see, that it was
setting strongly in one direction.

This comparison is not without its use. Here were men eminently learned,
painstaking, minute; eminently ingenious also, and in a certain sense,
eminently critical. In accumulating and assorting facts--such facts as
lay within their reach--and in the general thoroughness of their work,
the rabbis of Jewish exegesis might well bear comparison with the rabbis
of neologian criticism. They reigned supreme in their own circles for a
time; their work has not been without its fruits; many useful
suggestions have gone to swell the intellectual and moral inheritance of
later ages; but their characteristic teaching, which they themselves
would have regarded as their chief claim to immortality, has long since
been consigned to oblivion. It might be minute and searching, but it was
conceived in a false vein; it was essentially unhistorical, and
therefore it could not live. The modern negative school of criticism
seems to me to be equally perverse and unreal, though in a different
way; and therefore I anticipate for it the same fate.

Mr Matthew Arnold, alluding to an eccentric work of rationalizing
tendencies written by an English scholar, and using M. Renan as his
mouthpiece, expresses the opinion that 'an extravagance of this sort
could never have come from Germany where there is a great force of
critical opinion controlling a learned man's vagaries, and keeping him
straight.' [24:1] I confess that my experiences of the critical
literature of Germany have not been so fortunate. It would be difficult,
I think, to find among English scholars any parallel to the mass of
absurdities, which several intelligent and very learned German critics
have conspired to heap upon two simple names in the Philippian Epistle,
Euodia and Syntyche; first, Baur suggesting that the pivot of the
Epistle, which has a conciliatory tendency, is the mention of Clement, a
mythical or almost mythical person, who represents the union of the
Petrine and Pauline parties in the Church [24:2]; then Schwegler,
carrying the theory a step further, and declaring that the two names,
Euodia and Syntyche, actually represent these two parties, while the
true yoke-fellow is St Peter himself [24:3]; then Volkmar, improving the
occasion, and showing that this fact is indicated in their very names,
Euodia, or 'Rightway,' and Syntyche or 'Consort,' denoting respectively
the orthodoxy of the one party and the incorporation of