nt
divines found in it references even to the religious wars in Germany
and to the Peace of Passau. In these days it seems hard to imagine how
really competent reasoners could thus argue without laughing in each
other's faces, after the manner of Cicero's augurs. Herder showed
Solomon's Song to be what the whole thinking world now knows it to
be--simply an Oriental love-poem.

But his frankness brought him into trouble: he was bitterly assailed.
Neither his noble character nor his genius availed him. Obliged to flee
from one pastorate to another, he at last found a happy refuge at
Weimar in the society of Goethe, Wieland, and Jean Paul, and thence he
exercised a powerful influence in removing noxious and parasitic growths
from religious thought.

It would hardly be possible to imagine a man more different from
Herder than was the other of the two who most influenced biblical
interpretation at the end of the eighteenth century. This was Alexander
Geddes--a Roman Catholic priest and a Scotchman. Having at an early
period attracted much attention by his scholarship, and having received
the very rare distinction, for a Catholic, of a doctorate from the
University of Aberdeen, he began publishing in 1792 a new translation of
the Old Testament, and followed this in 1800 with a volume of critical
remarks. In these he supported mainly three views: first, that the
Pentateuch in its present form could not have been written by Moses;
secondly, that it was the work of various hands; and, thirdly, that it
could not have been written before the time of David. Although there
was a fringe of doubtful theories about them, these main conclusions,
supported as they were by deep research and cogent reasoning, are now
recognised as of great value. But such was not the orthodox opinion
then. Though a man of sincere piety, who throughout his entire life
remained firm in the faith of his fathers, he and his work were at
once condemned: he was suspended by the Catholic authorities as a
misbeliever, denounced by Protestants as an infidel, and taunted by both
as "a would-be corrector of the Holy Ghost." Of course, by this
taunt was meant nothing more than that he dissented from sundry ideas
inherited from less enlightened times by the men who just then happened
to wield ecclesiastical power.

But not all the opposition to him could check the evolution of his
thought. A line of great men followed in these paths opened by Astruc
and Eichhorn, a