the thinking world now acknowledges, infinitely more important; it was, indeed, the most valuable single contribution ever made to biblical study. But such was not the judgment of the world then. While Lowth's book was covered with honor and its author promoted from the bishopric of St. David's to that of London, and even offered the primacy, Astruc and his book were covered with reproach. Though, as an orthodox Catholic, he had mainly desired to reassert the authorship of Moses against the argument of Spinoza, he received no thanks on that account. Theologians of all creeds sneered at him as a doctor of medicine who had blundered beyond his province; his fellow-Catholics in France bitterly denounced him as a heretic, and in Germany the great Protestant theologian, Michaelis, who had edited and exalted Lowth's work, poured contempt over Astruc as an ignoramus.
The case of Astruc is one of the many which show the wonderful power of the older theological reasoning to close the strongest minds against the clearest truths. The fact which he discovered is now as definitely established as any in the whole range of literature or science. It has become as clear as the day, and yet for two thousand years the minds of professional commentators, Jewish and Christian, were powerless to detect it. Not until this eminent physician applied to the subject a mind trained in making scientific distinctions was it given to the world.
It was, of course, not possible even for so eminent a scholar as Michaelis to pooh-pooh down a discovery so pregnant; and, curiously enough, it was one of Michaelis's own scholars, Eichhorn, who did the main work in bringing the new truth to bear upon the world. He, with others, developed out of it the theory that Genesis, and indeed the Pentateuch, is made up entirely of fragments of old writings, mainly disjointed. But they did far more than this. They impressed upon the thinking part of Christendom the fact that the Bible is not a book, but a literature; that the style is not supernatural and unique, but simply the Oriental style of the lands and times in which the books were written; and that they must be studied in the light of the modes of thought and statement and the literary habits generally of Oriental peoples. From Eichhorn's time the process which, by historical, philological, and textual research, brings out the truth regarding this literature has been known as "the higher criticism."
He was a deeply religious man, and the mainspring of his efforts was the desire to bring back to the Church the educated classes who had been repelled by the stiff Lutheran orthodoxy; but this only increased hostility to him. Opposition met him in Germany at every turn, and in England Lloyd, Regius Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge, who sought patronage for a translation
