no scruple in doing just this. When a man of Israel had in his possession a book that seemed to him defective in its point of view, he saw no reason why he should not correct it by insertion of what he thought more adequate. This process was almost inevitable in the case of a sacred book, for religious ideas change, and what is edifying to one generation may not be so to another. We have seen how the allegorical interpretation was made to give the old Bible new meanings. Before the text had become fixed the same end was attained by interpolation and redactional changes. If we are rightly to appreciate the historical process which has embodied itself in these documents we must first apply the critical process and separate earlier elements from those which are later.

It would be a mistake to suppose that what, for want of a better name, we call interpolations are of less value to us than the older strata with which they are interspersed. These later additions reveal most clearly, and often most touchingly, the state of mind of religious men who felt the defects of the documents which had come down from antiquity. All that we need to guard against is the temptation to take the later portions as evidence of what went on at an earlier time. This temptation naturally beset the first generation of critics, and it took a long time to establish the real historical order of the documents. The difficulty was caused by the strength of the tradition embodied in the Hebrew documents themselves. This tradition made the Law of Moses the starting-point of Israel's history. At the present day it is generally conceded that this is a mis

take. With such a presupposition the history of Israel is unintelligible, whereas on the modern theory we get a wellordered development culminating in the priestly legislation instead of starting from it.

In saying that our method must be critical we mean that we assume the results of critical study as to the order of the documents. This implies, of course, that we base our sketch of the religion of Israel on the critical reconstruction of Israel's history. But, since this reconstruction is not yet universally accepted, it is necessary at this point to state in brief what it holds to be the actual process of Israel's development. The comparative study of religions shows with increasing clearness that the religion of a people bears an intimate relation to that people's political and social conditions. What these conditions were in Israel must be determined by the historian. As thus determined, Israel's development may be sketched as follows:

About thirteen hundred years before Christ a group of nomad clans was making its way into the cultivated country of Canaan, the district which lies between the Jordan and the Mediterranean. For some three hundred years the struggle went on between the older inhabitants and the newcomers. The result was the amalgamation of the two elements, with the desert blood predominant. David succeeded in uniting the heterogeneous sections into one people, though the unity was never very perfect, and the single kingdom was broken into two after less than a hundred years. The larger fraction maintained a semblance of independence for about two hundred years, succumbing at last to Assyria in 722. Judah, the smaller fraction, enjoyed the name of a kingdom for something over a hundred years longer. But it, too, fell before a greater power, becoming an insignificant province of the Babylonian Empire. Never again politically independent, the Jews yet learned to live among the gentiles without mixing with them, keeping their separate social and religious customs.

This bare outline shows that we may distinguish four

stages in the history of this people, and the presumption is that the religion will show four stages corresponding to these. First of all, the clans were nomads living on the milk of their flocks and the plunder taken from their neighbours. Their religious ideas must have been similar to what we find among the Arabs of the same region at the present day. Then came the stage of amalgamation with the Canaanites and the adoption of the agricultural life. The adoption of Canaanitish religion would naturally follow, and we have abundant evidence that it actually did follow. With the reign of Solomon the arts of life made an advance; commercial enterprises were undertaken; great buildings were erected; class divisions became more marked. The reaction did not come at once, but when, in the time of Ahab, foreign customs seemed about to prevail, a vigorous protest was made under the lead of Elijah. The succession of prophets thus introduced marks a new era for the religion of Israel. Their political revolution, which set Jehu on the throne, did not stop the march of events, but their influence lasted long after the fall of Samaria, which they so plainly foresaw. Their message was repeated with emphasis by Isaiah but was disregarded in the half-century that followed his death. The attempt of the prophetic party to effect a thorough reformation of religion under Josiah was of short duration, but, as was true in the case of the earlier prophets, the message had greater vitality than the men who formulated it. The remnant which survived the fall of Jerusalem felt the full force of the denunciations which the prophets had put on record, and their attempt to regulate their lives by the traditions which came from the fathers made the final period (that of legalism) the most strongly marked of all the stages of Israel's religion.

What is now clear to us is that in our history of the religion we must begin with the nomadic stage and end with the highly developed legalism which is characteristic of the religious community which we know as the Jews. For the nomadic stage we have to depend on indirect evidence, for