the glossarial annotations groan beneath the burden of numberless unsifted examples and parallel passages. What had been done during the past sixteen hundred years remains almost entirely unnoticed; Luther is not explored, even Calvin within the pale of his own church no longer exerts any influence over the exposition of Scripture. After 1750, the exposition of Scripture lost that spiritual and ecclesiastical character which had gained strength in the seventeenth century, but had also gradually become torpid; whereas in the Romish church, as the Psalm-expositions of De Sacy, Berthier and La Harpe show, it never sank so low as to deny the existence of revealed religion. That love for the Ps., which produced the evangelical hymn-psalter of that truly Christian poet and minister Christoph Karl Ludwig von Pfeil (1747),[1] prefaced by Bengel, degenerated to a merely literary, or at most poetical, interest, - exegesis became carnal and unspiritual. The remnant of what was spiritual in this age of decline, is represented by Burk in his Gnomon to the Ps. (1760) which follows the model of Bengel, and by Chr. A. Crusius in the second part of his Hypomnemata ad Theologiam Propheticam (1761), a work which follows the track newly opened up by Bengel, and is rich in germs of progressive knowledge (vid., my Biblisch-prophetische Theologie, 1845). We may see the character of the theology of that age from Joh. Dav. Michaelis' translation of the Old Testament, with notes for the unlearned (1771), and his writings on separate Psalms. From a linguistic and historical point of view we may find something of value here; but besides, only wordy, discursive, tasteless trifling and spiritual deadness. It has been the honour of Herder that he has freed psalm-exposition from this want of taste, and the merit of Hengstenberg (first of all in his Lectures), that he has brought it back out of this want of spirituality to the believing consciousness of the church.
The transition to modern exposition is marked by Rosenmüller's Scholia to the Ps. (first published in 1798-1804), a compilation written in pure clear language with exegetical tact and with a thankworthy use of older expositors who had become unknown, as Rüdinger, Bucer, and
- ↑ Vid., his Life by Heinr. Jerz (1863), 111-117.
