and vied with each other in
defending or opposing its positions. Crossing the German frontier, it
was published in complete and abridged forms in all the principal
languages of Europe. Even staid Scotland, unable to escape the
contagion, issued a popular edition of the exciting work.

Nor were the views advanced by Strauss in his _Life of Jesus_ less
extraordinary than its very flattering reception. He was diametrically
opposed to Neander in the latter's estimate of the ideal and historical.
According to Strauss the idea is the very soul of all that is valuable
in the past; and history is the gross crust which envelops it. What is
history in its early stages but so many faint legends? Happy are we if,
within them, we can discover the seed-truth. The same neglect of the
movements of history in their outward form led Strauss into still
another tendency which proved to be in direct conflict with Neander. The
latter, as we have seen, was devoted to his theory of the importance and
power of personality in history. But Strauss rejected it as of small
moment. He attached great importance to the issue involved, but
regarded the persons engaged in bringing it to pass as mere machinery.

This contempt of the historical and the personal is the key to Strauss'
work. The church, when it continued faithful, had always looked to the
Gospels as the Holy Sepulchre of its faith, and was ever ready to make a
crusade against the power which would wrest it from her grasp. But, amid
the conflicts occasioned by the growth of the destructive criticism, the
Gospels had received at its hands a treatment no less severe than had
been inflicted upon the history of the Old Testament. Many theories had
already been propounded by the Rationalists in order to account for
them, but there was no general harmony among these men either on this or
any subject of speculation. Wetstein, Michaelis, and Eichhorn were
agreed that the Gospels were more human than divine, and the fate to
which all the inspired records were consigned by those critics and their
sympathizers has its analogy in the treatment bestowed by vultures upon
the carcass of the exhausted beast that has fallen by the wayside. But,
after all, the accounts of the Evangelists had suffered less severely
than any other part of the Scriptures, and the injury they had sustained
was owing more to the attacks made on the historical and prophetical
portions of the Old Testament than to any immediate inva