had for amanuensis and critic a sister whom he passionately loved, who was taken from him just before the conclusion of his pleasant task, and to whose memory he inscribes his volume in the most touching of dedications: so that, as he says, the book was almost entirely composed amongst the scenes where Jesus was born and lived. He had nothing more to do on his return than verify and retouch.

But he wishes it to be understood that it is merely an instalment of a longer and more ambitious undertaking, which he calls "Histoire des Origines du Christianisme," which would compass the period from the first moment of its actual apparition to its complete establishment at, we suppose, the peace of the Church under Constantine, and which would consist of four distinct books. The first would naturally treat exclusively of its sublime Founder; the second, of the Apostles and their immediate disciples, having for its term the close of the first century; the third and fourth being devoted respectively to the consideration of the two succeeding centuries, and what few years of the fourth were necessary to witness the definitive triumph of the new religion. He expresses his fears that sufficient life and strength do not remain to enable him to execute the whole of so extensive a conception, and declares that he shall be satisfied if he be permitted to write but two parts of his scheme. The first part is now before us. He more than hints that there are some circumstances which render him peculiarly fitted for the work proposed. He lays it down, that, in order to write worthily the history of a religion, a man must once have believed in it, and afterwards ceased to believe in it absolutely. The first is necessary for the full comprehension of it; the second, for complete historical sincerity. And as, we seem to remember, M. Renan was once a student at Saint Sulpice, and is now certainly not a member of the RomanCatholic communion, we cannot be far wrong in pointing out the natural inference from his language. And we freely admit that, if such a work is to be undertaken at all in a merely historical spirit, we should seek in vain for one more highly qualified. His preference of the historical, and censure of M. Strauss for relying so largely on the theological method, will surprise no one who is acquainted with the tone of his mind and the temper of his previous writings. In one of his Essays," he goes so far as to avow his conviction that history has taken the place of poetry, and will henceforth demand all the imagination which hitherto has been ascribed to the latter, joined to the critical faculty, to which of course it never pretended. Hence vast information, great powers of mental divination, crowned by constructive capacity, must be the property of any modern historian deserving the name. He has, he believes, left no ancient testimony that bears on the life of Jesus unexamined. In the writings of Philo he seeks for the ideas which were fermenting in the minds of those who occupied themselves with religious questions at the time of his coming. From Josephus, whose

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short and disputed passage about Jesus he accepts as authentic, though considering it touched up by a Christian editor, he obtains a flood of light upon the governing powers whose names figure so sadly in the sacred history. The book of Daniel, whose real date he fixes after the persecution of the Jews by Antiochus, serves to explain the development of the Messianic ideas, and the conception by Jesus of the kingdom of God. For a complementary account of the circumstances which surrounded him, the Talmud has been diligently studied. The apocryphal gospels, rejected by the Church, he esteems of inferior value. The first, and by far the most important, place must be conceded to the four gospels, accepted as authentic by the whole of Christendom.

Of course the amount of credence which must be attached even to these is, with M. Renan, a capital question. In order to determine this amount, it is necessary that we should know at what period, by what hands, and under what conditions, they were composed. That they all existed, more or less in their present form, at the close of the first century, is clear; but that they were simultaneously composed, and finally left in the state in which we possess them by those to whom they are ordinarily attributed, is denied. Pretending here to reproduce without comment the author's conclusions, hinting only at his arguments where clearness obliges it, our task being not to controvert nor to endorse, we shall content ourselves with remarking, that he sees in the words of Papias, and in the existing formulas of "The Gospel according to Matthew," "according to Mark," &c., considerable testimony of their being compilations from looser records by these evangelists. Matthew being originally the chief authority for the words, Mark for the acts, of Jesus, the arrangers of the first two gospels have respectively borrowed from each. Luke had both these under his eyes, strove to harmonise them, compiled mostly from their contents, but borrowed again from the floating pious legends of the time. His gospel is the most charming but the least trustworthy. The difference between these three-the synoptical-gospels and the gospel of John is too striking to be overlooked. If Jesus really spoke as he speaks in Matthew, he could not have spoken as he speaks in John. M. Renan does not hesitate for a moment to accept the testimony of the former. He sees in the language of the fourth evangelist a dogmatical, metaphysical, and sectarian character quite alien to the character of Jesus, but completely in harmony with the contemporaneous intellectual state of Asia Minor. The tone is mystical, and is neither Jewish nor Hebraistic, nor in affinity with that of the Talmud. It was written towards the close of his life, when John had become disabused, by practical experience, of his original belief, shared with the other disciples, in the proximate apparition of the Son of Man in the clouds; and in it he attempted to reconcile his early faith with his later theory. There were certain floating ideas of the time which might be made to approximate to certain Christian doctrines. Believing them

to be true, he came, in his old age, to ascribe them to Jesus, whom he regarded as the incarnation of truth. Our recollections of people change with ourselves, just as the treacherous memories of Napoleon's followers represented him as a liberal when, after his exile and death, they were flung into the liberal atmosphere of the times. Their total historical value is therefore great, but far from absolute. They are biographies, but legendary biographies. They are popular compositions, and therefore inexact. They contain just those contradictory mistakes which three or four soldiers, comparing notes a dozen years or so after the events, would have been sure to make in their respective recitals of Bonaparte's carcer. One would be guilty of anachronisms, another of important omissions, a third of confusion of persons. But one thing, at least, would result from their narrations—a distinct impression of the character of their hero. The evangelists often contradict each other; but it does not at all follow that the events concerning which they are at issue did not happen at all. There is no necessity imposed upon us of accepting all or rejecting all. The miracles therein related occurred at a time when miracles were rather expected than otherwise; were regarded as natural, and not at all "supernatural" in our sense of the word. They are spoken of as being worked by others not having a divine mission, and were never subjected to the slightest scientific scrutiny. They were eagerly looked for, gladly and readily accepted, and never examined. With regard to Messianic applications, they are so subtle, and the passages chosen were so unsettled beforehand, that they are absolutely valueless. Sometimes there did exist a preconceived idea that the Messiah would do such-and-such a thing. Jesus is the Messiah, it was argued; therefore he has done it. Sometimes, on the other hand, when Jesus performed such-and-such an act, since it has happened to him, it was said, He is the Messiah, and it must have been predicted of the Messiah. Not in the name of philosophy, but in the name of an experience unvarying since the critical and careful spirit has been aroused, M. Renan avows that he banishes the miraculous from all history, and therefore from the one which he proceeds to relate. He makes an apology for its biographical form, and says that this is owing to the conviction, which he did not always hold, that history cannot be made to consist of abstractions; and that, in accounting for its occurrences, men must be considered, and are even more important than doctrines.

After an exquisite description of Nazareth, where M. Renan considers Jesus to have been born, he proceeds to estimate the circumstances of his early education. The natural scenery, at once soft and imposing, of the quiet province in which his young years were cast, had a predominant influence in the formation of his character. He learned to read and write after Oriental fashion, but was indebted for little more to direct instruction. Still, it would be a complete misconception to attribute to him what we understand by want of knowledge. Scholastic

education is with us of such a kind, that they who receive it are distinctly marked off from those who do not. In the social state which surrounded him, and which still exists in Eastern countries, ignorance is the very condition of originality, and the promoter of great actions. It is improbable that he knew Greek, and just as little likely that he easily read the Hebrew writings in their original tongue. Neither directly nor indirectly was he affected by any element of Hellenic culture. He lived entirely in a Jewish atmosphere; though, happily, a comparative stranger to the fantastic scholasticism which was being taught at Jerusalem, and which is discoverable in the Talmud. The principles and aphorisms of Hillel, whom he resembled, were probably not unknown to him. But his chief occupation and pleasure consisted in perusing the Old Testament, whose true poetry he fully comprehended, and by which he was profoundly impressed. The Psalms were his delight; the book of Daniel a sea of suggestion. Of the general condition of the world at large he had no knowledge; and the great ones of the earth he regarded across the naturally naive prism of a young provincial. In a still slighter degree, or indeed not at all, was he aware of those scientific views propounded, a century before, by Lucretius, which established the regular and orderly as against the capricious government of the world. Nor is it to be wondered at, since Philo, who lived in a great intellectual arena, and was a man of liberal education, had but a chimerical notion of science. Never before, perhaps, had the Jews manifested such a hunger and thirst after the marvellous. Jesus lived in an atmosphere loaded with what we should call supernaturalism. But this mental state produced in his large soul a totally different result from that which it produces among the vulgar. In him it encouraged a profound belief in the familiar relations of God with man; and hence an exaggerated credence in the power of the latter. This belief was the secret of his influence.

The time for its exercise was most opportune. Severe reverses and lengthened trials had dashed the early enthusiastic dream by the Jewish people of a great national future. For a moment the victory of Cyrus seemed to promise the realisation of their hopes. But the arrival of Grecian and Roman dominion in Asia flung them back upon mystical aspirations. These assumed diverse forms-now of an earthly, now of a supramundane order; now affecting the individual, now the race, occasionally the world. In these ideas Jesus was steeped, and gradually evolved from them all his own. The failure of the semi-political movement, headed by Juda the Galilean, had warned him of the futility of all such attempts. Discarding seditious schemes, he availed himself of the blunder of his predecessors, and shaped out another kingdom, and a different mode of deliverance. It was in Galilee especially that this mental restlessness, these half-terrestrial, half-spiritual forebodings, were fermenting; for Jerusalem was too much occupied with its respectable

forms and orthodox functions. His annual visits thither gave him early a distaste for such hollow shows and barren disputations; and he only returned with greater and greater love for his dear Galilee, where he might commune with his Heavenly Father among verdant hills and trickling fountains, where happy children and tender women, singing canticles of angelic joy, were awaiting the salvation of Israel.

Meanwhile in his bosom was growing up no exotic conviction, but the genuine production of his own great soul, the very essence of his strength,-a profound conviction of the divine. In order to comprehend this, we must blot out all that intervenes between him and his time, and us and ours. Wretched discussions about Deism and Pantheism, the conflicting poles of a perplexing theology, were unknown to him. Physical or metaphysical proofs of the existence of God would have been to him matters of indifference. He felt God; he never declares himself to be God; but he is in direct communication with God, is the Son of God, and has the most thorough consciousness of God that ever existed in the human breast. God conceived of, directly, as Father, contains the whole theology of Jesus. His God is not the partial despot choosing Israel for his people as against all the world. He is the God of humanity. The phrase "kingdom of God," taken from the book of Daniel, was his favourite method of representing the revolution which he was to bring about on earth. Its signification varies and oscillates during his career, according to the pressure of surrounding circumstances, and his necessary struggles with the mists and oppositions which eventually closed around him. But its earliest meaning was its best, and really the one which he attributed to it; the meaning expressed in the assurance that the "kingdom of God is within you.” This was indeed to transport heaven to earth. He was a revolutionist on the largest scale; but a moral revolutionist. Could his career have closed at this period, he would have left all of his teaching, but he would probably not have been known. For in morality, as in art, words are nothing; action is every thing. Men of but mediocre morality have left behind them most excellent maxims; and men of great virtue have often done nothing to keep up the tradition of it. The crown was reserved for him who was equally potent in words and deeds; who felt what was right, and shed his blood to secure its triumph. Hence Jesus is without rival or equal; but hence he was driven to a troubled life and a painful death.

The first external circumstances which had a definite effect upon his career were his interview and subsequent relation with John the Baptist. Mixed up with the Messianic ideas prevalent among the Jews was the expectation of a precursor. According to the predominant belief, this was to be no other than the prophet Elias, with whom was sometimes associated Enoch, sometimes Jeremiah. Accordingly, when, throughout the whole of Palestine, about the year 28 of our era, there spread the