for them, and yet are unable to explain real history. There stands Christ in the unique consciousness of His Godhead, His redeeming vocation, and His universal Kingship. There is the Church, there is Christianity with its world-regenerating effects,-all undeniable facts. All these Strauss cannot explain by referring them to one who was not free from sin and error, or to the inventive, ay, deceptive, imagination of his followers. Here we see the immense residuum which even Strauss cannot get rid of, and which shows his whole hypothesis to be insufficient and wrong.

His hypothesis does not suit the clearness of that age, which was a historical and not a prehistoric one; it does not accord with the truth-breathing spirit of the Gospels, nor with their simple, clear, and temperate style; it does not accord with the personal greatness, the moral perfection, nor the self-consciousness and the self-testimony of Christ, for whom all human standards are insufficient; it suits neither the spiritual, conscientious, and honourable character of the primitive Church, nor the behaviour of its opponents, who raise no contradiction; it does not accord with the immense and ever beneficial moral effects of the Gospel, which cannot have proceeded from beautiful though unconscious fancies, nor from intentional deceptions; and finally, we boldly say, it does not accord with the present age, in which the Christ of the Gospels is still approving Himself to many thousand hearts and consciences as living power and truth, and not as legend.

It all comes to the dilemma: Did Christ create the Church, or did the Church invent Christ? The former of these propositions is supported by the entire analogy of history; the latter, as we have seen, is abnormal and inconceivable. The Christ of Strauss first called this wonderful Church into existence in a perfectly natural manner, and was then born again as a creature of her fancy. Is not this the old trick which Hegel tried to play, treating the world as posited by the "absolute Idea," whilst this "absolute Idea" is only realized in the world (vide p. 167)? No wonder that Nemesis appeared in the person of Bruno Bauer (not to be confounded

Cf. Dorner, History of Protestant Theology, p. 838 (English edit., vol. ii. p. 372), and Schaff, Die Person Jesu Christi (Gotha, 1865), p. 110 et ss., English edition (Boston, 1865), pp. 187 et ss.

with Dr. Ferdinand Christian von Baur), who carried Strauss' hypothesis to its extreme, and said in effect: You derive everything from the idea of the Messiah which you suppose to have been already in existence; but, my friend, the existence of this idea itself is likewise a myth: neither Christ made the Church nor the Church Him, the Church made itself!! I will spare you any further delineation of this utter nonsense, which would make everything exist before it exists, and would engulf all historical development in an eternal progress from nothing to nothing.

"Simplex veri sigillum"-Simplicity is the seal of the truth. This wise motto of a great physician is applicable in all matters of history and of faith. Compare, my honoured hearers, this artificially invented, this laboriously and violently applied mythical hypothesis as to the life of Christ, with the simple and artless statements of the Gospels. Can you any longer doubt which bears the impress of truth?

IV.—RENAN'S " VIE DE JESUS."

After having thus fully discussed the mythical theory, it will suffice to give the French Strauss a shorter consideration than his German colleague. The standpoint of Ernest Renan in his Vie de Jésus1 is essentially the same as that of Strauss, and is shattered to pieces on the same rock.

Goethe says somewhere: "A book which should explain to us Christ as a man glorified by the pure divine charm which surrounded him, would exercise an immense influence on Christianity." If the success of a book were any criterion of its intrinsic value, we might imagine that Renan had succeeded in solving this problem, and that Goethe's prophecy was fulfilled in him; although, to be sure, there is not much of the "pure divine charm" left us in his portrait of Christ. But we have every reason to believe that the unparalleled success of this book, which has been circulated by hundreds of thousands, especially in the Roman Catholic world (France and Italy), is primarily due to its graceful form.

We quote from the edition of 1863.

Renan's work is an embodiment of the spirit of modern French infidelity. We see it here gracefully floating along in all its seductive elegance, labouring hard to compress much into brilliant and short sentences, yet withal pleasantly entertaining, and using all those arts which for centuries have made it such a favourite in the polite society of Europe. But, at the same time, we mark its boundless, well-nigh incomprehensible capriciousness, its superficial frivolity, which only calculates on sensations suited to the times, and gracefully waives the most difficult problems; we mark its entire want of earnest moral consciousness, of real scientific perception, of thorough and conscientious historical investigation, and, worse than all, the piquant flippancy (pleasing, alas! to too many) which does not hesitate to clothe the most holy Figure in history in the garb of a social democrat of modern France, nor to change the most sacred life into-a novel.

1

This book is the first part of a larger work; it was written on the occasion of a journey to Phoenicia and the Holy Land. I wrote down a sketch of it hurriedly enough in a Maronite hut, with five or six books around me. . . The striking agreement between the descriptions of the New Testament and the places which lay around me; the wonderful harmony between the ideal portrait of the Gospels and the landscape which served as its frame-all these things were a kind of revelation to me. I seemed to have a fifth gospel before me, mutilated and torn, but still legible; and from that hour, under the guidance of Matthew and Mark, I saw, instead of that abstract being whose existence one can scarce help questioning, a genuine but wondrously beautiful human figure full of life and motion. . . . I fixed this picture, which appeared to my spirit, with a few hasty strokes, and what grew from it is this story" (vide Introduction).

On a

This explains to us the whole character of the book. well-drawn background of Syrian landscapes, Renan sketches the picture of Christ, not in philosophical abstractions, but with the fresh colours of life; not floating in mythical mists, but with sharply defined features. Unlike the figure drawn by Strauss, which is constantly shrinking up under the mono

"Histoire des origines du Christianisme." There have since appeared the second part, "Les Apôtres," the third, "St. Paul," and the fourth, "L'Autichrist."

tonous action of the critical dissecting knife, till at last the operator complains that of few great men do we know so little as of Christ;-unlike this, here we see flesh and blood, life and development. Indeed, there is a certain warmth of feeling for the beauties of the King whom yet he seeks to dethrone. Nowhere do we breathe the close air of the study, but always the fresh breezes of an inspiriting journey. But then this vivid freshness is so dearly bought, that we could wish the lamp of study had not been wanting in that Maronite hut (and afterwards too!), and that the clever Frenchman had not so often tried to cover his want of thorough investigation by fanciful ideas and brilliant superficiality. For the "fifth gospel" from which he borrows is (as we shall soon see) not only the ocular instruction obtained on the scene of the occurrences, but to a considerably greater extent his imagination, which appears to have blossomed so luxuriantly under the rays of the Eastern sun, that it plays its possessor one trick after another, and finally changes him from a historian into a novelist.

Renan, too, sees in Jesus nothing more than a man. He intends to draw a "wondrously beautiful," yet "genuinely human," portrait, to the exclusion of all supernatural factors. We shall see whether he succeeds in both these respects, or whether the all too great humanity does not spoil the wondrous beauty, and make ugly stains in it. As Strauss makes use of the myth to get rid of the supernatural, so Renan uses the cognate conception of the legend. His views are expressed in the sentence, that "the life of Christ, as the evangelists relate it, is essentially historical, but in no way supernatural." The Gospels are "essentially" genuine writings, composed by apostles or their disciples in the course of the first century. Even the Gospel of St. John Renan supposes probably to have been written by an intimate disciple of his, and quite in his spirit. But for all that, in them the real history of Christ is throughout distorted by legends, and adorned by the traditions of the wonder-loving disciples. Moreover, these four "legendary biographers flagrantly contradict each other" (Introduction, p. xliv); "they are full of errors and of nonsense" (p. 450). The questions which we asked above,-whether the fabrication of such legends is in accordance with the otherwise

conscientious and sober character of the disciples, and with the behaviour of their opponents who do not dispute the miracles, none of them trouble Renan; his historical conscience is far above such scruples. We are merely told that tradition at that time was utterly unconcerned as to an exact record of what had happened; since "the spirit was everything, the letter nothing" to these primitive historians,—just as though no one could have had any interest in obtaining certain and exact information about the words and works of Christ (cf. Luke i. 4).

But from this mass of legends and apocryphal miracles the real history of Christ may still be extracted by means of a bold historical criticism. How, then, does it now appear?

Jesus, the son of Joseph and Mary, was born in Nazareth, not in Bethlehem, nor of the lineage of David. He grew up in poor circumstances, and notwithstanding his unusually rich gifts, he remained under the influence of the narrow views common to his people. Thus he believed in Satan, in demons, in miracles, and had no knowledge whatever of the "inflexibility of all nature's laws" (vide Introduction). In his youth he even showed some inclination to the uncouth and narrow-minded fanaticism of the Pharisees. "Probably," however, he learned from the mild Rabbi Hillel (who lived from 110 B.C. to 10 A.D.). In addition to the Old Testament, he "probably" read many of the apocryphal writings; and the visions of Daniel especially fixed themselves in his mind. This constant "probability" at the very outset shows that Renan is writing history only in hypotheses.

Renan divides the public life of Christ into three periods.' The first and most beautiful was "the period of pure moral teaching," of the tranquil Galilean life. There, from the blue skies of Galilee, from the beauties of nature, and from his own heart, Jesus extracts a consciousness of God such as no one before or after him has ever had, and he begins to preach about the heavenly Father whom he has found. "God is our Father, and all men are brethren." This was at that time the purport of his preaching. He announced a kingdom of God "which we must create in ourselves through uprightness of the will and poetry of the heart." In the Sermon on

1 Cf. Luthardt, ubi sup. p. 25 et ss.; Uhlhorn, ubi sup. p. 15 et ss.