intellectual atmosphere in which we live. I ask myself, for instance,
whether one who lived in the age of the rabbis would have been
altogether right in resigning himself to the immediate current of
intellectual thought, because he saw, or seemed to 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