so hard to say in what manner a history which many centuries have held for sacred is to be retold in the language of historical science, that it is only just to inquire whether others have been more successful, and in what points precisely M. Renan's deficiency lies.

We may admit then-it is impossible to deny it—that a great part of the so-called orthodox scheme of Bible interpretation is a tradition of the least trustworthy kind,—a tradition of mistakes and misrepresentations, which have come down to us from an uncritical and unscrupulous age. We may admit that the German school of theology,―more persuasively represented by M. Renan than by any one among their own number,-have performed a task of urgent necessity, and have left Biblical exegesis no longer one of the opprobria of historical science. But along with these large admissions large reservations also must be made. The student, whatever his speculative opinions, who is really imbued with the spirit of the New Testament, will assuredly deny,-will be tempted to deny even with a touch of indignant scorn,-that this recent school of criticism has reproduced that essential spirit with anything like the potency and profundity which may often be found in the comments of an equivocating Father or an ill-educated Saint. Around the productions of Leyden or Tübingen there hangs the rawness of a revolutionary scheme of things; one feels at every turn that to treat these matters aright there needs not only patience, accuracy, ingenuity, which these men give us, but depth of feeling and width of experience, which they have not got to give. We are impressed, for instance, by Strauss' air of laborious thoroughness as he explains away the wonder and beauty of the Christian story with an arid logic which its very aridity seems to make more convincing. But our regard for his opinion drops rather suddenly when, as at the close of his Old and New Faith, he takes a constructive, an edifying tone. One feels, at least, that it takes a very thorough-going Germanism to enable him to indicate Goethe's Elective Affinities, or the libretto of the Magic Flute, which no less a man than Hegel has long ago demonstrated to be a very good text,'' as a substantial consolation to which mankind, disabused of ancient errors, will always be enabled to cling.

Εἶθ ̓ ὤφελ' Αργους μὴ διαπτάσθαι σκάφος
Κόλχων ἐς αἶαν κυανέας Συμπληγάδας-

Would that the band of adventurous critics had never sailed between the clashing rocks of Tradition and Authority in quest of truth, if the golden treasure is to be set forth for worship by hands like these!

In F. C. Baur, again, the combination of sagacity and naïveté is German in a more agreeable way. Much of his work commands our adhesion, all of it deserves our respect. Never was there a more

The Old Faith and the New, p. 418, English translation.

ingenious Professor. But his outlook on life has not enabled him to imagine any early Christian writer less ingenious or professorial than himself. To keep well-informed of each other's favourite doctrines, and then promptly to issue Tendenz-Schriften, or academical programmes, designed, beneath an appearance of amity, to put those doctrines down-such, it seems, was the leading preoccupation of these holy men. Nay, to such a pitch of subtlety did they push, in Baur's view, their damning insinuations, that surely the worst fate which pseudo-Paul could have wished for pseudo-Peter, or pseudoPeter for pseudo-Paul, would have been that he should be called on to explain his own sous-entendus to the satisfaction of the Tübingen school.

M. Renan's danger certainly does not lie in the direction of narrowness or pedantry. And indeed French tact, French elegance, French propriety of thought and expression, are so often and so justly proposed as models to our English bluffness and crudity, that there seems some presumption in taking to task for faults of taste the greatest living master of French prose. Yet it is surely no insular coldness that makes us shrink, for instance, from the phrase 'roulant d'extases en extases,' as descriptive of the ideally religious man, or dislike the constant repetition of such words as ravissant and délicieux in connection with the person and teachings of Christ.

A few excisions would remove this sentimental taint, which, indeed, seldom appears except in the Vie de Jésus, as an element in the quasi-poetical tone in which that volume is written; a tone which, to English taste at least, is on M. Renan's lips entirely mistaken and disadvantageous-a gratuitous divergence into a realm which is beyond his mastery.

Another element in M. Renan's personal equation' may be noticed as sometimes modifying his historical views. I mean his exclusively contemplative life, and the mood of gentle irony which such a life has begotten. In dealing with almost all subjects this disengagement of temper is an unmixed advantage. When the theme is one of the heroes of philosophy-a Marcus Aurelius or a Spinoza -the reader reaps the full benefit of this similarity between author and subject; their kinship in wise elevation and disenchanted calm. But M. Renan's favourite subjects are chosen from a race of men of nature, as he has himself remarked, as different as possible from his It is the founders of religions whose career he loves to trace; and it is always perceptible how far his spontaneous sympathy carries him with them, and where his admiration for them becomes almost pity in that they had so little conception of the relativity of truth, the limitations of virtue, the vanity of all things beneath the sun. The Book of Job is the theme of the finest of his Old Testament expositions; the mournful Preacher is in his eyes the most inspired of the sacred writers.'

own.

In a well-known passage he has given a half-humorous expression to the kind of provocation excited in his mind by St. Paul's confident self-assurance and dominating force of faith:

Certes, une mort obscure pour le fougueux apôtre a quelque chose qui nous sourit Nous aimerions à rêver Paul sceptique, naufragé, abandonné, trahi par les siens, seul, atteint du désenchantement de la vieillesse ; il nous plairait que les écailles lui fussent tombées une seconde fois des yeux, et notre incrédulité douce aurait sa petite revanche si le plus dogmatique des hommes était mort triste, désespéré (disons mieux, tranquille), sur quelque rivage ou quelque route de l'Espagne, en disant lui aussi, 'Ergo erravi!'

It would, however, be grossly unfair to speak as if M. Renan's peculiar temperament-emotional at once and philosophic-were productive, in his historical pictures, only of distortion and melodrama. So far is this from being the case that there is hardly a page of his history where there may not be found some touch of feeling which has real beauty, some connection of deep significance between early Christian faith and practice and the meditations of other times and men. In his account of the resurrection, for instance, amidst much which may well seem to us merely futile, he has brought out, as few before him had ever done, what is in one sense the profoundest lesson which the life of Jesus has to teach. He has described, that is to say, the absorbing power with which one high affection may possess the soul; and most of all where wrongs nobly borne have added to reverence a solemn compassion, and given its last intensity to love. The object of that affection fades from our bodily sight, but stands forth more plainly revealed in its essential beauty; succeeding life is guided and glorified by the transcendent memory, and love is transfigured into worship in the deep of the heart. M. Renan has had the skill to make us feel how glorious a lot was theirs, who through all perils carried in their bosoms this ineffaceable joy; how true were the words which said that 'kings have desired to see the things which ye see, and have not seen them.'

Again, a kindred spirit of unworldliness has enabled M. Renan to interpret with wise conviction the Beatitude of the Poor. He has dwelt on the tie which unites all those whose aim it is to subserve the spiritual welfare of men, and who turn with indifference or distaste from the rewards which the world bestows on its material benefactors. Speaking of the sect of those who took this evangelic poverty in its strictest sense, he says:

Bien que vite dépassé et oublié, l'ébionisme laissa dans toute l'histoire des institutions chrétiennes un levain qui ne se perdit pas. . . . Le grand mouvement ombrien du XIIIe siècle, qui est, entre tous les essais de fondation religieuse, celui qui ressemblait le plus au mouvement galiléen, se fit tout entier au nom de la pauvreté. François d'Assise, l'homme du monde qui, par son exquise bonté, sa communion délicate, fine et tendre avec la vie universelle, a le plus ressemblé à Jésus, fut un pauvre. L'humanité, pour porter son fardeau, a besoin de croire

...

qu'elle n'est pas complètement payée par son salaire. Le plus grand service qu'on puisse lui rendre est de lui répéter souvent qu'elle ne vit pas seulement de pain.

And again :

La noblesse et le bonheur de la pauvreté, c'était peut-être la plus grande vérité du christianisme, celle par laquelle il a réussi et par laquelle il se survivra. En un sens, tous, tant que nous sommes, savants, artistes, prêtres, ouvriers des œuvres désintéressées, nous avons encore le droit de nous appeler des ébionim. L'ami du vrai, du beau et du bien n'admet jamais qu'il touche une rétribution. Les choses de l'âme n'ont pas de prix; au savant qui l'éclaire, au prêtre qui la moralise, au poëte et à l'artiste qui la charment, l'humanité ne donnera jamais qu'une aumône, totalement disproportionnée avec ce qu'elle reçoit.

It is thus indeed. The evangelic poverty is not so much a deliberate as an unconscious abstinence from that which most men desire; or if conscious, then conscious not with self-applauding effort, but with the glad indifference of one who has his treasure otherwhere.

It is needless to multiply instances to show that in M. Renan's case, as in all others, the law prevails that to eyes which read aright the book reveals the author, so that the recounters of a history which holds a place for all of greatness and goodness to which man's soul can reach may give, indeed, artistic expression, it may be, to much which is beyond their ken, but convincing reality to such things only as they themselves have known.

A more perplexing topic remains behind, a topic which it is difficult to discuss briefly, but which cannot be passed over in silence in any serious attempt to estimate the value of M. Renan's work: I mean his treatment of the miraculous element in the Gospel history. I must begin by saying that I do not think that it can be maintained that he is ever consciously unfair. He is not animated, as so many free-thinkers have been, by a spirit of malignity against the Christian faith. On the contrary, his expressed sympathies are always with that faith; and those who cannot understand so vigorous a criticism conducted in so mild a spirit are apt to think him hypocritically enthusiastic and offensively patronising. The fact is that the whole gist of his controversy is included in a single frank assumption. He begins his history by avowedly excluding all that is miraculous or supernatural from the domain of the scientific historian. When a story is told, he says, which includes such elements as these, we simply know that it is told incorrectly. We may not always be able to give a plausible account of our own of the events in question. But if we cannot explain the miraculous story we may simply let it alone, and feel certain that there is some explanation to it which it is now impossible to recover.

It is obvious that a wholesale assumption of this kind relieves the sceptical historian from much polemic in detail. He takes, once for all, the full advantage which the present commanding attitude of Science gives him, and he is not obliged, as Voltaire or Gibbon was

obliged, to meet each miracle separately with argument or sarcasm. He is not therefore tempted, as they were tempted, to minimize the importance of his theme, or to emphasize its less dignified aspects. On the contrary, he will be disposed to bring out all its meaning, and to show, if he can, that the story possesses a truer grandeur and impressiveness when narrated in the scientific rather than in the theological temper.

To this line of argument we shall best reply, not by controverting his treatment of individual points, but by some such careful definition of the disputed field as may (if this be possible) reduce the conflict between science and orthodoxy from the shape which it too often assumes of a sheer and barren contradiction to some form in which an ultimate reconcilement may be at least conceivable. Let us attempt, therefore, to give the view of each party in its most moderate and non-polemical form. And first let us reject all question-begging terms-all phrases such as violation of the order of Nature,' or 'direct interposition of the Deity,' which are not mere descriptions of recorded facts, but descriptions coloured, the first by anti-theological, the second by theological feeling. Phrases such as these have often been felt as repugnant both by the deeply religious and by the calmly scientific mind. God,' says St. Augustine in a well-known passage,2 'does nothing against Nature. When we say that He does so we mean that he does something against Nature as we know it-in its familiar and ordinary way-but against the highest laws of Nature He no more acts than He acts against Himself.'

6

Following this weighty hint, let us altogether dispense with unproved assumptions and merely polemical antitheses. Let us not oppose law and miracle, for whatever abnormal phenomena may have occurred must (as we shall all now feel with S. Augustine) have occurred consistently with eternal law. Let us not oppose the natural and the supernatural, for God does nothing against Nature,' and all that these two terms can mean is what we expect to see in nature,' and 'what we do not expect to see.'

Avoiding, then, these verbal fallacies, let us consider with what various prepossessions the study of the Gospel records is usually approached. On each side of the controversy we find a reasonable prepossession pushed too often to an unreasonable extreme. The Christian begins by saying: Many facts point to the existence of a beneficent Ruler of the Universe. If there be such a Ruler, it is probable that he would wish to make some revelation of himself; and such a revelation would probably be accompanied with unusual phenomena.' This may well be thought reasonable; but it is not reasonable to go on to affirm: 'This revelation is in fact contained

2 Contra Faustum, xxvi. 3. On this passage see (for instance) Archbishop Trench in the preface to his treatise On the Miracles, as an example of modern orthodoxy enforcing St. Augustine's view.