ily
literary critics, not dogmatic theologians. Like the older rationalists,
they are occupied largely with biblical interpretation; but, perceiving
the hollowness of their attempt to explain away moral and spiritual
mysteries by reference to material events, they transfer to the Bible the
theories used in the contemporary investigations in classical history, and
explain the Biblical wonders by the hypothesis of legends or of myths.
Though they ignore the miraculous and supernatural equally with the older
rationalists, they allow the spiritual in addition to the moral and
natural, and thus take a more scholarlike and elevated view of the Hebrew
history and literature. The system of interpretation adopted is the
transition from the previous one, which admitted the facts but explained
them away, to the succeeding one of Strauss, which denies the facts, and
accounts for the belief in them by psychological causes.

The wish to give a possible basis for the existence of legend, by
interposing a chasm between the events and the record of them, stimulated
the pursuit of the branch of criticism slightly touched on by their
predecessors, which investigates the origin and date of scripture books.
They transferred to the Hebrew literature the critical method by which
Wolf had destroyed the unity of Homer, and Niebuhr the credibility of
Livy. Not a single book,--history, poetry, or prophecy,--was left
unexamined. The inquiries of this kind, instituted with reference to the
book of Daniel, were alluded to in a former lecture;(785) and those which
relate to the Gospels will occur hereafter.(786) At present it will only
be possible to specify a single instance in illustration of these
inquiries--the celebrated one which relates to the authorship and
composition of the Pentateuch. It is the one to which most labour has been
devoted, and is an excellent instance for exhibiting the slow but
progressive improvement and growing caution shown in the mode of
exercising them.(787)

As early as the time of Hobbes and Spinoza it was perceived that the
Pentateuch contains a few allusions which seem to have been inserted after
the time of Moses; a circumstance which they, as well as R. Simon,
explained, by referring them to the sacred editor Ezra, who is thought to
have arranged the canon: but about the middle of the last century a French
physician, Astruc,(788) pointed out a circumstance which has introduced an
entirely new element into the dis