brought him before the elector. Luckily, this
potentate was one of the old easy-going prince-bishops, and contented
himself with telling the priest that, though his contention was perhaps
true, he "must remain in the old paths, and avoid everything likely to
make trouble."

But at the elector's death, soon afterward, the theologians renewed the
attack, threw Isenbiehl out of his professorship and degraded him. One
insult deserves mention for its ingenuity. It was declared that
he--the successful and brilliant professor--showed by the obnoxious
interpretation that he had not yet rightly learned the Scriptures; he
was therefore sent back to the benches of the theological school, and
made to take his seat among the ingenuous youth who were conning the
rudiments of theology. At this he made a new statement, so carefully
guarded that it disarmed many of his enemies, and his high scholarship
soon won for him a new professorship of Greek--the condition being that
he should cease writing upon Scripture. But a crafty bookseller having
republished his former book, and having protected himself by keeping the
place and date of publication secret, a new storm fell upon the author;
he was again removed from his professorship and thrown into prison; his
book was forbidden, and all copies of it in that part of Germany were
confiscated. In 1778, having escaped from prison, he sought refuge with
another of the minor rulers who in blissful unconsciousness were doing
their worst while awaiting the French Revolution, but was at once
delivered up to the Mayence authorities and again thrown into prison.

The Pope, Pius VI, now intervened with a brief on Isenbiehl's book,
declaring it "horrible, false, perverse, destructive, tainted with
heresy," and excommunicating all who should read it. At this, Isenbiehl,
declaring that he had written it in the hope of doing a service to the
Church, recanted, and vegetated in obscurity until his death in 1818.

But, despite theological faculties, prince-bishops, and even popes, the
new current of thought increased in strength and volume, and into it at
the end of the eighteenth century came important contributions from two
sources widely separated and most dissimilar.

The first of these, which gave a stimulus not yet exhausted, was the
work of Herder. By a remarkable intuition he had anticipated some of
those ideas of an evolutionary process in nature and in literature which
first gained full recognit