Another most important development in his toriography in the last century has been the gradual but sure secularization of *sacred° his tory and the consequent removal of the last ob stacle to the scholarly and objective treatment of every field of history.' This progress has been in part a product of the brilliant advances in the critical methods in the last century, and in part has been due to the philosophical de struction of the whole basis of the conception of *sacred° history, which has resulted from the unparalled discoveries in natural science since 1800. On the whole, it is probable that the latter has been the most important influ ence because the difference in the skill in handling documents on the part of Mabillon and Wellhausen was infinitely less than the di vergence between their *Weltanschauung.° The process through which the sources of the Old Testament were discovered and separated has been briefly discussed in an earlier section of this article and need not be repeated here. Upon the basis of this criticism of the sources there has grown up a critical history of the Jewish nation and its religion which had been impossi ble of attainment since the inclusion of Hebrew history as the corner-stone of the Christian synthesis of the history of antiquity by Euse bius, Jerome and Orosius. A rather lame and halting beginning of a critical and objective history of the Hebrews, upon the basis of the biblical criticism of the early 19th century, was made by the Gottingen professor, Heinrich Ewald, whose 'History of the People of Israel' was published in the years following 1843. The first straightforward and thorough-going crit ical history of the religious development of the Jews was contained in the 'Religion of Israel,' published by the Leyden professor, Abraham Kuenen, in 1869. Even more advanced was the epoch-making 'History of Israel' of Julius Wellhausen, a professor in G6ttingen and the greatest of Old Testament scholars. Wellhau sen's work, published originally in 1878, was but a brilliant fragment, and the preparation of a systematic history of Israel in accordance with the advanced views of Wellhausen was the work of the Giessen professor, Bernhard Stade, whose 'History of the People of Israel' was published in 1887. The results of these works from the new critical mode of approach were utterly to destroy the exaggerations regarding the glories of ancient Israel, which had been set forth in Kings and Chronicles-Ezra-Nehe miah, had been repeated by Josephus, and were thoroughly embodied in Christian tradition. For the first time the history of Palestine was revealed in its proper perspective in the larger history of the ancient East. Not less damag ing was the effect of the work of Wellhausen and his associates upon the doctrine of a unique, primordial and revealed monotheism among the Jews. It was clearly shown that monothe ism had been a gradual and precarious develop ment out of an original polytheism, and that its maintenance was always difficult and sub ject to serious The late origin of the alleged laws of Moses was no less dearly es tablished. The secularizing process was carried still further by the brilliant Cambridge pro fessor, Robertson Smith, in his 'Religion of the Semites,' which showed the many points of similarity between the religion of the Hebrews and the religious beliefs and practices of the other branches of the Semitic peoples. Finally, Delitszch, Winckler and Rogers have made clear the profound influence of the Babylonian his torical and religious traditions upon the religion of Israel. While the work of the most of these writers was highly technical and intended pri marily for scholars, its general significance was popularized through Renan's brilliant and wide ly-read 'History of the People of Israel.' No less startling has been the result of the inva sion of the °sacred° history of the Christian era by the critical methods. Building on the basis of the textual criticism of the sources of the New Testament by such scholars as Strauss, Baur, Loisy and Harnack, and the study of con temporary religions by Renan, Hatch, Cumont, Glover, Dill and others, Percy Gardner, Weiz sicker, Conybeare, Wernle, Harnack, Duchesne and McGiffert have explained with great schol arship and lucidity the syncretic nature of Apostolic and Patristic Christianity, the his toric causes for the final success of Christian ity, and the nature of the gradual development of Christian dogma and ecclesiastical organiza tion. Henry C. Lea, in a series of massive monographs, which constitute the most notable contribution of America to Church history, has dealt with the most diverse phases of the his tory of the medimval Church in a fine objective and secular spirit. Beard and TrOltsch have traced the rise and development of Protestant ism with insight and candor. Three Catholic scholars of the highest rank in the field of scholarship, Dellinger, Huber and Reusch, have made as great contributions to the battle against ecclesiastical obscurantism as any his torians from the Protestant or sceptical camps. Doflinger totally demolished the alleged his torical foundations of ultra-montanism and in fallibility in his work on 'The Pope and the Council.' Huber surveyed the history of the Jesuits with the aim of proving their deadly opposition to the spirit of modern learning and the freedom of thought. Reusch contributed the standard treatise on the history of the Papal Index and threw a flood of light upon the sinister machinery through which the re actionary element in Catholicism has endeavored to perpetuate the credulity of its followers and to exclude the perilous fruits of modern scien tific and critical research. The net result of the labors of critical scholars of every religious complexion in the field of °sacred history' has been to destroy entirely the premises of the (Fathers," which led them to mark off a field of historical development which was taboo to critical research, and it has opened every field to the operation of the same degree of patient research and calm and objective narration.
With the growth of modern natural science and the critical attitude in the appropriation and assimilation of knowledge, the effort to formu late some magnificent and systematic philo sophical scheme for the organization and pres entation of historical development, such as was devised by Augustine and Hegel, has greatly declined. Scepticism of any formal philosophy
of history seems to be but a necessary accom paniment of our increasing knowledge of the infinite complexity of social and historical phenomena, as these attempts to reduce history to such simplicity savor too much of the il•priori method, now so thoroughly discredited. To take the place of the older dogmatic philoso phy of history there have developed what may be called various of historical data. These at present differ from the older philosophy of history in the absence of any teleological element and in the rejection of the deductive method. They aim solely to em phasize and bring into high relief those factors, which, according to the various schools, seem to have been most influential in producing the civilization of to-day. It is, in short, the at tempt to supplement Ranke's aimless search for what occurred in the past by at least a feeble and humble effort to explain how the present order came about. Far from being less scientific than the older program of Ranke, it really constitutes the perfect completion of scientific method in historiography, in the same way that the formulation of the great laws of natural science constitute the logical com pletion of the task of gathering data by observation and. experimentation in the labora tory. The preceding sketch of the develop ment of historiography affords striking corrobo ration of the thesis of Professor Shotwell that the prevailing types of historical interpretation through the ages faithfully reflect the dominat ing intellectual interests of the successive eras. The divine epics of the ancient Orient were superseded by the mythological and philosophi cal interpretations of the thinkers of classical antiquity. With the general acceptance of Christianity, the classical mythology was replaced by that eschatological conception which domi nated historical interpretation from Augustine to Bossuet. With the coming of the commercial revolution and its violent shock to the old intellectual order, there arose the critical and rationalistic school of Bacon, Descartes, Vol taire and Hume, which, on account of its being too far in advance of the intellectual orienta tion of the masses, tended to lapse into the idealism of Kant and Fichte and the romanti cism of Burke, Bonald, DeMaistre and Hegel. The growth of nationalism following the French Revolution tended to give temporary precedence to the political mode of interpre tation, but the great transformations which constituted the industrial revolution, of ne cessity doomed so superficial a view to an ephemeral existence. The unprecedented breath and depth of modern knowledge and intel lectual interests have produced a number of interpretations of historical development, most of which represent the outgrowth of some one of those outstanding intellectual and social transformations which were reviewed above. There are at present some eight definite schools of historical interpretation among the representatives of the modernized students of historical phenomena, each of which has made an important contribution to our knowledge of historical development. They are in no sense in all cases mutually exclusive, but are rather, to a large degree, supplementary. They may be designated as the personal or °great man' theory; the economic or materialistic; the allied geographical or environmental; the spirit ual or idealistic; the scientific; the anthropo logical; the sociological; and the synthetic or 'collective psyschological." It may be pointed out in passing that, in the main, the older type of historian either clings to the outworn theory of political causation, or, with Professor Emer ton, holds that historical development is en tirely arbitrary and obeys no ascertainable laws. The best known of these schools of historical interpretation, and the only one that the cur rent political historians accord any considera tion, .is that which found its most noted rep resentatives in Carlyle and Froude, who claimed that the great personalities of history were the main causative factors in the historical de velopment. This view is, of course, closely allied to the catastrophic interpretation of the 18th century rationalists. Perhaps its most dis tinguished adherents to-day are Prof. Emile Faguet of Paris and Prof. William A. Dunning of Columbia University. The contributions of the economic school of historical interpretation, which was founded by Feurbaeh and Marx, and has been carried on by a host of later and less dogmatic writers, such as Sumner, Schmoller, Loria Simons, Ashley, Beard, Bogart and Siznkhovitch, are too familiar to call for any additional elaboration. In its best and most generally accepted form, it contends that the mode and status of the economic processes in society will to a very great degree decide the nature of existing social insti tutions. In spite of slight exaggerations, no phase of historical interpretation has been more fruitful or epoch-making. Imme diately related is the geographical interpreta tion of history which began with Hippocrates and continued through the writings of Strabo, Vitrtzvius, Bodin, Montesquieu and Buckle, has been revived and given a more scientific inter pretation in the hands of such writers as Karl Ritter, Ratzel, Reclus, Semple, Metchnikoff, Demolins and Huntington. Since the days of Ritter no respectable historian has dared to chronicle the history of a nation without first having acquired a knowledge of its geography. The special phases of this interpretation have been sketched above and need not be repeated at this point. Widely at variance with the economic and geographical interpretation is the somewhat belated offshoot of the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, to be found in the so-called spiritual interpretation of history, which finds its most ardent advocates in Prof. Rudolph Eucken of Germany and Prof. Shailer Matthews of Chicago. Professor Matthews thus defines this view of history: "The spiritual interpre tion of history must be found in the discovery of spiritual forces co-operating with geographic and economic to produce a general tendency toward conditions which are truly personal.