successfully, and put aside
all the half truths or specious untruths urged by minor critics whose
zeal outran their discretion. This was a great constructive scholar--not
a destroyer, but a builder--Wellhausen. Reverently, but honestly and
courageously, with clearness, fulness, and convicting force, he summed
up the conquests of scientific criticism as bearing on Hebrew history
and literature. These conquests had reduced the vast structures which
theologians had during ages been erecting over the sacred text to
shapeless ruin and rubbish: this rubbish he removed, and brought out
from beneath it the reality. He showed Jewish history as an evolution
obedient to laws at work in all ages, and Jewish literature as a growth
out of individual, tribal, and national life. Thus was our sacred
history and literature given a beauty and high use which had long been
foreign to them. Thereby was a vast service rendered immediately to
Germany, and eventually to all mankind; and this service was greatest of
all in the domain of religion.(476)

(476) For Lowth, see the Rev. T. K. Cheyne, D. D., Professor of the
Interpretation of the Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford,
Founders of the Old Testament Criticism, London, 1893, pp. 3, 4.
For Astruc's very high character as a medical authority, see the
Dictionnaire des Sciences Medicales, Paris, 1820; it is significant that
at first he concealed his authorship of the Conjectures. For a brief
statement, see Cheyne; also Moore's introduction to Bacon's Genesis of
Genesis; but for a statement remarkably full and interesting, and based
on knowledge at first hand of Astruc's very rare book, see Curtiss, as
above. For Michaelis and Eichorn, see Meyer, Geschichte der Exegese;
also Cheyne and Moore. For Isenbiehl, see Reusch, in Allg. deutsche
Biographie. The texts cited against him were Isaiah vii, 14, and Matt.
i, 22, 23. For Herder, see various historians of literature and writers
in exegesis, and especially Pfleiderer, Development of Theology in
Germany, chap. ii. For his influence, as well as that of Lessing, see
Beard's Hibbert Lectures, chap. x. For a brief comparison of Lowth's
work with that of Herder, see Farrar, History of Interpretation, p. 377.
For examples of interpretations of the Song of Songs, see Farrar, as
above, p. 33. For Castellio (Chatillon), his anticipation of Herder's
view of Solomon's Song, and his persecution by Calvin and Beza, which
drove him to starvation