A curious discussion between M. Renan and M. 314zieres con-
cerning the personal appearance of St. Paul, has followed the public reception of M. Renan into the French Academy. M. Renan has described St. Paul as a bald man, of short stature, aquiline nose, meeting eyebrows, pale face, small head, pierc- ing eyes, thick beard, prominent shoulders, and bow legs. Challenged to explain whence he derives all these remarkable de- tails of St. Paul's personal appearance, he has cited the " Acts of Thekla " as his authority for the aquiline nose, the baldness, the meeting eyebrows, the small stature and the bow legs,—and the ecclesiastical history of Nicephorus for the small head, the piercing eyes, the pale face, the thick beard, and the prominent shoulders. As M. Renan would certainly not accept either of these very unhistorical authorities as his warrant for any state- ment intrinsically improbable, we wonder why he so eagerly appeals to them for matters not intrinsically improbable. An apocryphal writer who will freely invent portents, will be quite as ready to invent their circumstantial frame-work. Would any one in his senses go to Defoe's "Apparition of Mrs. Veale," with the view of discovering, not what Mrs. Veale's ghost was like,—being rationalistic enough to reject the ghost as a fib of Defoe's,—but what Mrs. Veale herself was like, where she had lived, and what were her circumstances ? The ways of imaginative rationalists are certainly wonderful, and their affirmations often stranger than their denials.
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