BOOKS.

M. RENAN'S LIFE OF JESUS.* Tuts is no common book. To us, indeed, it seems the attempt to create, by the aid of great learning and greater imagination, a mighty phantom in the place of the Son of God and the Son of Man ;—to paint the majestic lines of His character who "'Take as never other man spake," as converging on an imaginary focus, and as presenting, therefore, a distorted and exaggerated human image, instead of the simple beauty of divine growth. Still, it is a book that is honest, learned, and vigorous; studded here and there with touches of true genius, and, above all, a sincere endeavour to solve the problem which scepticism usually repudi- ates, wilfully depriving itself thereby of all popular claim. If the world is to be robbed of the great and solemn objects of its trust, those who undermine its worthip are, we think, bound to substitute, so far as they can, what they do believe themselves in place of the popular images which they break before our eyes. Hitherto they have not done so. They have been

i''' Vi, de Jesus. Par Ernest Renan, Membre de Unsling... Paris: Michel bhp London: Williams and Norgate. 1863.

content with Strauss and Baur to dissipate by analysis forms and scenes which they have not attempted, even where it was possible for them, to remodel and restore. M. Ronan does not fall into this error. His purpose differs from that of former sceptical critics mainly in this, that it attempts to reconstruct the life of Christ, though without any supernatural elements, instead of to analyze those elements away ; that it strives to re • store by the bold strokes of no contemptible art the life-like features of a portrait in which all the most characteristic tradi- tiGnal expressions have been condemned as spurious. What Strauss and Baur have rejected, M. Renan for the most part rejects also ; but, nevertheless, he does not despair of giving back pur- pose, power, and majesty, to the figure thus disrobed of all the drapery in which centuries of faith bad enveloped it. And we believe it will, in fact, prove the destiny of this book to awaken the educated intellect of Europe far more effectually to the greatest problem of human history, than any of its more theoretical predecessors have succeeded in doing. It is exactly because there is little or no novelty in its premisses, nothing that has not long been familiar to every student of the recent critisism, that it will string the intellectual nerve of the Christian Church to face honestly and answer adequately the greatest question that can agitate human thought. For it is the first time that any man of high power, putting aside what he believes to be super- natural and therefore false, has sought to explain honestly to himself, —without, except in one memorable instance, needlessly narrow and ungenerous criticism,—the part which our Lord has played in the history of the world. It fails, of course, utterly, as every effort of imaginative genius, however great, must fail, in trying to exclude from its vision the radical fact with which it has to deal,—to think vividly, and yet think away the very essence it is handling ; but it fails honestly and even solemnly, never intentionally suppressing anything, and allowing us to see clearly at every step that the rationalistic hypothesis which M. Renan professes to take as the ground- work of his picture, is one from which almost all the true colours that be strives to lay on, inevitably fade and disappear under his very hand. He grapples with his subject with a serious and often subtle force, that cannot but rouse all the genuine vigour of Christian conviction to interrogate its own thought in the same spirit. There is but one blot on the spirit with which, granted his premisses, his work has been done.

The first sketch of his book was traced amidst the scenes of the Gospel history, and it was concluded in the very shadow of death. Its dedication, though to our English ears it may want the reserve in which, perhaps, we too much delight to shroud private grief, is too striking a guarantee of the earnest purpose of the book to be passed over by those who wish, as we do, to reproduce honestly the sort of impression it is cal- culated to make, before we attempt to point out how its genius and insight seem to be in conflict with the ground-principle which underlies and runs through it. In 1860 and 1861 the French scientific mission for the exploration of Plicenicia, headed by M. Renan, led him to reside for some time on the borders of Galilee, and to travel repeatedly through almost every scene of our Lord's life. During the summer he retired with his sister to Ghazir, in the Lebanon, for rest, and while his impressions were yet fresh in his mind wrote out rapidly his preliminary sketch of the Life of Jesus. It was to this stay that we owe the following dedication :—

0 To THE PIME SPMIT OF MY SISTER HENRIETTE, WHO DIED AT BUILDS, 24.ra SWIMMER, 1861.

"Do you remember, from your rest in the bosom of God, those long days at Ghazir, where, alone with you, I wrote these pages, inspired by the scenes we had just traversed ? Silent at my side, you read every leaf, and copied it out as soon as written, while the sea the villages, the ravine, the mountains, unrolled themselves at our feet. When the overwhelming light of the sun had given place to the innumerable army of stars, your fine and delicate questions, your discreet doubts, brought me back to the sublime object of our common thoughts. One day you said that you should love this book—first, because it had been written with you and also because it pleased you. If sometimes you feared for it the narrow judgments of the frivolous man, you were always persuaded that spirits truly religious would in the end be pleased with it. In the midst of these sweet meditations Death struck us both with his wing ; the sleep of fever seized us both in the same hour ; I awoke alone! You sleep now in the land of Adonis, near the holy Byblus and the sacred waters where the women of the ancient mysteries came to mingle their tears. Reveal to me, my good genius, to me whom you loved, those truths which master Death, prevent us from fearing, and make us almost love it !"

These are lines which no man could trace without a deep con- viction that his thoughts had been double-sifted through both a sincere intellect and a sincere spirit; and so, in truth, painfully as M. Renan's pages often impress us, we believe it to be. Indeed, even before his sister's death, his familiarity with the scenes of Christ's life seem to have powerfully affected his imagination :— " All this history," he says, "which at a distance seemed to float in the clouds of an unreal world, now took a body and solidity which ,astonished me. The striking agreement of the text and the places, the marvellous harmony of the evangelical ideal with the country which served as a frame to the picture, were for me like a revelation. I had before my eyes a fifth gospel, injured but still decipherable, and from that time forward, through the narratives of Matthew and Mark, in place of an abstract being whom one might think had never existed, I saw an admirable human figure live and move." Let us try to reproduce M. Renan's "admirable human figure," before we attempt very briefly to criticize his work.

Jesus of Nazareth, then, he sketches as originally a simple, contemplative, innocent, rustic saint, with a villager's simple ideas of the kingdoms of the world, and the glories of a court, —which he sketches in his parables about kings, says M. Rental, with the most delightful naiveté and want of contwissance des choses,—but with a religions fire of love burning in his heart, a profound apprehension of God as his Father, and that ardour to bring others to the same love of Him which gives force, dignity, and breadth to the least experienced wisdom. His whole nature revolted against the hard and false sanctimony of Phari- saism. With regard to the Law, he had eagerly accepted the teaching, then widely disseminated among the Jews, of the school of Hillel, who, his predecessor by fifty years, had "by his humbly borne poverty, by the gentleness of his character, by the opposition which he offered to the hypocrites and priests, earned the right to be regarded as the true master of Jesus, if one may speak of a master at all in rela- tion to an originality so great." But it would not be for even the widest interpreters of the Law, says M. Renan, that Christ can have felt any great fascination. The Psalms, Isaiah, and the more recent Messianic literature, beginning with the Book of Daniel, and continued in the Apocryphal Book of Henoch; had for many reasons a greater imaginative charm for the genius of the young prophet. It is from the Book of Daniel that he drew the Messianic title of " Son of Man," which, with a fine apprecia- tion of his own exquisitely human genius, he reserved especially for himself. Moreover, the attempt in these books to sketch the future course of history was the origin of Christ's own great millennial dreams, and the source of much of his imaginative power over his countrymen.

It was the sublimity of these visions which raised the popular poetry of the Jews so far above that of the classical nations. "Greece," says M. Ronan, "traced charming pictures of human life in sculpture and poetry, but always without evanescent back- grounds or distant horizons. Here there are wanting the marble, the practised workman, the exquisite and refined language. But Galilee raised for the popular imagination a more sublime ideal, since behind its idyls you see swaying in the balance the lot of humanity, and the light which shines upon its pictures is the sun of the kingdom of God." Into such a heritage of thoughts and pictures Jesus, says M. Renan, early entered, feeding his heart first upon his own spiritual intercourse with his Father, then upon the gentle and anti-ceremonial wisdom of Hillel, lastly on the pure poetry of the Psalms, the wonderful visions of the Prophets, and those growing stores of Apocalyptic literature which, in boldly venturing to identify the destiny of the Jews with the destiny of the whole human race, had given the first impulse to what we now call the philosophy of his- tory, and so rivetted the high speculative imagination of Jesus. It is now no more possible, says our author, to throw our- selves back into Christ's position, "than for the earth, after it has cooled down to understand the phenomena of the primitive creation when the fire which then penetrated it has died out." He had no notion, indeed, says M. Renan, of physical law, and to him tho miracle which arrests sickness and death was nothing but "the free volition of God," and, therefore, nothing extraordinary. "But in his great spirit such a belief produced effects quite oppo- site to those which it produced on the vulgar. With the vulgar, faith in the particular action of the Deity brought with it a silly credulity and the trickery of charlatans. With him it led to a pro- found idea of the familiar relations between Gad and man, and an exaggerated belief in the power of man, —beautiful errors which were the secret of his power ; for if they were one day to lower him in the eyes of the physician and the chemist, they gave him a power on his time of which no man ever disposed either before or since." Add to all this the freedom of his life in Galilee before his boldness brought down upon him the death he

almost courted,—a freedom which no modern society, hedged in by conventional rules and positive laws, can understand,—for the medical laws of France alone, says our author, would have at once put a stop to that irregular and empiric practice of healing the multitude which was one great source of his power with them, —and M. Renan gains some faint vision of the favourable condi- tions under which his great character grew to such unexampled sublimity. In the free life under the open sky of Galilee he risked everything, no doubt, but great risks are only stimulus to a truly creative mind ; it is the petty fetters of an omnipresent social police, cutting and clipping life to a given pattern, which dwarf the growth. and stunt the greatness of modern humanity. "That mountain summit of Nazareth, where no man of modern days can sit without a troubled feeling, perhaps frivolous, about his destiny—there Jesus sat twenty years without a doubt. Delivered from self-seeking, the source of our troubles, which makes us seek bitterly for some interest in virtue beyond the tomb, he thought only on his work, on his nation, on the human race. Those mountains, that sea, that azure heaven those high table-lands on the horizon, were for him not the melan- bholy vision of a soul which interrogates nature about its lot, but the certain symbol, the transparent shadow, of an invisible world and a new heaven." Thus love of his spiritual Father, Hebrew poetry, the living spirit of the Law, the visions of a Messianic age that should include the whole race of man, his ignorance of science and belief in the plenary force of divine volition, the politi- cal freedom of his time which scarcely interfered with individual action except to slay at once, the beauty of nature about him, and—part result of all these, part cause,--his wonderful power of inspiring love in the simple men and women around,—all tended, says our author, to raise to the highest Intensity a character of marvellous breadth and force. One touch is so true and so original in M. Ronan, that believers in our Lord may thank him heartily for it, and we have, there- fore, reserved it to the last. There was never in the world, says M. Renan, a character so little capable of entering into shades of thought and feeling (nuances) as the Semitic. The hard contrasts and bitter ruptures which mark all the Jewish history are full of testimonies to this defect. The lines of dividing light and shadow are more harsh and strong than the shadow lines of moonlight. But "Jesus, who was exempt from almost all the de- fects of his race, and whose dominant characteristic was an infi- nite delicacy," was an exception to the rule. Hence, in great measure, perhaps his wonderful power over women, whom, says M. Renan, he, —wrapped in divine ideas,—and, half careless of human ties, ex- cept as ministering to the development of their thoughts, treated with the tenderness of "a vague poetry." Finally, and for much the same reason, our author thinks that, while tolerating the State or civil power, he always speaks of it with an essential "irony," and regarded it in his heart as at best an external alle- viation, and utterly inadequate remedy, for the ills of human society, Such is a sketch, in many respects remarkable for insight and beauty, of the character of him from whom M. Remus wishes to withdraw all faith that May not be given to man. It is not easy to feel equal respect for the spirit of his narrative of ourLord's life. Working withthe unmanageable hypothesis that everything super- natural is false, there are two constant and perpetually recurring obstacles to anything like a high appreciation. In the first place, Christ's whole life is inextricably intertwined with a belief in his own kingdom and his absolute relation with God, through which, Indeed, others might come to the Father, but not without his intermediate agency to bestow the true spirit of the Son ; next, it is not only full, but fuller and fuller as the end draws near, of the assertion of his power, if men will only consent, to break every yoke from that of sin and suffering to that of death itself. M. Renan sees this, and is forced to adopt the hypothesis of a partial degeneration of the character of Jesus, as the exigeont claims of his own asserted Messiahship forced him to vin- dicate them to the world. Had he died after the Sermon on the Mount, or the declaration of that "only absolute religion" by the well of Samalia, "God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth," then "there would not have been in his life any page to grieve us ;—but, greater in the eyes of God, he would have been ignored by man. He would have been lost in the crowd of . great unknown spirits, the greatest of all." Fortunately for us, says M. Renan, it was not so. Jesus did not come "stainless out of the struggle of life," or he would have been unable to influence life. "Au fond the Ideal is always a Utopia." "Every idea loses something of its purity from the moment it aspires

to realize itself." It was the instinct of genius for acting upon the world that led Jesus into the Messianic groove of thought. It was that says M. Renan, that soiled his purity, though with- out it he could never have founded a lasting Church. If he had i any original defect it was in that which we moderns call absolute

f sincerity with ourselves—a virtue almost unknown to the ancient world, scarcely possible to its half-developed consciousness, and its wholly undeveloped science. Modern veracity, he thinks, is half a product of exact science, which has given to faithfulness in details a new importance. If, therefore, M. Renan denies this to Jesus in its highest degree, he warmly deprecates the notion that he is denying to him what the same denial would mean in modern times, and in the west of Europe. "Sincerity with oneself," says M. Renan, "has not much meaning with Orientals, little habituated as they are to the delicate distinctions of the critical spirit. Good faith and imposture are words which, to our rigid conscience, are as irreconcileable as logical opposites. In the East there are, in passing from the one to the other, a thousand shades of evasion and indirectness. All great things spring from the people, but one cannot guide the people except by con- cessions to their ideas. . . . The philosopher who, knowing this, isolates himself, and entrenches himself in his nobility, is worthy of high praise. But he who takes humanity with its illusions, and seeks to act upon it and with it, could not be blamed. Ctesar knew very well that he was not the son of Venus. France would not be what she is if men had not believed for a thousand years in the holy vial of Rheims. It is easy for us, impotent as we are, to call this Falsehood, and, glorying in our timid honesty, to treat with disdain the heroes who have accepted, under other conditions, the struggle of life. When we have done with our scruples what they did with their falsehoods, we shall have won the right to be hard on them." Accordingly, M. Renan, trying to conceive the truth of the life of Jesus in a rationalizing point of view, sees even in his first years, "innocent artifices," such as the attempting to persuade Nathana.el into the belief that he had a certain supernatural knowledge of his thoughts under the fig-tree ; and believes that the Messianic claim which he set up in perfect good faith, and held earnestly to the last, led him deeper towards the close of his career into that Oriental finesse for a good end, which he deems so little blame- able. He believes that throughout, Jesus, believing himself in his own miracles of healing, was still uncomfortable as to the extent and amplitude of his powers, that in consequence of this feeling, as well as the deeper fascination of his spiritual and Messianic ideas, he felt and frequently betrayed that impatience of the appetite for miracle which occasionally escaped him, and that, in short, he rather underwent (subissait) the miracles which the people and his disciples demanded of him than worked them, or, still less, courted the opportunity of working them. But this demand upon him grew as his claim to the Messiahship spread. And hence M. Henan seeks to explain the great miracle of the resurrection of Lazarus in a fashion wholly unworthy of his own purely naturalistic conceptions of Christ—in a fashion which is, indeed, the great literary blot on his book. He inclines to believe that a fictitious resurrection was got up as a "pious fraud" at Bethany by the family of Lazarus, and that their Master, after weeping genuinely for the supposel death of his friend, on Lazarus's return from the tomb permitted the reputation of his miraculous recall to life to be attributed to him without denial. The friends of Jesus would never have hesitated, he thinks, to force thus the hand of their Master. "Faith knows no law but the interest of that which it believes to be true. If this proof were not solid, how many were ! Intimately persuaded that Jesus was a worker of wonders, Lazarus and his two sisters might have helped one of his miracles into execution, as so many pious men, convinced of the truth of their religion, have sought to triumph over the obstinacy of men by means of which they well knew the feebleness As for Jesus, he was no more than St. Bernard and St. Francis of Assisium, able to master the greediness of the crowd and of his own disciples for the marvel- lous. Death, besides, was about in a few days to give him back his divine liberty, and to rescue him fr3m the fatal necessities of a part which became each day more exigeant, more difficult to sustain." Thus has the "innocent artifice," which began by playing a moral legerdemain with Nathanael's conscience, developed into a toleration of a "pious fraud" far gro:ser than even Pharisaic consciences were wont to tolerate ! The woe which Christ had so lately denounced on "the scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, like unto whited sepulchres, which appear beautiful outwardly, but within are full of dead men's bones and of all _uncleanness," would surely, according to this great literary no less than spiritual blunder,. have recoiled on the head of M. Renan's Jesus, Such a conspirator as this cannot be identified even with M. Renan's greatbut rapidly degenerating hero. It is the only thread of thought in the book which we feel inclined to call not only erroneous, but impious.

Moreover, the necessity of his false Messianic position led our Lord, in M. Renan's view, not only into duplicity but fanaticism. We will conclude the merely expository part of our review with a very remarkable passage, in which he strives to delineate the growing fever which burnt up the soul of his imaginary hero as the necessity of his position grew more and more urgent :—

" We easily understand that for Jesus, at the period at which we have now arrived, all that was not the kingdom of God bad absolutely disappeared. He was, if one may say so, entirely beyond the limits of nature (totalement hers de la nature)—family, friendship, country, had no longer any meaning for him. Without doubt he had from this time made the sacrifice of his life. Sometimes one is tempted to think that seeing in his own death a means of founding his kingdom, he deliber- ately conceives the purpose of making his foes kill him.(I ) At other times, though such a thought was not till much later elevated into a dogma, death presents itself to him as a sacrifice destined to appease his Father and to save men.(2) A strange taste for persecution and tortures penetrated him (Luke vi. 22, and following). His own blood appeared to him like the water of a second baptism with which he had yet to be baptized, and he seemed seized with a strange haste to anticipate this baptism, which alone could quench his thirst. The grandeur of his views on the future was at moments surprising. He did not conceal from himself the fearful storm which he was to raise in the world. You believe, perhaps,' he said, with boldness and beauty, ' that I came to bring peace on earth ;

I did not come to bring peace but to throw down a sword. In one house of five persons three shall be against two, and two against three.

I came to bring division between the son and the father, between the daughter and the mother, between the daughter-in-law and

the mother-in-law. In future, a man's foes shall be those of his own household.' 'I came to bring fire on earth, and so much the better if it be already burning.' 'They will deliver you from the synagogues, and the hour will come when, in killing you, they will think to render God service. If the world hates you, know that it hated me before you. Remember the word I have said unto you, the servant is not greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you also.' Carried away by this frightful access of en- thusiasm, compelled by the necessities of a preaching more and more exalted, Jesus was no longer free. He belonged to his part, and in a sense to humanity. Sometimes one would say that his reason was disturbed. He had something like agonies and interior agitations.(3) The great vision of the kingdom of God glancing without cessation before his eyes, turned him giddy (lui donnait is vertige). His disciples at moments believed him insane.(4) His enemies declared him pos- sessed.(5) His temperament, full of passion, carried him every instant beyond the bounds of human nature. His work being one not of reason, and playing (se jouant) with all the classifications of the human spirit, what it demanded most imperiously was 'faith.' This word was that which was oftenest repeated in the little church. It is the word of all popu- lar movements. It is evident that none of these movements would succeed if it were necessary that their leader should gain all his disciples, one after the other, by good proofs logically deduced. Reflection leads only to doubt, and if the authors of the French Revolution, for example, had had to be preliminarily convinced by adequately long meditation, all would have arrived at old age without doing anything. Jesus, in the same way, looked less to inspiring regular conviction than to carrying away his hearers. Urgent, imperative, he suffered no opposition. One must be converted; he is waiting. His natural sweetness seems to have deserted him; he was sometimes rough and bizarre.(6) His dis- ciples at times did not understand him, and felt before him a sort of sentiment of fear.(7) Sometimes his displeasure against all opposition carried Him away into acts inexplicable and even absurd.(8) It was not that his virtue was declining, but his struggle in the name of the ideal against reality became insupportable. He bruised himself, and recoiled from contact with the earth. Obstacles irritated him. His notion of the Son of God became troubled and exaggerated. The fatal law which condemns the idea to decay from the moment that it seeks to convert men took effect in his case. Men, in touching him, lowered him to their level. The tone which he had taken could not be sustained beyond a few months ; it was time for death to come and unloose the knot of a situation of the extremest tension, relieve him from the impossibilities of a path without Lime, and, by delivering him from a trial too pro- longed, introduce him, for the future sinless, into his heavenly peace."

Such is, we think, a fair, at all events an anxiously candid account of a book, which we believe to contain the most genuine and devout attempt to explain our Lord's life, if we may reason- ably use such an expression, from below, that we have ever met with. Wholly and painfully at issue with its principle, we sin- cerely believe the book will do almost unmixed good. It is too earnest and noble in tone to attract mere sceptical levity. And for all other thinkers, whether holding to the Incarnation or not, it puts for the first time the full issue, in a practical form, before their—we will not say imaginations, but rather before themselves. If M. Renan's striking picture does not call up within them a (1) Matthew xri., 21-23; xvIt, 12 and 21-22.

(2) Mark x., 45.

(3) John xil, 27.

(4) Mark iii, 21, and following.

(5) John via., 20; viii., 48; x., 20. (0) Matt xvii., 10; Mark iii., 0; Ix., 18; Luke viii., 15; IL, 41. (7) Mark iv., 40; v., 15 ; ix., 31; x., 92. (8) Mark xi., 12, 14, 20, Sc.. figure far more striking, and yet also far more real, if their hearts do not so far burn within them even at the traits whinh M. Renan occasionally brings out so finely as to shrivel up to dust much of his appended literary theory, if even through this sin- cere but warped interpretation, "the thoughts of many hearts" are not so far revealed as to awaken other and deeper thoughts, which M. Rman either ignores or has forsworn, we must have read this book under the shadow of some great illusion. We have never read a professedly sceptical book that tended more powerfully to strengthen the faith which it struggles to supplant. In trying to dispel the darkness cast by mere negative criticism, and to throw the light of the new theory more fully on the image of Christ, M Renan seems to us to be constantly and involun- tarily using expressions which snatch us away altogether out of the ostensible plane of his own thought. You shift your point of view uneasily to catch his meaning, and re-examine the citations by which he supports it, and suddenly his words take a new effect on the mind, and instead of pressing a forced criticism from below, they unseal our sight to a fresh illumination from above. It would not be possible, without too far extending this already too extended review, to illustrate our meaning at all fully, but we cannot leave the book without a few more lines of ex- planation.

The one great difficulty, it will have been seen, which M. Renan evidently foals most keenly, is the reconciliation of something large, sunny, and sometimes almost playful, iu the character of Jesus, with the vehemence, the force of passion, the overbearing self-sacrifice of tone which he discerns in other passages of his life, and which seem to his keen eye to put Christ almost altogether "out of the plane of nature," and present him as living for the Ideal, every human tie sundered or despised, in bitter conflict with reality. The bright vision of the kingdom of Gol seams, at times, says M. Renan, to turn the brain of Jesus giddy, and burn too fiercely and exhaustingly into the tender sympathies of his humenity ; at other times the " vague poetry" of his tender- ness for women, the delicate sense of moral nuances amid the bleak forms and desolate grandeur of the Semitic thought, the sweet elasticity of his filial faith, that could bear all things except hypocrisy, the patient tolerance of his bearing towards the civil power, the sunny freedom of his love for nature, strike him with equal surprise, as the characteristics rather of a wise poet than a burning prophet. The two do seem inconsistent, and the scientific artifice by which M. Ronan has reconciled them is scarcely worthy a moment's consideration. As we have seen, he gets over the difficulty by pushing back the gentle characteristics into the earlier period of the life of Jesus, and postponing the more passionate to the later. On examining his references, however, one may see that there is not the remotest bio- graphical ground for this device. Many of the more command- ing and scathing words attributed to him belong, if there be any reliable notes of time at all in his career, to the earliest period of our Lord's life. M. Renan, with what we hold to be a thoroughly true critical insight, holds to the external narrative of St. John's gospel, though unfriendly, and, indeed, thoroughly unjust, to its report of Christ's discourses. But, judged by this gospel, the severest and most decidedly Elijah-like act of Christ's life, his cleansing of the Temple, was immediately consequent on his first intercourse with John the Baptist. And looking not only to that, but to all the other gospels, we cannot doubt that the severest of his conflicts with the Pharisees is by no means to be placed in the last period of his ministry. Probably, there is no period in his life which is so fully penetrated with the divine sunlight of his tenderness as the period before and during the last passover. If tradition has any chronological value at all , that period, when the box of ointment was shed upon him, w h en he wept over the doomed city, when he warned Peter of his coming fall, washed the feet of the disciples, told the daughters of Jerusalem to weep not for him though the cross was oven then being set up before his eyes, but to weep for themselves and for their children, and finally prayed for forgiveness on his enemies, was not a period of zeal withering all human ties, and putting him beyond the plane of nature, but of marvellous and surpassing love, such 83 could not easily be matched in our accounts of the Galilean period. M. Renan's attempt to trace a history of gradual absorp- tion into an idea, of a dizzied brain, and enthusiasm almost drying up the fountains of human charity, has not even the shadow of a foundation. If there be a period still traceable in our imperfect records of a more prophetic force of denunciation than any other, it is an earlier period, before the end closed in, and there still seemed to glimmer some hope that the Pharisaic phalanx might be piereed. Yet that there are these two striking contrasts in Christ's character,—the luxuriantlreauty and the forked lightning, —M. Renan has truly discerned ; may not Christ's own con- stantly repeated account of their origin be the true one, "Whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father eaith unto me, so I speak ?" The divine charity and the divine wrath are only rays broken in two by the imperfections of men. In the Son of God, whose mind moves in perfect harmony with his Father's, they may exist together, though they shine, out separately for us. M. Renan believes that "the Idea " must degenerate when it attempts to incarnate itself in practice' human life. Perhaps that may be so with "the Idea ;" it has, at all events, ever been so with idealists. We do not see that it can be so, we feel the profoundest faith that it is not so, when it is not "the Idea," but the divine personality of the. Son of God, who comes into that humiliating but elevating contact.

Indeed, to those who can believe entirely in the genuine gospel of the Incarnation, and at the times when they can utterly believe it, to those who can have fait 11 in the entrance of the Eternal. Son for a season into a finite nature and mortal consciousness,, who can 830 that this is something far as the poles asunder from that affectation of a human part by Omniscience, which pseudo- Orthodox theology so often confounds with it—for these all M. Ronan s difficulties fade away, while all the gleams of new light his book has shown, remain. The nail and inex- perienced Galilean peasant, speaking of Courts with a villager's vague impressions, and looking at the world, without any glimpse of insight into the scientific discoveries of ages yet to come, fore- seeing with rapture the divine kingdom and divine judgments,. but only through the semi-transparent light of those "times and- seasons which the Father bath kept in his own power,"— showing forth adequately his divine personality and origin only in the fullness and perfection of his communion with his Father's will, but unfolding that will to man through the limited forms and imperfect conceptions of his age and nation,—wollking- miracles, as he spoke, not at his own will, but at the will of Him who sent him, in short, continuing under the con- ditions of shortsighted humanity the spiritual life he had lived. in the plenitude of his heavenly intercourse with God, and so linking together eternity with time, the divine purposes behind the laws of nature, with their steady and seemingly inex- orable course—this figure, surely, is far more true, as well as far more noble, than M. Renan's composite Jesus. Indeed, this. mystery seems to us in no way more difficult, in many ways far easier to lay hold of, than M. Renan's Absolute Spirit, who. inspires man with ideas which necessarily degenerate in practice, who can breathe into man true thoughts, but cannot teach him to act true actions. If we could concede that a belief in revealing miracle is justifiable only by such external evidence as would ba required for mere marvels—if we could grant, too, that Christ's one spiritual certainty of the unique and immanent character of his relation to the Father was necessarily a fanatical belief, then M. Renau's doubts and his imputations of innocent artifice and Oriental unscrupulousness are all justified ; while his gleams of insight remain monuments of generous credulity. We can grant neither premise; but have to thank this spiritual sceptic for new glimpses into the power of a faith which he regards with pity ; for a deeper apprehension of an incarnated purity that he con- siders safe from pollution only while it remains unmanifested- cloistered in the solitude of a fruitless ideal world.