David Friedrich Strauss, - the author of the once celebrated mythical
theory of the New Testament history, died at Ludwigs- burg in Wiirtemberg on Monday last, aged 65. His general view was that the expectations which tradition and legend had fostered in the minds of the Jews before the birth of 'Christ, had gradually crystallised into the miraculous narratives which we find recorded so soon after Christ had inspired in his disciples the belief in him as the Messiah. Devout expectation, blending with a few fragments of fact, soon be- came, said Strauss, marvellous history, —and on this theory he attempted, with infinite ingenuity and labour, to explain away the alleged marvels of our Lord's life. But 'The Life of Jesus,' -the tone of which was strictly pantheistic, was not the mature -expression of his religious view. In the book called 'Religion and Dogma,' which made so much stir a year ago, Strauss abandoned all affectation of faith in anything divine, except 'the " Universum " or Cosmos, and did -not explain clearly what he found admirable in that. His scepticism was of the kind which makes the man who indulges it distrust popular feelings, and wish for an aristocracy of culture,—the thought which exposes supersti- tion seeming to him the highest evidence of power for government. When he was elected to the Wiirtemberg Diet in 1818, he joined the Conservative party, to the disgust of his constituents, who noon prevailed on him to resign. His mind was marked by that intellectual tenuity which loves to spin what looks like much -out of little, but the fate of such speculations is usually -to verify the nature of their origin, by returning into the comparative unimportance from which they came. And so it will be with Strauss's works, except his biographies of contemporaries, which were written in classical German, and with great insight into character. His satire on the pietist King Frederick Wil- liam IV., under the thin veil of a monograph on "Julian the Romanticist," was, perhaps, the most successful of his polemical vrritings.
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