iblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has
gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the
foundations of Baur's own work as precarious, the results at which he
arrived as unwarranted. New documents have come to light since his day.
Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to
the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly changed. There
is still another other thing to say concerning Baur. He was a Hegelian.
He has the disposition always to interpret the movements of the
religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas. He frankly says
that without speculation every historical investigation remains but a
play upon the surface of things. Baur's fault was that in his search
for, or rather in his confident discovery of, the great connecting
forces of history, the biographical element, the significance of
personality, threatened altogether to disappear. The force in the
history was the absolute, the immanent divine will. The method
everywhere was that of advance by contrasts and antagonisms. One gets an
impression, for example, that the Nicene dogma became what it did by the
might of the idea, that it could not by any possibility have had any
other issue.

The foil to much of this in Baur's own age was represented in the work
of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history in Berlin, who
exerted great influence upon a generation of English and American
scholars. He was not an investigator of sources. He had no talent for
the task. He was a delineator, one of the last of the great painters of
history, if one may so describe the type. He had imagination, sympathy,
a devout spirit. His great trait was his insight into personality. He
wrote history with the biographical interest. He almost resolves history
into a series of biographical types. He has too little sense for the
connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious
spirit. The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the
emotions of individuals. The old delineators were before the age of
investigation. Since that impulse became masterful, some historians have
been completely absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this
investigation. Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering
the results of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the
writing of church history on a great scale. They have contented
themselves with p