rical
investigations, have no organic connection with the investigations and
results of modern criticism. It is perfectly correct, therefore, to
state that the modern higher criticism had its birth in the great
awakening of the Renaissance and the Reformation. They gave to it a
life and an impetus which from that day to this have not abated in the
least. Some of the reformers themselves and their coworkers advanced
views which later investigation has confirmed and expanded. Carlstadt,
for example, the friend and coworker of Luther, published in 1520 an
essay in which he argued, on the ground that the style of narration in
the account of Moses's death which, he believed, was not written by
Moses, was {81} the same as in the preceding chapters, that it might be
held that Moses did not write the entire Pentateuch. The freedom with
which Luther criticized both the Old and the New Testament books is
well known. Concerning the Old Testament, he admitted that the books
of Kings were more credible than Chronicles. "What would it matter,"
he asks, "if Moses did not write the Pentateuch?" He thinks it
probable that Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, and Ecclesiastes received their
final form at the hands of redactors. The testimony of the psalm
titles he does not regard as conclusive. He admits chronological
difficulties and contradictions in the statements of historical facts.
He concedes that we do not always hear God himself speaking in the Old
Testament. Esther might well have been left out of the canon, and
First Maccabees might have been included. If this is not criticism,
what is?

The case of Luther has been mentioned simply to show the absurdity of
the claim that modern higher criticism is the outgrowth of German
rationalism or English deism or infidelity; or that a man who pursues
Old Testament study on the line of the higher criticism is necessarily
an infidel, a rationalist, or a fool. True, there have been and are
those out of sympathy with Christianity or the Bible who have employed
critical methods in carrying on their anti-Christian warfare; but {82}
such misuse of critical methods no more proves the illegitimacy of this
process of investigation than the employment of a surgical instrument,
which, in the hands of a skillful surgeon, may be the means of saving a
diseased organism, by a murderer to carry out his destructive aim,
would prove that the use of all surgical instruments is unscientific or
criminal. T