is an immeasurably deeper and loftier system than Mr. Parker's substitute for it?

NOTE UPON RENAN'S LIFE OF CHRIST.

Renan has followed Strauss in an attempt to eliminate the miracles from the life of Christ. On another page, we have briefly pointed out the weakness of the structure which his fancy has raised out of materials furnished in the Gospels. It may be well to connect with the review of Strauss a few additional remarks upon this more recent work. Renan, as far as he has any philosophy, agrees in this particular with Strauss. For Renan lays down with equal assurance,-we had almost said, effrontery, the atheistic maxim of the impossibility of miracles. Like his German predecessor, he is a Pantheist, knowing no Divine Person, no sovereign Will from which nature sprung, and to which nature is subject.

But Renan, unlike Strauss, admits the substantial genuineness of the Canonical Gospels. This concession, however creditable to his candor, is fatal to his argument. Notwithstanding his inability to appreciate the discourses in John, and the other difficulties which he brings forward by way of criticism upon this Gospel, he, nevertheless, acknowledges the historic value that belongs to it. The latter part of the Gospel, a special object of assault by the Tübingen critics, Renan considers to be the one consecutive, and, in the main, satisfactory description of the closing events in the career of Jesus. In various other passages in this Gospel, for example the fourth chapter, giving the interview of Christ with the Samaritan woman, Renan discerns the convincing marks of historical truth. Unfounded as are many of his remarks upon the fourth Gospel, and upon the others also, his treatment of this topic is, to us, the most acceptable portion of his work. His views contradict, and successfully contradict, the positions of the Tübingen school; and to none will they be more distasteful than to Strauss.

But the concessions of Renan cut him off from the use of the mythical theory in accounting for the narratives of mira

cles. This theory, at least, admits of only a partial application. Hence he is obliged to fall back upon the old, forsaken assumption of cheating on the part of the founder of Christianity and his chosen disciples. This member of the French Institute can find no more reasonable explanation of the origin of the Christian religion than the theory that the disciples got up miracles, like common jugglers, and that their Master be came, rather reluctantly, to be sure, a party to the fraud! We could hardly believe our eyes when we read the suggestion that the raising of Lazarus was a pious fraud, in which the two sisters, and all the parties concerned, took part, the motive being the desire to produce an impression upon the unbelieving Jews! It was not the offensive character of such a suggestion that struck us with surprise; for the ascription of dishonesty to the Saviour and the apostles is no new thing; but that a supposition so thoroughly exploded, so long denounced alike by infidel and believer, should be again dragged from its grave and held up as the last conclusion of science!

Renan's work, therefore, regarded from a scientific point of view, has the effect of an argument for the Christian faith and for the verity of the Christian miracles. For the alternative to which we are brought by his discussion is that of believing the reporters or charging them with fraud. We have either truth or gross cheating. Such is the real alternative, and Renan has unintentionally done a service to the Christian church by impaling unbelief upon this dilemma.

The impossibility of forming a consistent conception of Christ, when the supernatural is rejected, is strikingly shown by the abortive essay of Renan. The most incongruous assertions are made concerning Christ. Now he is credited with sublime attributes of intellect and heart, declared to be the greatest of the sons of men, a character of colossal proportions, and now he is charged with a vanity that is flattered with the adulation of the simple people who followed him; is accused of weakly yielding to the enthusiasm of his disciples who were anxious that he should be reputed a miracle-worker and is said to have given way to a gloomy resentment and to a morbid, half-insane relish for persecution and martyrdom.

He is thought-this highest exemplar of mental and moral excellence, of wisdom and goodness, that has ever appeared or ever will appear on earth-to have not only cherished the wildest delusion concerning himself, his rank in the universe, and his power to revolutionize the Jewish nation, but he is also said to have declared against civil government and the family ties, and thus to have attempted a movement, most impracticable and mischievous, for the virtual disorganization and overthrow of society! Renan describes under the name of Jesus an impossible being. Although incompatible actions and traits are imputed to him without necessity, even upon the naturalistic theory, yet the prime, the insurmountable obstacle in the way of the task which Renan has undertaken, lies in the impossibility, so long as the supernatural elements of the narrative are rejected, of attributing to Jesus the excellence which undeniably belongs to him.

The special criticism in Renan's work, if not sophistical like much of the criticism of Strauss, may be justly termed lawless. Starting with his unproved assumption that the canonical Gospels are legendary narratives, he seems to be governed in his beliefs and disbeliefs, in his acceptance and his rejection of their statements, by no fixed rules. This part of the narrative is accepted, and that thrown out, when frequently there is no assignable reason beyond the critic's arbitrary will. But in styling Renan's critical procedure lawless, we had chiefly in mind his exegesis of the New Testament, and in particular his interpretations of the teaching of Christ. It is often true that while these interpretations are in some degree plausible, they are unsound and false. The effect of them, not unfrequently, is to foist upon Christianity and its author doctrines which he never taught. The reader must permit us to vindicate this judgment by some illustrations. Witness the mode in which Renan seeks to support the false assertion that the Saviour enjoined poverty and celibacy. We may first observe, however, that the most which the Roman Catholic interpreters have pretended to find in the Gospels, is a recommendation of these monastic virtues. They are placed by the Roman Catholic theology among the Evangelica consilia,—as

not being commanded, not essential to salvation, but as quali ties of the higher type of Christian excellence. The charge that the renunciation of property is required, as a condition of salvation, finds no support in the invitations of Christ addressed to the poor, in common with all who were in suffering, nor in the implication, which was the actual fact, that a spiritual susceptibility, not usually found in the more favored classes, belonged to them. Confronted by a fact like the discipleship of the wealthy Zaccheus, of whom no surrender of his property was required, Renan says that Christ made an exception in favor of rich men who were odious to the ruling classes! As if Jesus could think that the sin of possessing wealth was washed out when the rich man happened to be unpopular! Renan's perverse interpretation of the Saviour's rebukes of covetousness and an ungenerous temper towards the poor, he supports by appealing to the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus. "Afterwards," he says, "this was called the parable of the wicked rich man.' But it is purely and simply the parable of the 'rich man. As if the rich man were sent to a place of torment for being rich! His desire, we must infer, to return to the earth "to testify" to his five brethren, was a wish to warn them not to possess property! But what of the response of Abraham: "if they hear not Moses and the Prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead!" Even Renan will not contend that the Old Testament considers the possession of property a sin. He would be much more apt to dilate on the earthly character of the rewards pronounced there to the pious. Renan derives from Matt. xix. 10-13, a law of celibacy, instead of the lawfulness of celibacy when spontaneously practised, as in the case of Paul, for the sake of greater freedom in promoting the progress of the kingdom of God,-which is the real sense of the text. He is even disposed to follow Origen in the revolting absurdity of literally construing the phraseology (Matt. xix. 12) by which the Saviour describes the condition of celibacy. In the context of this very passage, the Saviour implicitly puts honor upon marriage. It was at a wedding that he first manifested forth his glory. The married state and the family are held

sacred in the Gospel. Yet Renan does not hesitate to found upon the injunction to forsake father and mother, in obedience to the higher law of Christ, the charge that he required, as an indispensable condition of discipleship, the rupture of all the ties of kindred! These preposterous interpretations are refuted by numerous places in the Gospels themselves and by the whole history of the primitive church. But these inconvenient passages it is easy for Renan to ignore or summarily cast out. Other examples of arbitrary and unfounded assertion in Renan's work are the statement that the Eucharist originated long before the last supper; that Judas was led to betray Christ out of jealousy of the other disciples; that John exhib-· its in his Gospel a feeling of rivalship toward Peter,-though Renan must have observed that Peter and John are frequently brought into conjunction in the Acts as well as in John's Gospel; that Christ had not the least idea of a soul as separate from the body,-as if he did not speak of "both soul and body," and imply the same distinction in a hundred passages besides; that Jesus, for the moment, thought of using force to prevent his arrest,—an interpretation, which, if it came from anybody but a professed orientalist, would be held to indicate a singular incapacity to understand the tropical method of instruction, which was habitual with Christ, and, in this case, was employed to impress on the disciples the change in their situation, involving dangers to which they had not before been exposed. These examples of baseless criticism might be indefinitely multiplied.

Both Strauss and Renan represent that Christ and the disciples, ascribing everything to the agency of God, were conscious of no distinction between the natural and the supernatural, the normal and the miraculous. But the statement is wholly contrary to the truth. Christ says that God makes the sun to shine and the rain to fall: does he mean, or did he imagine, that the shining of the sun, or a shower of rain, is a miracle? There is no need of argument to show that he did not, that he made the same distinction which we make.*

* See, on this point, the Essay of Julius Müller, de mirac. Jesu Christi natura, etc., p. 33, N.