a presentiment that a Life of Jesus is yet to be written, which shall build out of all these materials a house of the soul's belief, open at once to the free air of earth and to the upper light of heaven; or, in plain speech, which shall apply with good sense to the Gospel records, not only the last conclusions of science, but also the everlasting sentiments of religion. Ingenious as have been the theories brought to bear upon the singular phenomena presented by the four Gospels, scarcely has one of their propounders approached, with reverence at all corresponding to his ability and ingenuity, the phenomena, the simple facts themselves, as they stand on the immortal pages, and asked, in the simplicity of common sense and conscience, How came they there? What do they mean? As a mere marvel of literary history, it seems astonishing that the question presented by this fourfold picture of a life which has wrought with such unexampled power on the world's life and fortunes, has so faintly and fitfully exercised the minds of literary men; but when we reflect that every man has a spiritual interest in the matter indefinitely transcending all mere intellectual interest, the amount of indifference on the subject seems unaccountable.

It may be said, however, Granting that no Life of Jesus has yet made the best use of all the ready material, that none has given so complete and just a picture of its subject as it would be interesting to have, is it important that another attempt should be made in this direction? In reply we say, it seems to us that a fresh presentation of the life of Jesus, conceived in the interests of humanity, under a sense of his humanity, and carried out in a careful, conscientious spirit, were, in these days especially, a thing to be welcomed. A timely and a thankful task, in our opinion, does he undertake, who, in a love of truth and goodness and man, seeks to recall, through the clouds of tradition and from amidst the confused shadows of sectarian exaggeration, and to reshape in the glow of an imaginative and sympathetic soul, the lineaments of that divine man after whom Christendom names itself, yet to whose word it has hitherto rendered, practically and comparatively, so little hearty homage. We hail as a good omen, and a most opportune labor of love, every sincere and single-hearted en

deavor to revive in the heart of this age a sense of the reality of Him who embodies the ideal after which the whole creation groans, and who is ever yearning to be born again into this world where his own are suffering and struggling, and to suffer and struggle and triumph with them in the strife of truth and right and liberty. He deserves the gratitude of every Christian and of every man who gives himself religiously to the work of so living over again in enlightened sympathy the life of Jesus as to add new strength and brightness to the bond which connects that life with the life we are living and the life we are called to live to-day; and to show that essentially we are tried as he was, and that he was tried and tempted just as we are; to make us feel, in short, Jesus still in the midst of humanity, to guard and guide the flame which he saw, and said that he had come to kindle, in the earth.

But now we come to the next question: Does the writer of the Life of Jesus before us give assurance of being qualified for the task which we have thus imperfectly indicated? Has he a true calling to the work? What gifts has he for it? The best answer to these questions, indeed, is to be sought in his book itself; and we do not mean to prejudge that by any personal or partisan considerations, a too common way of wronging both men and truth; but, as a natural and pleasant, and perhaps not unprofitable, way of approaching his book, we will say a word of the author.

Who is Ernest Renan? Of the man himself, apart from his writings, our knowledge is somewhat meagre. Of his literary and official history we know not much; of his personal history, almost nothing. He is said to be of Hebrew extraction. He was born in Brittany in 1823, but at an early age came to Paris, where he entered (we believe as a charity-scholar) the seminary of St. Sulpice, and received the tonsure, preparatory to entering upon the Romish priesthood. Before taking orders, however, when, why, and how we know not, — whether because of his predominant taste for philology (which, to one who understands the doctrine of the Logos, means as much as philosophy), or from whatever cause, he renounced his clerical and Catholic connections, and entered upon the vocation of a litterateur. It is interesting, if not significant, that his

first distinction in this new and independent field was the gaining of the Volney prize for a history of the Semitic languages in 1847. He now acquired a rapid notoriety, and took a prominent place in various literary and philosophical associations and commissions. He has hitherto beeh best known to English readers by a number of able essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and by three poetic and scholarly volumes of translation and exposition, devoted to Job, Ecclesiastes, and Solomon's Song. In this country he is also known by a remarkable paper on Channing, in which he finds fault with Channing, as well as with the so-called rational and liberal Protestants generally, for attempting to maintain a half-way ground between private reason and public authority in religious faith. In the preface to a volume called Études et Essais, formed of his contributions to the Revue des Deux Mondes, Renan disclaims all sympathy in opinion with either Strauss or Hegel, much as he respects the dispassionate tone of the one and the lofty spirit of the other. In the paper on the Critical Historians of Jesus, he contends that criticism ought to be reverent, as well as sympathetic and creative. Between the rationalistic theory of Eichhorn and the mythical one of Strauss, he prefers the former, but holds that "to no exclusive system will it be given to solve the difficult problem of the origin of Christianity."

In the general preface to the volume of Essays occurs one remark which we shall do well to remember in examining the Life of Jesus. "It may be regretted," says M. Renan, "that, in advancing certain ideas contrary to the opinions generally received in France, I have not felt myself obliged to display a greater apparatus of demonstration"; and then he goes on to ascribe this to the sketchy nature of the contents of this volume, and to give notice that, when he treats hereafter of the origin of Christianity, he shall make good this defect.

In the years 1860-61 Renan was at the head of a commission appointed to examine the remains of ancient Phoenicia, and it was during excursions into Galilee which that tour invited, that his Life of Jesus was conceived and chiefly composed. Soon after his return he was appointed to a chair in the College of France, then vacant, as Professor of the Hebrew,

His inau

Chaldee, and Syriac Languages and Literatures. gural address on the "Part of the Semitic Peoples in the History of Civilization," in which he spoke of Jesus as the reformer, regenerator, re-creator of Judaism, and the founder of "the eternal religion of humanity, the religion of the spirit, disengaged from everything sacerdotal, from all rites and observances," (p. 23,) alarmed the priests and the government, and a few days after its publication (Feb. 27, 1862) a decree suspended his functions. This was soon followed by an appeal to his colleagues, — (La Chaire d'Hébreu au Collége de France. Explications à mes Collègues,)-presenting, with great beauty of expression and of spirit, his ideas of the way in which a teacher appointed to address at once Christians and Jews ought to speak of religion and of Christianity. Although these papers were subsequent to the conception and composition of the Life of Jesus, as a history, still they may be regarded as containing the germs of the idea of Christianity which that book implies. Particularly may we say this of the chapter in the Explication (page 27) entitled, “That it is not irreligious to try to separate Religion from the Supernatural." In one place he says that, inasmuch as he treats his subject not as a theologian, but as an historian, he cannot recognize miracles. He lays it down as an "inflexible rule, base of all criticism, that an event designated as miraculous is necessarily legendary." "The supernatural," he writes, "has become a sort of original defect, of which one is ashamed; even the most religious want no more than a minimum of it; one seeks to make it play as small a part as possible; one hides it in the corners of the past." Finally, he says:

"Whether to be rejoiced in or regretted, the fact is, the supernatural is disappearing from the world. It no longer secures serious faith except in those classes which are not up to their age. Must religion crumble under the same blow? No, no! Religion is eternal. The day when it should disappear would see the drying up of the very heart of humanity. Religion is as eternal as poesy, as eternal as love; it will survive the destruction of all illusion, the death of the loved object. But what do I say? Its object also is eternal. Never will man content himself with a finite destiny; under one form or another always a cluster of beliefs expressing the transcendent value of life, and the

participation of each one of us in the rights of a Son of God, will make part of the essential elements of humanity."—p. 30.

We see, now and then, in these minor works, a predominance of sentiment over philosophy, not to say logic, which we shall also notice in his Life of Jesus. We can hardly help feeling, however, when we read such a statement as the following, that the way in which the defenders of miracles have urged their cause has too often shown them to have less insight into the heart of the truth than many of their opponents: "God does not reveal himself by miracle; he reveals himself through the heart, whence an unutterable yearning, as St. Paul says, rises towards him unceasingly." (p. 28.)

In regard to the supernatural, (about which, as it seems to us, so much has been said confusedly,) whether it is or is not "irreligious to try to separate religion from the supernatural," it surely is unreasonable to pronounce confidently where the line between nature and the supernatural runs. Nature (including, as its etymology shows, all that is born, in whatever world) is a great deal larger, perhaps, than most who enter warmly into these disputes reflect. There is a danger of presuming to limit God; but is there not also a danger of undertaking to limit nature?

Whether the speculations in these treatises be true or false, they certainly give one an agreeable impression of the author's temper and spirit. How fine, for instance, is his statement of the neutrality required of a state professor in religious matters!" It does not consist," he says, " in satisfying everybody (which could not be done without warping the scientific spirit), nor in passing silently over the points that might wound any one's opinion (which would be to belittle everything) it consists in a propriety of tone, in a certain serious and sympathetic manner suitable to religious history, and above all in that highest homage which the truth claims, in that supremely religious act which is truthfulness.”

Indeed, all that we learn of Renan, from his writings or otherwise, gives us the impression of a man who, "whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things

*La Chaire d'Hébreu, p. 12.