n a mist of Hegelian metaphysics,
a sufficient number of watchmen on the walls of the Prussian Zion saw
its meaning, and an alarm was given. The chroniclers tell us that "fear
of failing in the examinations, through knowing too much, kept students
away from Vatke's lectures." Naturally, while Hengstenberg and Frederick
William IV were commanding the forces of orthodoxy, Vatke thought it
wise to be silent.

Still, the new idea was in the air; indeed, it had been divined about a
year earlier, on the other side of the Rhine, by a scholar well known
as acute and thoughtful--Reuss, of Strasburg. Unfortunately, he too was
overawed, and he refrained from publishing his thought during more
than forty years. But his ideas were caught by some of his most gifted
scholars; and, of these, Graf and Kayser developed them and had the
courage to publish them.

At the same period this new master key was found and applied by a
greater man than any of these--by Kuenen, of Holland; and thus it was
that three eminent scholars, working in different parts of Europe and on
different lines, in spite of all obstacles, joined in enforcing upon the
thinking world the conviction that the complete Levitical law had
been established not at the beginning, but at the end, of the Jewish
nation--mainly, indeed, after the Jewish nation as an independent
political body had ceased to exist; that this code had not been revealed
in the childhood of Israel, but that it had come into being in a
perfectly natural way during Israel's final decay--during the period
when heroes and prophets had been succeeded by priests. Thus was the
historical and psychological evolution of Jewish institutions brought
into harmony with the natural development of human thought; elaborate
ceremonial institutions being shown to have come after the ruder
beginnings of religious development instead of before them. Thus came
a new impulse to research, and the fruitage was abundant; the older
theological interpretation, with its insoluble puzzles, yielded on all
sides.

The lead in the new epoch thus opened was taken by Kuenen. Starting
with strong prepossessions in favour of the older thought, and even with
violent utterances against some of the supporters of the new view, he
was borne on by his love of truth, until his great work, The Religion of
Israel, published in 1869, attracted the attention of thinking scholars
throughout the world by its arguments in favour of the upward movem