tatement in these books is a precise statement of
historical or scientific fact, yet that the entire text contains
vast hidden meanings. Such was the rule: the exceptions made by a few
interpreters here and there only confirmed it. Even the indifference
of St. Jerome to the doctrine of Mosaic authorship did not prevent its
ripening into a dogma.

The book of Genesis was universally held to be an account, not only
divinely comprehensive but miraculously exact, of the creation and of
the beginnings of life on the earth; an account to which all discoveries
in every branch of science must, under pains and penalties, be made to
conform. In English-speaking lands this has lasted until our own time:
the most eminent of recent English biologists has told us how in every
path of natural science he has, at some stage in his career, come across
a barrier labelled "No thoroughfare Moses."

A favourite subject of theological eloquence was the perfection of the
Pentateuch, and especially of Genesis, not only as a record of the past,
but as a revelation of the future.

The culmination of this view in the Protestant Church was the Pansophia
Mosaica of Pfeiffer, a Lutheran general superintendent, or bishop, in
northern Germany, near the beginning of the seventeenth century. He
declared that the text of Genesis "must be received strictly"; that "it
contains all knowledge, human and divine"; that "twenty-eight articles
of the Augsburg Confession are to be found in it"; that "it is an
arsenal of arguments against all sects and sorts of atheists, pagans,
Jews, Turks, Tartars, papists, Calvinists, Socinians, and Baptists";
"the source of all sciences and arts, including law, medicine,
philosophy, and rhetoric"; "the source and essence of all histories and
of all professions, trades, and works"; "an exhibition of all virtues
and vices"; "the origin of all consolation."

This utterance resounded through Germany from pulpit to pulpit, growing
in strength and volume, until a century later it was echoed back by
Huet, the eminent bishop and commentator of France. He cited a hundred
authors, sacred and profane, to prove that Moses wrote the Pentateuch;
and not only this, but that from the Jewish lawgiver came the heathen
theology--that Moses was, in fact, nearly the whole pagan pantheon
rolled into one, and really the being worshipped under such names as
Bacchus, Adonis, and Apollo.(472)

(472) For the passage from Huxley regarding Mosa