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Time was--and that not very long ago--when all the relations of
ancient authors concerning the old world were received with a
ready belief; and an unreasoning and uncritical faith accepted
with equal satisfaction the narrative of the campaigns of Caesar
and of the doings of Romulus, the account of Alexander's marches
and of the conquests of Semiramis. We can most of us remember
when, in this country, the whole story of regal Rome, and even
the legend of the Trojan settlement in Latium, were seriously
placed before boys as history, and discoursed of as
unhesitatingly and in as dogmatic a tone as the tale of the
Catilline Conspiracy or the Conquest of Britain. ...
But all this is now changed. The last century has seen the birth
and growth of a new science--the Science of Historical
Criticism. ... The whole world of profane history has been
revolutionised. ...<1>
If these utterances were true when they fell from the lips of a
Bampton lecturer in 1859, with how much greater force do they
appeal to us now, when the immense labours of the generation now
passing away constitute one vast illustration of the power and
fruitfulness of scientific methods of investigation in history,
no less than in all other departments of knowledge.
At the present time, I suppose, there is no one who doubts that
histories which appertain to any other people than the Jews, and
their spiritual progeny in the first century, fall within the
second class of the three enumerated. Like Goethe's
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