adel: in his Anticritica he brought all his
stores of knowledge to uphold the doctrine that the rabbinical points
and accents had been jotted down by the right hand of God.

The controversy waxed hot: scholars like Voss and Brian Walton supported
Capellus; Wasmuth and many others of note were as fierce against him.
The Swiss Protestants were especially violent on the orthodox side;
their formula consensus of 1675 declared the vowel points to be
inspired, and three years later the Calvinists of Geneva, by a
special canon, forbade that any minister should be received into their
jurisdiction until he publicly confessed that the Hebrew text, as it
to-day exists in the Masoretic copies, is, both as to the consonants and
vowel points, divine and authentic.

While in Holland so great a man as Hugo Grotius supported the view
of Capellus, and while in France the eminent Catholic scholar Richard
Simon, and many others, Catholic and Protestant, took similar ground
against this divine origin of the Hebrew punctuation, there was arrayed
against them a body apparently overwhelming. In France, Bossuet, the
greatest theologian that France has ever produced, did his best to crush
Simon. In Germany, Wasmuth, professor first at Rostock and afterward at
Kiel, hurled his Vindiciae at the innovators. Yet at this very moment
the battle was clearly won; the arguments of Capellus were irrefragable,
and, despite the commands of bishops, the outcries of theologians,
and the sneering of critics, his application of strictly scientific
observation and reasoning carried the day.

Yet a casual observer, long after the fate of the battle was really
settled, might have supposed that it was still in doubt. As is not
unusual in theologic controversies, attempts were made to galvanize the
dead doctrine into an appearance of life. Famous among these attempts
was that made as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century by two
Bremen theologians, Hase and Iken. They put forth a compilation in two
huge folios simultaneously at Leyden and Amsterdam, prominent in which
work is the treatise on The Integrity of Scripture, by Johann Andreas
Danzius, Professor of Oriental Languages and Senior Member of the
Philosophical Faculty of Jena, and, to preface it, there was a formal
and fulsome approval by three eminent professors of theology at Leyden.
With great fervour the author pointed out that "religion itself depends
absolutely on the infallible inspiration, bo