XIII is neither a Paul V nor an Urban VIII,
and is too wise to bring the Church into a position from which it can
only be extricated by such ludicrous subterfuges as those by which it
was dragged out of the Galileo scandal, or by such a tortuous policy as
that by which it writhed out of the old doctrine regarding the taking of
interest for money.

In spite, then, of the attempted crushing out of Bartolo and Berta and
Savi and Lenormant and Loisy, during this very epoch in which the Pope
issued this encyclical, there is every reason to hope that the path
has been paved over which the Church may gracefully recede from the old
system of interpretation and quietly accept and appropriate the main
results of the higher criticism. Certainly she has never had a better
opportunity to play at the game of "beggar my neighbour" and to drive
the older Protestant orthodoxy into bankruptcy.

In America the same struggle between the old ideas and the new went on.
In the middle years of the century the first adequate effort in behalf
of the newer conception of the sacred books was made by Theodore
Parker at Boston. A thinker brave and of the widest range,--a scholar
indefatigable and of the deepest sympathies with humanity,--a man called
by one of the most eminent scholars in the English Church "a religious
Titan," and by a distinguished French theologian "a prophet," he had
struggled on from the divinity school until at that time he was one
of the foremost biblical scholars, and preacher to the largest regular
congregation on the American continent. The great hall in Boston could
seat four thousand people, and at his regular discourses every part
of it was filled. In addition to his pastoral work he wielded a vast
influence as a platform speaker, especially in opposition to the
extension of slavery into the Territories of the United States, and as
a lecturer on a wide range of vital topics; and among those whom he most
profoundly influenced, both politically and religiously, was Abraham
Lincoln. During each year at that period he was heard discussing the
most important religious and political questions in all the greater
Northern cities; but his most lasting work was in throwing light upon
our sacred Scriptures, and in this he was one of the forerunners of
the movement now going on not only in the United States but throughout
Christendom. Even before he was fairly out of college his translation of
De Wette's Introduction to the Old T