with a view of eliciting its historic contents; and, accordingly,
they accomplished but little. Two brilliant exceptions must,
however, be noticed. Spinoza, in the seventeenth century, and
Lessing, in the eighteenth, were men far in advance of their age.
They are the fathers of modern historical criticism; and to
Lessing in particular, with his enormous erudition and
incomparable sagacity, belongs the honour of initiating that
method of inquiry which, in the hands of the so-called Tubingen
School, has led to such striking and valuable conclusions
concerning, the age and character of all the New Testament
literature. But it was long before any one could be found fit to
bend the bow which Lessing and Spinoza had wielded. A succession
of able scholars--Semler, Eichhorn, Paulus, Schleiermacher
Bretschneider, and De Wette--were required to examine, with
German patience and accuracy, the details of the subject, and to
propound various untenable hypotheses, before such a work could
be performed as that of Strauss. The "Life of Jesus," published
by Strauss when only twenty-six years of age, is one of the
monumental works of the nineteenth century, worthy to rank, as a
historical effort, along with such books as Niebuhr's "History of
Rome," Wolf's "Prolegomena," or Bentley's "Dissertations on
Phalaris." It instantly superseded and rendered antiquated
everything which had preceded it; nor has any work on early
Christianity been written in Germany for the past thirty years
which has not been dominated by the recollection of that
marvellous book. Nevertheless, the labours of another generation
of scholars have carried our knowledge of the New Testament
literature far beyond the point which it had reached when Strauss
first wrote. At that time the dates of but few of the New
Testament writings had been fixed with any approach to certainty;