With such radical alteration of the funda mental judgments regarding Scripture and the Church underlying interpretation there resulted naturally a complete change in the interpretative method. Not only was the literal sense held to he the primary sense to be considered. hut the study of it was held to be perfectly possible with the aid furnished by Scripture itself. In other words, Scripture was held to be its own inter preter, sufficient and complete in all matters per taining to salvation. As a consequence, the de termination of Scripture meaning devolved upon the individual student of Scripture, so that pri vate judgment for the first time in history came to be not only a fact of criticism, but a right, of religion.
At the same time, under the continued influ ence of scholarship, the study of the original lan guages and other helps was carried on, serving constantly to make the Scriptures clearer to the understanding, while, under the growth of relig ious fervor, the Scriptures themselves were stud ied for the aid they could give religious life, serving to make them increasingly impressive to the spiritual sense. The Spirit was recognized not only as having spoken to the writers of Scripture, but as then and there speaking to those who came to Scripture in study or in med itation. and so the tendency asserted itself to refer all Scripture in its meaning to Christ, and naturally also claim was laid upon the need of faith in Christ and general spiritual illumination in order to understand the meaning which Scrip ture really conveyed.
This tendency to centre everything on Christ, however, naturally opened the way to a return to the old habit of allegory; while the tendency to interpret Scripture in the light of itself led to the sole emphasizing of what was called, after the Pauline phrase (Rom. xii. 5), "the propor tion of faith." This idea of proportion was use ful primarily in preventing the distortion of single passages against their context or against the statements of Scripture as a whole. but it shifted its course most easily from the 'faith' given by Scripture in its own teachings to that laid down by the teachings of the Church. and in so doing started the whole process of interpre tation toward the baneful exaggerations of the scholasticism which followed upon this first period of the Reformation.
(2) The period of the Counter-Reformation, represented by Cajetan, 1469-1534; Bellarmin, 1542-1621; Francis of Sales, 1567-1622; and Jansenius. 1585-1638.
Though the Roman communion did not change its conception of the Church's authoritative rela tion to interpretation. nor alter its idea of the plenary inspiration of the Scriptures, yet the humanism which had been so influential in bring ing Protestantism to life had had its effect also within the Mother Church. In both churches it had emphasized the value of the sources of the ology; yet, owing to the fact that with the Roman Catholic Church the old belief in eccle siastical authority and Scripture inspiration still obtained, it was natural, not only that while the Reformers went back for their sources to Augustine and Paul. the Roman Catholic schol ars stopped with Aquinas; but also that such revival of theological learning as their study of the sources brought about did not produce with the latter any vital change in interpretative methods.
In fact, the merits of the Counter-Reforma tion, which are to he freely and fully recognized, were in the purifying of the Church's organiza tion and the spiritualizing of its life, rather than in the liberalizing of its methods of interpreta tive work. What impulses toward this there might have been were impossible of realization in view of the reactionary decrees of the Council of Trent (1545-63), which united ecclesiastical tradition to the Scriptures and the Apocrypha as the authoritative sources of the Church's faith, and made the Church itself the sole expounder of the sense they should have.
(3) The Post-Reformation Period. (1) The sub-period of Protestant Scholasticism, repre sented by Gerhardt, 158•.-1637: J. G. Carpzovius, 1679-1767; and Calovius, d.1686.
It was natural that, having rejected the infal lible authority of the Papacy, the Reformation Church should not only look around for another objective authority to take its place. which it found in the Scriptures, but that, having secured a political right to its peculiar doctrines, and be ing thus compelled to maintain them against the attacks of opposing Protestant theologies, as well as against the teachings of Rome, it should come to make the authoritative Scripture an oracle to serve it in its needs, and so substitute for a scholarly interpretation of the Scriptures a dog matic distorting of them.