ity. More and more, too, the
new scholarship has developed the conception of the New Testament as,
like the Old, the growth of literature in obedience to law--a conception
which in al probability will give it its strongest hold on the coming
centuries. In making this revelation Christian scholarship has by no
means done work mainly destructive. It has, indeed, swept away a mass
of noxious growths, but it has at the same time cleared the ground for
a better growth of Christianity--a growth through which already pulsates
the current of a nobler life. It has forever destroyed the contention of
scholars like those of the eighteenth century who saw, in the multitude
of irreconcilable discrepancies between various biblical statements,
merely evidences of priestcraft and intentional fraud. The new
scholarship has shown that even such absolute contradictions as those
between the accounts of the early life of Jesus by Matthew and Luke, and
between the date of the crucifixion and details of the resurrection
in the first three Gospels and in the fourth, and other discrepancies
hardly less serious, do not destroy the historical character of the
narrative. Even the hopelessly conflicting genealogies of the Saviour
and the evidently mythical accretions about the simple facts of his
birth and life are thus full of interest when taken as a natural
literary development in obedience to the deepest religious feeling.(502)

(502) Among the newer English works of the canon of Scripture,
especially as regards the Old Testament, see Ryle in work cited. As to
the evidences of frequent mutilations of the New Testament text, as well
as of frequent charge of changing texts made against each other by early
Christian writers, see Reuss, History of the New Testament, vol. ii, S
362. For a reverent and honest treatment of some of the discrepancies
and contradictions which are absolutely irreconcilable, see Crooker, as
above, appendix; also Cone, Gospel Criticism and Historic Christianity,
especially chap. ii; also Matthew Arnold, Literature and Dogma, and God
and the Bible, especially chap. vi; and for a brief but full showing of
them in a judicial and kindly spirit, see Laing, Problems of the Future,
chap. ix, on The Historical Element in the Gospels.

Among those who have wrought most effectively to bring the leaders
of thought in the English-speaking nations to this higher conception,
Matthew Arnold should not be forgotten. By poetic insi