His
Holiness naturally condemned the higher-criticism, but he dwelt at
the same time on the necessity of the most thorough study of the
sacred Scriptures, and especially on the importance of adjusting
scriptural statements to scientific facts. This utterance was
admirably oracular, being susceptible of cogent quotation by both
sides: nothing could be in better form from an orthodox point of
view; but, with that statesmanlike forecast which the present Pope
has shown more than once in steering the bark of St. Peter over the
troubled waves of the nineteenth century, he so far abstained from
condemning any of the greater results of modern critical study that
the main English defender of the encyclical, the Jesuit Father
Clarke, did not hesitate publicly to admit a multitude of such
results--results, indeed, which would shock not only Italian and
Spanish Catholics, but many English and American Protestants.
According to this interpreter, the Pope had no thought of denying
the variety of documents in the Pentateuch, or the plurality of
sources of the books of Samuel, or the twofold authorship of
Isaiah, or that all after the ninth verse of the last chapter of
St.
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