_Robert Elsmere_ rests on the achievements of historic criticism,
chiefly German criticism. From the traditional, old-fashioned Christian
way of regarding and using the old records which we call the Bible, the
ground, we are told, is hopelessly and for ever cut away by German
historical criticism. And the difference between the old and the modern
way of regarding and using them is expressed by the difference between
_bad translation_ and _good_; the old way of reading, quoting, and
estimating ancient documents of all kinds was purblind, lifeless,
narrow, mechanical, whereas the modern comparative and critical method
not only is more sure in important questions of authenticity, but puts
true life and character and human feeling and motives into the
personages who wrote these documents, and of whom they speak. These
books were entirely misunderstood, even if people knew the meaning of
their words; now, at last, we can enter into their real spirit and
meaning. And where such a change of method and point of view, as
regards these documents, is wholesale and sweeping, it involves a
wholesale and sweeping change in all that is founded on them. Revised
ideas about the Bible mean a revised and reconstructed Christianity--"A
New Reformation."

Mrs. Ward lays more stress than everybody will agree to on what she
likens to the difference between _good translation_ and _bad_, in
dealing with the materials of history. Doubtless, in our time, the
historical imagination, like the historical conscience, has been
awakened. In history, as in other things, the effort after the real and
the living has been very marked; it has sometimes resulted, as we know,
in that parading of the real which we call the realistic. The mode of
telling a story or stating a case varies, even characteristically, from
age to age, from Macaulay to Hume, from Hume to Rapin, from Rapin to
Holinshed or Hall; but after all, the story in its main features
remains, after allowing for the differences in the mode of presenting
it. German criticism, to which we are expected to defer, has its mode.
It combines two elements--a diligent, searching, lawyer-like habit of
cross-examination, laborious, complete and generally honest, which,
when it is not spiteful or insolent, deserves all the praise it
receives; but with it a sense of the probable, in dealing with the
materials collected, and a straining after attempts to construct
theories and to give a vivid reality to facts