It is intelligible enough that the criticism of the Bible could not arise amongst the orthodox theologians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They were restrained by a rigid doctrine of inspiration from an unprejudiced treatment of the Bible, and were moreover too much absorbed in dogmatic controversies and the defence of their confessions of faith, to feel the need of more searching Biblical studies. It was amongst English Free-thinkers and Deists that the credibility of the Biblical narratives was first seriously assailed, and with so much temper as to greatly detract from the scientific value of the result. Thomas Woolston’s Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (six in number, 1727–1729) are specially noteworthy. They attack the literal interpretation of the miracles as ludicrous and offensive, and advocate the allegorical interpretation of them as figures and parables of spiritual truths. It is possible to find in Woolston’s theory an anticipation of the mythical principle of interpretation which Strauss opposes to the rationalistic one. Reimarus, the author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, by the publication of which Lessing threw German theology into a ferment, occupies the same position as the English Deists, and indeed owed much to their influence. But at the same time a noteworthy difference is observable from the very first between the way in which Lessing treated these questions and their treatment by the earlier Free-thinkers; and the difference is characteristic of the two schools. German rationalism bears the marks of its origin in the idealistic optimism of the philosophy of Leibnitz and Wolff, and remains in sympathy with the ethical spirit of Biblical religion; whilst the but faintly religious naturalism of the English Deists leads them, with their rejection of the Biblical miracles, to attack the religion of the Bible, and drag down into the mire its representatives and heroes. With this the German Rationalists have no sympathy. They were unable to treat the Biblical narratives of miracles as historical occurrences, but they were not prepared on that account to regard them as deceit and delusion on the part of Biblical heroes, or as the invention of Biblical narrators: their reverence for the Bible and its religion kept them from both of these inferences. They tried to get over the difficulty in two ways,—either they looked upon the narratives of miracles, particularly those of the Old Testament, as popular religious legends, traditions, or “myths,” of the same kind as the myths to be met with in all heathen religions; or, on the other hand, regarding them as containing the actual history of perfectly natural events, they ascribed the miraculous appearance and form which they bear simply to the mistaken judgment of the narrators, or, in other cases, to the erroneous view of the interpreters. The latter method was employed especially by Dr. Paulus in his commentary on the