That which carries no such reproach in it, but is, when rightly read, an honor to the Bible, may be pointed out, as the Biblical writers, indeed, do for us themselves.

The marks of a patient and noble literary workmanship are in every writing.

We can see this as our fathers could not see it, because the glasses through which to read literature critically have been ground within our century.  Literary criticism is the study of literature by means of a microscopic knowledge of the language in which a book is written, of its growth from various roots, of its stages of development and the factors influencing them, of its condition in the period of this particular composition, of the writer’s idiosyncrasies of thought and style in his ripening periods, of the general history and literature of his race, and of the special characteristics of his age and of his contemporary writers.

Every educated person knows something of the working of this criticism on other books.  You have read your Shakespeare with intelligence, and have felt many misgivings as to the genuineness of a few plays, and of passages in many plays.  The brutalities and beastlinesses of Titus Andronicus seemed impossible to the author of “The Tempest” and the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.”  The historic plays seemed to you often “padded.”  But there was nothing more than guess-work in your conclusions, and, you suspected, in the more pretentious opinions of others.  You take up, however, the lectures of Hudson or the charming study of Dowden, and you find that criticism is becoming, not merely an art, depending on certain instincts and tastes, but a science, building slowly a well-settled body of laws and rules, and shaping already a well defined consensus of judgment.  The growth of the English language and literature, the characteristics of society, of language and of literature in the Elizabethan era, the idioms of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the manner of Shakespeare himself, in his different periods, have all been so minutely studied as to form a distinct specialty in knowledge.  The Shakespearian scholar is a well differentiated species of the genus scholar, and speaks with a substantial authority upon what is now a real science.  You can follow this teacher into Shakespeare’s work-shop, watch the building of his plays, distinguish the hands which toiled over them and mark their journeyman’s work, till quite sure where the Master’s own inimitable touch caressed them into noble form, and in what period of his life he thus wrought.  There is a new revelation of Shakespeare to our age.

This criticism turned upon the great books of the ancients.  Niebuhr led the way in reconstructing the early history of the Romans.  Dr. Arnold predicted that a Niebuhr of Jewish literature would arise.  He came duly.  His name was Ewald.  Successors have followed in abundance.  The principles and processes of literary criticism were applied to the Hebrew writings.