light.

A fourth source of materials, which is but another vein of this
scientific quarry, is _the historical and literary investigation of the
Bible_. This has not been so recently opened as is commonly supposed,
but has been worked at intervals throughout the history of the Church,
and notably at the Protestant Reformation. Luther carefully reexamined
the books of the Bible, and declared that it was a matter of
indifference to him whether Moses was the author of the Pentateuch,
pronounced the _Books of the Chronicles_ less accurate historically than
the _Books of the Kings_, considered the present form of the books of
_Isaiah_, _Jeremiah_ and _Hosea_ probably due to later hands, and
distinguished in the New Testament "chief books" from those of less
moment. Calvin, too, discussed the authorship of some of the books, and
suggested Barnabas as the writer of the _Epistle to the Hebrews_. But
the Nineteenth Century witnessed a very thorough application to the
Scriptures of the same methods of historical and literary criticism to
which all ancient documents were subjected. The result was the discovery
of the composite character of many books, the rearrangement of the
Biblical literature in the probable order of its writing, and the use of
the documents as historical sources, not so much for the periods they
profess to describe, as for those in and for which they were written.

We can assign the following elements in our contemporary Christian
thought to these scholarly investigations:

(1) The conception of revelation as progressive--a mode of thought that
falls in with the idea of development or evolution.

(2) The distinction between the Bible as literature, with the history,