The appearance of one of them, that entitled "Bible," which contained a general view of the history of the canonical books of Scripture, their dates, authorship, and reception by the Christian Church, became a turning-point in his life. The propositions he stated regarding the origin of parts of the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch, excited alarm and displeasure in Scotland, where few persons had become aware of the conclusions reached by recent Biblical scholars in Continental Europe. The article was able, clear, and fearless, plainly the work of a master hand. The views it advanced were not for the most part due to Smith's own investigations, but were to be found in the writings of other learned men. Neither would they now be thought extreme; they are in fact accepted to-day by many writers of unquestioned orthodoxy in Britain and a (perhaps smaller) number in the United States. In 1876, however, these views were new and startling to those who had not studied in Germany or followed the researches of such men as Ewald, Kuenen, and Wellhausen. The Scottish Free Church had theretofore prided itself upon the rigidity of its orthodoxy; and while among the younger ministers there were a good many able and learned scholars holding what used to be called "advanced views," the mass of the elder and middle-aged clergy had gone on in the old-fashioned traditions of verbal inspiration, and took every word in the Five Books (except the last chapter of Deuteronomy) to have been written down by Moses. It was only natural that their anger should be kindled against the young professor, whose theories seemed to cut away the ground from under their feet. Proceedings were (1876) taken against him before the Presbytery of Aberdeen, and the case found its way thence to the Synod of Aberdeen, and ultimately to the General Assembly of the Free Church. In one form or another (for the flame was lit anew by other articles published by him in the _Encyclopaedia_) it lingered on for five years. So far from yielding to the storm, Robertson Smith defied it, maintaining not only the truth of his views, but their compatibility with the Presbyterian standards as contained in the Confession of Faith and the Longer and Shorter Catechisms. In this latter contention he was successful, proving that the divines of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had not committed themselves to any specific doctrine of inspiration, still less to any dogmatic deliverance as to the authorship of particular books of Scripture. The standards simply declared that the Word of God was contained in the canonical books, and as there had been little or no controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics regarding the date or the authorship or the divine authority of those books (apart of course from disputes regarding the Apocrypha), had not dealt specifically with those last mentioned matters. As it was by reference to the Confession of Faith that the offence alleged had to