f 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 theologians, Jewish and Christian, were unable 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 its various parts
were written; and that these 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 of Eichhorn's work, was met generally with
contempt and frequently with insult.

Throughout Catholic Germany it was even worse. In 1774 Isenbiehl, a
priest at Mayence who had distinguished himself as a Greek and Hebrew
scholar, happened to question the usual interpretation of the passage in
Isaiah which refers to the virgin-born Immanuel, and showed then--what
every competent critic knows now--that it had reference to events looked
for in older Jewish history. The censorship and faculty of theology
attacked him at once and