tations of religious ideas in the form of facts, which were honestly believed by the authors to have actually occurred. The ideas symbolised in these facts are declared to be true in the abstract, or as applied to humanity as a whole, but denied as false in the concrete, or in their application to an individual. The authorship of the evangelical myths is ascribed to the primitive Christian society, pregnant with Jewish Messianic hopes, and kindled to hero-worship by the appearance of the extraordinary person of Jesus of Nazareth, whom they took to be the promised Messiah. But this theory is likewise surrounded by insurmountable difficulties. Who ever heard of a poem unconsciously produced by a mixed multitude, and honestly mistaken by them all for actual history? How could the five hundred persons, to whom the risen Saviour is said to have appeared, dream the same dreams at the same time, and then believe it as a veritable fact, at the risk of their lives? How could a man like St Paul submit his strong and clear mind, and devote all the energies of his noble life, to a poetical fiction of the very sect whom he once persecuted unto death? How could such an illusion stand the combined hostility of the Jewish and heathen world, and the searching criticism of an age of high civilisation, and even of incredulity and scepticism? How strange that unlettered and unskilled fishermen, and not the philosophers and poets of classic Greece and Rome, should have composed such a grand poem, and painted a character to whom Strauss himself is forced to assign the very first rank among all the religious geniuses and founders of religion. The poets must, in this case, have been superior to the hero; and yet the hero is admitted to be the purest and greatest man that ever lived! Where are the traces of a fervid imagination and poetic art in the gospel history? Is it not, on the contrary, remarkably free from all rhetorical and poetical ornament, from every admixture of subjective notions and feelings, even from the expression of sympathy, admiration, and praise ? The writers evidently felt that the story speaks best for itself, and would not be improved by the art and skill of man. Their discrepancies, which at best do not affect the picture of Christ's character in the least, but only the subordinate details of his history, prove the absence of conspiracy, attest the honesty of their intention, and confirm the general credibility of their account. Verily the gospel history, related with such unmistakable honesty and simplicity, by immediate witnesses and their pupils, proclaimed in open daylight from Jerusalem to Rome, believed by thousands of Jews, Greeks, and Romans, sealed with the blood of apostles, evangelists, and saints of every grade of society and culture, is better attested by external and internal evidence than any other history. The

All Infidel theories "weighed and found wanting." 719

same negative criticism which Strauss applied to the gospels would with equal plausibility destroy the strongest chain of evidence before a court of justice, and resolve the life of Socrates, or Charlemagne, or Luther, or Napoleon, into a mythical dream. The secret of the mythical hypothesis is the pantheistic denial of a personal living God, and the a priori assumption of the impossibility of a miracle. In its details it is so complicated and artificial that it cannot be made generally intelligible; and in proportion as it is popularised it reverts to the vulgar hypothesis of intentional fraud, from which it professed at starting to shrink back in horror and contempt.

With this last and ablest effort, infidelity seems to have exhausted its scientific resources. It could only repeat itself hereafter. Its different theories have all been tried and found wanting. One has in turn transplanted and refuted the other, even during the lifetime of their champions. They explain nothing in the end; on the contrary, they only substitute an unnatural for a supernatural miracle, an inextricable enigma for a revealed mystery. They equally tend to undermine all faith in God's providence in history, and ultimately in every truth and virtue, and deprive a poor and fallen humanity, in a world of sin, temptation, and sorrow, of its only hope and comfort in life and in death.

Dr Strauss, by far the clearest and strongest of all assailants of the gospel history, seems to have had a passing feeling of the disastrous tendency of his work of destruction and the awful responsibility he assumed. "The results of our inquiry," he says in the closing chapter of his "Life of Jesus," "have apparently annihilated the greatest and most important part of that which the Christian has been wont to believe concerning his Jesus, have uprooted all the encouragements which he has derived from his faith, and deprived him of all his consolations. The boundless store of truth and life which for eighteen hundred years have been the aliment of humanity, seems irretrievably devastated; the most sublime levelled with the dust, God divested of his grace, man of his dignity, and the tie between heaven and earth broken. Piety turns away with horror from so fearful an act of desecration, and strong in the impregnable self-evidence of its faith, boldly pronounces that let an audacious criticism attempt what it will-all which the Scriptures declare and the church believes of Christ, will still subsist as eternal truth, nor needs one iota of it to be renounced."* Strauss makes, then, an attempt, it is true, at a philosophical reconstruction of what he vainly imagines to have annihilated

* Leben Jesu, Schlussabhandlung, vol. ii. p. 663, (4th ed. of 1840).

as a historical fact by his sophistical criticism. He professes to admit the abstract truth of the orthodox Christology, or the union of the divine and human, but perverts it into a purely intellectual and pantheistic meaning. He refuses divine attributes and honours to the glorious Head of the race, but applies them to a decapitated humanity. He thus substitutes from pantheistic prejudice a metaphysical abstraction for a living reality, a mere notion for a historical fact, a progress in philosophy and mechanical arts for the moral victory over sin and death, a pantheistic hero-worship or self-adoration of a fallen race for the worship of the only true and living God, the gift of a stone for the bread of eternal life!*

Humanity scorns such a miserable substitute, which has yet to give the first proof of any power for good, and which will probably never convert or improve a single individual. It must have a living head, a real Lord and Saviour from sin and death. With renewed faith and confidence, it returns from the dreary desolations of a heartless infidelity and the vain conceits of a philosophy falsely so called, to the historical Christ, and exclaims with Peter: "Lord, where shall we go but to thee? thou alone hast words of eternal life, and we believe and are sure that thou art the Son of God!"

Yes there He lives, the divine man and incarnate God, on the ever fresh and self-authenticating record of the gospels, in

"In an individual," says Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. ii. p. 710, “in one God-man, the properties and functions which the church doctrine ascribes to Christ contradict themselves; in the idea of the race they agree. Humanity is the union of the two natures-the incarnate God, the infinite externalising itself in the finite, and the finite spirit remembering its infinitude; it is the child of the visible mother and the invisible Father, nature and spirit; it is the worker of miracles, in so far as in the course of human history the spirit more and more completely subjugates nature, both within and around man, until it lies before him as an inert matter of his activity; it is the sinless existence, for the course of its development is a blameless one; pollution cleaves to the individual only, and does not touch the race or its history. It is humanity that dies, rises, and ascends to heaven; for from the negation of its natural life there ever proceeds a higher spiritual life: from the suppression of its limitation as a personal, national, and terrestrial spirit, arises its union with the infinite spirit of the heavens. By faith in this Christ, especially in his death and resurrection, man is justified before God: that is, by the kindling within him of the idea of humanity, especially by the negation of its natural and sensual aspects, the individual man partakes of the divinely human life of the species." But the idea of the human and divine is no more contradictory in an individual than in the race. What is true in idea or principle, must also actualise itself, or be capable of actualisation in a concrete living fact. History teaches, moreover, that every age, every great movement, and every nation, have their representative heads, who comprehend and act out the life of the respective whole. This analogy points us to a general representative head of the entire race, Adam in the natural, and Christ in the spiritual order. The humanity of Strauss is like a stream without a fountain, or like a body without a head.

the unbroken history of eighteen centuries, and in the hearts and lives of the wisest and best of our race. Jesus Christ is the most certain, the most sacred, and the most glorious of all facts, arrayed in a beauty and majesty, which throws the "starry heavens above us and the moral law within us" into obscurity, and fills us truly with ever-growing reverence and awe. He shines forth like the self-evidencing light of the noonday sun. He is too great, too pure, too perfect to have been invented by any sinful and erring man. His character and claims are confirmed by the sublimest doctrine, the purest ethics, the mightiest miracles, the grandest spiritual kingdom, and are daily and hourly exhibited in the virtues and graces of all who yield to the regenerating and sanctifying power of his Spirit and example. The historical Christ meets and satisfies our deepest intellectual and moral wants. Our souls, if left to their noblest impulses and aspirations, instinctively turn to him as the needle to the magnet, as the flower to the sun, as the panting hart to the fresh fountain. We are made for him, and our heart is without rest until it rests in him." He commands our assent, he wins our admiration, he overwhelms us to humble adoration and worship. We cannot look upon him without spiritual benefit. We cannot think of him without being elevated above all that is low and mean, and encouraged to all that is good and noble. The very hem of his garment is healing to the touch; one hour spent in his communion outweighs all the pleasures of sin. He is the most precious and indispensable gift of a merciful God to a fallen world. In him are the treasures of true wisdom, in him the fountain of pardon and peace, in him the only substantial hope and comfort in this world and that which is to come. Without him, history is a dreary waste, an inextricable enigma; with him, it is the unfolding of a plan of infinite wisdom and love. He is the glory of the past, the life of the present, the hope of the future. Mankind could better afford to lose the whole literature of Greece and Rome, of Germany and France, of England and America, than the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Not for all the wealth and wisdom of this world would I weaken the faith of the humblest Christian in his divine Lord and Saviour; but if, by the grace of God, I could convert a single sceptic to a childlike faith in Him who lived and died for me and for all, I would feel that I had not lived in vain.

ART. III.-Father Lacordaire.

Le Père Lacordaire. Par Le Comte de MONTALEMBERT, l'un des quarante de l'Académie Française. Paris: Charles Douniol, Libraire-Editeur. 1862.

WE find much to admire in the eloquent work which Count Montalembert has consecrated to the memory of his early and beloved friend, the famous Dominican preacher, Father Lacordaire; but, at the same time, our admiration is considerably lessened by the intolerance which is displayed in every chapter, towards all those who do not agree with the author in his extreme views of the power and authority of the Romish Church. With him it is not only Hors de l'église point de salut, but also Tout pour l'église et par l'église, as if the right of free inquiry in matters of faith were entirely superseded and extinguished by the principle of authority. In his view, truth is in the church alone, and to seek it elsewhere is rebellion and blasphemy; and he therefore naturally enough regards all such attempts with horror and detestation. Thus, in the volume before us, he speaks of "religious liberty after the fashion of Luther, which was only a revolt and a destruction," and quotes with approbation various passages from the discourses of Lacordaire, in which Luther is classed with Arius and Mahomet, and in which the noble stand made by the French clergy and parliament in the seventeenth century, in defence of the liberties of the Gallican Church against papal usurpation and Jesuitical intrigue, is spoken of as "a now scarcely breathing senility," as "the frightful spirit of Gallicanism," and as an element destructive of the Catholic Church our eternal country." At the same time, it must be remembered that both Count Montalembert and the great preacher, for thirty years his friend and associate-even while holding these extreme views, while bending on all occasions to the authority of the church, and maintaining to its fullest extent the doctrine of the "divine power" of the pope-uniformly defended and advocated liberty of speech, liberty of teaching and of association, and liberty of the press; though it is almost unnecessary to point out the gross inconsistency of the maintenance of such views by devout believers in the infallible church, looking to the way in which that church has uniformly resisted and condemned all such liberties. Both Count Montalembert and Lacordaire learned to respect and appreciate these liberties from their early master the celebrated Abbé Lamennais, to whom, we are sorry to say, a very scanty and imperfect measure of justice has now been dealt out by his