is here wholly wanting.  Men and things are brought summarily to the bar of the wisdom of the author’s year of grace.  They are approved or condemned by this criterion.  For Baur, all things had come to pass in the process of the great life of the world.  There must have been a rationale of their becoming.  It is for the historian with sympathy and imagination to find out what their inherent reason was.  One other thing distinguishes Baur as church historian from his predecessors.  He realised that before one can delineate one must investigate.  One must go to the sources.  One must estimate the value of those sources.  One must have ground in the sources for every judgment.  Baur was himself a great investigator.  Yet the movement for the investigation of the sources of biblical and ecclesiastical history which his generation initialed has gone on to such achievements that, in some respects, we can but view the foundations of Baur’s own work as precarious, the results at which he arrived as unwarranted.  New documents have come to light since his day.  Forgeries have been proved to be such, The whole state of learning as to the literature of the Christian origins has been vastly changed.  There is still another other thing to say concerning Baur.  He was a Hegelian.  He has the disposition always to interpret the movements of the religious spirit in the sense of philosophical ideas.  He frankly says that without speculation every historical investigation remains but a play upon the surface of things.  Baur’s fault was that in his search for, or rather in his confident discovery of, the great connecting forces of history, the biographical element, the significance of personality, threatened altogether to disappear.  The force in the history was the absolute, the immanent divine will.  The method everywhere was that of advance by contrasts and antagonisms.  One gets an impression, for example, that the Nicene dogma became what it did by the might of the idea, that it could not by any possibility have had any other issue.

The foil to much of this in Baur’s own age was represented in the work of Neander, a converted Jew, professor of church history in Berlin, who exerted great influence upon a generation of English and American scholars.  He was not an investigator of sources.  He had no talent for the task.  He was a delineator, one of the last of the great painters of history, if one may so describe the type.  He had imagination, sympathy, a devout spirit.  His great trait was his insight into personality.  He wrote history with the biographical interest.  He almost resolves history into a series of biographical types.  He has too little sense for the connexion of things, for the laws of the evolution of the religious spirit.  The great dramatic elements tend to disappear behind the emotions of individuals.  The old delineators were before the age of investigation.  Since that impulse became masterful, some historians have been completely absorbed in the effort to make contribution to this investigation.  Others, with a sense of the impossibility of mastering the results of investigation in all fields, have lost the zeal for the writing of church history on a great scale.  They have contented themselves with producing monographs upon some particular subject, in which, at the most, they may hope to embody all that is known as to some specific question.