so were implied. Almost down to modern
times texts have been drawn indifferently from either Testament to prove
doctrine and sustain theology. Moses and Jesus, prophets and Paul, are
cited to support an argument, without any sense of difference. What we
have said is hardly more true of Augustine or Anselm than of the classic
Puritan divines. This was the state of things which the critics faced.

The Old Testament critical movement is a parallel at all points of the
one which we have described in reference to the New. Of course, elder
scholars, even Spinoza, had raised the question as to the Mosaic
authorship of certain portions of the Pentateuch. Roman Catholic
scholars in the seventeenth century, for whom the stringent theory of
inspiration had less significance than for Protestants, had set forth
views which showed an awakening to the real condition. Yet, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, no one would have forecast a
revolution in opinion which would recognise the legendary quality of
considerable portions of the Pentateuch and historical books, which
would leave but little that is of undisputed Mosaic authorship, which
would place the prophets before the law, which would concede the growth
of the Jewish canon, which would perceive the relation of Judaism to the
religions of the other Semite peoples and would seek to establish the
true relation of Judaism to Christianity.

In the year 1835, the same year in which Strauss' _Leben Jesu_ saw the
light, Wilhelm Vatke published his _Religion des Alten Testaments_.
Vatke was born in 1806, began to teach in Berlin in 1830, was professor
extraordinarius there in 1837 and died in 1882, not yet holding a full
professorship. His book was obscurely written and scholastic. Public
attention was largely occupied by the conflict which Strauss' work had
caused. Reuss in Strassburg was working on the same lines, but published
the main body of his results much later.

The truth for which these scholars and others like them argued, worked
its way slowly by force of its own merit. Perhaps it was due to this
fact that the development of Old Testament critical views was subject to
a fluctuation less marked than that which characterised the case of the
New Testament. It is not necessary to describe the earlier stages of the
discussion in Vatke's own terms. To his honour be it said that the views
which he thus early enunciated were in no small degree identical with
those which wer