the belief of the
supernatural to be the great obstacle to political reform, an intense
feeling of antipathy was aroused; and Schmidt,(836) under the pseudonym of
Stirner, reached the naturalistic point of view held by Volney, the
worship of self-love. This new school, which had arisen in the few years
subsequent to Strauss's work, mingled itself with the revolutionary
movements of Germany in 1848, and was the means of exciting the alarm
which caused the suppression of them. Since that date the school has been
extinct as a literary movement.

The tendency just described was entirely destructive. The three others,
which remain for consideration, exist within the church, and are in their
nature reconstructive, and aim at repelling the attacks of Strauss and of
other previous critics. The one that we shall describe first is that which
is most rationalistic, and approaches most nearly to Strauss's views; and
is frequently called, from the Swabian university which has been its
stronghold, the Tuebingen school.(837) It is a lineal offshoot in some
slight degree from the school of Hegel, and more decidedly from the
critical school of De Wette, before named. But it stands contrasted with
the latter by caution, as marked as that which separates recent
critics(838) of Roman history from earlier ones, like Niebuhr. Like
Strauss, it restricts its attention to the New Testament; but it is a
direct reaction against his inclination to undervalue the historical
element. The great problem presented to it is, to reconstruct the history
of early Christianity, to reinvestigate the genesis of the gospel
biographies and doctrine. Declining to approach the books of the New
Testament with dogmatic preconceptions, it breaks with the past, and
interprets them by the historic method; proposing for its fundamental
principle to interpret scripture exactly like any other literary work.
Pretending that after the ravages of criticism, the Gospels cannot be
regarded as true history, but only as miscellaneous materials for true
history, it takes its stand on four of the Epistles of St. Paul, the
genuineness of which it cannot doubt, and finds in the struggle of Jew and
Gentile its theory of Christianity.(839) Christianity is not regarded as
miraculous, but as an offshoot of Judaism, which received its final form
by the contest of the Petrine or Judaeo-Christian party, and the Pauline or
Gentile; which contest is considered by it not to have been decided