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 THE CHRI8T OF THE GOSPELS AND THE 
 CHRIST OF MODERN CRITICISM: 
 
 LEOTUEES 
 
 ON 
 
 M. KENAN'S VIE DE JESUS." 
 
 BY 
 
 / 
 JOHN TULLOCH, D. D., 
 
 PfilNCIPAI. OF THE COLLEGE OF ST. MARY, IN THE UNIVERSITY OF 
 
 ST. .ANDREW; AUTHOR OF "THEISM," "LEADERS 
 
 OF THE REF0R3IATI0N," ETC. 
 
 WITH 
 
 AN INTRODUCTION, 
 
 BY 
 
 REV. I. W. WILEY, D. D. ^ 
 
 CINCINNATI: 
 PUBLISHED BY POE & HITCHCOCK. 
 
 R. P. THOMPSON, PRINTER. 
 1865. 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Dr. Tulloch, the author of the little work 
 
 we here present to American ^]- • '^^ n 
 
 ready widely known in the Christi- ■ ••;■'. c^s 
 
 the author of " Theism," " Tnjd Leadet _ ihe 
 
 Reformation," and other valuable works. In 
 
 learning, in piety, and in the skillful handling 
 
 of the pen, he is every way qualified to review 
 
 and refute the captivating book of M. Renan, 
 
 and in doing so, to produce a work still more 
 
 captivating in its clear, fluent, eloquent style, 
 
 than even the florid rhetoric of Renan himself. 
 
 In this respect he meets the skeptic on his own 
 
 ground, and is his master in eloquence and 
 
 rhetoric. " The Christ of the Gospels, and the 
 
 Christ of Modern Criticism," is an admirable 
 
 though brief exposition at once of the book of 
 
 3 
 
4 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 M. Renan, and of the historical and philosoph- 
 ical as well as Christian principles which nega- 
 tive its conclusions. 
 
 "Principal Tulloch's Lectures," says the re- 
 viewer of this little work in Blackwood's Maga- 
 zine for October, 1864, "have already fulfilled 
 the primary and immediate purpose for which 
 they were in no respect after date, and, having 
 done so, come as fitly as modestly to the public, 
 not so much in refutation of the brilliant French- 
 man's idyl, as in calm remonstrance and protest 
 against the principles at once of historical in- 
 quiry and moral criticism, which have produced 
 this last and newest exposition of the ideas of 
 the nineteenth century. Rehgious declamation 
 or pious horror would be out of place from a 
 chair in which theology has to be treated as a 
 science, and where to prove all things is as 
 necessary as to hold fast that which is true. 
 Nor is it, fortunately, the custom nowadays to 
 impute motives, or set down, as in more primi- 
 tive times, a religious speculatist as naturally 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 an impious man. Principal Tulloch himself is 
 one of the chief leaders of religious thought in 
 Scotland, and is neither afraid of speculation, 
 nor disposed to confine it within artificial limits. 
 On the contrary, he considers it a necessary 
 instrument in the Church, destined to weed and 
 winnow the superfluous matter which attaches 
 itself to every real substance of truth; and it 
 is, accordingly, without any undue heat or prej- 
 udice that he looks at M. Renan, whose real 
 qualities of scholarship he acknowledges with- 
 out hesitation, and against whose honesty he 
 makes no suggestion. The faults he alleges 
 against the book are of a more radical quality. 
 To call it blasphemous would have been easy. 
 The critic, in the present case, goes much 
 further, and calls it unphilosophical. He finds 
 fault with its principles, not only in a religious 
 but in an intellectual point of view. He de- 
 scribes it as at once theoretical and dogmatic, 
 rejecting the Catholic belief with the bland 
 elevation of superior intelligence, yet claiming 
 
6 EDITORIAL introduction: 
 
 from its readers a faith in its own assumption, 
 which no Pope has yet been abb to extort from 
 the unwilhng world." 
 
 M. Kenan's work is not strong, but captiva- 
 ting ; not logical, but rhetorical ; not a book of 
 facts, but a book of pictures. He states no 
 propositions which he attempts to prove, but 
 assumes certain facts on which he beautifully 
 expatiates. He attempts to prove nothing, not 
 even the fundamental principles of the books, 
 which are nothing more than the assumptions 
 of a bald materialism, the exclusion of all su- 
 pernatural elements from the world's history; 
 and on this basis of naturalism he attempts to 
 explain the wonderful life and character of 
 Christ. In this life and character, according to 
 M. Renan, there was nothing miraculous, noth- 
 ing superhuman. Like every other human life 
 it developed itself in accordance with the nat- 
 ural endowments of his individual nature, as 
 those endowments were acted upon and evolved 
 by the circumstances which surrounded him. 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 In developing the life of Christ there was sim- 
 ply a happy meeting of a peculiarly gentle, 
 sagacious, loving, and lovable human nature in 
 the person of Jesus, with such influences aris- 
 ing from climate, scenery, certain popular ideas, 
 etc., as could not result otherwise than in a 
 remarkable character. The life of Jesus is but 
 the resultant aggregate of these internal and 
 external forces. 
 
 The only reasons M. Renan has to give for 
 this entire exclusion of every thing supernatural 
 or miraculous from the life of Christ, are, first, 
 that it is impossible to believe in the miracu- 
 lous; that the world naturally and historically 
 is obviously governed simply and solely by 
 natural, uniform, and all-pervading laws, and 
 that the miraculous does not come within the 
 sphere of our human experience, and, therefore, 
 not within the sphere of our belief. Secondly, 
 that there is no need of invoking the aid of the 
 supernatural in explaining the life of Christ, as 
 all its phenomena, remarkable as he acknowl- 
 
8 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 edges them to be, can be adequately accounted 
 for on purely natural and human principles. 
 
 These views give a double task to M. Renan. 
 First, to remove out of the life of Christ as 
 recorded by the evangelists every miraculous 
 feature, for which purpose he must either sim- 
 ply deny the historical fact, or accepting the 
 fact, must attempt its explanation on natural 
 principles. He uses both these methods; the 
 miraculous birth, the resurrection of Christ, and 
 other equally vital facts in the Gospel, he 
 simply sets aside as myths that have grown 
 up in later years out of the profound veneration 
 of the disciples for their beloved Master. The 
 turning of water into wine, the feeding of the 
 five thousand, the raising of Lazarus, and many 
 other miracles, he attempts to explain on nat- 
 ural principles, such as exaggeration, illusion, 
 a willingness in some cases on the part of the 
 disciples to be deceived, and even to aid in a 
 deception; and he even goes so far in some 
 cases as to implicate in some degree the blessed 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 Lord himself in these deceptions, who, however, 
 he claims was involuntarily and unapprovingly- 
 pressed into them by the constant demand of 
 his followers for marvels. Generally the fault 
 is charged upon the over-loving disciples, who 
 were excessively in earnest to gather around 
 their Master the fame of a wonder-worker. 
 One of the best examples of these efforts of 
 M. Renan to explain the mu'acles of Christ is 
 the one selected by our author; namely, the 
 resurrection of Lazarus, found in the body of 
 the work, the reading of which will both serve 
 to illustrate Kenan's method and to refute it. 
 This part of M. Kenan's book is a failure; 
 it is not even dangerous; its attempted expla- 
 nations are so impossible in some instances, so 
 absurd, ridiculous, and contradictory in others, 
 that they refute themselves. We almost agree 
 with a French critic in rejoicing that M. Renan 
 has made this attempt. He is a scholar of 
 acknowledged eminence, learned in all the in- 
 tricacies of Asiatic literature, a savant in nat- 
 
10 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ural science, an Oriental traveler, making the 
 tour of the Holy Land purposely to secure the 
 data necessary for liis work; and with these 
 eminent qualifications he professes to enter 
 with a perfectly candid and unbiased mind upon 
 the consideration of those singular phenomena 
 which attended the origin of Christianity. He 
 denies their miraculous character; he attempts 
 to explain them on mere natural principles; he 
 fails— fails even to satisfy his own mind, fails 
 to produce a scheme of interpretation that the 
 skeptics of France and Germany will accept. 
 The savant of the nineteenth century furnishes 
 no more satisfactory solution of the marvelous 
 phenomena of the hfe of Christ than did the 
 cotemporaneous Pharisees who attributed them 
 to Beelzebub, or than Celsus, Porphyry, or 
 Julian, of the primitive centuries, who attributed 
 them to magic. 
 
 Having thus, as he supposes, eliminated the 
 miraculous from the life of Christ, the next 
 task of M. Renan is to explain his history and 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 11 
 
 character as he supposes them to have been 
 naturally developed by the influences which sur- 
 rounded him. For this purpose he does not 
 depreciate the remarkable human life of Christ. 
 He has evidently been deeply impressed by the 
 wonderful character he has set himself to por- 
 tray. He constantly reminds us of the sublime 
 contrast which Rousseau has drawn between the 
 character of Jesus and that of Socrates. In 
 this part of his work the philosopher becomes 
 an enthusiast. The following thoughts of an 
 English reviewer of M. Kenan's work are ad- 
 mirably descriptive of this feature of his book: 
 "To account for the influence exercised by a 
 man of humble station and uncultivated powers, 
 not only over his own generation but over cen- 
 turies of distant time and worlds of alien peo- 
 ple, does indeed require that every thing that 
 is most noble and perfect in mind and spirit 
 should at least be allowed to the individual who 
 has occupied so singular a place in the world. 
 M. Renan accordingly depicts the Author of 
 
12 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 our religion in the warmest and brightest colors. 
 So far from attempting to lessen the beauty of 
 his character, he sets it forth, as we have said, 
 with graceful enthusiasm, elaborating many a 
 charming vignette by the way of that fair East- 
 ern landscape, which he concludes to have im- 
 parted so much of its reflective calm and pastoral 
 beauty to the soul of the young Nazarene. He 
 describes to us, in very full detail, what Jesus 
 knew and did not know, and the processes of 
 thought and growth of ideas in his mind. He 
 touches lightly, with a tender regret, on those 
 unfortunate moments in which, beguiled by the 
 wiles of his friends and the necessities of the 
 time, this wonderful reformer permitted himself 
 to be seduced into thaumaturgical performances 
 and pretenses of miracle. By these means — 
 by the beauty of Christ's character, and even, 
 for M. Renan is bold, of his person — ^by the 
 enthusiasm of his followers, and the ingenuity 
 of his disciples, and the mingled wants and 
 credulity of the age — the new biographer of 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 Jesus of Nazareth does his best to account for 
 Christianity." 
 
 So far from detracting from the glory of the 
 figure which it is his ambition to portray, his 
 evident desire and intention is to add to it, and 
 record more distinctly its wonderful elevation 
 and majesty. Yet in all this eloquence of de- 
 scription he never allows the character of Christ 
 to rise above the human. Jesus is for him only 
 the son of Mary, never the Son of God ; a man 
 of wonderful genius and high originality, but 
 never actually a divine person. Indeed, M. 
 Renan seems to proceed as if no one ever for 
 a moment had thought of any other elements 
 in the character of Christ than those of our 
 common humanity, though possessed by him in 
 an extraordinary degree, and developed by pe- 
 culiar circumstances into a unique character of 
 great loveliiiess and power. This sublime char- 
 acter, too, as drawn by himself, is a historical, 
 an actual person; this life of wonderful beauty 
 is not a myth, not a legend. M. Renan had 
 
14 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 heart and power to perceive that the human 
 imagination is incapable of so magriificent an 
 invention; least of all would he have supposed 
 for a moment that the illiterate disciples could 
 have conceived and depicted so wonderful a 
 character. 
 
 It becomes the task, then, of M. Eenan to 
 explain this sublime life, so far transcending all 
 other human lives, and so powerfully affecting 
 not only the age and country in which he lived, 
 but all subsequent ages, and even these remote 
 ends of the world. This he attempts to do by 
 reference to the ordinary influence of surround- 
 ing circumstances in the development of char- 
 acter. On this law of influence he lays great 
 stress; with him every human character is but 
 the aggregate result of certain natural endow- 
 ments as acted upon by the outer influences 
 into the midst of which the living individual is 
 thrown. Of course all this is materialistic, 
 even mechanical; yet chiefly by the action of 
 this law he attempts to explain the character 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 of our Lord. He concedes to him, first of all, 
 a moral nature most happily constituted — gen- 
 tle, loving, sensitive, conscientious, impressible ; 
 his mind is one of remarkable originality and 
 acuteness; he is intelligent, but not educated; 
 has great intuitional power, and is profoundly 
 contemplative; he is in active sympathy with 
 the current ideas of his age and country, and 
 is strongly influenced especially by the mes- 
 sianic expectations of his nation. This nature 
 develops itself amid the grand scenery of 
 Galilee; the mountains, the valleys, the lakes, 
 the magnificent landscapes, the calm, quiet pas- 
 toral life around him, the ideas floating about 
 as the common food of thought, all act upon 
 his gentle and impressible nature, and the re- 
 sult is the wonderful man Christ Jesus. If we 
 should ask M. Renan, "What thinkest thou of 
 Christ?" he would give us the bald, mechanical 
 reply, He is the sum total of certain elements 
 of a very fine nature born of Mary, and the 
 influence of the climate, scenery, modes of life 
 
16 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 and thoTiglit existing eighteen centuries ago in 
 Galilee ! 
 
 All, then, that M. Renan has to offer us in 
 explanation of the wonderful life of Christ which 
 he himself so eloquently depicts, is " that Christ 
 was produced by Judaism, the most austere and 
 narrow of all reUgious systems, and by the 
 lovely pastoral landscapes and simple rural 
 manners of Galilee — these two working to- 
 gether, but chiefly and most powerfully the 
 last, upon the gracious and tender influence of 
 which he enlarges with a dainty eloquence which 
 makes one fain to believe, though experience is 
 little in favor of the idea, that the soft hills 
 and green pastures, the sweet shadow of olive 
 woods and glimmer of inland waters, are not 
 only full of moral influence, but of the loftiest 
 inspiration." 
 
 With pointing out the utter inadequacy of 
 this explanation, we have nothing to do in this 
 introduction. This has been ably done by Dr. 
 Tulloch, and that part of his work devoted to 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 this duty is most eloquent and impressive. Here 
 again the work of M. Renan is a failure. He 
 only makes us feel every moment that we read 
 his attempted explanations more than ever that 
 the life and character of Christ, and the origin 
 of Christianity are utterly inexplicable on any 
 theory that ignores the Divine and miraculous. 
 In the sublime character which he has drawn 
 for Christ it is impossible not to feel that he 
 has served the cause he meant to injure. Yet 
 this part of M. Kenan's work is not without 
 its dangers. It is this high appreciation of the 
 character of our Lord and his truly- eloquent 
 statement of it which gives popularity to the 
 book, and, where the subtile infidelity is not 
 detected, finds for it a place in the Christian 
 home and library. We have heard good Chris- 
 tians admiringly speak of this book, and unsus- 
 pectingly pronounce the Christ of M. Renan most 
 beautiful and perfect. The following thoughts 
 of M. De Pressense, an eminent clergyman of 
 the Reformed Church of France, who has writ- 
 
18 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 ten an excellent reply to Renan's work, are just 
 and suggestive : " M. Renan's book at bottom 
 flatters all the bad cotemporaneous instincts; it 
 makes the apotheosis of that melancholy and 
 voluptuous skepticism which covers up with a 
 certain distinction and a certain charm the most 
 positive materialism; it flatters our languid 
 wills, substitutes the worship of the beautiful 
 for the worship of the holy, and authorizes, by 
 the false ideal which it presents to us, a facti- 
 tious religious sentiment which demands no sac- 
 rifice, no manly act, covers up the cross under 
 flowers, and at last only gives back to humanity 
 its old idol, newly carved and painted. This 
 idol is no other than humanity itself. This mix- 
 ture of atheism and sensibility is particularly 
 dangerous, because it meets preexistent tenden- 
 cies and colors them with a fallacious poesy. 
 The art of the historian, or rather of the ro- 
 mance writer — Renan — consists in his hiding the 
 entire absence of all belief under graceful met- 
 aphors and an unctuous style, just as the brill- 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 19 
 
 iant snow of the Alps covers up the abyss 
 and deprives the traveler of the salutary horror 
 which would save him." 
 
 Another feature of the work of M. Renan is 
 the view he takes of the origin of the Gospels. 
 It is impossible to detect any system of criti- 
 cism on which he proceeds in settling the import- 
 ant questions of authorship, date, etc., of these 
 sacred books. In fact, he follows no school. The 
 theories of Strauss he simply sets aside, though 
 he compliments the author of the " Lehen Je%u^^ 
 and was evidently very powerfully influenced by 
 that work in the composition of many parts of 
 his own. Of the labors of Baur and the Tubin- 
 gen divines he knows nothing, or at least makes 
 no account of them. In fact his system, or 
 rather non-system, is his own. He claims for 
 it also a high scientific value, and yet, while 
 claiming such an authority, we find him every- 
 where freely indulging in a spirit of the most 
 arbitrary and unauthorized assertion. Without 
 alleging any facts, or even condescending to 
 
20, EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION, 
 
 any argumentation, he declares the Gospels to 
 be books which grew into their present propor- 
 tions under the hands of a great multitude of 
 authors, each man adding to his scanty manu- 
 script any incident or utterance that specially 
 impressed himself. Out of the multitudes of 
 manuscripts thus formed the present Gospels 
 were accepted and sanctioned by the Church. 
 How on such a supposition these Gospels grew 
 up into such marvelous unity he does not pre- 
 tend to tell us. Indeed, he does not find any 
 unity, either in any individual Gospel, or in 
 their relation to each other. Wherever his own 
 judgment, on the intuitional power of which 
 he places a remarkably high estimate, finds ap- 
 parent confusion, or contradiction, or inconsist- 
 ency, or improbability, he does not hesitate to 
 set it aside. The Gospels in his judgment are 
 in some sense historical, but by no means re- 
 liable as historical records, and in no sense in- 
 spired. They are compilations made by incom- 
 petent hands, even though in some parts they 
 
EDITORIAL INRTODUCTION. 21 
 
 may be the work of the authors whose names 
 they bear. The compilers, whoever they were, 
 were partisan writers, avowed disciples of him 
 whose biography they write; and what in his 
 opinion is still more unfortunate, they were 
 not able to understand and appreciate the won- 
 derful human character of him of whom thej? 
 wrote, but were constantly mistaking his true 
 character, and aiming at gathering about their 
 adored hero the halo of the wonderful and mar- 
 velous. 
 
 Of course M. Renan follows all other modern 
 skeptical critics in finding peculiar difficulties in 
 St. John's Gospel. In his judgment it was 
 simply impossible for the son of Zebedee, the 
 fisherman of Galilee, to be the author of those 
 profoundly philosophical discourses found in 
 that Gospel, or even to comprehend them suffi- 
 ciently to record them for us, if they had ever 
 been spoken by our Lord. He claims that the 
 ideas were of later origin than the age of Christ 
 or the lifetime of John, and bear on their face 
 
22 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 certain evidence of an origin remote from Judea. 
 Yet he allows that St. John may have furnished 
 the historical ground-work on which much later 
 and more philosophical writers ingrafted these 
 remarkable discourses. He dwells, too, very 
 strongly on the differences between the earlier 
 Gospels and that of John; differences which he 
 so far exaggerates as to enable him to declare 
 that, ''If Jesus spoke according to St. Mat- 
 thew, he certainly did not speak according to 
 St. John." It does not seem to have occurred 
 to M. Renan that no one claims for St. John 
 the authorship of the wonderful discourses which 
 he records, but that the author of the Gospel 
 containing those discourses only relates them 
 as the sayings of that man whom Renan him- 
 self describes as the most wonderful genius, 
 and most profound philosopher, and most orig- 
 inal thinker the world had then produced. 
 Surely such a person might have uttered these 
 discourses, and surely the loving disciple was 
 competent merely to record them. 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 23 
 
 The difference in style and contents between 
 the three earlier Gospels and that of St. John 
 is not a discovery of M. Renan, but has long 
 since been pointed out and accounted for by 
 orthodox critics. In reality it presents no diffi- 
 culty; it is easily and satisfactorily accounted 
 for by the difference of the individuality and 
 scope of the writers, as w^ell as by the fact of 
 the later origin of John's Gospel. Owing to 
 this later origin we may take it for granted 
 that the synoptical Gospels were generally 
 known when John wrote; that he, therefore, 
 purposely abstaining from writing anew what 
 they had at sufficient length recorded, only 
 sought to complete them by narrating those 
 portions of the life of Jesus which had been 
 omitted by the others, and especially by re- 
 cording those very discourses which they had 
 not given. 
 
 The following excellent thoughts on this point 
 wc quote from the same English reviewer of 
 Renan's work, who has already furnished uti 
 
24 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 one or two valuable paragraphs : " How far this 
 characteristic distinction may have arisen from 
 a difference of audience we do not undertake to 
 decide; but an intelligent reader will perceive 
 that in various specified cases the audience 
 mentioned in the Gospel of John is of an 
 altogether different character from the rustic 
 crowds of Matthew. There is, in the first place, 
 Nicodemus, with whom the Master treated in 
 private of high and difficult matters, which it 
 would have been utterly impracticable to dis- 
 cuss on the mountain or the shore of the lake, 
 in presence of a fluctuating and ignorant mul- 
 titude; and, toward the end of the Gospel, it 
 is with the intimate circle of his immediate 
 disciples, gathered round him in awe, and dis- 
 may, and painful half- comprehension, like peo- 
 ple at a death-bed, that the Savior talks — 
 speaking to them things which they understood 
 * afterward,' as the record itself pathetically 
 says. Such an auditory was little likely to 
 be addressed in the broader general discourses 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 25 
 
 with which the ministry of Christ began. To 
 deliver to them, under such circumstances, an- 
 other Sermon on the Mount, would have been 
 a proceeding entirely false to that human nature 
 which was ever surpassed but never contra- 
 dicted by Jesus of Nazareth; and what is un- 
 questionably true of the discussions which begin, 
 and of the wonderful and affecting intercourse 
 which closes this Gospel, has also, so far as we 
 are able to judge, every appearance of being 
 applicable to the intervening portions. It is 
 not the out-door crowd which can do nothing 
 but listen, but the groups in the porches of the 
 synagogues, on the steps of the Temple, curious 
 and hostile, laying traps for the speaker, whom 
 we perceive dimly through John's narrative; 
 and the distinction is natural enough, and easy 
 to understand. But the question is one which 
 demands larger space and fuller treatment. It 
 is to John we owe the narrative unequaled in 
 human literature, of these last communings with 
 His chosen friends, which are to most Christian 
 
26 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 souls the most profoundly affecting part of the 
 history of Christ. His is the story of that last 
 mortal meal, where, as yet unassailed and un- 
 condemned, the Redeemer sat among his fol- 
 lowers with the prescience of death in his eyes, 
 addressing to them those counsels and those 
 promises of which it was hard for them to see 
 the occasion ; while they, alarmed, and dismayed, 
 and awe-stricken, asked bewildered questions, 
 and knew not what they said." 
 
 Our author, Dr. Tulloch, ably discusses these 
 false critical methods of Renan in his third 
 and fourth lectures, and with as much fullness, 
 perhaps, as Renan' s loose, confused, and con- 
 tradictory views deserve; but the subject itself 
 is of the highest importance, and we wish the 
 lecturer had been in a little less haste, and had 
 entered more fully and critically into the dis- 
 cussion of the points w^hich M. Renan raises. 
 It is a subject, however, that belongs more 
 properly to higher biblical criticism, has really 
 very little logical connection with the other 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 27 
 
 parts of M. Renan's book, and a more critical 
 discussion would, perhaps, detract from our 
 author's more popular aim and ^ method. We 
 are glad to find in the admirable introductory 
 chapters to Dr. Nast's Commentary, a very full 
 and able discussion of this important question 
 of "the Origin of the Gospels," and that the 
 learned commentator has there not only met 
 the older views of Strauss, but has even antici- 
 pated the conjectures of Renan, and the still 
 more carefully elaborated views of Strauss pre- 
 sented in his new "Life of Jesus." 
 
 The admirable little work of Dr. Tulloch is 
 by no means untimely or unnecessary. Al- 
 though the work of Renan has nearly passed 
 through its ephemeral life, and the popular tide 
 has already turned against it, yet its false prin- 
 ciples and methods still survive, and have not 
 only produced their poisonous effects in many 
 minds, but are still reappearing in other works 
 just issuing from the press. At this time the 
 evangelical Churches of Germany are under- 
 
28 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 going the same fermentation as those of France 
 on the publication of Kenan's book. This ex- 
 citement has been created by the appearance 
 of the work of a learned divine, M. Schenkel, 
 entitled the " Characteristics of Jesus Christy' 
 and which, like the work of M. Renan, is an 
 effort to reduce Christianity to a simple moral 
 evolution without miracles and without revela- 
 tion, abandoning entirely all faith in the super- 
 natural. Still more recently has appeared the 
 new work of Strauss, entitled '•'Das Lehen Jesu 
 fur das Deutche Volk bearbeitet,'' which is not 
 a mere recast of the earlier work, but substan- 
 tially a new book, primarily designed "for the 
 people," and which has already passed through 
 its second edition, and will soon appear in an 
 English dress. It is well, then, that Dr. Tul- 
 loch has not confined himself to answering 
 merely the specific errors of Renan, but has 
 discussed the false principles, assumptions, and 
 critical methods on which the '' Vie de Jesus'' is 
 constructed — principles and assumptions which 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 29 
 
 are nearly the same as those adopted in the 
 much more able works of Schenkel and Strauss. 
 It is evident that the great battle of Chris- 
 tianity in our day is to be fought over the ques- 
 tions of the Divine origin of the Scriptures, and 
 the Divine nature of Christ. Modern skepti-- 
 cism has leveled its strongest batteries on these 
 points. The aim of its blows, though in two 
 directions, is yet single — out of the Scriptures 
 and out of Christ must be eliminated every 
 Divine element, and both alike must be reduced 
 to the sphere of the human. The Scriptures 
 must be emptied of inspiration, and the charac- 
 ter of Christ of all Divine features. To satisfy 
 the cravings of the Christian heart, or rather 
 to allay the fears that would be excited by so 
 plain a statement of their object, these skeptics 
 seem willing to compensate for the loss of these 
 Divine characteristics by exalting, to the highest 
 possible point of admiration, the human product 
 that is left. The Scriptures, though uninspired, 
 are still by far the most sublime and valuable 
 
30 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of human productions. The character of Jesus, 
 though only human, is still the most excellent 
 of all human lives, and by its surpassing ex- 
 cellence becomes the moral inspiration of all 
 subsequent ages. We can easily see, then, how 
 it comes that some of the highest praises ever 
 bestowed on the Scriptures have come from 
 men who at the same time are undermining all 
 the claims of these sacred records to rehable 
 truth and Divine authority by denying their 
 inspiration; and how men, who deny all super- 
 human characteristics of Jesus, may yet exalt 
 him as the first and best among men. Still we 
 believe there is a sort of honesty in these ad- 
 miring descriptions; that these men are really 
 charmed by what they find in Christ, and that 
 there is something strange in the fascination 
 which binds the hearts of these men to the 
 wonderful character of Jesus. Is it not the 
 Divine attraction of that mysterious character 
 operating on these men at the very moment 
 that they are denying its existence? 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 31 
 
 The Church needs not fear to accept this new 
 battle offered by modern skepticism. True, it 
 strikes at the most vital part of our Chris- 
 tianity, but for that very reason it must fail. 
 Christianity can afford to lean on the character 
 of her Divine Founder, and to witness without 
 fear the attacks of her enemies on the Rock 
 of Ages. She may confidently repeat his own 
 challenge, "Which of you convinceth me of 
 sin?" — a question which no one yet has been 
 bold enough to take up. There is, perhaps, a 
 little danger that some may be deceived by 
 the exalted descriptions of Christ given by this 
 school of skeptics, and yet we think but few; 
 for after all it is a strange incongruous char- 
 acter that is presented to us in "the Christ 
 of modern criticism;" contradictory, either de- 
 ceiving or being deceived, if not, indeed, both; 
 exalted almost to divine excellence in some 
 respects, and in others reduced below the in- 
 telligence, candor, and honesty of ordinary men. 
 "They may dispute," says M. Guizot, "the 
 
32 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 
 
 nature and supernatural power of Jesus Christ: 
 but they can not dispute the perfection, the 
 sublimity of his actions and of his precepts, 
 of his life and of his moral law. And, indeed, 
 not only do they not dispute them, they cele- 
 brate them with gratitude and complaisance; 
 they seem even willing to give back to Jesus 
 Christ as a man the superiority which they take 
 away from him in refusing to see God in him. 
 But then, what incoherences, what contradic- 
 tions, what falsehood, what moral impossibility 
 in his history as they represent it! What a 
 series of hypotheses irreconcilable with the facts 
 which they admit! This man, perfect and sub- 
 lime, is at the same time a dreamer or a char- 
 latan ; a dupe himself and a deceiver of others ; 
 the dupe of his own mystic exaltation when he 
 believes in his own miracles, a voluntary de- 
 ceiver when he arranges appearances so as to 
 lead others to believe them. The history of 
 Jesus Christ is no more than a tissue of chime- 
 ras and impositions. And yet the hero of this 
 
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION. 33 
 
 history remains perfect, sublime, incomparable, 
 
 the greatest genius and the greatest heart 
 
 among men; the type of virtue and of moral 
 
 beauty, the supreme and legitimate head of 
 
 humanity V 
 
 I. W. WILEY. 
 Cincinnati, 1865. 
 
 3 
 
PEEFATOET NOTE. 
 
 These Lectures were written during last 
 Winter in Rome, for the use of my stu- 
 dents in St. Andrew's. Compelled by iU- 
 health to leave the active discharge of my 
 duties in the hands of others, I felt, with 
 returning strength, reluctant to be idle in 
 my professional capacity, even amid the 
 engrossing glories of Rome. My atten- 
 tion had been drawn to M. Renans vol- 
 ume before leaving home. It encountered 
 me in all my wanderings in the Mediter- 
 ranean and Levant in the early Winter, 
 It was every-where a common topic of 
 conversation. Many minds were evidently 
 
 35 
 
36 PREFATORY NOTE. 
 
 disposed to accept it as a satisfactory ex- 
 planation of Christianity. Many more did 
 not know very well what to think of it^ 
 but were disposed to regard it as a very 
 significant, if not altogether successful, at- 
 tack upon religion and the Church. I 
 thought I could not do better than write 
 a few lectures upon it. 
 
 Some friends in R,ome, knowing what I 
 was about, asked me to read the lectures; 
 and they were read there to successive 
 companies of friends, chiefly clerical — 
 American, Anglican, and Scotch-Presbyte- 
 rian — whose intelligent criticism I recall 
 with pleasure. 
 
 To myself these few lectures must al- 
 ways have something of a mournful inter- 
 est, associated as they have been with a 
 time of painful trial and suffering. At 
 such a time one learns to look within, to 
 
PEE FA TOR Y NO TE. 37 
 
 see on what his life is resting. Christian- 
 ity is nothing to me or any man, if it is 
 not a source of living strength — "the light 
 of life." This, I trust, I have found it to 
 be in a time of need. And out of the 
 fullness of my feeling I have sj^oken — 
 very imperfectly, I am aware— it may be 
 weakly, according to the convictions of 
 others, below what they may feel and 
 realize of Divine truth, but honestly, ac- 
 cording to my own convictions, as I have 
 always sought to do. 
 
 Grave, however, as are the faults of M. 
 Renan's work, and unworthy as appears to 
 me the spirit animating certain parts of it, 
 I have not felt called upon to indulge in 
 any denunciation of either. To all per- 
 sonal criticism in such discussions I have a 
 strong aversion. It never does any good, 
 and it is in itself a mean and contempt!- 
 
38 PREFA TOR Y NO TE. 
 
 ble weapon. In a time like ours, when 
 Christian truth needs so much the advo- 
 cacy of reason as well as of zeal, it is 
 painful and sad to think how the cause of 
 this truth sometimes suffers from a mode 
 of advocacy inconsistent not only with 
 Christian principle, but with those rules 
 of honorable courtesy toward opponents 
 which now prevail in all higher circles of 
 intellectual activity. 
 
 I may add that I have not seen Dr. 
 Strauss's new and popular work on the 
 "Life of Jesus," and that all my remarks, 
 so far as he is concerned, of course apply 
 to his previous well-known work. 
 
 CuEPRi, May. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 c 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 Editorial Introduction 3 
 
 Prefatory Note 35 
 
 I. 
 
 General Remarks — Positivism and the Super- 
 natural 41 
 
 II. 
 Nature of Evidence for the Christian Mira- 
 cles 73 
 
 III. 
 Origin and Character of the Gospels ac- 
 cording TO M. Renan — M. Renan's Critical 
 Method loi 
 
 IV. 
 
 Integrity of the Gospels — ^The Gospel of St. 
 
 John -^Parallel of the Gospels with the 
 
 Lives of the Saints 133 
 
 39 
 
40 CONTENTS. 
 
 V. 
 
 PAGE. 
 
 Origin of Christianity according to M. Re- 
 nan — Person and Character of Jesus . . .171 
 
 VI. 
 
 Person and Character of Jesus continued — 
 Unintelligibility, Inconsistency, and Inade- 
 quACY of M. Renan's Portrait 304 
 
LECTURES. 
 
 I. 
 
 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATUAL. 
 
 The publication of M. Renan's "Vie de 
 Jesus," marks a crisis in the present course 
 of philosophical and religious opinion. This 
 is its chief significance. The book itself 
 has been judged very differently, from dif- 
 ferent points of view — denied all merit by 
 some — ^loudly applauded by others; but the 
 grave import of its appearance, and of its 
 immediate wide-spread circulation through- 
 out Europe, can not be questioned by any. 
 
 Note. — The references are throughout to the fifth 
 French edition. 
 
 41 
 
42 POSITIVISM AND THE SVPERNATUBAL. 
 
 It has caused a greater shock in Christen- 
 dom than any work since Dr. Strauss's 
 "Leben Jesu," while the attractiveness of 
 its form and style has already given it a 
 reputation and an influence far more ex- 
 tensive than its more elaborate German 
 predecessor. In England, and throughout 
 the Continent, it is a common topic of 
 conversation. It is heard of amid all the 
 excitements of political, and of military 
 struggle; in the halls of Oxford, in the 
 salons of Paris, in the churches of Italy, 
 in the counting-houses of the Levant. 
 While we write, it is the subject of sol- 
 emn "reparation" services in aU Catholic 
 countries, and the Archbishop of Smyrna, 
 Apostolic Vicar of Asia Minor, has just 
 published a "Pastoral" to his clergy, in 
 vindication of the faith against its daring 
 statements. It is indispensable that stu- 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNA TUBAL. 43 
 
 dents in divinity should know something 
 of such a work, or rather — for no student 
 can be kept ignorant of it — that they 
 should be able to say something re§pifding 
 it, not merely by way of deprecation and 
 condemnation, but of intelligent apprecia- 
 tion and reply. 
 
 Like its German predecessor, the "Vie 
 de Jesus" marks the spring-tide of an ad- 
 vancing wave of thought inimical to Chris- 
 tianity. As the former was the result 
 of Hegelian speculation and of the crisis 
 reached by rationalistic criticism, the nat- 
 ural consummation of the antichristian 
 activity of the German intellect through 
 many years, so the work of M. Renan is 
 the result, and, it may be hoped, the con- 
 summation of the course of materialistic 
 thought, known as Positivism, which since 
 then has been active, not only in France, 
 
44 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 but in England, Germany, and elsewhere, 
 and of an historical criticism divorced 
 from all faith and true reverence. So far 
 there is a remarkable analogy between the 
 works. They are the respective types of 
 a definite mode of antichristian thought. 
 In other respects they do not present 
 much resemblance. The "Vie de Jesus" 
 is a more dangerous, but, so to speak, a 
 less formidable book. It is more danger- 
 ous, because it addresses a far wider class 
 of readers; it is designed to influence the 
 young and the multitudes of educated and 
 half-educated minds in our day, who are 
 impelled, by the atmosphere of inquiry 
 surrounding them, to investigate such a 
 subject as the origin of Christianity, but 
 who have neither the resources nor the 
 leisure to investigate it thoroughly. It is 
 less formidable, because less solid, and ap- 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 45 
 
 parently less earnest. In these qualities 
 the German work is greatly superior. In 
 the language of German theology the 
 "Leben Jesu" was acknowledged to be a 
 strictly scientific treatise, addressed to 
 theologians and mainly aiming at their en- 
 lightenment and advance. With compara- 
 tively few attractions of manner and style, 
 it is throughout grave, philosophical, and 
 vigorously polemical, presenting an array 
 of argument and learning far more impos- 
 ing than the light and rapid pages of the 
 present work. 
 
 But the chief difference in the influence 
 of the two works will be found to arise 
 from the different modes of thought which 
 they represent, and to which they appeal. 
 Neither Hegelian philosophy nor rational- 
 istic criticism, in its successive develop- 
 ments, strangely exciting as they were in 
 
46 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 Germany, created much excitement be- 
 yond Germany. The former has remained 
 to this day an esoteric system, unknown 
 save to a limited circle of speculative stu- 
 dents; it is said to have been abandoned 
 or idly regarded by Dr. Strauss himself in 
 after years. Positivism, within the last 
 <^uarter of a century, has become an act- 
 ive and even fashionable mode of thought, 
 and no where more so than among certain 
 literary and intellectual circles in England. 
 So far as it is a philosophy, it is adapted 
 to the common understanding, and falls in 
 fitly with the scientific and social tend- 
 encies of the time, while it has received a 
 noted impulse from certain living writers 
 of great ability. 
 
 But Positivism is, characteristically, not 
 so much a definite philosophy as a method 
 of philosophizing, a way of thinking about 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 47 
 
 science/ life, and religion. And this way 
 of thinking largely aifects many who know 
 little or nothing of M. Comte's particular 
 opinions, or who may not even have heard 
 of M. Comte himself. There is no one 
 who knows any thing of current literature, 
 either French or English, who does not 
 know that the influence of Positivism has 
 in this manner extended widely, and pre- 
 pared, as it were, for the reception of a 
 work like M. Renan's, which should apply 
 its principles and modes of reasoning to 
 the Gospels and the Life of Jesus. 
 
 This state of intellectual preparation, 
 combined with the genuine literary merits 
 of the "Vie de Jesus," is sufficient to ac- 
 count for its extraordinary circulation and 
 the remarkable interest which it has ex- 
 cited every-where. There were waiting, 
 so to speak, for such a book, many minds 
 
48 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 stored with vague novelties as to the 
 growth of religious and social constitu- 
 tions and the general development of civ- 
 ilization, such as Positivism suggests, and 
 groping in that dim perplexity of spiritual 
 inquiry which is so common in our time. 
 A volume which professes to account for 
 the origin of Christianity, and to explain 
 the appearance of Jesus on ordinary his- 
 torical principles, within a few hundred 
 pages, written in a charmingly facile style 
 and with an apparent depth of thoughtful- 
 ness and sentiment, could not fail to secure 
 hosts of readers and to excite universal 
 attention. 
 
 Some critics, we observe, have turned 
 the extremely popular character of the 
 work into a reproach against it. They 
 allege that a book of such a character 
 places itself beyond the pale of grave the- 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 49 
 
 ological discussion, that it is more a ro- 
 mance than any thing else, and scarcely 
 deserves serious refutation. Even Dr. 
 Ewald, of Gottingen, who would be sup- 
 posed by many in England to be a fellow- 
 worker with M. Renan, is reported to have 
 denounced the volume as conceived and 
 written in a spirit unworthy of theological 
 science. But whether such a reproach be 
 deserving or not, we can not help thinking 
 that it is an unhappy device of Christian 
 theology to despise and overlook any book, 
 evidently influential, on such a ground. It 
 would seem as if, in certain quarters, the 
 old antagonism between Christianity and 
 literature in its more attractive forms still 
 lingers. There are good people who seem 
 to imagine that a book can not be at once 
 very pleasant and very valuable. Dull- 
 ness has its prescriptive rights; and a cer- 
 
 4 
 
50 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 tain heaviness of thouglit and style is 
 supposed to be peculiarly suitable in theo- 
 logical discussion. Gravity certainly al- 
 ways becomes such discussion. But even 
 if the "Vie de Jesus" should appear to us 
 lacking in appropriate gravity, it would be 
 absurd to satisfy ourselves with neglecting 
 and disparaging it merely on this account; 
 for it is its very literary attractiveness, its 
 clear beauty and fluency of style, its con- 
 fident gayety and piquancy of argument, 
 the ease, lightness, and rapidity with 
 which it moves along through all the dif- 
 ficulties of its subject, the imaginative 
 brilliance which lights up its descriptive 
 sketches, and the glow of sentimental en- 
 thusiasm which is but seldom wanting in 
 its moral discussions, which give to it its 
 peculiar influence, and make it at once so 
 seductive and so dangerous to many minds. 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 51 
 
 Nor, we confess, much as we shall find 
 occasion to condemn M. Renan's tone, do 
 we see any reason to doubt, upon the 
 whole, his honesty of intention in this 
 or in any other of his works, which are 
 mostly devoted to Biblical or religious 
 subjects. In all of these works he seems 
 animated by a spirit of inquiry, which, if 
 tinged by a pervading materialism and 
 something of the careless, sensuous ethics 
 of his country, is yet, in its way, thought- 
 ful and sincere. He is deeply interested 
 in the historical origin and development of 
 religious opinions; and to the investigation 
 of such topics he has brought the resources 
 of a rare, comprehensive, and living learn- 
 ing. Of this latter point there can be no 
 question, whatever we may think of the 
 application he has made of his learning in 
 the present case, particularly of those ex- 
 
52 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 travagant pretensions as to the Talmud by 
 which he has sought to cany the weakness 
 of his position and to impose upon himself 
 and others. His scholarly acquisitions he 
 has further improved and vivified by resi- 
 dence in the East and intelligent personal 
 contact with Eastern manners and institu- 
 tions; while to his other qualifications he 
 adds that fine turn for generalization so 
 characteristic of the critical and historical 
 intellect of France, and which gives to all 
 its productions a rare charm for educated 
 readers. 
 
 There is really no point of view, there- 
 fore, in which M. Renan can be conceived 
 a weak or contemptible opponent, or in 
 which his volume does not demand and 
 require the awakened attention of the 
 Christian theologian. In this conviction 
 these lectures have originated, and as they 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 53 
 
 have been written in some degree to sat- 
 isfy the writer's own mind, as well as dis- 
 charge a formal duty, they may be found 
 helpful to guide and inform the minds of 
 others. 
 
 I. M. Renan's book first demands our 
 attention in its philosophical aspect. It 
 is the expression, we have said, of a pre- 
 vailing philosophical tendency. Its funda- 
 mental and controlling conception takes its 
 rise in a system of thought very marked 
 at the present time. This fact is apparent 
 on the face of the volume. The author 
 not only does not conceal, but throughout 
 the introduction and early chapters pa- 
 rades the great Positivist idea of an un- 
 changing material law governing all things, 
 the tvorlcl of historg as well as the loorld of 
 matter. And in certain passages he ex- 
 pressly appeals to this idea as the neces- 
 
54 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 sarily guiding principle of all historical 
 investigation — and of the investigation of 
 the origin of Christianity^ no less than 
 other historical problems — in the very 
 same manner as Strauss appealed to cer- 
 tain Hegelian conceptions, and sought to 
 brmg Christianity within their conditions. 
 He tells us, as a matter of course, in one 
 of his earliest pages,* that the "Gospels 
 are partly legendary," for the reason that 
 " they are full of miracles." Any miracu- 
 lous relation is to him incompatible with 
 historical veracity. It is enough to stamp 
 a record as so far fictitious or legendary 
 that it acknowledges the reality of the su- 
 pernatural, or incloses any professed mirac- 
 ulous occurrences. And this, he contends, 
 is not to impose any preconception or the- 
 ory upon history, but simply to insist 
 
 ■^Introduction, p. xv. 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 55 
 
 upon the critical observation and analysis 
 of facts. " It is not in the name of this 
 or that philosophy/' he says/^' "but it is 
 in the name of a constant experience that 
 we banish miracle from history. We do 
 not say that ' miracle is impossible/ but 
 merely that no miracle has been hitherto 
 proved." "None of the miracles with 
 which ancient histories are filled have 
 happened under scientific conditions. Uni- 
 form observation teaches us that they only 
 happen in times and countries where peo- 
 ple are prepared to believe them." 
 
 We shall afterward have occasion to con- 
 sider what he says on the special subject 
 of "scientific conditions/' applied to a mir- 
 acle, and to examine the value of his sup- 
 posed tests or conditions. In the mean 
 time we wish to fix attention upon the 
 
 * Introduction, pp. 1. li. 
 
56 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 general principles of his philosophy, rather 
 than their particular application. He 
 would have us to understand, from the 
 above statement, that he and the school 
 to which he belongs are free from the- 
 oretic bias in the interpretation of histor- 
 ical facts. But this is just what it is 
 impossible to concede to them. Thei/ are 
 theorists, and of a most extreme character, 
 in their views of history, and their expla- 
 nation of some of its most characteristic 
 phenomena. M. Renan may pretend not 
 to afi&rm the possibility of miracles, merely 
 to judge them from a critical and histor- 
 ical point of view, but such an affirmation 
 is in the face of the whole spirit and scope 
 of his book. It is contradicted almost in 
 the very breath in which he utters it ; for 
 why should recitals of miracles be neces- 
 sarily legendary if miracle be not held to 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 57 
 
 be a friori impossible?* On what ground, 
 otherwise, are the Gospels at once pro- 
 nounced to be partly legendary? For ob- 
 serve, this is said antecedent to all exam- 
 ination of the Gospel miracles, or their 
 appropriate evidence. "No miracle has 
 been hitherto proved!" Is not this to beg 
 the whole question in a spirit of arbitrary 
 theory? For what but such a theory can 
 cover an affirmation of such sweeping gen- 
 erality? 
 
 But we are not left to mere inference 
 for M. Renan's theoretic views on this 
 subject. In another and very striking 
 passage — striking both in itself and in its 
 connection — he enunciates them with the 
 utmost plainness.f The passage is found 
 in the chapter on the "Education of Je- 
 sus" — a chapter singular in its vague, 
 
 * Introduction, p. 1. f Pp- 30-43. 
 
58 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 bold, and unauthorized surmises. He de- 
 scribes the rustic simplicity in the midst 
 of which Jesus passed his youth in Gal- 
 ileCj as a quiet villager, loving the country 
 and having no taste for the artifices and 
 pomps of CO temporary greatness. Of the 
 imperial world surrounding him the youth- 
 ful Son of Mary had evidently no just 
 conception. The earth seemed to him di- 
 vided into kingdoms that made war one 
 with another. The "Roman peace," the 
 "Homan power," were to him merely 
 vague conceptions. The name of "Caesar" 
 alone had reached his ear. The imposing 
 architectural works of the Herods in Gali- 
 lee and its neighborhood he regarded with 
 displeasure. All he loved was the sweet 
 Galilean country, with its artless villages, 
 its clusters of lowly cottages, and gardens, 
 and wine-presses hewn out of the rock. 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 59 
 
 its wells, tombSj fig-trees, and olive-trees. 
 "He remained always near to nature. 
 The court of kings was to him only a 
 place where people lived arrayed in fine 
 clothing." And while the youthful Jesus 
 was thus ignorant of the cotemporary 
 events and circumstances of his time, he 
 knew still less of its philosophy and sci- 
 ence. The great idea of Greek science, 
 the basis of all philosophy, was unknown 
 to him — the idea, namely, that the govern- 
 ment of the world is by universal laws, 
 and not by capricious deities. " Nearly a 
 century before him" — and we now trans- 
 late directly from M. Renan — "Lucretius 
 had expounded, in an admirable manner, 
 the principle of the inflexibility of the 
 laws of nature. The negation of miracle, 
 the idea that all proceeds in the world by 
 laws in which the personal intervention of 
 
60 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 superior beings has no part, were truths 
 held in common by the great schools of 
 every country which had received Greek 
 science. Probably even Babylon and Per- 
 sia were not strangers to them. But Jesus 
 inew nothing of this progress. Although 
 born in an epoch in which the principle of 
 positive science was already proclaimed, 
 he lived in the full consciousness of the 
 supernatural. Never, perhaps, had the 
 Jews been more possessed with a craving 
 after the marvelous. ... In this respect 
 Jesus differed nothing from his compatri- 
 ots. He believed in the existence of the 
 devil, whom he regarded as a sort of evil 
 genius; he imagined that nervous maladies 
 were the result of demon-possession. The 
 marvelous was not exceptional to him ; it 
 was the normal condition of his life. A 
 man ignorant of physical law, and who be- 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 61 
 
 lieves that he can by prayer change the 
 course of the weather and arrest disease, 
 and even death itself, finds nothing extra- 
 ordinary in a miracle. The whole course 
 of things is to him the result of the free 
 volitions of Deity." Such a man was 
 Jesus. Such was the intellectual state 
 of Jesus. 
 
 Here there can be no doubt of M. Re- 
 nan's philosophical sentiments, and as little 
 doubt of the manner in which he applies 
 them to history. It is his evident prin- 
 ciple, as it is that of the whole school to 
 which he belongs, to ignore the reality of 
 any spiritual or Divine government of the 
 world. The order of the universe is fixed 
 in certain laws, which exclude all personal 
 intervention, and remain unchanging for- 
 ever. It is the business of science to 
 discover these laws; it is the function of 
 
62 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 the historian to recognize their operation, 
 and to interpret by them the whole course ' 
 of past phenomena; for it admits of no 
 question that they are the same laws 
 which we now see operating around us, 
 which have been, without deviation, oper- 
 ating from the beginning. There is, and 
 can be, no room, therefore, in history for 
 miracle. There is no room even for God, 
 save as the poetic or philosophical ideal 
 of an inflexible system of law. This is 
 Positivism in its general conception — the 
 startling creed of a widely-prevailing phi- 
 losophy. Not only Christianity, but The- 
 ism is held to be a philosophical mistake. 
 The world has not advanced — ^nay, has 
 retrograded from the days of the great 
 schools of Greek science. It is the spirit 
 of Lucretius, the recognition of his "in- 
 exorable Fatum," which is the highest 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 63 
 
 point of wisdom, and to which the world 
 must return as the spring of its higher 
 progress and the consummation of all 
 knowledge. 
 
 It is somewhat hard for the Christian 
 apologist to be thus continually dragged 
 from the fair field of historical evidence, 
 to a discussion of the ultimate principles 
 of all truth. And yet it is a very in- 
 structive fact, that every school of unbe- 
 lief is now driven to this resource. It 
 makes its chief attack upon Christianity 
 from behind general principles, not merely 
 inimical to the Church, and the supernat- 
 ural foundation upon which it rests, but 
 inimical to all religion; inimical, in fact, 
 to all spiritual philosophy, and every noble 
 creative art and product of civihzation 
 which has its root in the spiritual life of 
 man — the sphere in which man is allied 
 
64 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 to a higlier divine life than the mere na- 
 ture around him, which he can see and 
 handle. For this is the real question in- 
 volved in Positivism. It is not, as writers 
 like M. Renan ingeniously put it, a ques- 
 tion between law and caprice, order and 
 arbitrariness in the government of the 
 world. There is no Christian thinker who 
 beheves that the government of the world 
 is otherwise than by general laws. The 
 universe of nature is conceived by all re- 
 flective minds as a great order or cosmos, 
 and the course of history, apparently ir- 
 regular as it has been, as a consistent de- 
 velopment in the great system of things. 
 The Theist recognizes the principle of 
 order quite as plainly as the Positivist; 
 but what he does not admit is the merely- 
 material character of this order. He main- 
 tains, on the contrary, that order is every- 
 
POSmVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. G5 
 
 where the du-ect expression of a living 
 Divine Will, which rules in and by the 
 order. He acknowledges, equally with 
 the Positivist, that the material facts or 
 phenomena in the midst of which he lives 
 are capable of classification into general 
 laws, continually subsisting, and of which 
 they may be regarded as the issue or mani- 
 festation; but he does not allow that these 
 material phenomena, or their laws, exhaust 
 the realities of being. On the contrary, 
 he holds that the highest being of man is 
 not contained in them, but is a part of, 
 and is closely allied to, a higher order 
 of being, transcending and embracing the 
 other. Every higher activity of our na- 
 ture presupposes and springs from this 
 higher order of being. Religion has no 
 meaning apart from it. Philosophy, as it 
 has been conceived by all the highest 
 
 5 
 
6Q POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 minds of the human race — by a Socrates 
 or a Pascal, or even by a Pythagoras or a 
 Kant, has no basis without it. Art of 
 every kind, poetry, painting, and sculp- 
 ture, imply and appeal to it; and, save for 
 the inspiration they draw from thence, 
 would be merely the toys of an idle and 
 frivolous luxury. Civilization, in its leg- 
 islative and judicial institutes, and in all 
 the more characteristic and elevating forms 
 of its manifestations, rests upon it, grows 
 with its growth, and decays with its cor- 
 ruption. That man is something more 
 than matter, that there is a divine spirit 
 in him, and a Divine Spirit above him, in 
 whom alone he lives, and that this divine 
 order of being is higher than the mere ma- 
 terial order, and may for wise and benefi- 
 cent purposes supersede and traverse this 
 lower order; that, in short, there is a 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL- 67 
 
 living Supreme Will, directly governing all 
 things, and communing with and controll- 
 ing the will of man; an Almighty and Per- 
 sonal Hand, which "none can stay from 
 working" — such a faith is indeed emi- 
 nently Christian. But it also lies, more 
 or less obscurely, at the root of every form 
 of religion and every conception of man as 
 a being capable of rational and moral prog- 
 ress. And this is what Positivism, if not 
 in all cases expressly, yet in its essential 
 character implicitly, denies; for it acknowl- 
 edges nothing higher than nature and the 
 system of laws into which nature may be 
 resolved. 
 
 Such a philosophy — if philosophy it can 
 be called — necessarily excludes all idea of 
 miracles. It ejects the miraculous from 
 history because it has already ejected God 
 from the world. Let it pretend as it may 
 
68 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 not to impose theory upon history, it does 
 so in the most obvious and sweeping man- 
 ner. For why are miracles incredible? 
 Not because they have been examined and 
 found to be devoid of credit, but because 
 the world proceeds by general laws and 
 not by personal agency. Deny this latter 
 fact, and of course no miracle can have 
 ever happened ; for a miracle in its very 
 idea presupposes personal agency. But 
 admit the reality of a Divine Intelligence 
 and "Will governing and acting in every 
 manifestation of nature and of history, 
 and it is impossible to exclude the idea 
 of miracle, or at once set it aside. For if 
 there be a Divine Intelligence and Will 
 moving all things, and moving man, of 
 which man is a sharer, how may they not 
 manifest themselves directly to man ? 
 What is there, then^ inconceivable, still 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 69 
 
 less improbable, in the supernatural? Is 
 not the Divine, or supernatural, the real- 
 ity, the substance, of which nature, the 
 material, is only the shadow? And may 
 not miracle, in its true conception, as 
 brought before us in the life of Christ, and 
 origin of Christianity, take its right place 
 in the development of the world's history, 
 as a direct manifestation of the Divine for 
 human good; as the stretching forth of 
 the Almighty hand, not by way of inter- 
 ference, still less of disturbance, but for 
 the purpose of urging forward in a more 
 powerful and consistent manner the wheels 
 of the world's progress. Ma?/ not miracle 
 he a fact of this kind? We do not mean- 
 time take higher ground, and it is not 
 necessary to take higher ground to upset 
 the pretensions of our author's philosophy. 
 Surely we are entitled to this modest sur- 
 
70 POSITIVISM AND TEE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 mise ! For how imperfect and dim, after 
 all, must be our conceptions of the highest 
 order — ^how little can we be entitled to 
 erect our little generalizations into ex- 
 haustive and universal canons ! What 
 poor judges must we be of the possible 
 or impossible in the realm of God ! We 
 do not dare to assign bounds to the possi- 
 bilities of history or to apply our theories 
 without reserve to the ways of God. All 
 this Positivism doe^ in its essential prin- 
 ciples. Is it not enough to say of any 
 philosophy that it denies God and dishon- 
 ors man? Taking away from the former 
 all personality and freedom of action — 
 from the latter all soul, all life beyond 
 nature; degrading the one into a blind 
 fate, the other into mere matter. 
 
 Whatever may be the rights of such a 
 philosophy, it can not have any claim to 
 
POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 71 
 
 stand at the door of history, and to de- 
 termme for us its laws and the character 
 of its facts. For let it be borne in mind 
 that M. Renan does not offer a single word 
 in vindication or even in formal exposition 
 of a theory by which he at once shuts out 
 the miraculous from history and God from 
 the world which he has made. He does 
 not profess to argue in its behalf; he sim- 
 ply announces it as the ultimate philos- 
 ophy. The Gospels are partly legendary, 
 because they are in part records of mirac- 
 ulous occurrences. The pretensions of a 
 pseudo-philosophy can not go further. We 
 are at least entitled to hold our own posi- 
 tion against such an insolent demand to 
 surrender. Surely it is not the Christian 
 apologist who is here the dogmatist. He 
 believes in God, it is true, but he does not 
 venture to accept the Christian miracles 
 
72 POSITIVISM AND THE SUPERNATURAL. 
 
 without inquiry and evidence. M. Kenan, 
 at once rejects them without inquiry, be- 
 cause he has no faith in a living God, and 
 no faith in the Divine government of the 
 world. 
 
II. 
 
 NATURE OF EVIDENCE FOR THE CHRISTIAN 
 MIRACLES. 
 
 We have endeavored to explain the phil- 
 osophical significance of M. Renan's vol- 
 ume. It comes from the mint of French 
 Positivism, just as Strauss's equally-famous 
 and more elaborate work came from the 
 mint of German Pantheism. Any criti- 
 cism which fails to apprehend the specu- 
 lative origin of these remarkable works 
 will, so far, fail to understand them. 
 Strauss sought to turn the evangelical 
 history into a series of myths, because he 
 had already confessedly adopted a specu- 
 lative system inconsistent with the idea 
 of the veracitv of this historv. The his- 
 
74 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 tory must be false, or at least mythical, 
 because, according to him, the notiou of a 
 personal God and Creator of men, and of 
 a Son of God revealing the will of a Heav- 
 enly Father, is imiMlosophical — a dream 
 of superstition, and not a truth of reason, 
 as expounded by its latest and highest 
 prophet, Hegel. In the same manner M. 
 Renan denies the veracity of the Gospels, 
 in part, because they are inconsistent with 
 his philosophical conception of the govern- 
 ment of the world by law. The notion of 
 a Personal Will interposing in human af- 
 fairs is incompatible with science, which, 
 according to his view, teaches, with irre- 
 sistible force of evidence, that the order 
 of the universe is unchanging. It is the 
 speculative error, therefore, which is the 
 fruitful and germinant error in both cases; 
 and we must be prepared to encounter 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 75 
 
 such false philosophies by a philosophy at 
 once more modest and more comprehen- 
 sive. We must be ready, from the bosom 
 of a higher thought, as well as of a deeper 
 faith, "to give a reason for the hope that 
 is in us." It may seem a wearying proc- 
 ess to be obliged thus continually to go 
 back to the "principles of the doctrine of 
 Christ/' and to lay over again, as it were, 
 the "foundation" of our religion; but it 
 is a necessity from which no student can 
 well escape. A religion that is not philo- 
 sophically grounded, in a time like ours, 
 must feel constantly weak in presence of 
 the persistent attacks made upon it by 
 philosophical weapons which it does not 
 understand, and the real strength of 
 which may be either greatly underrated 
 or greatly exaggerated, according to its 
 ignorance. 
 
76 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 A clear and thoughtful comi3rehetision 
 of the principles of Theism must be the 
 best and the only adequate means of 
 meeting the unbelief propagated by such 
 works. It is not enough merely to learn 
 those principles, or gather them from oth- 
 erSj but we must sift them, and make them 
 our own in the depths of our spiritual and 
 rational experience, till we feel that the 
 instincts which connect us with a personal 
 God and Father in the heavens are a true 
 part of our very being — deeper and more 
 real than any other facts in the universe, 
 and having, therefore, a philosophical or 
 rational groundwork, in comparison with 
 which the most imposing philosophical the- 
 ories are mere illusions, incapable of mov- 
 ing us. Such a vital experience of the 
 rational consistency of Theism and of the 
 harmony of its truths with the deepest 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 77 
 
 study of nature and of history, and with 
 our profoundest insight into the mysteries 
 of this complex being, will be found the 
 best safeguard against the seductive gen- 
 eralizations of writers like M. Renan. He 
 denies miracles because he does not be- 
 lieve in a Supreme Will governing the 
 world; because the idea of material latv 
 has swallowed up, with him, all idea of 
 free moral volition. We believe miracles, 
 on the contrary — or, at least, the miracles 
 of the Gospels, because the reality of a 
 Supreme Will, directing the world and 
 moving in all the affairs of men, is a par- 
 amount dictate of our rational conscious- 
 ness — a truth which asserts itself equally 
 with the truth of our own personal exist- 
 ence; and because the expression of this 
 Will, or a moral Providence, is to us not 
 only a higher conception than that of ma- 
 
78 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 terial law, but a conception which embraces 
 the latter, and without which it has no 
 meaning and no reality. We are utterly 
 separated, therefore, in thought, as well as 
 in faith; and "miracle" is not only not 
 impossible to us, but already intelligible 
 in the sphere of our reason and the light 
 with which it invests the manifestations 
 of nature and the "ways of God to man." 
 
 Where there is such an opposition of 
 thought in regard to the supernatural, it 
 may seem of little use to enter into more 
 detailed discussion of M. Kenan's views 
 as to miracles. But on the same ground 
 we might decline controversy with him al- 
 together ; and this would be neither a use- 
 ful nor a courageous course. The Christian 
 theologian need not provoke controversy, 
 but he is not entitled fairly to decline it. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 79 
 
 and, disengaging himself from contact with 
 an evident enemy, to pass by on the other 
 side. When the conflicts of doubt and of 
 faith are so incessant and perplexing as in 
 our age, and when they penetrate into all 
 classes of society and all channels of intel- 
 lectual and literary intercourse, it is far 
 better to come out to the enemy, and meet 
 him at every point. Truth has never any 
 thing to fear in such discussion, but re- 
 ceives new confirmation from encounters 
 with every novel and ingenious fallacy 
 which ^eeks to pervert it. 
 
 Such a result seems to us particularly 
 illustrated by our author's further state- 
 ments as to miracles and the tests or con- 
 ditions which he would apply to them, 
 and we now proceed to consider these 
 statements. After telling us that no mir- 
 acles have "hitherto been proved," he goes 
 
80 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 on to tell us what sort of proof he desid- 
 erates. The passage in which he does this 
 is the only piece of argument which he 
 offers on the subject; and the argument 
 has evidently appeared to himself as some- 
 what original and convincing; for he has 
 repeated and dwelt upon it with pleasure 
 in the Appendix to the famous Inaugural 
 Lecture which occasioned his dismissal 
 from the University of Paris, and which 
 he afterward published in explanation and 
 justification of his conduct. 
 
 The passage, thereforcj to which we al- 
 luded, invites our consideration; and all 
 the more that the consideration of it in- 
 volves the important question of evidence 
 touching miracles, and the Christian mir- 
 acles in particular. Nothing can well be 
 more important than to have a clear and 
 just conception of the nature of this evi- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 81 
 
 dence, and of the conditions within which 
 it claims our assent. 
 
 M. Renan's argument must be stated in 
 his own language : " No miracle/' he says, 
 "has ever been performed before an as- 
 sembly of men capable of verifying the 
 miraculous character of a fact. Neither 
 common people nor people of the world 
 are fitted to do this. It requires great 
 precaution and a long habit of scientific 
 research. Have we not, for example, in 
 our time, seen society become the dupe 
 of coarse pretenses or puerile illusions? 
 Miraculous facts, so called, attested by 
 whole villages, have disappeared before a 
 more rigorous inquiry, as utterly worth- 
 less. And if it be thus proved that no 
 cotemporary miracles bear discussion, is it 
 not likely that the miracles of the past, 
 which were all performed in the presence 
 
 6 
 
82 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 of mere popular witnesses, would be found 
 equally illusive if they could be subjected 
 to the same careful scrutiny? . . . "Were a 
 worker of miracles to present himself in 
 these days with pretensions sufficiently se- 
 rious to be discussed, and to announce him- 
 self, we shall suppose, as capable of raising 
 the dead, what should we do? We should 
 appoint a commission, composed of physi- 
 ologists, physicians, chemists, and persons 
 trained in historical criticism. This com- 
 mission would choose a dead body; would 
 assure themselves that it was in reality a 
 dead body; would select a room for the 
 experiment; and arrange an entire system 
 of precautions necessary to place the re- 
 sult beyond doubt. If, under such condi- 
 tions, the raising of the dead was effected, 
 a probability nearly equal to a certainty 
 would be obtained. However, as an ex- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 83 
 
 periment must be always capable of repeti- 
 tion — as those who have once done a thing 
 must be able to do it again, and there can 
 be no question of easy or difficult in regard 
 to miracles — the miracle-worker would be 
 invited to reproduce the miraculous fact in 
 other circumstances, and upon other dead 
 bodies, in another company. If on each 
 occasion the miracle succeeded, two things 
 would be proved : first, that supernatural 
 facts happen in the world ; and, secondly, 
 that the power of producing them belongs 
 to, or is delegated to, certain persons. But 
 who does not see that no miracle has ever 
 been performed under these conditions ; that 
 the miracle-worker has always himself hith- 
 erto chosen the subject of experiment, and 
 the company or witnesses before whom the 
 act was to be done ; more frequently still, 
 perhaps, that it is the people themselves — 
 
84 TEE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 obeying an invincible impulse to recognize 
 something Divine in all great events and 
 great men — who have created, after the 
 event, the miraculous legend or story. 
 Historical criticism, therefore, compels us 
 to maintain it as a principle, that recitals 
 of miraculous events are, p^r se, inadmissi- 
 ble ; that they always involve credulity or 
 imposture, and must consequently be sifted 
 and explained to see how much of truth, 
 how much of error lies in them."* 
 
 Such is M. Kenan's argument. Let us 
 look at it for a little. Miraculous facts 
 must be scientifically tested — this is the^ 
 purport of the argument. But is not this 
 in the nature of the case an absurd and 
 impracticable test? Does not the very 
 idea of such a test raise a different ques- 
 tion, and imply a fact of an entirely differ- 
 
 * Introduction, pp. 1-lii. 
 
THE CHRISTTAN MIRACLES. 85 
 
 ent order from that of a miracle ? Let us 
 take an example; and we willingly take 
 one suggested by M. Renan's language. " 
 Our Lord, in the course of his jour- 
 neys, went into the city of Nain, and as 
 he went — "and many of his disciples 
 and much people went with him" — he 
 met a funeral procession, with the dead 
 body of a young man, carried on an open 
 bier, according to the custom of the East, 
 and his weeping mother following the bier. 
 "And when the Lord saw her, he had 
 compassion on her, and said unto her, 
 Weep not. And he came and touched 
 the bier, and ih^j that bare him stood 
 still. And he said. Young man, I say 
 unto thee arise. And he that was dead 
 sat up and began to speak, and He deliv- 
 ered him to his mother. And there came 
 a fear on all. And they glorified God, 
 
86 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 saying, That a great Prophet is risen up 
 among us, and that God hath visited his 
 people." Think of this scene — a touching 
 and memorable incident — one among many, 
 although few so striking, in the life of our 
 Lord. Then recall, for contrast, M. Re- 
 nan's laboratory, and assembly of scientific 
 commissioners prepared to investigate the 
 alleged resuscitation of a dead body, care- 
 fully selected and scientifically scrutinized. 
 The contrasted facts are of an entirely dif- 
 ferent order, and the issue contemplated in 
 the one case is quite distinct from the issue 
 alleged in the other. 
 
 The Widow of Nain's son — was he raised 
 from the dead or not ? It is perfectly fair 
 to put this question. The fact admits of 
 inquiry, and of proof if it happened. But 
 what sort of inquiry, and what sort of 
 proof? Scientific inquiry, demonstrative 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 87 
 
 proof, says M. Renan. Not in the least, we 
 say. The nature of the fact is inconsistent 
 with this kind of inquiry and evidence. 
 The raising of the Widow of Nain's son, 
 if it really took place, was an historical 
 fact, and as such it has nothing to do with 
 scientific experiment — the tests of repeat- 
 ed trial and demonstration do not apply to 
 it. It belongs to a different category, and 
 rests on evidence quite distinct. 
 
 M. Renan has here fallen into so plain a 
 confusion as to confound a fact of experi- 
 ence, a professed historical incident, with 
 a scientific conclusion. Facts of incident 
 or contingency/ — and all historical facts, mi- 
 raculous or otherwise, are of this class — 
 belong to a sphere of their own — differ- 
 ent from the scientific — and rest on their 
 own characteristic and appropriate proof. 
 Whether ant/ thing has happened or not, is 
 
88 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 a question of contingency to be settled by 
 the evidence of those who profess to have 
 seen the thing happen. Did they really 
 see it ? Were they truly cognizant of it ? 
 And were they capable of judging — not by 
 scientific tests, but by the ordinary exer- 
 cise of their senses and their judgment — 
 whether what they saw was a reality, and 
 not an illusion? Are they honest men, 
 and have they no inducement to say that 
 the thing happened, if it did not happen ? 
 Such is the nature of historical evidence. 
 Scientific evidence is of a different charac- 
 ter; the evidence not of personal testi- 
 mony, but of continual demonstration, as 
 has been already described. Scientific 
 facts, imlike facts of mere contingency or 
 incident, are truths of nature which, once 
 discovered, admit of repeated verification, 
 because they rest on the constitution of 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 89 
 
 things — the existing laws of the material 
 universe; they are equally true at all 
 times, therefore, and their proof can be 
 demonstratively exhibited at one time as 
 well as another. In the case of such 
 facts, personal evidence is of no conse- 
 quence. No amount of such evidence, 
 apart from scientific experiment and dem- 
 onstration, could establish, for example, 
 the law of gravitation, or the law of equi- 
 librium of fluids. You or I may believe 
 these scientific truths, because of Newton's 
 statements on the one hand, or Pascal's 
 statements on the other ; but any number 
 of such statements does not form the ap- 
 propriate evidence of such truths. They 
 rest on the evidence of direct observation 
 and experiment, capable of constant repe- 
 tition, and of being exhibited in formulae 
 of the utmost exactness and certainty. 
 
90 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 M. Renan asks with triumph, Who does 
 not know that no miracle has ever been 
 performed under the conditions laid down 
 by him? May we not ask, with a more 
 justly-founded confidence, Who does not 
 see that a miracle, performed under such 
 conditions, would be no miracle at all? 
 So soon as you can reduce any fact within 
 scientific laws and conditions, it necessa- 
 rily ceases to have the character of a mira- 
 cle. It is the very idea of miracle, that it 
 transcends these laws and conditions ; that 
 it is an incident or occurrence, appearing 
 within the sphere of human experience, 
 but incapable of being resolved by the 
 ordinary laws which govern this experi- 
 ence. If it can be so resolved, it loses all 
 pretension to be miraculous, or even mar- 
 velous. And so it is that many pretended 
 miracles have been exploded by an expla- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 91 
 
 nation of the natural principles or laws of 
 operation under which they have been pro- 
 duced. If the case supposed by M. Renan 
 could really occur, the conclusions w^hich 
 he draws from it are not those which 
 would really follow. The true inference 
 would be, not that miraculous powers have 
 been intrusted to certain persons, but that 
 raising the dead was a natural or scientific 
 process, and not an exhibition of miracu- 
 lous or supernatural power at all. How 
 could it be, if capable of spontaneous repe- 
 tition in the manner suggested? For is 
 not this capacity of repetition just the 
 characteristic of a scientific fact? Is not 
 the process described the very process by 
 which some new truth or law of science is 
 discovered and verified ? A miracle, on 
 the other hand, implies, as its essential 
 idea, a special and extraordinary exercise 
 
92 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 of Divine power, wMch, from its very na- 
 ture, it is absurd to suppose repeated with 
 a view to verification. 
 
 It pleases God Almighty, let us suppose, 
 with a view to man's good and the dem- 
 onstration of his own glory, to interpose 
 in human affairs, arresting the ordinary 
 action of the la,ws of nature — as in the 
 case of immediate recovery from sickness, 
 or restoring the dead to life again. The 
 operation of the natural forces which make 
 up the course of human experience, and 
 which only subsist at any moment be- 
 cause God, who appointed them, continues 
 them, is temporarily set aside for some 
 wise end, so that the Original Will— of 
 whom alone all these forces are, and whose 
 power alone they express — is made bare, 
 stands forth, as it were, in direct demon- 
 stration and authority. This is the Chris- 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 93 
 
 tian idea of a miracle — the will of God in 
 direct and extraordinary exercise. This is 
 the nature of the fact which M. Renan in- 
 sists upon calling together an assembly of 
 scientific persons to settle. Is this the 
 hand of God ? They are to determine the 
 question by experiment, and by an appli- 
 cation of scientific tests. If the hand of 
 God raises a dead man to life, it must re- 
 peat the process under a more rigorous and 
 vigilant scientific scrutiny, before the sci- 
 entific notables can determine whether the 
 thing has been reaUy done or not. It is 
 surely needless to add, that no miracle has 
 been hitherto performed under such condi- 
 tions; for the conditions entirely divest the 
 supposed act of all Divine character — nay, 
 of all moral import. The idea of God 
 repeating an exercise of his will for the 
 gratification or information of an assembly 
 
94 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 of savanSy is surely one of the most prepos- 
 terous — might we not say blasphemous ? — 
 ideas that could have occurred to any 
 mind. 
 
 For historical facts, or facts of incident, 
 there can only be the evidence of personal 
 teBtimony — no other. Did an alleged fact 
 happen yesterday, to-day, a hundred, or a 
 thousand years ago, how can we learn 
 whether it happened or not? By care- 
 fully examining the evidence of those who 
 profess to have witnessed the fact. If 
 their evidence is satisfactory, if it stands 
 the tests we are bound to apply to it, as 
 to the honesty and competency of the wit- 
 nesses, we are bound to accept it; or, at 
 least, if we reject it, we must reject simi- 
 lar evidence in other cases; in short, we 
 destroy the foundations of historical credi- 
 bility. And, essentially, the case is not 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 95 
 
 altered by the alleged fact being a miracle. 
 Was the widow of Nain's son raised from 
 the dead ? Was Lazarus restored to life 
 again after having lain in the grave three 
 days ? If we allow such facts to be capa- 
 ble of proof at all, they can only be proved 
 by evidence of the same kind as certifies 
 the fact that Julius Csesar was slain in the 
 Senate at Rome on a certain day of the 
 year 44 B. C, or any other equally-admitted 
 historical occurrence. 
 
 It is very true that, in the case of a 
 professed miraculous occurrence, other con- 
 siderations, besides the mere amount and 
 value of the personal evidence, must come 
 into view, and at times so prominently as 
 to render almost unnecessary the consider- 
 ation of the alleged evidence. In order 
 to establish a miracle, it is by no means 
 enough that we have a host of honest- 
 
96 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 minded people saying that they saw such 
 a thing at such a time. To this extent M. 
 Kenan's skepticism is perfectly justifiable. 
 If we were told, for example, by some 
 twelve grave and honest people that they 
 saw a man on a given day or night ascend 
 to the roof of a room, and float suspended 
 in the air without any apparent support, 
 we should not, perhaps, distrust their tes- 
 timony, or say that they meant to deceive 
 us; but we should, nevertheless, refuse 
 our assent to their story. We should not 
 believe that any man did what they say 
 he did. And the case is no imaginary one 
 in a time like ours. "Whatever might be 
 the apparent strength of the evidence 
 here, we could not believe it; and why? 
 not simply because the alleged fact contra- 
 dicts the laws of nature — M. K-enan's plea 
 against all miracles — but because while it 
 
TEE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 97 
 
 does contradict the laws of nature, it does 
 so with no serious intention, with no moral, 
 not to say, no beneficent aim. It bears the 
 stamp of falsehood on its front — meaning 
 nothing, accomplishing nothing — a notable 
 instance of human folly. Here the princi- 
 ple "Nee deus intersit" at once comes into 
 play, and may serve to settle the matter 
 without looking at the evidence at all. 
 
 It is impossible to separate miracle, in 
 any case, from general considerations as to 
 the character of God and his government 
 of the world. For what is miracle, accord- 
 ing to our frequent definition, but the 
 special action of God — the extraordinary 
 manifestation of the Divine Will -, and how 
 can we, therefore, separate it from the 
 thought of God and the apparent designs 
 of his will in nature and in providence ? 
 
 To suppose an aimless or absurd miracle is 
 
 7 
 
98 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 to suppose an impossibility.* A faith that 
 would accept miracles without Divine 
 meaning is a faith without reason, and for 
 which we do not venture to plead. 
 
 In the case we have supposed, therefore, 
 we refuse our assent to the alleged fact at 
 once and conclusively. We know that the 
 twelve witnesses have beeii deceived in 
 some manner, although we may not be 
 able to explain in what manner. We 
 know that men do not float suspended 
 from the roofs of houses, nor spirits give 
 answers to foolish questions, notwithstand- 
 ing that hundreds may tell us that they 
 
 ^ Still more a "moral miracle," as suggested by an 
 Oxford writer in certain well-known Bampton Lectures. 
 The conception of a "moral miracle" is an essentially 
 skeptical conception, whicti can only be vindicated on 
 grounds which would destroy the moral tests of credi- 
 bility, and so sap the foundations of religious belief 
 altogether. 
 
THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 99 
 
 have seen the one and heard the other. 
 They may have done so. We do not ques- 
 tion their honesty nor yet the evidence of 
 their senses, though both may be truly 
 liable to question. But we know, never- 
 theless, that they are mistaken. For the 
 very reason that God is God, and the 
 laws of his universe divine laws, we know 
 that he does not reveal his will after this 
 manner. 
 
 What M. Renan says with reference to 
 legends we may say with far more truth 
 of miracles : There are miracles — and mira- 
 cles. There are occurrences in the past, 
 professing to be miraculous, that must 
 perish before the advance of historical 
 criticism, which spares not any thing, and 
 is not bound to spare any thing, that it can 
 really explain. Such occurrences, from 
 shining large and mysterious to our early 
 
100 THE CHRISTIAN MIRACLES. 
 
 imagination^ must "fade into the light of 
 common day/' and disappear in its full 
 blaze. But there are other occurrences, 
 and the miracles of the Gospels among 
 them, which shine all the more radiant, 
 full, and significant, the more they are ex- 
 amined. Let the light be turned upon the 
 mere marvel or portent, it vanishes; but 
 these witnesses of Divine love and power, 
 these symbols — (TrjiJ.eja — of an infinitely 
 beneficent meaning, only stand the more 
 firmly in the face of any philosophical and 
 historical method which is reverent as well 
 as keen, inductive as well as subtile, which 
 is faithful, in short, to the moral instincts 
 as well as the intellectual impulses of 
 humanity. 
 
III. 
 
 ORIGIN AND CHARACTER OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 But it is now time to turn to another 
 aspect of M. Renan's volume. From its 
 philosophy, we proceed to consider its crit- 
 icism. There is an obvious connection be- 
 tween the two; the latter is greatly influ- 
 enced by the former, as in Strauss's case; 
 but the "Vie de Jesus" does not boast any 
 such comprehensive and consistent critical 
 method — exactly adapted to the exigency 
 produced by the author's philosophical sys- 
 tem — as the " mythical theory." The ex- 
 igency is of this kind : the Gospels are not 
 to be accepted as historical narratives — 
 true in every part, or even in the main, 
 like other histories. The miraculous recit- 
 
 101 
 
102 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 als are in their nature unhistorical. The 
 question then comes — what explanation do 
 they admit of? Are they to be regarded 
 as having any claims upon our belief ? Are 
 they in any degree historically credible ? 
 
 In reply, Dr. Strauss presented at least 
 a very intelligible and consistent answer. 
 The idea of the myth as a characteristic 
 element in the early history of all peoples 
 was, at the time of his studies, rising into 
 notice. The critical mind had grasped its 
 importance, and recognized, with a kind of 
 creative joy, how widely applicable it was, 
 and how well it served to account for the 
 highly-colored story of all infant civiliza- 
 tions, and the heroic supernatural aspects 
 which they assumed. The answer of 
 Strauss accordingly was — the Gospels are 
 in no degree historically credible. But 
 neither are they fictitious, still less false, 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS, 103 
 
 in the ordinary sense. They are not the 
 impositions or inventions of any sect with 
 a view to deceive the world, as the older 
 forms of rationalism inclined or permitted 
 to believe. The mere progress of histor- 
 ical study had entirely exploded that no- 
 tion. But they are a collection of myths, 
 the spontaneous and unconscious growth 
 of the Jewish imagination in the beginning 
 of the Christian era. The only historical 
 nucleus of the whole is the name and per- 
 sonality of Jesus, dim and uncharacteris- 
 tic — a Jewish Rabbi, who had gathered 
 around him a number of followers whose 
 faith and hopes he had greatly excited by 
 his preaching, and the power and charm 
 of his manner. All the details of the Gos- 
 pels, miraculous and otherwise, were the 
 creation of the marvelous excitement thus 
 kindled in a few minds, and breaking forth 
 
104 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 into objective representation and story. 
 The narratives of our Lord's birth — of the 
 visit of the Magi — of his youthful appear- 
 ance in the Temple — of his baptism, tempt- 
 ation, and "beginning of miracles" in Cana 
 of Galilee — of his preachings and wonder- 
 ful works in the villages around the Lake 
 of Tiberias — of his Paschal journeys and 
 conflicts with the Pharisees — of his tender 
 touching interviews with ' his disciples in 
 his last days — of his passion, resurrection, 
 and ascension — all, in short, that rises be- 
 fore us the grand, living, most human yet 
 most Divine, image of the Gospels, were 
 the idealizing pictures, and nothing more, 
 with which the Galilean imagination in 
 a trance of creative enthusiasm had sur- 
 rounded the name of Jesus. They were 
 the embodied dreams of a few Jews raised 
 to a hight both of practical heroism and 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 105 
 
 of imaginative hero-worship by the long- 
 inherited traditions of a baffled and self- 
 concentrating patriotism. As the Hellenic 
 imagination created circles of ideal activity 
 around heroic names ; or as the more nar- 
 row Latin imagination conceived those pa- 
 triotic idyls with which it tried to deceive 
 itself, and so long deceived the world, as 
 to the origin and progress of Roman great- 
 ness — so did the Jewish imagination pro- 
 duce the Gospels, and impose them upon 
 human belief. The incidents of the evan- 
 gelical history are not really more histor- 
 ical than the exploits of Perseus and 
 Hercules, or the legends of Virginia and 
 Coriolanus. 
 
 Such was the famous mythical theory. 
 It has perished, like the previous theories 
 of the "vulgar rationalism" which it super- 
 seded. There is no historical student in 
 
106 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 our day would urge it as equal to the ex- 
 igency which it proposed to meet — as 
 furnishing, in other words, a complete and 
 satisfactory explanation of the phenomena 
 of the evangelical history. But, as a the- 
 ory, it had at least the advantage we have 
 hinted — of consistency and comprehensive- 
 ness. Attributing all the Gospels more or 
 less to the same cause, it supposed that 
 they gradually sprang up as the Christian 
 tradition gathered force and deepened in 
 dogmatic intelligence, and that none of 
 them consequently, in their present form, 
 ascend to the first apostolic age. In what 
 way they originated and were molded into 
 their present shape amid the conflicts of 
 the time, it has been the aim of the well- 
 known Tubingen school of skeptical the- 
 ology to show. 
 
 M. Renan does not profess any such 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 107 
 
 comprehensive critical theory. He is com- 
 plimentary/ indeed, to Dr. Strauss, and 
 commends the influence of his labors ; but 
 his own historical studies, and the mere 
 progress of historical knowledge, if noth- 
 ing else, prevents him from adopting any 
 similar explanation of the Gospels.* He 
 makes little or nothing of the mythical 
 theory, although its influence may be 
 plainly traced in many parts of his work. 
 According to him, the Gosj)els are one and 
 all to be regarded as the productions of the 
 first century. He does not even except 
 the Gospel of St. John, as we shall find, 
 although his views regarding this Gospel 
 are very wavering and difiicult to fix. The 
 
 ^ Strauss' s detailed criticism of the text of the Gospels, 
 he says, " leaves little to be desired. But he is wrong in 
 his theory; and his book, according to me, has the disad- 
 vantage of keeping too much on theological, too little on 
 historical ground." — Introduction, p. viii. 
 
108 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 following is his account of the origin of the 
 several Gospels. 
 
 First, he supposes that there were two 
 primitive sources of evangeHcal tradition, 
 corresponding to the discourses or Logia of 
 St. Matthew, and the anecdotical narrative 
 matter of St. Mark. He believes that the 
 expressions of Papias, in the well-known 
 passage preserved by Eusebius, favor, and 
 indeed demand, this supposition; and he 
 repeatedly recurs to his interpretation of 
 these expressions, and urges it upon his 
 readers. We shall afterward consider how 
 far he is justified in this, by a special ex- 
 amination of the passage. But, in the 
 mean time, we proceed with the explana- 
 tory statement of his views. 
 
 Following out this idea, he supposes 
 that the documents mentioned by Papias, 
 are the nuclei of our present Gospels of St. 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 109 
 
 Matthew and St. Mark. Gradually these 
 primitive nuclei of the evangelical tradi- 
 tion passed into more elaborate composite 
 forms. The manner in which this transi- 
 tion took place marks the second stage in 
 the history of the evangelical narratives. 
 It is impossible to do justice to our author's 
 theory on this subject, except in his own 
 language. " The early Christians," he says, 
 "cared little for any written accounts of 
 the sayings or actions of Jesus. As they 
 believed that the end of the world was ap- 
 proaching, they only cared to preserve in 
 their hearts the living image of their Mas- 
 ter about to appear in the clouds in glory. 
 The evangelical texts, accordingly, ac- 
 quired little authority during the first half- 
 century of the Christian era. No scruple 
 was felt in supplementing, combining, and 
 completing them from different sources 
 
110 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 and from one another. The poor man, 
 who had only a single book, naturally 
 wished it to contain all which touched his 
 heart. The Christians borrowed, accord- 
 ingly, from one another these small books, 
 and each transcribed on the margin of his 
 copy the touching words or parables which 
 he found unknown to him before. The 
 most beautiful result in the world was in 
 this way the issue of an obscure and en- 
 tirely popular elaboration !" Is there not 
 an unconscious irony in the language? 
 Thus arose our present Gospels of St. Mat- 
 thew and St. Mark — " impersonal composi- 
 tions," bearing no trace of individual au- 
 thorship — ''ou T auteur' disparait iotalementr 
 The third stage in the history of the 
 Gospels is that of individual compilation, 
 represented by St. Luke. The Gospel of 
 St. Luke is " a regular composition^ found- 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. Ill 
 
 ed upon anterior documents. It is the 
 work of a man who selects, adapts, com- 
 bines ;" a work " at second hand/' in which 
 the words of Jesus are set forth more re- 
 flectively and with greater arrangement. 
 M. Renan makes no doubt of this Gospel 
 being really the production of St. Luke, 
 the companion of St. Paul, and the author 
 of the Acts of the Apostles. Here, then, 
 we have a definite production of the first 
 century — following very soon the destruc- 
 tion of Jerusalem, in the year 70 — genuine 
 in every sense. But the historical value 
 of this Gospel, he proceeds to say, is the 
 least of all. It represses details with a 
 view to produce an artificial agreement ; it 
 softens passages which might prove embar- 
 rassing to the growing ideal of Christ as 
 Divine ; it exaggerates the miraculous, and 
 commits errors in chronology. The author 
 
112 ORIGIN OF TEE GOSPELS. 
 
 is entirely ignorant of Hebrew, and does 
 not cite any of the words of Jesus in that 
 language. To all the Jewish localities he 
 gives Greek names. St. Luke, in short, is 
 a harmonist and compiler, who uses liber- 
 ties with his texts, and does not scruple to 
 bring them into a forced accord. 
 
 The fourth and final stage in the origin 
 of the Gospels is, of course, the stage of 
 speculation and conscious narrative pur- 
 pose, represented by St. John. This Gos- 
 pel is supposed, also, to have been in ex- 
 istence in the end of the first century, or 
 the very beginning of the second. The 
 statements of Justin and his cotemporary 
 apologists, Tatian, Anaxagoras, and The- 
 ophilus of Antioch, along with those of 
 Irenseus, place this beyond question. M. 
 Renan even inclines to regard the Gospel 
 as in part, at least, the work of St. John 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 113 
 
 himself. He hesitates greatly, and changes, 
 apparently, his stand-point and his conclu- 
 sions as they suit his immediate purposes. 
 But his predominant view is, that John, in 
 his old age, having read the other evangel- 
 ical narratives, and marked their deficien- 
 cies, and being moved, moreover, by some 
 feeling of offense that he had not received 
 a sufficiently-prominent place in these nar- 
 ratives, began to dictate to his disciples his 
 own impressions and reminiscences of the 
 life of our Lord ; and that these brief notes 
 of their master were afterward elaborated 
 and supplemented by his disciples. He 
 does not pretend, however, to have any 
 clear idea how far this process of revision 
 and addition extended. This and other 
 difficult questions concerning the fourth 
 Gospel could only be " settled by some in- 
 sight into the events of that mysterious 
 
 8 
 
114 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 scliool at Ephesus wMch more than once 
 appears to have delighted to wrap itself in 
 obscurity." But in whatever degree the 
 fourth Gospel may have been the work of 
 the disciples of St. John rather than him- 
 self, it is of capital value as an authority 
 regarding our Lord's life. Any one setting 
 himself to write this life without a precon- 
 ceived theory as to the relative value of 
 the Gospels, and following the guidance 
 merely of the sentiment of the subject, 
 and its natural development, would be led, 
 in a multitude of cases, to prefer the nar- 
 rative of St. John to that of the Synop- 
 tics. M. Renan, in short, values the Gos- 
 pel of St. John for its historical accuracy, 
 and disparages it for its discursive doctrin- 
 ism. The language he uses on the latter 
 subject must be as strange as it is painful 
 to many Christian students. How often 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 115 
 
 have they been moved by the sublime and 
 pregnant discourses of the fourth Gospel, 
 thrilling with a fullness of Divine revela- 
 tion which at once satisfies the soul and 
 draws forth all its powers ! To our author 
 these discourses are nothing but long ego- 
 tistical argumentations, wanting in life, 
 freshness, and force ! 
 
 There is one point, in particular, on 
 which he has bestowed great pains and 
 elaboration. The tone and doctrine of the 
 fourth Gospel, he says, are quite incon- 
 sistent with the tone and doctrine of St. 
 Matthew, so that we can not accept both 
 as a true representation of Christ. We 
 must make our choice between them. "If 
 Jesus spoke according to St. Matthew, he 
 certainly did not speak according to St. 
 John. And between the two," he con- 
 tinues, "no critic can or will hesitate. If 
 
116 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 even Papias had not told us that Matthew 
 transcribed the words of Jesus m their 
 original form; the natural^, the ineffable 
 truth, the matchless charm of the synop- 
 tical discourses, their profoundly Hebrew 
 cast, the analogy which they present to 
 the sentences of the Jewish doctors of the 
 same age, their perfect harmony with the 
 natural features of Galilee — all these traits, 
 in comparison with the obscure gnosis and 
 metaphorical monotony which fill the dis- 
 courses of St. John, point alike to the 
 same conclusion. This does not imply 
 that there are no admirable ghmpses in 
 the discourses of St. John — traits which 
 come directly from Jesus. But their mys- 
 tical tone in no degree corresponds to the 
 eloquence of Jesus, such as we picture it 
 to ourselves in the other Gospels. A new 
 spirit has breathed ; the gnosis has already 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 117 
 
 commenced; the Galilean era of the king- 
 dom of God is finished; the hope of the 
 new coming of Christ is distant; we enter 
 among the aridities of metaphysic, the 
 obscurities of abstract dogma; the Spirit 
 of Jesus is not there; and if the son of 
 Zebedeehas really traced these j)'ages he 
 must have forgotten while he did so the 
 Lake of Gennesareth, and the delightful 
 conversations which he had heard upon its 
 banks." 
 
 So confidently does M. Renan express 
 himself. The result of the whole is that, 
 according to him, the Gospels contain ele- 
 ments of history, but nothing more. They 
 are not mere fictions, conscious — according 
 to the old infidel view — or unconscious — 
 according to the modern mythical view; 
 but neither are they credible historical 
 narratives throughout. As he himself puts 
 
118 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 it, they are neither biographies after the 
 manner of Suetonius, nor merely fictitious 
 legends after the manner of Philostratus. 
 "I should compare them rather to the 
 legends of the Saints, the lives of Plotinus, 
 of Proclus, and of Isidore, and other writ- 
 ings of a similar kind, where historic 
 veracity and the intention of presenting 
 models of virtue combine in different de- 
 grees. The inaccuracy, which is a feature 
 of all such popular compositions, makes 
 itself particularly felt." And, in illustra- 
 tion, he supposes the modern parallel of 
 two or three old soldiers of the Empire 
 who might undertake the task of writing 
 the life of Napoleon from their recollec- 
 tions. There is no parallel too audacious 
 or startling for M. Renan, if it only appear 
 to his vivacious fancy to give piquancy to 
 his pages. These old soldiers, he says, 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 119 
 
 "would make all sorts of mistakes in 
 the narrations, would reverse the order 
 of their hero's exploits, and would omit 
 some of his most important expeditions 
 altogether; but they would, one and all, 
 probably preserve a high degree of truth 
 in the single matter of the character of 
 their hero, and the personal impression 
 which he made upon them." In this re- 
 spect "popular histories are of much more 
 value than solemn and official history. We 
 can say as much for the Gospels. Solely 
 bent on setting in relief the excellence of 
 their Master — his miracles, his teachings — 
 
 the evangelists show an entire indifference 
 to all which is not of the same spirit as 
 Jesus. Contradictions as to time, place, 
 and persons are regarded as quite insig- 
 nificant; for while we attribute to the 
 words of Jesus himself a high degree of 
 
120 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 inspiration, we are far from according the 
 same inspiration to the evangelical editors. 
 These we must regard merely as scribes, 
 having one aim in view — to omit nothing 
 which they themselves know. 
 
 " Beyond contradiction, some precon- 
 ceived ideas must mingle themselves with 
 such recollections. Several narratives, es- 
 pecially of St. Luke, are plainly invented 
 to bring into more lively relief the portrait 
 of Jesus. This portrait itself would un- 
 dergo a change day by day. Jesus would 
 be a unique phenomenon in history if with 
 the part he played he had not been very 
 greatly transfigured. The legend of Alex- 
 ander was already in full play before the 
 generation of his companions in arms had 
 died away. That of St. Francis of Assisi 
 commenced in his lifetime. A rapid work 
 of metamorphosis proceeded in the same 
 
ORIGIN OF TEE GOSPELS. 121 
 
 manner during the twenty or thirty years 
 following the death of Jesus, and imposed 
 upon his biography the rounding touches 
 of an ideal legend. Death perfects the 
 most complete man. It exhibits him with- 
 out stain for all who loved him." 
 
 We must postpone to another lecture 
 our special examination of M. Renans 
 views as now presented, and the grounds 
 on which he supports them. But there 
 are certain general considerations by which, 
 in the mean time, we may fairly judge the 
 character of his criticism. 
 
 (1) And, first of all, it deserves to be 
 noticed how entirely subjective his method 
 of criticism is. The Gospels of St. Mat- 
 thew and St. Mark, he says, can not be 
 received as original in their present shape; 
 they are evidently collections or miscel- 
 
122 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 lanea, and not the definite productions of 
 single minds, as they have descended to 
 us. The discourses of the one, and the 
 lively, anecdotical matter of the other, are 
 the only parts stamped respectively with 
 originality. Saving the obscure hints of 
 Papias, which we shall find do not warrant 
 his interpretation, he does not profess to 
 give any proof of these statements, nor 
 does he seem to think that they need 
 proof. So the matter appears to him. 
 And in the same spirit, and even from a 
 more subjective point of view, does he 
 deal with St. Luke and St. John. He 
 speaks of errors in chronology, of forced 
 agreements, of exaggeration of the mar- 
 velous, of ignorance of Hebrew on the part 
 of the former, without assigning any thing 
 that can be called proof. He gives a few 
 references, nothing more; but these refer- 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 123 
 
 ences, wliicli we have been at the trouble 
 to verify, are absurdly inadequate and in- 
 applicable. Not one of them, it may be 
 said, does not admit of an interpretation 
 inconsistent with that which he puts upon 
 it. And this, we shall find, is especially 
 true of the oppositions of thought and 
 doctrine which he tries to fix between 
 St. John and St. Matthew. These oppo- 
 sitions are, in great part, the creation of 
 his own brain, proceeding from his determ- 
 ination to keep out of view what does not 
 suit his purpose, and from a very one-sided 
 interpretation of other passages. 
 
 Throughout, the tone of M. Kenan's 
 criticism is of the same subjective char- 
 acter. Nothing weighs with him in com- 
 parison with his own internal judgment of 
 the documents with which he deals. Tra- 
 dition is of no account; Catholic opinion 
 
124 OBIOIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 of no account; evidence, weighty in itself, 
 because resting on facts which none can 
 reasonably dispute, and therefore calcu- 
 lated equally to affect all minds, is no 
 where urged by him — is apparently never 
 even taken into consideration. While pro- 
 fessing to base his inquiries on a historical 
 and not a theological foundation, he is yet 
 dogmatic in the highest degree. The most 
 subjective school of German theology is 
 not more subjective or less soberly in- 
 ductive than he is. 
 
 (2) M. Renan is, in truth, more than 
 subjective in his criticism of the Gospels. 
 He is arbitrary and personal in an unwont- 
 ed measure. He not only separates him- 
 self from the Catholic interpretation of the 
 Church, but he does not ally himself with 
 any school of criticism. He is not careful 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 125 
 
 to fortify his own judgments, even the 
 most amazing of them, by the coincident 
 opinions of scholars who have devoted 
 their lives to the special studies upon 
 which he has ventured in this volume. 
 As a skeptic, he wages war with Catholic 
 sentiment and tradition almost entirely at 
 his own hand. To the great skeptical 
 school of Germany, who have labored with 
 such perseverance in this field, he scarcely 
 alludes. He makes no use of their con- 
 clusions; he builds nothing upon them. 
 And yet he professes that it is one of his 
 principles not to do over again what has 
 been well done. He professes, in short, 
 not once, but throughout, to wark, as it 
 were, from the center of accumulated in- 
 quiries, historical and critical, which have 
 all tended to the same result, and left 
 many of the startling issues which he has 
 
126 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 popularizedj beyond question in the eyes 
 of all scholars. And yet he stands singu- 
 larly aloof from any class of these inqui- 
 ries, and pays no deference to them. For 
 an orthodox critic* to write regarding the 
 Gospels, and to ignore the labors of the 
 Tubingen divines, would be at once deemed 
 a reproach to him — a mark of ignorance ; 
 but M. Renan apparently knows nothing 
 of them, or at least makes no account of 
 them. We do not blame him for this. 
 But he is to be blamed for claiming every- 
 where a so-called scientific value for his 
 conclusions — which can only belong to 
 them as the concurrent conclusions of 
 
 * This has been remarked by M. De Presseuse, who 
 has written an excellent answer to M. Renan's volume — ■ 
 an answer which would have been still more excellent, if 
 the writer had been here and there more intent upon the 
 merits of his case and the satisfaction of his reader, than 
 upon the personal triumph over M. Renan. 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 127 
 
 many scholars, and as resting on indisputa- 
 ble data, to which historical criticism has 
 at length given a consistent and irresisti- 
 ble meaning; and at the same time while 
 claiming such an authority, we find him 
 every-where freely indulging in a spirit of 
 the most arbitrary and unauthorized asser- 
 tion. The truth is, that this pretense of 
 scientific value for the views of an advanced 
 skeptical criticism in this particular prov- 
 ince of inquiry, is absurd. It has become 
 a common-place of skeptical criticism, but 
 has no better foundation than many other 
 common-places which this criticism de- 
 spises. For if there is one feature of the 
 writings of this school more remarkable 
 than another, it is what must be fairly 
 called their utterly unscientific character — 
 their confusion, mutual contradictions, and 
 even contemptuous displacement of one 
 
128 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 another. As Strauss repudiates Paulus, 
 so Renan repudiates Strauss. No book 
 ever showed more plainly than the "Vie 
 de Jesus" how unsettled this whole field 
 of inquiry must be, regarded from a scien- 
 tific-historical point of view. Whatever 
 openings toward a scientific unanimity of 
 opinion may be observable, are certainly 
 not in the direction of M. Renan. Con- 
 cord is least of all an attribute of skeptical 
 historians and theologians. While heartily 
 combining against Christianity, they show 
 but little fraternal love and indulgence to 
 each other's skepticisms. They level their 
 lances against a common foe, but they also 
 point them, often with equal ardor, against 
 one another. 
 
 (3) But M. Renan's criticism is not 
 only arbitrary and unauthorized ; it is. 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 129 
 
 moreover, inconsistent as an historical 
 method. It stamps the Gospels, in so far 
 as they are miraculous, with an inveterate 
 incredibihty, and yet it professes to use 
 them as historical data for the life of 
 Christ. The author even justifies this 
 course by an appeal to the alleged parallels 
 of the Lives of the Saints, and the neces- 
 sity of a certain power of "divination and 
 conjecture" in reproducing the great char- 
 acters of the past. He claims the right, 
 in short, and carries it into practice every- 
 where throughout his volume, to select 
 and adapt the texts of the Gospels as he 
 likes, accepting what suits him, and reject- 
 ing what does not fall in with his precon- 
 ceptions and ideal. But this is not to 
 write history. It is impossible to use doc- 
 umentary sources after such a fashion ; or, 
 at any rate, it is incompatible with any 
 
 9 
 
130 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 fair and consistent principles of historical 
 
 criticism to do so. Legend and history 
 
 must be kept in their respective places. 
 
 The former may be a safe and valuable 
 
 stimulant to the historical imagination, but 
 
 it is useless — it may be often positively 
 
 pernicious — as a guide to historical truth. 
 
 And, particularly, a document can not be 
 
 regarded as at once legend and history, in 
 
 the sense and to the degree, presumed by 
 
 our author of the Gospels. The fallacy 
 
 involved in his parallel of the Gospels to 
 
 the Lives of the Saints we shall afterward 
 
 see; but even if we were to grant this 
 
 parallel, it would not serve M. Renan's 
 
 purpose. For lives of saints, as much 
 
 filled with miracles, and, therefore, as 
 
 legendary, as the Gospels are according to 
 
 his view, would not be regarded by any 
 
 school of historians, and least of all by 
 
ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 131 
 
 the critical school to which he professes to 
 belong, as historical documents, any more 
 than the mythical narrative of Livy, 
 or the heroic delineations of Homer. It 
 would be a vain task, which no scholar 
 would attempt, to reproduce the biographic 
 lineaments of such saint, any more than 
 of a mythical hero of the early ages of 
 Greece and Rome. Ecclesiastical tradition 
 and ar1>criticisni may delight themselves 
 with the imaginary characteristics and ex- 
 ploits of legendary saints, but such ideal 
 portraits, religious or artistic, are recog- 
 nized to belong to quite a different prov- 
 ince from the historical. The Gospels, 
 therefore, can not be used in the double 
 sense of M. Renan. The principles of that 
 historical criticism to which he appeals are 
 directly opposed to such an inconsistency. 
 If they are legendary to the extent he 
 
132 ORIGIN OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 supposes, they are worthless as historical 
 documents. We can not accept them with 
 the one hand, and reject them with the 
 other; for they are homogeneous, if ever 
 documents were — informed by one spirit, 
 bearing one character, and stamped alike 
 in their miraculous and their ordinary 
 narrative by one consistent purpose and 
 meaning. 
 
IV. 
 
 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 Having explained the critical ground- 
 work of the " Vie de Jesus," we now 
 propose to examine this ground-work 
 more carefully. We have remarked how 
 personal, arbitrary, and unscientific it is, 
 while making unusual scieiitific preten- 
 sions. The author does not rest his crit- 
 ical conclusions on full inquiry, and minute 
 induction and argument. He is sentiment- 
 al rather than judicial; highly authorita- 
 tive, but the authority implying in the 
 main little more than his own ipse dixit. 
 The simple-minded reader — anxious to 
 know the truth, and conscious of his igno- 
 rance of the Talmud, of Philo, and it may 
 
 133 
 
134 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 be even of Josephus — not to speak of the 
 Zendavesta and the Boundehesch — is apt 
 at first to be overwhelmed by the extraor- 
 dinary confidence of the author; but the 
 more carefully he reads, the less impres- 
 sion does this tone make upon him. And 
 when he finds the same confidence and 
 rashness of assertion carried into subjects 
 of which he really knows something — for 
 M. Renan loves to indulge his generalizing 
 faculty and tendency to dogmatism on all 
 subjects — he is able to estimate the book 
 more according to its just proportions and 
 value. 
 
 There are three points in M. Renan's 
 critical account of the Gospels deserving 
 attention. I. His view of the Gospels of 
 St. Matthew and St. Mark. II. His esti- 
 mate of the fourth Gospel, and the sup- 
 posed contradictions which it presents to 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 135 
 
 that of Matthew. And, III. His general 
 view of the Gospels as legendary biog- 
 raphies. We shall consider these several 
 points in succession. 
 
 I. He proposes mainly to base his con- 
 clusions as to the Gospels of St. Matthew 
 and St. Mark on an expression of Papias 
 in a passage preserved by Eusebius. This 
 passage implies, according to him, that the 
 original Gospel of St. Matthew contained 
 only the Logia, or discourses, which still 
 form so large a part of it. St. Mark's 
 Gospel, on the other hand, was originally 
 little more than a collection of biographic 
 anecdotes. It was only gradually, by a 
 process which he describee, that these 
 Gospels respectively assumed their present 
 form. St. Matthew is "characterized by 
 long discourses ; St. Mark is above all 
 
136 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 anecdotical — more exact than the first as 
 to minute facts, brief even to dryness, 
 poor in discourse, ill composed." 
 
 Now, whether this be a true account 
 of these Gospels or not, it does not really 
 correspond to the statement of Papias. 
 There is no such marked contrast implied 
 in his language as is here drawn from it. 
 It is true Papias uses the expression ASytaj 
 and nothing else, in speaking of St. Mat- 
 thew's Gospel; but the Gospel of St. Mark 
 is described as containing rd ond rod Xptaroh 
 ^ Uxdivxa r) Tzpaidhra:^ Whatever, therefore, 
 may be the precise interpretation of logia^ 
 
 * " Mark being the interpreter of Peter, whatsoever he 
 recorded he wrote with great accuracy, but not, however, 
 in the order in which it was spoken or done by our Lord; 
 for he neither heard nor followed our Lord, but, as before 
 said, he was in company with Peter, who gave him such 
 instruction as was necessary, but not to give a history 
 of our Lord's discourses: wherefore Mark has not erred 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 137 
 
 there is no warrant, so far as Papias is 
 concerned, for the presumption that the 
 Gospel of St. Mark was originally nothing 
 more than a brief narrative of facts, or 
 collection of anecdotes. It is expressly 
 said to have contained the things "spoken" 
 as well as "done" by our Lord. It would 
 be impossible to use any expressions more 
 fitly answering to the Gospel in its present 
 form. 
 
 Is there really any more reason for sup- 
 posing St. Matthew's Gospel to have been 
 originally nothing more than a collection 
 of discourses? The expression "ilo^-fa," 
 
 in any thing by writing some things as he has recorded 
 them ; for he was carefully attentive to one thing — not to 
 pass by any thing that he heard, or to state any thing 
 falsely in these accounts. These are the things recorded 
 by Papias respecting Mark. Concerning Matthew he 
 speaks thus : Matthew composed his history in the Hebrew 
 dialect, and every one translated it as he was able," 
 
138 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 no doubt, mainly suggests the idea of dis- 
 courses, or rather "oracles," but it may be 
 held to bear the general historic sense of 
 "annals;" it is maintained by competent 
 and impartial critics that it must have this 
 meaning here. According to a German 
 critic,* who has made a special study of 
 all the Patristic passages regarding the 
 Gospels, in the interest of no school, it 
 
 ■^ Kirchhofer, in his Quellensammlung zur Geschichte 
 d. Neut. Canons, p. 33. Liicke also maintains that the 
 expression ra Idyia entirely corresponds to the parallel 
 phrase applied to St. Mark's Gospel, ra vtto tov Xptarov rj 
 Ti^ExOevra 7] Trpaxf^ivra — denoting as denominatio a potiori 
 a writing embracing the relation of acts as well as dis- 
 courses — in the same manner as Papias, when he describes 
 the Gospel of St. Mark, in the same passage, as cvvra^iQ 
 Tuv KvpiaKtJv 16yo)v does not mean to contradict his pre- 
 vious statement as to this Gospel containing to, TrpaxOevra 
 as well as ra XexOivra. This further phrase of Papias, 
 indeed, would serve conclusively to settle the matter in 
 the eyes of all who simply wish to ascertain his meaning 
 without having any theory to support. 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 139 
 
 can not have any other meaning, when 
 ^dewed in its whole connection, than that 
 of an "account of our Lord's deeds as well 
 as his discourses." It is absurd, therefore, 
 to base a theory on this mere expression. 
 
 Further, it deserves to be noticed that 
 while M. Renan makes use for his own 
 purpose of the words of Papias preserved 
 by Eusebius, he entirely ignores another 
 very distinct passage of Eusebius, where 
 we are told that Matthew, "having in the 
 first instance delivered his Gospel to his 
 countrymen in their own language, after- 
 ward, when he was about to leave them 
 and extend his apostolic mission else- 
 where, filled up or completed his written 
 Gospel, for the use of those whom he was 
 leaving behind, as compensation for his ab- 
 sence." This would indicate that, what- 
 ever may have been the original character 
 
140 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 of St. Matthew's Gospel, it was afterward 
 supplemented, revised, and completed by 
 himself. 
 
 Catholic tradition, and the voice of the 
 fathers, so far as it has been preserved — 
 of Irenseus,* Origen,f and EusebiusJ — 
 unanimously presume the integrity of St. 
 Matthew's Gospel from the beginning. 
 Patristic authority, it is well known, is 
 almost unanimous in asserting a Hebrew 
 original of this Gospel, prepared by the 
 apostle specially for the use of his coun- 
 trymen, and it is most unlikely that such 
 a document would not contain a narrative 
 of our Lord's miracles as well as of his 
 discourses. And when we turn to the 
 Gospel itself it is found to bear every 
 
 * Adv. Haer., iii, 1. 
 
 f Comm. in Matt, in Euseb. H. E., vi, 25. 
 
 J H. E., as above. 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 141 
 
 appearance of undivided authorship. It 
 is stamped throughout by a dominant im- 
 pression — a special and individual aim — 
 exactly answering to the Patristic idea of 
 f; it. It is the Gospel to the Hebrews. The 
 author is a Jew among Jews, and obviously 
 writing for Jews. The great purpose of 
 his Grospel accordingly is to exhibit Jesus 
 as the Messiah — as the accomplishment of 
 Hebrew prophecy — the fulfillment of the 
 Law and the Prophets. Whatever Jesus 
 may have been besides, he was also and 
 primarily the Messiah, the highest devel- 
 opment of Judaism, humanly speaking. 
 He was not merely this accomplishment 
 in an external sense, but the highest ex- 
 pression of all that was good in Judaism — 
 the inheritor of whatever moral wisdom, 
 whatever spiritual genius survived in it. 
 Although we can not, therefore, say with 
 
142 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 M. Renan — for it is neither consistent with 
 reason nor evidence to say it — that Jesus 
 Christ was "a disciple of Hillel/' that he 
 borrowed from the Jewish schools those 
 charming moral utterances which Matthew 
 has above all preserved in his Gospel, and 
 that "Philo was his elder brother" — al- 
 though we desiderate all historical author- 
 ity for such statements — we do not doubt 
 that Jesus Christ was Avise according to 
 all the wisdom of the Jews of his time. 
 "Whatever was beautiful, or touching, or 
 sublime in the moral maxims of his country, 
 shone with a yet higher beauty, pathos, 
 and sublimity in his large intelligence, and 
 came forth from him in more living and 
 perfect form than it had yet known. In 
 this sense Jesus was a rabbi among rabbis; 
 the religious spirit of the old Dispensation 
 culminated in him. He was both its sub- 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 143 
 
 jective and objective fulfillment, in whom 
 at once its genius was consummated and 
 its historical function done away. And 
 this Jesus, at once the greatest among 
 Jews and the finisher of Judaism — the 
 Messiah — is the Jesus represented to us 
 by St. Matthew. This is the image which 
 the Gospel — not merely in parts but as a 
 whole, not in its discourses merely but in 
 its narrative also — constantly brings before 
 us. This personality lives throughout its 
 pages, binding them into a unity, anima- 
 ting them as a whole; and it is impossible 
 that such a consistent picture could have 
 been the result if the Gospel had been, 
 as supposed, a mere mass of gradually- 
 accumulating tradition. 
 
 The evidence for the unity of the Gos- 
 pel of St. Mark as it now stands, is, if 
 possible, still more conclusive. According 
 
144 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 to uniform Patristic tradition,* the force 
 of which we confess impresses us the more 
 we study it, this Gospel especially repre- 
 sents the teaching of St. Peter, of whom 
 St. Mark was "companion," "disciple," 
 "interpreter." The Gospel, in its very 
 marked characteristics, exactly answers to 
 this idea. Its picturesque brevity of style; 
 the beautiful, affectionate hints that drop 
 out here and there as to the looks, and 
 manner, and attitude of our Lord; the 
 simplicity and minuteness of its descrip- 
 tive touches, as when it notes the color 
 of the grass on which the multitudes at 
 the miraculous feast sat down;f the very 
 curtness and inexpansiveness of its dis- 
 
 * Papias in Euseb. H. E., iii, 39; Clemens Alex, in 
 Euseb. H. E., ii, 25; Tertullian Adv. Marcion., ii, 5; 
 Iren. Adv. Hser., iii, 10; Euseb. H. E., v, 8, vi, 14; 
 Jerome Cat. Script. EccL, c. 8; Ep. ad Hedib., c. 2. 
 
 t Chap, vi, 39. 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 145 
 
 courses, which M. Renan makes a reproach 
 to it — all indicate the warm, impulsive, 
 frank-hearted disciple, whose affections 
 opened so keenly toward the Lord, and 
 embraced so readily his higher character, , 
 but whose intelligence and strength of will 
 obviously did not always keep pace with 
 his affections; whose faculty of discourse, 
 as his epistles and sermons in the Acts of 
 the Apostles show, was not equal to his 
 faculty of practical work and organization. 
 
 II. Our author's view of the fourth 
 Gospel is founded upon his inability to 
 conceive the Son of Zebedee to be the 
 writer of the long metaphysical discourses 
 which characterize it. St. John, according 
 to him, probably left notes behind him; 
 but the speculative elaboration and polem- 
 ical turn of these notes must be attributed 
 
 10 
 
146 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 to his scholars at Ephesus, of whose char- 
 acter and history we know so little. One 
 thing alone is certain with him, that this 
 Gospel can not be accepted as conveying 
 a true picture of our Lord. M. Renan 
 reiterates his confidence on this point, and 
 suggests the theory of a double origin as 
 the most likely explanation of the double 
 character he finds in it; namely, its direct 
 traces of originality on the one hand, and 
 on the other its dogmatic, reflective tone, 
 so alien, in his estimation, from the spirit 
 of Jesus Christ and his first disciples. It 
 is sufficient to say, in answer to all this, 
 that the double character which M. Renan 
 attributes to the fourth Gospel is, like 
 many other things in his volume, merely 
 the creation of his own critical fancy. To 
 other minds, and according to the almost 
 uniform testimony of Biblical scholars, 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 147 
 
 there is nothing inconsistent in the evident 
 originality of the narrative of the fourth 
 Gospel, which gives to it such a special 
 historical value, and its prevailing dogmatic 
 tone. The whole Gospel, with the excep- 
 tion perhaps of the twenty-first chapter, 
 and two isolated portions* which have 
 always been regarded as of doubtful au- 
 thenticity, is plainly the production of one 
 mind. The same spirit and style every- 
 where pervade its didactic and narrative 
 parts. These can not be separated and 
 attributed to diverse authorship on any 
 fair principle of literary interpretation. So 
 far as it is possible to make sure of the 
 unity of any composition by the identity 
 of its spirit and structure throughout — 
 and criticism always acknowledges the 
 force of this evidence — it is possible to 
 
 ^ Chap, vi, 53; viii, 1-12. 
 
148 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 certify the unity which marks the suc- 
 cessive chapters of the fourth Gospel with 
 almost a monotone of sentiment and of 
 language. Here, as elsewhere, we may 
 well set the judgment of Catholic scholar- 
 ship against mere arbitrary opinionative- 
 ness. The majority even of skeptical 
 theologians have united in affirming the 
 unity of the fourth Gospel. They may 
 deny its apostolic authorship, but they 
 acknowledge the irresistible evidence fur- 
 nished by the Gospel itself of its having 
 proceeded from a single mind of very 
 marked individuality. 
 
 But what have we to say to the diversity 
 between this Gospel and the synoptical 
 Gospels, especially that of St. Matthew, 
 so sharply drawn out by M. Renan? The 
 two Gospels are not merely diverse in 
 his view, but they are conflicting — the one 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 149 
 
 excludes the other. Either St. Matthew 
 must be wrong or St. John must be wrong, 
 he says, in the picture which they convey 
 of our Lord, and the report of the dis- 
 courses which they put into his mouth. 
 The discourses of St. John, we are told, 
 have nothing in common with the logia 
 of St. Matthew in tone, style, or doctrine. 
 If Jesus spoke as represented by the latter, 
 he can not have spoken as represented by 
 the former. And between the two author- 
 ities, from our author's estimate, no critic 
 can or will hesitate. He will recosfnize 
 the Jesus of the first Gospel as the true 
 Jesus, and the charming sentences which 
 fell from him on the Mount, and on the 
 banks of the Lake of Gennesareth, as his 
 genuine utterances. 
 
 Now, the contrast between the first and 
 fourth Gospel, or between the latter and 
 
Ie50 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 the synoptics generally, has been always 
 recognized. It has been a subject of de- 
 vout study in the Church from the days 
 of Clemens Alexandrinus. Both Clemens 
 and Origen after him give a definite and, 
 in some respects, beautiful explanation of 
 the difference.* Eusebius also, from a 
 separate point of view, endeavors to ex- 
 
 * Clemens, in a passage cited by Eusebius — H. E., vi, 
 14 — descriptive of the origin of the Gospels generally, 
 says: "That when John saw in the other Gospels out- 
 ward or corporeal matters — ra aufiaTiKa — he composed a 
 spiritual Gospel — Trvev/jaTiKov iroLfjoat evay'y£?uov.^' The 
 statement of Origen — Com. in Johan. — is more to the 
 point: "We may venture then to say that the first fruit 
 of all the Scriptures is the Gospels, and of the Gospels 
 the first fruit is that according to St. John, whose mean- 
 ing no one can grasp unless he have leaned on Jesus' 
 bosom, or have received from Jesus Mary, and she become 
 his own mother." 
 
 In referring to these explanations we do not mean to 
 imply any opinion as to their accuracy or value. Whether 
 we think them to the point or not, both passages are 
 
INTEGRITY OF TUB GOSPELS. 151 
 
 plain it. The subject is one which Chris- 
 tian scholars have never shrunk from dis- 
 cussing, and which yields, w^hen fairly and 
 fully examined, a testimony to the exalted 
 character of the doctrine of Christ rather 
 than an embarrassment in the reception 
 of it. 
 
 There is, indeed, a^ striking difference 
 
 interesting in themselves, and serve very fitly to show the 
 ancient interest of the Church in the peculiar character 
 of St. John's Gospel. We may take this opportunity of 
 stating that it has been our aim throughout the text to 
 keep clear of any questions as to the Gospels save those 
 which M. Renan forces upon us. We could not otherwise 
 have kept to our special task, or accomplished it within 
 any due limits — so many points arise on all sides for dis- 
 cussion as to the relative origin and character of the 
 Gospels. Scarcely any province of critical inquiry pre- 
 sents more conflicting theories. Those who deny the 
 supplementary theory of the origin of St. John's Gospel — 
 concluding that the apostle had never seen any of the 
 other Gospels — pay little deference of course to such 
 statements as those of Clemens and Origen. It appears 
 
152 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 between the first and the fourth Gospels, 
 but there is no contradiction. Between 
 the Sermon on the Mount, and such argu- 
 ments as fill the sixth chapter of the 
 Gospel of St. John, and the touching dis- 
 courses of our Lord in the latter chapters 
 of the same Gospel, there is a wide dis- 
 tinction, but there is no discrepancy. St. 
 John represents a special side of our Lord's 
 
 to us, however, that it is impossible to disregard these 
 statements altogether, especially while resting so confi- 
 dently, as we do, on the testimony of the same fathers 
 to the genuineness of the Gospels. We regret, therefore, 
 to notice that, in the last edition of his Greek Testament, 
 Dean Alford goes the length of repudiating a Hebrew 
 original of St. Matthew's Gospel, in the face of evidence 
 which, with all possible deductions, seems irresistible ; and 
 that he is even disposed to treat slightly the unvarying 
 Patristic traditions as to the connection of St. Peter with 
 the Gospel of St. Mark. If the testimony of the fathers 
 is good for any thing at all, this connection is as certain 
 as any historical fact can be, and not less important than 
 it is certain. 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 153 
 
 divine character and doctrine which St. 
 Matthew has only shghtly touched. What- 
 ever view we take of the origin of the 
 fourth Gospelj it w^as obviously written in 
 circumstances wholly different from those 
 in w^hich St. Matthew composed his Gos- 
 pel. New tendencies had sprung up in 
 the Church — new forms of error had be- 
 gun to show themselves. The Christian 
 consciousness had developed and matured, 
 and was able both to enter more fully into 
 the mind of Christ, and to recall more 
 fully the expression of that mind given 
 in the days of his flesh. The Spirit was 
 accomplishing his promised mission to 
 " guide " the apostolic mind " into all 
 truth." And so, from the lessons of this 
 higher and more mature consciousness of 
 what Christ was, and of many things 
 that he spoke, arose the fourth Gospel — 
 
154 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 very distinct in character from the others, 
 bringing into clearer view certain specially 
 divine aspects of Christ's doctrine, but no 
 where opposing the teaching of the synop- 
 tics; unfolding and explaining that teach- 
 ing, but in no respect contradicting it. 
 M. Renan, notwithstanding all he says on 
 the subject, does not venture to point out 
 any contradictions. The truth is, that the 
 Gospel of St. John and the other Gospels 
 are too much apart to contradict each 
 other. Their very diversity saves them 
 from opposition. Their mode of composi- 
 tion, their purpose, their style are distinct. 
 The synoptics are in the main merely 
 historical and descriptive. St. John is 
 dogmatic as well as historical. He has 
 evidently the conscious purpose through- 
 out of representing our Lord in his more 
 divine relations — as he appeared not merely 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 155 
 
 to the more limited Jewish apprehension, 
 but to the fuUj-informed and comprehen- 
 sive Christian conception — ptosis. 
 
 And there is nothing surprising in the 
 fact that so manifold and sublime a per- 
 sonality as our Lord's should thus appear 
 to different minds so different, or that his 
 teaching should be capable of being exhib- 
 ited with equal truth in two such diverse 
 forms. Even granting Jesus to have only 
 been such a character as M. Renan allows 
 him to have been — a man in whom the 
 consciousness of the divine rose to a pitch 
 of unexampled exaltation — there is really 
 nothing unlikely in this. Rather it is 
 extremely likely that such a character 
 in such circumstances should appear in 
 one case merely as the Galilean prophet 
 and teacher of a Divine morality; in the 
 other as a Divine thinker and doctor in 
 
156 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 the highest sense. Granting for a moment 
 the justice of the picture, fanciful as it 
 really is, which describes him as a beau- 
 tiful Galilean youth, inspired by a radiant 
 spiritual intelligence, seeking vent in the 
 most exquisite ethical aphorisms, is it at 
 all strange that the same youth should be- 
 come a teacher of the highest spiritual phi- 
 losophy, dogmatic or polemical, as suited 
 his subject and audience? Surely not. 
 M. Renan allows that the ideas of Jesus 
 underwent a change as he advanced in 
 his career; that he became less simple, 
 less expository — more vehement, more de- 
 nunciatory. Is it more inconsistent with 
 real unity of character that he should 
 at one time have been more the mere 
 preacher on the Mount, at another time 
 more the lofty theologian, at another time 
 the meditative thinker, reveling in the 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 157 
 
 consciousness of his supreme relation with 
 the Father, and from the hight of that 
 supreme communion making known its 
 mysteries to his assembled disciples, be- 
 fore they should be separated from his 
 earthly presence? M. Renan can not con- 
 ceive the moral aphorisms of St. Matthew 
 and the metaphysics of St. John to proceed 
 from the same mind. But may not this 
 be as much owing to his own narrowness 
 of conception as to any thing inconceivable 
 in the combination itself? On the con- 
 trary, it has appeared to the Church, and 
 to Biblical scholars in general, that there 
 is not only nothing unintelligible in such a 
 combination, but that in truth the wonder 
 would have been if so sublime a person- 
 ality had not been presented to us in two 
 such diverse but no where contradictory 
 lights. 
 
158 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 But we must further maintain that not 
 only is there no contradiction in the testi- 
 mony of the two evangelists, but that a 
 genuine criticism is every-where able to 
 elicit a clear harmony and even identity in 
 their views. Their representations are not 
 commensurate, but they touch and unite 
 at different jjoints. The Jesus of St. John 
 claims more uniformly a Divine dignity, 
 surrounds himself more obviously with a 
 Divine light, making himself equal with 
 the Father in power and glory; but no 
 less does the Jesus of St. Matthew claim 
 and accept Divine homage, and exercise 
 Divine prerogatives. He forgives sin;* 
 he accepts worship ;f he elicits from St. 
 Peter the declaration that he is the Son 
 of God J — no mere prophet or teacher, 
 but the Son of God in a sense in which 
 
 * Matt, ix, 2. t Matt, xiv, 33. J Matt, xvi, 15, 16. 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 159 
 
 no prophet was before him. In a well- 
 known passage,* he declares that " all 
 things are delivered to him of the Father; 
 and no man knoweth the Son but the 
 Eather ; neither knoweth any man the 
 Father save the Son, and he to whomso- 
 ever the Son will reveal him." Such 
 statements breathe the very spirit which 
 pervades St. John ; they are compara- 
 tively isolated, but they are there, clear 
 and emphatic. It is impossible to empty 
 such statements of dogmatic import and 
 not to recognize that they are meant to 
 carry on the mind, as it were, from the 
 mere idea of a Galilean teacher to that 
 of a Divine person — from the Sermon on 
 the Mount to the prologue of the fourth 
 Gospel. This is surely the natural view 
 of the question, even as a mere literary 
 
 * Matt, xi, 27. 
 
160 INTEGBITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 question. Two documents survive, which 
 profess to represent the public career of 
 one who, by his spiritual greatness, has 
 influenced the world more than any other 
 person who ever lived. One of these 
 documents represents his teaching in its 
 more simple elements, in its popular moral 
 relations, so to speak; the other represents 
 his teaching in its higher meanings, its 
 more theological relations. The teaching 
 in the one case does not contradict that 
 in the other ; it only supplements and 
 crowns it. In its simpler elements, as 
 contained in the earlier document, there 
 is not the same uniform assertion of the 
 higher theological truth, but there are 
 every-where the indications of it, pointing 
 the mind forward to that higher truth. 
 Is not this fact what we might expect; 
 and does not the recognition of Jesus as 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 161 
 
 at once the Messiah and the Son of God, 
 as at once the Son of man and equal with 
 the Father, harmonize with the literary 
 facts and explain them; while no other 
 supposition does this, but leaves both the 
 facts unexplained, and the personality or 
 character unsolved ? 
 
 III. But there is still a further point 
 in M. Renan's critical estimate of the Gos- 
 pels that claims special notice. The right 
 view of the Gospels, he tells us, is that 
 of legendary biographies. The image of 
 St. Francis of Assisi constantly occurs to 
 him as a historical phenomenon similar 
 to our Lord; and the biographies of the 
 saint and others are suggested as parallels 
 to the Gospels. This is one of the most 
 extraordinary statements, we venture to 
 say, that has ever been made even in 
 
162 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 the literature of unbelief, and the very 
 piquancy of its dogmatism is apt to im- 
 pose upon the popular reader. It excites 
 his imagination — it takes even his intellect 
 by surprise. What a natural idea! he is 
 apt to think. His mind feels a species of 
 satisfaction in being furnished with such a 
 novel explanation of the Gospels. They 
 form no longer an exceptionable, unac- 
 countable literature; they take their place 
 as ordinary phenomena in literary history. 
 The mythical theory has been proved to 
 be unsatisfactory. It throws the whole 
 task of the creation of the Gospel upon 
 the Messianic imagination of the first dis- 
 ciples — an utterly inadequate cause. Ac- 
 cording to our author, the disciples were 
 incapable of comprehending the Divine 
 original presented to them. So far as 
 they could, they have marred the picture 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 1G3 
 
 rather than made it. The personality of 
 Jesus was a reality, just as that of St. 
 Francis was, but the records of his life 
 have become mixed with fabulous tradi- 
 tions, like those of the medieval saint. 
 This was only inevitable. Jesus would 
 not only have been an extraordinary but 
 a wholly unexampled character if such 
 legendary matter had not gathered around 
 his life. The life of Alexander had talready 
 become inextricably mixed up with legend 
 before the death of his companions in arms. 
 The legend of St. Francis had begun before 
 his own death. 
 
 But there is a simple answer to all this 
 pleasant inventiveness. There is really no 
 literary parallel between the Gospels and 
 the lives of the saints. Save in so far as 
 both present a combination of miraculous 
 and ordinary incident, they are in every 
 
164 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 respect different. The lives of the saints 
 are of two classes: sometimes — as in the 
 lives of the patron saint of England and 
 of the four great virgin-martyrs of the 
 Roman Catholic Church — the matter is 
 entirely legendary, and mostly miraculous; 
 in other cases — as in that of the lives of 
 St. Francis of Assisi, and even more char- 
 acteristically perhaps of St. Bernard — the 
 legendary-miraculous element is distinct, 
 and capable of being separated from the 
 intelligible outline of undeniable facts and 
 features composing the real lives of these 
 hero-saints. Nay, it may be said that, 
 in almost every case, the addition of the 
 legendary -miraculous matter can be traced 
 as an after-growth — the real life of the 
 saint standing clear apart from it, and 
 being found described without miraculous 
 admixture in some earlier record. For 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 165 
 
 example, of the very St. Francis to whom 
 M. Renan so often refers we possess three 
 lives — two of them written by cotempo- 
 raries,* and one of them, the most famous, 
 by Bonaventura, in the generation imme- 
 diately following. The process of miracu- 
 lous addition to the incidents of St. Fran- 
 cis's life can be plainly noted in these 
 almost coeval biographies. Thomas of 
 Celano, his first biographer, ascribes to 
 him no wonders except the cure of sick- 
 ness. The natural features of the saint 
 appear sufficiently marvelous, yet suffi- 
 ciently intelligible. But gradually miracu- 
 lous accretions gather round his life. In 
 the biography by Bonaventura it is re- 
 corded that the intercession of the saint 
 was successful in restoring sight to a 
 
 * Thomas de Celano, and the "Tres Socii," or three 
 associates of the saints. 
 
166 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 blind man. This would be almost cotem- 
 poraiy testimony. But the BoUandist 
 editors have discovered that the passage 
 containing this alleged miracle was not 
 the production of Bonaventura himself, 
 but was inserted in the work after his 
 death. Thus we see the formation of the 
 legendary-miraculous matter in the life of 
 St. Francis, and at the same time see the 
 life standing quite apart from it. And the 
 very same thing is true of St. Francis's 
 great cotemporary — St. Dominic. His 
 later biographies are crowded with mira- 
 cles; but his first biographer declares that 
 the miraculous stories he had heard were 
 so conflicting that he did not venture to 
 record them. 
 
 It is to the latter class of the lives of 
 the saints, of course, that M. Renan refers 
 in drawing a comparison between them 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 167 
 
 and the Gospels. But who does not, 
 even in our brief statement, recognize 
 the broad distinction between the two? 
 St. Francis, St. Bernard, or St. Dominic 
 are not only intelligible, but they are dis- 
 tinctly-marked historical characters, quite 
 apart from any of the legendary miracles 
 attributed to them. There are lives of 
 them extant in which the miraculous ele- 
 ment holds no place, or at least a place 
 so unimportant and accidental that it may 
 be dropped out, and the narrative be all 
 the more consistent and intelligible. But 
 in the Gospels the miracle is not merely a 
 part of the narrative — ^it is the main nar- 
 rative. The miraculous elements of our 
 Lord's life are the characteristic elements; 
 his life is a supernatural life throughout, 
 and so the Gospels begin with miracles 
 and end with miracles. The supernatural 
 
168 INTEaRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 is the cohesive thread of the narrative, 
 and if dropped out the life itself would 
 disappear. M. Renan does not dare to 
 class the Gospels with such mere fables 
 as the traditionary lives of St. George, 
 or St. Christopher, or St. Ursula, or St. 
 Catherine ; and yet the life of our Lord 
 would be almost as blank as the lives 
 of these saints with the miraculous ele- 
 ments withdrawn from it. The parallel 
 suggested by him, therefore, is utterly 
 inapplicable. The legendary biographies 
 of the saints form a literature which, if 
 not without its puzzles to the historical 
 student, is yet sufficiently intelligible. It 
 sprang up in an atmosphere of legend and 
 of miraculous exaggeration. The beliefs 
 to which it appealed were ready made, 
 and so importunate as to demand material 
 to feed upon. There is nothing analogous 
 
INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 169 
 
 in the character or origin of the Gospels. 
 The supernatural life which they picture 
 was not a life in harmony with predom- 
 inant Jewish interests, or even prevailing 
 Jewish beliefs and sympathies. Unlike 
 the medieval miracles, the miracles of 
 the Gospels were not wrought in support 
 of a powerful Church or sect. They were 
 wrought, on the contrary, in attestation 
 of a mission repudiated and despised by 
 the Jewish power, Pharisee and Sadducee 
 alike. All, in short, that serves to explain 
 the legendary-miraculous hterature of the 
 middle ages is wanting in the case of 
 the evangelical miracles; and it is only 
 an imagination such as M. Renan's that 
 could possibly suppose the Gospels satis- 
 factorily accounted for by being compared 
 to the lives of the saints. A higher 
 historical imagination — a more compre- 
 
170 INTEGRITY OF THE GOSPELS. 
 
 hensive critical intellect, looking merely 
 at the literary facts — must at once reject 
 such a comparison as unfounded and un- 
 worthy. 
 
V. 
 
 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY ACCORDING TO 
 M. RENAN. 
 
 We have hitherto been employed in 
 exposing the philosophical and critical 
 assumptions which lie at the basis of 
 M. Kenan's book. We now approach the 
 substance of the book itself, which we 
 shall treatj as far as is necessary, in two 
 lectures. Nor is there any disproportion 
 in this mode of treatment, for the poison 
 of the book really lies in those assump- 
 tions with which we have been dealing; 
 and clearly to make them understood is to 
 show in the best manner how unfounded 
 the book is, and how absurd and untenable 
 are its historical pretensions. For if the 
 
 171 
 
172 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 Christian is not warranted to set out from 
 the assumption of the supernatural, still 
 less surely can the skeptic be entitled to 
 start from the assumption of its denial 
 and impossibility. The Christian has at 
 least the assenting tradition of Christen- 
 dom, the common faith of humanity, on 
 his side. What has the Positivist on his 
 side? The conclusions of a partial and 
 polemical philosophy—conclusions of yes- 
 terday, which, if accepted by one or two 
 distinguished men and a herd of imitators, 
 have not won the assent of a single really- 
 great mind, in which the springs of faith 
 lie deep beside the wells of science — at 
 once acute and comprehensive, spiritual 
 and logical. To send abroad to the world 
 a "Life of Jesus" founded on the assump- 
 tions of such a philosophy, without a single 
 word in vindication of them, argues a con- 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 173 
 
 fidence quite as remarkable as the most 
 absolute faith, on which the author looks 
 with pity. Nor is the criticism of the 
 volume more free from assumption than 
 its philosophy — more weighty in itself, 
 or better sustained. While claiming an 
 eminently-historical character, it has really 
 no historical value. It is a mere abuse of 
 language to term such criticism scientific. 
 To call the Gospels legendary narratives, 
 like the lives of the medieval saints, and 
 to suppose, apart from all deeper ques- 
 tions, that they are thereby sufficiently 
 explained as mere literary jDhenomena, 
 implies a wonderful insensibility or a 
 wonderful credulity. 
 
 But let us now turn to the life which 
 M. Renan presents us, and test his labors 
 by their result. Is it a consistent, intel- 
 
174 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 ligible life which he has drawn? Does 
 it harmonize with his conclusions and the 
 admitted facts of the case? The aim of 
 every biographer of Jesus must be to 
 explain the marvelous ideal which the 
 Gospels bring before him. It is this 
 ideal which fastens the gaze of skepticism 
 as well as the eye of faith. It has con- 
 fessedly fascinated and " charmed " our 
 author; he gives voice to his admiration 
 in many places, and can not sufficiently 
 utter the moral delight with which it fills 
 him. How has he succeededj then, in 
 drawing this ideal on the principles from 
 which he starts? Has it any vraisem- 
 hlance, artistically, morally, or historically? 
 Is it intelligible on any of the ordinary 
 principles on which we interpret the great 
 phenomena of history and of life? These 
 are fair questions to ask; they touch the 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 175 
 
 center of all historical treatment of the 
 Gospels; for who shall define the intimate 
 association in every case between our view 
 of the Gospels and of the Christ which 
 they represent? The picture fits the 
 frame and the frame the picture. They 
 shed a reflected glory on one another. 
 It is the divine perfection of the ideal 
 which more than all stamps a divine com- 
 pleteness and authority upon the several 
 sources of its expression. This is the 
 higher light which lightens every Chris- 
 tian intelligence, and around which all 
 the phenomena of the evangelical history 
 fall into harmony and receive their ex- 
 planation. What does M. Renan make 
 of this ideal? How does his life har- 
 monize with his materials, with itself, 
 with the known facts of history? We 
 shall devote this lecture to explanation; 
 
176 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 in the next we shall examine the picture 
 set before us. 
 
 It is needless to say that M. Renan 
 ignores the alleged supernatural birth of 
 our Lord. Here, as elsewhere, he calmly 
 sets aside the testimony of the Gospels 
 whenever it suits him. There was no 
 such birth at Bethlehem as St. Luke 
 describes. The notion of such a birth 
 sprang from the later effort to connect 
 Jesus with the lineage of David — a con- 
 nection which could have no historical 
 foundation, for the race of David had 
 long before passed away. He was born 
 at Nazareth, and was known as a Naza- 
 rene all his life. He sprang from a family 
 in the middle walks of life — not rich, yet 
 not miserably poor — of the rank of arti- 
 sans living by their labor. Our author 
 has drawn a lively picture of the character 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 177 
 
 of such a family in the East, and of the 
 supposed circumstances in the midst of 
 which Jesus spent his youth. External 
 nature, a singularly-beautiful and happy 
 disposition, the floating moralisms and 
 wide -spread, deeply -exciting Messianic 
 dreams of his country, these are the 
 influences which made Jesus what he 
 was — the causes out of which Chris- 
 tianity sprang. All who have read M. 
 Renan's volume will admit the fairness 
 of this statement. His explanations no 
 where go beyond these resources. He 
 speaks, indeed, in his Introduction, of 
 Philo, and calls him the elder brother 
 of Jesus; he speaks of the "excellent 
 maxims of the love of God, of charity, 
 of rest in God," in the writings of the 
 illustrious Alexandrian thinker,* which 
 
 ^ Page 35. 
 12 
 
178 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 find their eclio in the Gospel; but he does 
 not attempt to connect Jesus with Philo, 
 or to attribute any influence to the latter 
 over the former. He admits, on the con- 
 trary — what, indeed, he could not help 
 admitting — that Philo remained utterly 
 unknown to Jesus, as Jesus probably did 
 to Philo, although the latter survived the 
 date of the crucifixion about twenty years. 
 He speaks also of the Talmud, and in 
 some places ascribes to it, or rather to 
 the oral teaching out of which it grew— 
 for the date of the Talmud, he confesses, 
 can not be higher than the year 200 — 
 a definite influence on the moral educa- 
 tion of Jesus, "The true notion of the 
 circumstances in which Jesus was pro- 
 duced must be sought," he says, "in this 
 hkarre compilation, where the most pre- 
 cious truths are mixed with the most 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 179 
 
 insignificant scholasticism."* But he re- 
 joices at the same time that Jesus was 
 happily beyond the circle of the Pharisaic 
 scholasticism, which formed the germ of 
 the Talmud. He does not, in short, at- 
 tempt to connect Jesus with any school 
 of thought or religious instruction. The 
 Essenes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, 
 were alike unknown to him during the 
 period of his youthful education in Gali- 
 lee. Possibly the principles of Ilillel, 
 who fifty years before had delivered 
 aphorisms very like his own, were not 
 unknown to him. He leaves this to be 
 inferred. He even says, with his char- 
 acteristic confidence, that Hillel was the 
 true teacher of Jesus f — a statement for 
 which there is not the slightest historical 
 foundation. 
 
 * Introd. xii. t Page 35. 
 
180 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 What, then, is his explanation of Chris- 
 tianity ? Virtually this : It sprang up 
 out of the bosom of Jewish culture in 
 Galilee. Jesus was a son of the Galilean 
 soil — where, according to M. Renan, he 
 was born and nurtured — nothing more. 
 It is a glowing romance, dazzling with 
 imaginary colors, that he draws. Let us 
 look at it. Christianity, he says, could 
 only have sprung out of this northern 
 region of Palestine. Its natural splendors 
 are all in harmony with the joyous spirit 
 of the infancy of the Gospel. 
 
 "With a less brilliant development in 
 one sense than Jerusalem, Galilee was 
 yet far more fertile in real greatness — 
 the most living works of the Jewish 
 people had always come from it. Jeru- 
 salem, on the contrary, was characterized 
 by a complete absence of the sentiment 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 181 
 
 of nature; a spirit, dry, narrow, and stern, 
 had left upon all its features an impress 
 sublime but sad, arid and repulsive. With 
 its solemn doctors, its insipid canonists, 
 its atrabilious hypocrites, Jerusalem would 
 never have conquered humanity. The 
 North alone has given to the world the 
 naive Shulamite, the humble Canaanite, 
 the penitent Magdalen, the good foster- 
 father Joseph, the Virgin Mary — the 
 North alone has made Christianity. Je- 
 rusalem, on the contrary, was the true 
 home of the obstinate Judaism which, 
 founded by the Pharisees and fixed by 
 the Talmud, has crossed the Middle Age, 
 and survived even to our own time. A 
 ravishing nature contributed to form the 
 less austere, less bitterly monotheistic 
 spirit, so to speak, which gave a charmx- 
 ing and idyllic impress to all the dreams 
 
182 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 of Galilee."* The country around Jeru- 
 salem, he adds, is perhaps the saddest in 
 the world, while the North is beautifully 
 green, umbrageous, and smiling; "the true 
 country of the Canticles, of the Songs of 
 the Beloved," where flowers and fruits 
 abound, and where "the voice of the 
 turtle" and the "singing of birds" is 
 heard ;f a country of lilies, and fig-trees, 
 and vines, where the wine is excellent, 
 and where they drink a good deal of it. 
 
 * Page 64. 
 
 f "Galilee, on the contrary, was a country verdant, 
 shaded, smiling — the true country of the Canticles, of 
 the Songs of the Beloved. During the two months of 
 March and April the country is a bed of flowers, with 
 a blending of incomparable colors. The animals are 
 small, but of great gentleness. Turtles, delicate and 
 sprightly — birds so light that they rest on the bushes 
 without causing them to bend — crested larks so gentle 
 that they nearly cast themselves under the feet of the 
 traveler — small fishes in the streams, whose eyes are 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 183 
 
 It is astonishing with what elaborate 
 delicacies of expression our author has 
 wrought up his picture of Galilean scen- 
 ery — a picture with charming touches here 
 and there, but also somewhat marred by 
 that overdone coloring and artificial neat- 
 ness which so often palls in French art. 
 
 Such was the cradle of Christianity; 
 and the whole history of the infant Gospel, 
 in conformity with the character of its 
 origin, was a "kind of delicious pastoral. 
 
 bright and soft — grave and modest storks in the air, 
 destitute of all fear, allowing themselves to be approached 
 so near by man that they seem to call him. In no other 
 country in the world are the mountains arranged with 
 more harmony, or do they inspire more elevated thoughts. 
 Jesus seems especially to have loved them. The most 
 important acts of his divine career happened on these 
 mountains; it was there that he was most inspired; it 
 was there that he had secret intercourse with the ancient 
 prophets; and there he showed himself to his disciples 
 already transfigured." — Pages 64, 65. 
 
184 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 A Messiah at marriage feasts, the harlot 
 and the good Zaccheus invited to the 
 banquet, the founders of the kingdom of 
 heaven a procession of bridal nymphs — 
 see what Galilee has attempted, and what 
 it has caused to be accepted. Greece has 
 traced charming tableaux of human life in 
 sculpture and in poetry, but always with- 
 out vanishing depths or distant horizons. 
 Here are wanting marble, excellent artists, 
 a language exquisite and refined. But, 
 withal, Galilee has created the sublimest 
 ideal of the popular imagination; for the 
 fate of humanity is transacted behind its 
 idyl, and the light which illumines its 
 tableaux is the sun of the kingdom of 
 God." 
 
 So far as M. Kenan's general descrip- 
 tions can be resolved into clear and definite 
 affirmations, the two main sources of the 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 185 
 
 evangelical doctrine, according to him, 
 were the moral aphorisms of Judaism, 
 and the Messianic ideas then every-where 
 prevalent. 
 
 The Sermon on the Mount was a happy 
 adaptation of truths which were already 
 familiar in the synagogue. They acquire 
 a tone of emotion and a certain poetry 
 of authority in the mouth of Jesus; but 
 this is all. The maxims themselves had 
 been long in circulation.* Exquisite as 
 is the form which Jesus gave them — and 
 M. Renan allows to the Sermon on the 
 Mount the utmost originality of form; it 
 is "the highest creation which ever pro- 
 ceeded from the human conscience, the 
 most beautiful code of the perfect life ever 
 traced by moralist" — yet it possesses no 
 originality of substance; it is capable of 
 
 * Pages 81, 82. 
 
186 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIA^flTY. 
 
 being entirely recomposed from ancient 
 sources * 
 
 In like manner the Messianic ideas, out 
 of which Jesus wrought his conception of 
 the "kingdom of God," the "kingdom 
 of heaven," were the common property 
 of all Jews of the time. Originating with 
 the older prophets, they had received a 
 striking expression in the book of Daniel 
 and the books of Enoch. The former 
 of these writings especially, to which the 
 great crisis of the Maccabean struggle 
 gave birth, had embodied these ideas in 
 a more definite form than before, and im- 
 pressed them widely upon the popular 
 imagination. M. Renan has no doubt 
 about the origin of the book of Daniel. 
 Beyond all question, it belongs to the 
 age of Antiochus Epiphanes, and takes 
 
 * Page 84. 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 187 
 
 no higher rank than the other apocryphal 
 books. It is needless to say that the dis- 
 tinction of apocryphal and canonical has 
 no existence for him. 
 
 These Messianic ideas were, in his 
 view, essentially popular. " They were 
 not taught in any school, but they were 
 in the air," and the soul of Jesus was 
 early penetrated by them. He yielded 
 himself up entirely to them, undisturbed 
 by any reflective care or sentimental 
 anxiety. "Our temptations, our doubts 
 never touched him. On the top of that 
 Mount of Nazareth, where no modern 
 man could sit without an unquiet, per- 
 haps frivolous feeling as to his destiny, 
 Jesus sat twenty times without a single 
 doubt; free from egotism, the source of our 
 sadness, and which makes us anxiously 
 forecast the future, he thought only of his 
 
188 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 work, of his race, of humanity. Those 
 mountains, that sea, that azure heaven, 
 those lofty plains in the horizon, were 
 for him no melancholy vision of a soul 
 which interrogates nature regarding its 
 fate, but the sure symbol, the transparent 
 shadow of an invisible world and of a new 
 heaven."* 
 
 According to M. Renan, then, our Lord 
 was neither more nor less than the typ- 
 ical Galilean of his time. All the moral 
 wisdom of the synagogue was found in 
 him, clothed in better and more beau- 
 tiful forms ; he wrought it into a more 
 exquisite creation of art than any teacher 
 of the synagogue had yet done. All the 
 passionate hopes of a higher kingdom and 
 glory for Israel, which fermented in the 
 popular Jewish imagination, were his in 
 
 * Pages 55, 56. 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 189 
 
 their utmost freedom and joy fulness of 
 excitement. And to these two sources 
 may be traced all that is characteristic 
 in the matter of his teaching. So far 
 he denies to Christ any originality ; but 
 he is too clear-sighted not to see that, 
 notwithstanding his statements about the 
 moral axioms of the synagogue, and the 
 Messianic dreams of the people, and his 
 elaborate praise of the glories of nature 
 in Galilee, he is far from having explained 
 the personality and career of Jesus. He 
 is forced into the confession of the pro- 
 found originality of Jesus after all. The 
 growth of a powerful personality like his 
 is not to be supposed subject to rigorous 
 law. ''A lofty notion of divinity, which 
 he did not owe to Judaism, but which 
 seems to have been entirely the creation 
 of his own great soul, was in some manner 
 
190 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 the principle of all his strength." "He 
 believed himself to be in direct relation 
 with Grod — he believed himself to be the 
 Son of God. The highest consciousness 
 of God which has ever existed in the 
 bosom of humanity has been that of 
 Jesus."* 
 
 Such is the Christ of M. Renans 
 volume — a moral genius sprung from the 
 decaying root of Judaism. All of divine 
 life that survived in Judaism centered in 
 him ; its moral precepts ; its Messianic 
 hopes; and, touched with the celestial 
 fire of his great soul — kindled into new 
 life by the breath of the divine conscious- 
 ness that was in him more than in any 
 man before or since — they became Chris- 
 tianity. Cakya-Mouni, the founder of 
 Buddhism, Plato, St. Paul, St. Francis 
 
 * Pages 73-75. 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 191 
 
 of Assisi, St. Augustine, were all men 
 of the same spirit. To them, too, has 
 it been given to manifest the divine in 
 this world. But Jesus is before all — the 
 founder not merely of a new religion, but 
 of the universal religion of humanity, the 
 religion of the Spirit. 
 
 This at least was the primary aim 
 of Jesus, the essential idea of his work. 
 But, like all other reformers, Jesus was 
 unable to carry out his original aim in its 
 purity, and by the merely moral means 
 which he himself desired. He could not 
 escape the superstitious excitements and 
 wild desires of his time, which lived in 
 the supernatural, and constantly craved 
 for its supposed manifestations. The first 
 conception which Jesus entertained of the 
 kingdom of God was a purely-moral con- 
 ception. "The kingdom of God is within 
 
192 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 you," he said to those who were rest- 
 lessly seeking for external signs of its 
 approach. "The Jesus who has founded 
 the true kingdom of God — the kingdom 
 of the sweet and of the hun;ble — be- 
 hold the Jesus of the first time, pure and 
 unmixed, when the voice of his Father 
 resounded in his bosom with perfect har- 
 mony."* 
 
 But erelong we see a change, if not in 
 his character, yet in his mode of action. 
 This alleged change M. Renan is pleased 
 to connect with John the Baptist. There 
 is no j)art of his volume in which he has 
 manifested a more arbitrary spirit than in 
 his descriptions of the Baptist, and the 
 relation which he held to Jesus. Ac- 
 cording to him, John was no forerunner 
 of Christ, but rather a rival leader and 
 
 * Page 80. 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 193 
 
 teacher, possessing an earlier authority, 
 which would probably have produced dif- 
 ficulties had not his arrest and death 
 withdrawn him from the scene. As it 
 was, it appears to have been during his 
 intercourse with the Baptist that the 
 views of Jesus regarding the kingdom 
 of God underwent a change. His preach- 
 ing henceforth became more formal and 
 authoritative. His watchword was hence- 
 forth the announcement of the near ap- 
 proach of the divine kingdom. He was 
 no longer merely a delightful moralist, 
 aspiring to embody in lively and brief 
 aphorisms sublime lessons; he became a 
 transcendent revolutionist, who tries to 
 renew the world from its foundation, and 
 to establish upon earth the ideal which he 
 has conceived.* Thus the moral gradually 
 
 * Page 116, chap, vii, 
 13 
 
194 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 vanished in the millennial conception of 
 the kingdom of God. This world is fuU 
 of evil — Satan is its king. The good are 
 persecuted and oppressed. Priests and 
 doctors impose on others what they do 
 not themselves perform. But God will 
 yet arise and revenge his "saints." And 
 the day of recompense is at hand. It 
 will come suddenly, as "a thief in the 
 night." The present world will be over- 
 turned, and all that is great in it laid 
 low, and all that is weak in it exalted. 
 " The first shall be last, and the last first." 
 Now, the good and evil are mixed to- 
 gether, like the wheat and tares in a field 
 of grain; but the hour of their separation 
 approaches, when each shall receive their 
 definite and everlasting fate. And who 
 is to accomplish this great change? Who 
 is to establish the new kingdom? Jesus 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 195 
 
 himself. He is the universal reformer ; 
 and it is by him and his doings that God 
 is to reign upon the earth. All the powers 
 of nature are subject to him for that pur- 
 pose, and he believes that he can move 
 them at his will.* 
 
 The contradiction thus apparent be- 
 tween the moral and millenarian doc- 
 trines of Christ is strangely represented 
 as the cause of his highest triumph. "It 
 was just this contradiction which caused 
 the success of his work. The millenarian 
 by himself would have accomplished noth- 
 ing durable : the moralist by himself would 
 have accomplished nothing powerful. Mil- 
 lenarianism gave the immediate impulse: 
 the moral doctrine secured the future. 
 And thus Christianity united in itself two 
 conditions of its greatest success — a point 
 
 * Chapter vii, passim. 
 
196 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 of revolutionary departure, and the possi- 
 bility of life."* 
 
 So in a similar manner Jesus became 
 a worker of miracles — a thaumaturgist. 
 According to our author the miracles of 
 Jesus were an after-thought — an expedient 
 to which he was driven to have recourse, 
 or else abandon his mission; for miracles 
 were then deemed the indispensable mark 
 of divine claims. It was understood that 
 the Messiah would perform many. "Jesus 
 then had no alternative but to renounce 
 his mission, or become a thaumaturgist. "f 
 He knew nothing besides, as we have al- 
 ready seen, of the higher philosophy of 
 the Greek schools; he had no conception 
 of "general laws," and an inviolable order 
 of nature. He behoved that human power 
 could influence natural events ; and the 
 
 * Chapter vii. f Page 257. 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 197 
 
 idea of miracles, therefore, excited in him 
 no surprise. Yet we are led to suppose that 
 the working of miracles were something 
 uncongenial to the better nature of Jesus. 
 He became a thaumaturgist a contre-cmur^ 
 against his will, and continually manifested 
 impatience under the necessities which it 
 imposed upon him. 
 
 All that concerns this subject is deeply 
 painful in M. Renan's book. It could not 
 but be so. His principles bound him to 
 repudiate all supernatural pretension. A 
 miracle in his eyes could be only a delu- 
 sion or imposture. It is impossible, with 
 any regard to the statements of the Gos- 
 pels — allowing ever so much for their 
 alleged legendary intermixtures — to deny 
 that Jesus did profess to work miracles. 
 M. Renan would fain evade the conclusion, 
 but he can not. It is forced upon him; 
 
198 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 and in a single memorable case, the raising 
 of Lazarus, he attempts to grapple with it. 
 Never was there a more hopeless task; and 
 the higher feeling and reason of M. Renan 
 himself must blush when he reperuses that 
 miserable scene around the tomb of Laza- 
 rus which he has drawn in his twenty-first 
 chapter. We do not venture to lift the 
 vail upon it. We will only say that, 
 were there nothing else to prove the ab- 
 surdity of the ideal which he attempts to 
 fi^ through all his pages, this scene were 
 enough to destroy that ideal forever. The 
 most "vulgar rationalism" never imposed 
 a baser interpretation on any Biblical in- 
 cident. The skepticism of the "Age of 
 Reason" never drew a more unworthy 
 picture.* 
 
 * "The family of Bethany was led, perhaps without 
 suspecting it, into the important act which they desired. 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 199 
 
 We are told, indeed, how great and good 
 men, in every age, have been the subject 
 of errors; how Columbus was a dreamer, 
 
 Jesus was there adored. It seems that Lazarus was sick, 
 and that it was even on the message of the alarmed sisters 
 that Jesus left Perea. The joy of his arrival may have 
 reanimated Lazarus. Perhaps also the desire to confound 
 those who strenuously denied the divine mission of their 
 friend influenced these impassioned persons beyond all 
 bounds. Perhaps Lazarus, yet pale from his sickness, 
 surrounded himself with bandages as one dead, and shut 
 himself up in his family tomb. These tombs were large 
 chambers cut in the rock, which was entered by an open- 
 ing closed with a great slab. Martha and Mary came in 
 advance to Jesus, and without permitting him to enter 
 into Bethany conducted him to the sepulcher. The emo- 
 tion which Jesus manifested at the tomb of his friend, 
 whom he believed dead, might be taken by the attend- 
 ants for that excitement and agitation which accompany 
 miracles. Popular opinion supposes the divine virtue to 
 act in man as an epileptic or convulsive paroxysm. 
 Jesus desired to see once more him whom he had loved; 
 and the stone having been removed, Lazarus came forth 
 with his grave-clothes, and his head bound with a napkin." 
 Page 361. 
 
200 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 and how Newton believed in his own fool- 
 ish explanations of the Apocalypse; how 
 the great men of the Middle Ages, how 
 Joan of Arc, came near to deception in 
 many of their most illustrious acts. But 
 the moral, nay, the historical, reason re- 
 fuses to take any satisfaction from such 
 parallels; its wounds can not be healed 
 by such anodynes. Could we allow for a 
 moment the vahdity of such a criticism 
 of the Gospel history, all divine light and 
 beauty must vanish from its pages. The 
 fane that has been kept sacred in our hearts 
 would be desecrated; the ideal which has 
 been bright to us when all else was dark 
 would lie shivered and soiled — our hopes 
 shaken with it, and our souls darkened, 
 with no dawn to break on them any more. 
 It is unnecessary to prolong this sketch. 
 The sort of "Life" which M. Renan has 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 201 
 
 attempted is sufficiently apparent. We 
 are not conscious, in any respect, of mis- 
 representing him. We have allowed him, 
 as far as possible, to speak in his own 
 words — words, it must be granted, which, 
 in their polished precision, never fail to 
 convey his meaning, if they yet often, in 
 their very delicacy and luxuriant neatness, 
 seem to jar with the deeper interests and 
 graver bearings of his subject. 
 
 It must further be allowed that there are 
 aspects of the subject which his scholarly 
 penetration and historic liveliness serve to 
 bring into fuller and more vivid light than 
 before. No one has more clearly appre- 
 hended the material circumstances, and in 
 some respects the external characteristics, 
 in the midst of which Christianity arose. 
 The local features of Palestine; the state 
 of the Jewish people and their rulers ; 
 
202 ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 
 
 the factions of Pharisee and Sadducee; the 
 proud, godless intolerance of the priest- 
 hood, and especially of the powerful family 
 represented by Annas and Caiaphas, that 
 held the chief power in their hands; the 
 relation of these factions to the Roman 
 authorities; the characters of Pilate and 
 of Herod — all stand depicted in his pages 
 in very graphic, interesting, and intelligible 
 outline. And the manner in which he has 
 contrived to bring forward these accessory 
 realities in the life of Jesus has given, in 
 parts, a pecuHar air of fact to his life, and 
 especially to the narrative of its closing 
 scenes. The pathos of those scenes, so 
 utterly beyond the dream of fiction, lives 
 fresh and tender beneath all the unbelief 
 of the philosopher and all the negations 
 of the critic. The artist is more natural, 
 less artificial, in the face of their tremen- 
 
ORIGIN OF CHRISTIANITY. 203 
 
 dous reality; and the Christian student 
 may gather profit, if he must also get 
 pain, from their perusal. The success 
 with which M. Renan has handled these 
 accessories of his subject, particularly the 
 portraits of Annas and of Pilate, only 
 serves to bring into more prominent relief 
 his utter failure in regard to his main sub- 
 ject. The human aspects of his story are 
 quite wdthin his reach, and come from his 
 pen in lively and impressive colors; but 
 the divine life transcends his conception; 
 and, misinterpreted ahke in its origin and 
 meaning, comes forth from his pages, as we 
 shall show, an inconsistent, unintelligible, 
 and distorted picture. 
 
VI. 
 
 THE PERSON AND CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 It remains for us to consider more closely 
 the portrait drawn by M. Renan, and to 
 test the value of his work by its effect. 
 This is especially the test which his work 
 invites — which the subject invites; for it 
 must be the special aim of every biogra- 
 pher of Jesus to explain, as far as he can, 
 the historical conditions under which he 
 arose — the combination of influences by 
 which his character was molded, and which 
 constituted his unexampled individuality. 
 We have seen how M. Renan tries to do 
 this; let us examine the result. 
 
 In whatever degree it is fair to judge 
 of ordinary biography by its result, by the 
 
 204 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 205 
 
 vraisemhlance of the portrait presented^ it 
 must be fair to apply such a test to a 
 biography of Jesus, and to judge of its 
 success accordingly; for of all charac- 
 ters his is the most prominent, the most 
 marked and impressive that the world has 
 ever seen. By universal consent no such 
 personahty has ever before or since ex- 
 isted. M. Renan fully and frankly admits 
 this, that among men Jesus of Nazareth 
 is without peer — the greatest in himself, 
 the greatest in the impulse which he has 
 communicated to the world. There is no 
 religion whos« interest centers in the per- 
 son and character of its founder in the 
 same degree as in Christianity. Christ is 
 Christianiti/ . In him are all its truths, all 
 its motives, all its glory summed up. He 
 is its Alpha and Omega; the embodiment 
 of all it teaches, all it prescribes, all it 
 
206 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 promises. In this respect it differs entirely 
 from Mohammedanism, or Buddhism, or 
 any other religion which has largely influ- 
 enced the world. They rest upon many 
 influences — Christianity rests above all on 
 Christ. It is the spiritual beauty and per- 
 fection of his character which has given 
 it the hold it has upon the intelligence 
 of the most intelligent nations of the 
 world — w^hich has given it the sway it 
 has over the most spiritual and exalted 
 souls that have ever lived in the world. 
 The character of Mohammed was by no 
 means an important element in the influ- 
 ence exercised by his religion. The char- 
 acter of Cakya-Mouni — pure, and noble, 
 and self-denying as it may have been — 
 was never a living, consistent, and intelli- 
 gible reality to the millions who submitted 
 themselves to his doctrines or institutions. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 207 
 
 Both characters may be quite obscured or 
 forgotten, and yet the religions which they 
 founded survive and maintain their force. 
 They are the religions of peoples governed 
 by institutions and traditions, and not by 
 character; by external rather than by 
 moral influences ; by the power of will 
 at best, not by the attraction of love. 
 Let it be admitted that there are nations 
 to whom Christianity has also become 
 little more than an external influence — an 
 institution — which claims their obedience, 
 rather than a moral power which instinct- 
 ively sways their hearts — to whom the 
 character of Christ is hidden behind the 
 forms and traditions which have gathered 
 around his name. It remains true, never- 
 theless, that this character is the great 
 motive power of a living Christianity 
 every-where, as it was the great motive 
 
208 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 power of its original progression. And 
 it is no less true that Christianity would 
 wholly fail as a religious influence were 
 this character to lose its luster. It does 
 so proportionally wherever the externali- 
 ties of the religion darken this spiritual 
 ideal. 
 
 Christianity has been the highest spring 
 of human civilization — its most preserving 
 strength. Why so? Because it has given 
 to humanity a spiritual ideal — a perfect 
 religious conception — which has been the 
 light of the world. There has been no 
 visible growth in this ideal, and no decay 
 in it. It burst upon the world with a 
 sudden illumination perfect as it how is. 
 It grew up "occidto velut arhor arvo" — a 
 "root out of a dry ground." In the lapse 
 of ages it has suffered no change, no dim- 
 inution. Christian creeds have imperfectly 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 209 
 
 defined it ; Christian institutions imper- 
 fectly represented it; even Christian hero- 
 isms have but feebly imitated it. Men 
 and Churches have faintly followed it, and 
 often grossly darkened it by prejudice and 
 passion. But no where has there been any 
 advance beyond it. It remains the "light 
 of the world/' as it declared itself to be 
 eighteen centuries ago. Whatever has 
 suffered change, or seems likely to suffer 
 change — whatever revision may await sys- 
 tems or ceremonies, modes of Christian 
 thought or Christian government — this 
 ideal remains lustrous with the same radi- 
 ance — "the same yesterday, to-day, and 
 forever"— an example of all love and of 
 all nobleness, of all grace and all true 
 grandeur ; inexhaustible in its spiritual 
 fullness, incapable of improvement in its 
 spiritual proportions. Art and life alike, 
 
 14 
 
210 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 the responsive intellectualj and the re- 
 sponsive moral idea in us, have found 
 in it, and continue to find in it, a peren- 
 nial fountain of inspiration; they catch 
 some new, and higher, and more celestial 
 aspects of it; they reach, perhaps, with 
 the deepening thoughtfulness of increasing 
 ages, some truer comprehension of it; but 
 the manifoldness of its excellence exceeds 
 all their imitative grasp. It still towers 
 above them, sympathetic at every ,point 
 to the touch of human aspiration, but out- 
 reaching the highest possibility of human 
 endeavor. 
 
 This unexampled ideal and force of 
 character in Jesus is perfectly consistent 
 and intelligible to the Christian. On his 
 theory of the supernatural, or rather his 
 faith in a living God, there is nothing un- 
 accountable in the Christ of the Gospels. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 211 
 
 The picture only answers to the hand of 
 the Divine Artist. "God manifest in the 
 flesh" could not but present a character 
 unparalleled in spiritual beauty and in 
 capacity of spiritual impulse. Granting 
 the possibility of the supernatural, all 
 follows intelligibly. The Word, "which 
 in the beginning was with God and was 
 God," "was made flesh, and dwelt among 
 us, and we beheld his glory, the glory 
 of the only-begotten of the Father, full 
 of grace and truth." May we not say 
 that the necessity of the supernatural 
 is already involved in the ideal of the 
 Gospels — the picture which they set be- 
 fore us ? It is already there, because 
 ihe)^e is obviously the Divine, "the glory 
 of the only-begotten of the Father;" the 
 perfect spiritual expression w^hich no com- 
 bination of natural causes could ever yield. 
 
212 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 This supernatural origin appears to 
 the Christian the adequate, and the only 
 adequate, explanation of Christ and of 
 Christianity. The cause is equal to the 
 effect — the effect corresponds to the cause. 
 They solve and confirm one another. This 
 has been the unanimous voice of Chris- 
 tendom from the beginning. It is but 
 fair, therefore, to require from one who 
 denies this supernatural origin an adequate 
 and consistent explanation of a fact which 
 has appeared to the general intelligence, 
 as well as to the eye of faith, so clearly 
 to involve the supernatural, and to be 
 unintelligible without it. The fact itself 
 may be denied. The surpassing excel- 
 lence of the spiritual ideal of the Gospels 
 may be disputed. Infidelity, in order to 
 be consistent, must perhaps always in the 
 end take up such a position, and attack 
 
en A RA CTER OF JES US. 213 
 
 the morality as well as the divinity of 
 Christ. We shall see how far this is the 
 case with our author. But this is not the 
 ground at first, or indeed mainly, taken up 
 by him. Whatever his treatment of the 
 subject may involve, M. Renan is so far 
 from professing to depreciate the character 
 of Christ, that he is constantly speaking 
 of him as above every other character; 
 and does not hesitate to say that "the 
 highest divine consciousness that ever ex- 
 isted in humanity existed in him." How 
 does he justify such a view? How does 
 he justify the demands of his subject? 
 Is the character which he has drawn in 
 any degree conformable to them? 
 
 I. Jesus, according to him, was the 
 natural offspring of Judaism. He was the 
 incarnation of its moral genius and its 
 
214 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 Messianic dreams — nothing more. Nature, 
 the teaching of the synagogues, and the 
 enthusiasm of the populace made him 
 what he was. Is this possible? Could 
 such a character spring out of such influ- 
 ences, and be produced from such sources? 
 It appears to us wholly impossible. We 
 may allow ever so much for the sweet 
 natural genius and the charming suscepti- 
 bility of Jesus ; but the result is still 
 incredible. For let genius be of the most 
 transcendent order, it must yet connect 
 itself by definite links with its age and 
 time. The most admirable and unique 
 human genius is found to stand in close 
 intellectual and moral relation with its 
 cotemporaries. Its growth is understood 
 from what they were, and the influences, 
 direct or indirect, which they exercised 
 upon it. There is in all cases, if not an 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 215 
 
 entirely clear, yet an intelligible affinity, 
 between the highest genius and the tend- 
 encies in the midst of which it arose. 
 
 This connection is entirely wanting in 
 the case of Jesus. M. Renan, indeed, 
 talks of moral maxims that were rife in 
 the synagogues, and kindred teachers, such 
 as Hillel and Gamaliel. But his constant 
 affirmations on this subject rest on no 
 evidence, and receive no countenance even 
 from his own detailed explanations. The 
 whole picture of Judaism which he draws 
 is opposed to them. He keeps repeating 
 statements about the moral teaching of the 
 synagogue — statements, let it be remem- 
 bered, confessedly founded on sources not 
 in existence till two centuries after the 
 Christian era; but he can not point to 
 any corresponding features in the actual 
 Judaism of the time. The features which 
 
216 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 this Judaism presented are sufficiently 
 well known. Pharisaism and Sadducism 
 represented its two predominant tenden- 
 cies; and what they were, especially how 
 utterly unmoral they were, no one has bet- 
 ter shown than our author. The former 
 had lost the very idea of morality — had 
 obscured and perverted its most obvious 
 and fundamental obligations. A super- 
 stitious formalism, consecrating the most 
 frivolous external observances, was its 
 only principle — a baneful and malicious 
 fanaticism its only passion. The Saddu- 
 cees were without any pretense of spiritual 
 feeling — materialists by profession, am- 
 bitious of power, wealth, pleasure, but 
 without a particle of serious thought or 
 sentiment. With both these great parties 
 Christ had confessedly no relations except 
 those of hostility. It is even a subject 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 217 
 
 of congratulation to M. Renan that his 
 hero^ in the progress of his moral develop- 
 ment, was so far removed from them — 
 and particularly from Pharisaism, with its 
 solemn, insipid absurdities and hypocri- 
 sies — in the quiet villages of Galilee. 
 Here it was, in Galilee, in the North, 
 he tells us, that Jesus imbibed his gen- 
 erous and lofty moral sentiments; and that 
 the inspiring brilliancies of an exquisite 
 nature nurtured and brought to maturity 
 such precious fruit of moral wisdom in 
 him. 
 
 But when we look for any evidence 
 of this moral culture in the North any 
 more than the South, in Galilee any more 
 than in Jerusalem, M. Renan gives us 
 nothing but picturesque description, and 
 dogmatic appeal to the Talmud. He has 
 no where vindicated, no where even clearly 
 
218 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 explained, the marked contrast which, ac- 
 cording to him, existed between the Juda- 
 ism of Galilee and of Jerusalem. And for 
 such a contrast there is not the slightest 
 historical foundation. The spirit of the 
 North was of a more free, simple, and 
 natural character; the tendencies of Juda- 
 ism had not there developed into the same 
 hardened oppositions — the same gross for- 
 mahsm on the one hand, and gross indiffer- 
 ence on the other. All that was charac- 
 teristic in Judaism necessarily reached its 
 most prominent expression in the capital. 
 But, withal, the Judaism of the North and 
 of the South, of Galilee and of Jerusalem, 
 was substantially the same. So far as 
 the Gospels present a picture of the state 
 of things, it is the same story of partial 
 susceptibility to the higher teaching of 
 Christ, and partial rejection of it, in the 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 219 
 
 North and in the South. The disciples 
 were Galileans. They were, one and all, 
 members of the Northern synagogues, and 
 may be taken, from the mere fact of 
 their association with Christ, as above 
 the average examples of the religious 
 and moral spirit which characterized these 
 synagogues. Do they then show, apart 
 from the direct influence and instruction 
 of their Master, any lofty spiritual tend- 
 ency, any characteristics of spiritual wis- 
 dom? Could St. Peter, or even St. John, 
 before the day of Pentecost, when they 
 accompanied our Lord on his Galilean 
 journeys, be conceived as giving utterance 
 to any such sermon as that on the Mount? 
 Is there any indication in them of the 
 same gifts of spiritual wisdom that we 
 find in him? What capacities of tender 
 and compassionate love there were in 
 
220 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 St. John, when he received the full unction 
 of the Holy Spirit, his epistles show. But 
 how different was his original natural 
 Galilean spirit — the spirit which said, 
 " Lord, wilt thou that we command fire 
 to come down from heaven and consume 
 them?"* This was the spirit of the syna- 
 gogue, or at least a spirit which the 
 teaching of the synagogue had in no 
 degree taught John to correct, or even 
 to suspect. If the religious feeling of 
 Galilee had been so much higher than 
 the religious feeling of Jerusalem, would 
 we not have had in the Gospels abundant 
 traces of the fact? If such maxims as 
 compose the Sermon on the Mount had 
 been a common moral currency in the 
 Galilean synagogues, would we not have 
 found some evidence of this in the disciples 
 
 ■^ Luke ix, 54. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 221 
 
 of our Lord as well as our Lord himself? 
 Would we not have seen at least a higher 
 and more spontaneous susceptibility to his 
 spiritual teaching? 
 
 The truth is, that M. Renan has filled 
 up from his own fertile imagination his 
 glowing picture of Galilee. The Gali- 
 leans were a comparatively rude and 
 simple people : their country w^as more 
 joyous and fruitful; their cottage life more 
 sweet, peaceful, and idyllic; their habits 
 in all respects more natural. But of a 
 higher spiritual susceptibility, or a richer 
 spiritual wisdom, among them there is no 
 trace. It was at Nazareth, where our 
 Lord "was brought up," that "they rose 
 up and thrust him out of the city, and led 
 him unto the brow of the hill whereon 
 their city was built, that they might cast 
 him down headlong." It w^as of his native 
 
222 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 district that he said, "A prophet is not 
 without honor, save in his own country, 
 and in his own house." It was of Caper- 
 naum, a town of Galilee, and Chorazin, 
 and Bethsaida, kindred villages, that he 
 laments with such pathetic sadness that 
 they were utterly indifferent to his teach- 
 ing ; that if the works which had been 
 done in them had been done in Tyre and 
 Sidon, they would long ago have repented. 
 The movement of Judas the Gaulonite or 
 Galilean, so far as it can be taken as 
 an indication of the Galilean spirit, not 
 only shows no countenance to the vieVr 
 of our author, but is entirely opposed to 
 it. Nothing can be conceived more unlike 
 the career of Jesus than the disorderly 
 political aims of this Judas. In Galilee 
 were found no doubt the simple Shulamite, 
 and the penitent Magdalene, and the good 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 223 
 
 Joseph, and Mary; but, side by side, there 
 were also found the political schemer, the 
 dark bigot, the fanatical enthusiast, no less 
 than in Jerusalem. The same variations 
 of natural character, with unimportant 
 modifications, appear in both. In both 
 there is the same mixture of bad and 
 good, of bigotry and simple piety, of in- 
 sensibility to the truth, and of capacity to 
 receive and obey it. For let it be borne 
 in mind, that if Jerusalem prominently 
 recalls the solemn Pharisee, the caviling 
 lawyer, and the insipid scribe, there were 
 also found Simeon and Anna; there, or in 
 the immediate neighborhood, abode Martha, 
 and Mary, and Lazarus; there we hear of 
 the inquiring Nicodemus, and the kind and 
 tender Joseph of Arimathea. 
 
 In short, M. Renan's elaborate contrast, 
 and the inferences which he founds upon 
 
224 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 it, have, as we have said, no historical 
 foundation. No more can we conceive 
 Christianity springing up by a natural 
 process of development in Galilee than 
 in Jerusalem. The spirit of Jesus is as 
 little the spirit of the one as of the other. 
 He found a few congenial souls in both. 
 Probably his early enthusiasm, and the 
 first fresh tenderness of his preaching, en- 
 countered a less stern opposition in Galilee 
 than it would have met in Jerusalem; but 
 he owed as little to the one as to the 
 other — to the teachers in the synagogue 
 as to the doctors in the Temple. There 
 were susceptibilities in both to which he 
 addressed himself; but there was no cre- 
 ative life in either which could have in- 
 spired and fashioned him. The soil was 
 ready here and there in both for the seed 
 of the kingdom; it may have been more 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 225 
 
 ready in the North than the South, but 
 unless the Divine Sower had gone forth 
 to sow, not only would the seed noA^er 
 have germinated to "everlasting life" — it 
 would never have been there to touch the 
 receptive soil. The old field of Judaic 
 culture, run to waste through many cen- 
 turies, and grown over with thorns and 
 briers, might have been turned up many 
 times and slightly fertilized by fresh in- 
 fluences, but it was utterly incapable of 
 nurturing, still more of producing, a new 
 creative germ like Christianity, without 
 the interposition of the Divine Husband- 
 man who originally prepared it. It was, 
 indeed, the prepared field for Christianity. 
 The new germ — "the planting of the Lord 
 and honorable" — needed a fitting soil in 
 which it might "take root downward and 
 bear fruit upward," and Judaism was that 
 
 15 
 
226 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 soil, divinely prearranged. In this sense 
 Christianity was a development of Juda- 
 ism, but in no other. The one was the 
 historical preparation for the other when 
 the "fullness of the ages" was come, and 
 the Lord of Life was manifested to de- 
 stroy the works of evil. Like the block 
 of marble which incloses the living statue, 
 from which the glorious conception of 
 genius is destined to arise with more 
 than mortal intelligence on its radiant 
 form and countenance, Judaism may be 
 said to have inclosed Christianity, and to 
 have formed the material out of which it 
 was hewn; but no more than the blind 
 amorphous mass can grow spontaneously 
 into living outline and exquisite expres- 
 sion, could the shapeless chaos of Jewish 
 notions eighteen centuries ago have grown 
 into the living Gospel. 
 
CHARA CTER OF JESUS. 227 
 
 M. Renau is, indeed, forced upon this 
 conclusion against his will. Under the 
 mere pressure of the facts he is driven 
 to recognize in Jesus a living creative 
 genius, entirely differing from any thing 
 in Judaism.* Neither here nor any where 
 is he very careful of consistency, trusting 
 to the facile resources of his brilliant 
 rhetoric. On the one hand he tells us 
 that in the early teaching of Jesus there 
 is nothing with which the synagogue 
 was not already familiar. Soon after- 
 ward he enlarges upon the splendid orig- 
 inality of Jesus in his conception of God 
 as a father — as " our Father in heaven." 
 " This is his grand act of originality ; in 
 this he owes nothing to his race. Neither 
 Jew nor Mussulman has ever understood 
 this delightful theology of love. The God 
 
 * Pages 14-11. 
 
228 ' CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 of Jesus is no fatal master, who kills us 
 when he pleases, condemns us when he 
 pleases, saves us when he pleases. The 
 God of Jesus is our father. He is the God 
 of humanity."* M. Renan is here perfectly 
 right. This revelation of the fatherhood 
 of God is the great act of originality in 
 Jesus — the great discovery of Christianity. 
 No human religion had dreamed of it, 
 no human philosophy announced it, and 
 both had done all that they ever could 
 do for the world before the advent of 
 Christianity. The conception of God as 
 infinitely great and holy, yet infinitely 
 tender and merciful — as doing according 
 to his will among the armies of heaven 
 and the inhabitants of the lower world, 
 and yet ordering all things with unerring 
 righteousness and careful love — as utterly 
 
 * Pages 74-77. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 229 
 
 removed from all earthly contact, and yet 
 not suffering a sparrow to fall to the 
 ground without his permission, or hearing 
 unheeded the humblest cry of his crea- 
 tures — as enthroned in inaccessible light 
 which no man can approach unto, and yet 
 very near to us even in our hearts — this 
 sublime conception, which the woi'ld con- 
 fessedly owes to Christianity, is of itself 
 sufficient to demonstrate the divine origin- 
 ality of Jesus. Human thought had not 
 only failed to elaborate it — the highest 
 of the schools not only been unable to 
 seize it with any clearness or consistency 
 of vision — but to this day, wherever it 
 turns from the light of Christianity, human 
 thought fails to preserve the great concep- 
 tion, and erects in its stead some barren 
 idol — the Eternal Process of Hegel, or the 
 mute, unconscious Law of Renan. 
 
230 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 The Christ of the Gospels, then, is 
 unintelligible on M. Renan's principles. 
 There is really no foundation for the 
 character which he has drawn. The origin 
 of Christianity can not be explained even 
 by the most favorable concurrence of nat- 
 ural causes in Galilee eighteen centuries 
 ago. Nature may do much for a responsive 
 soul, but even its most glorious combina- 
 tions have in themselves no creative effect. 
 Sweet genius and a charming spiritual 
 susceptibility may constitute an attractive 
 character, and even rise to a hight of 
 powerful and commanding influence in 
 dealing with current spiritual influences, 
 moving all minds, and awaiting only some 
 kindling touch to come forth into perma- 
 nent activity. This is the obvious secret 
 of such characters as St. Francis of Assisi 
 and others. Marvelous as their career and 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 231 
 
 the power which they exercised may be, 
 we understand them readily, because we 
 see the conditions out of which they sprang. 
 But these conditions we no where see in 
 the case of Jesus. Let nature and genius 
 have all the effect that can be ascribed to 
 them, they have no where produced such 
 a character; they have in no case — not 
 even in one memorable case which will 
 occur to most minds, that of Socrates — 
 approximated to the production of such a 
 character; they have no where developed 
 into such an originality of spiritual con- 
 ception, nor molded into such a perfect 
 proportion of spiritual greatness. No mere 
 human influences have ever germinated 
 into such a consummate expression of 
 wisdom and love — of "grace and truth." 
 The loftiest human model still stands — 
 with its strange mixture of loftiness and 
 
232 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 lowness, of divine light and human dark- 
 ness, of righteousness of aim and error 
 of practice — at an infinite distance. Nor 
 was this model, be it remembered, the 
 production of Jewish soil and of an effete 
 age. 
 
 The more all the characteristics of the 
 Judaism of the first century are studied, 
 the more all the tendencies of the time 
 are investigated, the more impossible will 
 it appear that they could have given birth 
 to such a life as Christ's, and such a doc- 
 trine as Christianity. It might even be 
 said that of all the spiritual forces then at 
 work in the world Judaism really seems 
 the less capable of originating such a life 
 and such a doctrine. It is not merely 
 a higher spirit which breathes in the 
 Gospel; but it is a different spirit — a 
 spirit which, in its creative breadth and 
 
CHA RA CTER OF JES US. 233 
 
 life, absorbs every other, and entirely 
 transforms it. This new creative energy, 
 manifesting, in contact with Judaism and 
 Hellenism, and every prevailing form of 
 faith, a new plastic life, is the character- 
 istically divine element of Christianity; 
 and in this respect it is unlike every 
 system and every religion of the time. 
 
 The case of Philo, to which our author 
 so often alludes, presents here an in- 
 structive contrast. In the writings of 
 the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher there" 
 are many impressive gleams of a lofty 
 moral doctrine;* there is especially the 
 same constant recognition of a higher ra- 
 tional and spiritual life, and the worthless- 
 
 * See Quis Rerum. Div. Heres? 8 et seq. iii, Ed. 
 Tauchnitz. I have only recently made any study of 
 Philo, and therefore speak from a partial knowledge. 
 But I do not think any candid student of Philo and 
 the Gospels will dispute the representation of the text 
 
234 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 ness, in comparisorij of the mere material 
 and sensitive life, that we find in the 
 Gospels and also in Socrates ; there are 
 comprehensive views of God, but there 
 is no creative, spiritual conception, fusing 
 all together, and combining them into a 
 living doctrine, capable of animating men's 
 hearts, controlling their principles, and 
 guiding their conduct. The finest spir- 
 itual thoughts are mixed up with the 
 most fantastic intellectual and spiritual 
 conceits ; glimpses of truth are obscured 
 by shadows of error 5 visions of a living 
 God by suspicions of a mere universal 
 principle,* removed beyond all human 
 contact and sympathy. 
 
 And the very same, and in a still higher 
 degree, is notoriously true of the moral 
 doctrine of the Talmud. Did we grant 
 
 * Philo (Mangey's edition) I, 560, 682, etc. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 235 
 
 all that our author says of the excellence 
 of its moral precepts, and then- coincidence 
 with those of the Gospel — did we grant 
 even that which would be quite unwar- 
 rantable, the higher originality of the Tai- 
 mudical precepts — he would be far from 
 making out his point. For these precepts 
 are, in the Talmud, imbedded amid a mass 
 of absurdities of the most frivolous and 
 debasing description — immoral in principle 
 and ridiculous in end. Now this is a 
 difference not merely in degree, but in 
 kind — a difference which settles the whole 
 question, and leaves the divine originality 
 of the Gospels as conspicuous as ever; for 
 no intelligent student has ever claimed 
 absolute originality for every precept of 
 the Gospels; no one has denied, or need 
 deny, that the sayings of Christ in the 
 Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere may 
 
236 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 have been partly derived and adapted from 
 Jewish sources — although this has actually 
 not been proved — and may therefore be 
 pai;alleled by similar sayings in the Tal- 
 mud. Every one has recognized with a 
 delightful satisfaction the striking coinci- 
 dence between some of these sayings and 
 those of the Platonic Socrates.* But no 
 such manifest coincidence, no such indebt- 
 edness, even could it be proved, touches 
 the essential originality of the evangelical 
 doctrine. This consists, above all, in the 
 completeness of that doctrine, and its 
 unity of creative conception and force. 
 There are no shadows and no reserves 
 in it, no painful gropings or hesitations, 
 no uncertainties; but all is clear, compre- 
 
 * See, among other examples of this, Plato, Legg. 5, 
 742 e.; Gorg. 50Y b.; Rep. 8, 555 c; and 9, 591 e.; and 
 9^ 586 a.; Tim. 28 c, 37 c; Theaet. 176 a.; Apol. 29 b. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 237 
 
 hensive, axiomatic, vitally organized, and 
 rounded into a perfect harmony; simple, 
 so that any child may understand it, yet 
 subtile and profound enough to satisfy the 
 deepest gaze of the philosopher. There 
 may be analogous precepts in other re- 
 ligions, but there is no such j^eligious system 
 any where, nor any approach to it. Other 
 ages of the world have had their great 
 teachers; fragments of the highest truth 
 may be gathered from many sources; but 
 no age has had a teacher such as Gahlee 
 had in the first century; and no such 
 living and fertile unity of doctrine has 
 ever been made known to the world. 
 
 II. But the Christ of the Gospels is not 
 only unintelligible on M. Kenan's data; 
 the portrait which he has drawn is, more- 
 over, inconsistent in itself. The ideal 
 
238 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 which he paints is contradictory and in- 
 credible. To the Christian the character 
 of Christ is at once intelligible in its origin 
 and perfectly consistent in its twofold 
 activity, moral and miraculous. " God 
 manifest in the flesh" could not but be 
 both infinitely beautiful in character and 
 miraculous in working. A supernatural 
 personality was only manifesting itself, 
 according to its proper nature, in the ex- 
 hibition of supernatural powers of healing, 
 and of raising the dead. Such miracles 
 as fill the Gospels not only do not con- 
 tradict the idea of such a personality, but 
 form its fitting and, so to speak, necessary 
 witness. The strange thing would have 
 been if such a personality had not wrought 
 such miracles ; for h 3w otherwise could the 
 supernatural bear witness to itself save in 
 manifestations of supernatural love and 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 239 
 
 power? The mere idea of wonder-working 
 for the sake of eclat, or the gratification of 
 personal distinction, is utterly alien to the 
 character of the Christian miracles. They 
 are never artistically prepared; they are 
 not preluded by any self-aspertion ; audi- 
 ences are not assembled to witness them; 
 but they come forth as the proper efflu- 
 ence of the Divine Man when he walks 
 the earth. At the very commencement 
 of his ministry, in the synagogue of Caper- 
 naum, in the house of a newly-married 
 friend in Cana of Galilee, so soon as the 
 time Avas come when he must be about 
 his Father's business and accomplish the 
 works that had been given him to do, his 
 miraculous powers manifest themselves. 
 So far from being fj^ctitious inventions 
 to secure reputation, or to preserve what 
 reputation he had already acquired, they 
 
240 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 are the actual, the spontaneous expres- 
 sion of the mind and spirit that were in 
 him; for those who saw them were all 
 amazedj and spoke among themselves, 
 saying, "What a woy^d is this! for with 
 authority and power he commandeth the 
 unclean spirits, and they come out."* 
 
 There is, therefore, to the Christian a 
 perfect consistency between the character 
 and the works of Christ. To M. Renan 
 they are utterly inconsistent, and he is 
 condescending enough to propose excuses 
 for the evangelical miracles. "It is nec- 
 essary," he says, "to admit that some acts, 
 which our enlightened age must regard as 
 displays of illusion or madness, occupy a 
 chief place in the life of Jesus. f But an 
 apology may be found for them in the 
 consideration that all popular heroes and 
 
 * Luke iv, 36. f Page 266. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 241 
 
 reformers were then expected to work 
 miracles. Thamnaturgy was a role of 
 the time from which no great man could 
 escape. The school of Alexandria was 
 a noble school, and yet it was devoted to 
 practices of extravagant theurgy. Soc- 
 rates and Pascal were not exempt from 
 hallucinations." How, then, can we ex- 
 pect Jesus to be singular in this respect? 
 In the direct face of all evidence it is 
 asserted that Jesus assumed with reluct- 
 ance the thaumaturgic role. It was un- 
 known to the first beautiful and joyous 
 period of his life — the period of his 
 fresh, moral enthusiasm in Galilee, and 
 the Sermon on the Mount; and it was 
 only assumed when he saw symptoms 
 of his influence beginning to wane, and 
 when the opposition which he encountered 
 
 kindled in him a more stormy zeal. To 
 
 IB 
 
242 CHARACTER OF JESUS, 
 
 the last it was uncongenial to him. "He 
 was a thaumaturgist and an exorcist in 
 spite of himself." 
 
 Not to insist upon the total lack of 
 evidence for such an account of Christ's 
 miracles, or rather the abounding evidence 
 against it, such a character as M. Renan 
 thus attributes to Jesus is plainly self- 
 contradictory. It is impossible to con- 
 ceive such a union of moral excellence 
 with such thaumaturgic imposture as he 
 attributes to him. Men of the highest 
 goodness may no doubt fall into grave mis- 
 takes. Pascal may believe in the miracle 
 of the Holy Thorn, and a St. Bernard 
 and St. Francis may delude themselves, 
 in special moments of spiritual access, with 
 the possession of miraculous powers ; but 
 there is nothing really parallel in such 
 cases to the miraculous career of Jesus. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 243 
 
 None of these men claimed, in the sense 
 that he did, a supernatural mission. Even 
 assuming their own point of view, the 
 miraculous was at the most an accident 
 in their lives. But it was the charac- 
 teristic life of Jesus — no after-thought, 
 no concession forced upon him — but the 
 primary and appropriate manifestation of 
 his Messianic mission, and the self-consti- 
 tuted vindication of the divinity which 
 he claimed. It is impossible to apologize 
 for such a miraculous career, for such 
 miraculous claims, supposing them to have 
 been factitious and assumed. If Jesus 
 was, according to M, Renan, a mere won- 
 der-worker, a thaumaturgist, like Appol- 
 lonius of Tyana, he could not be the noble 
 and beautiful character which he describes. 
 The Preacher on the Mount would cry 
 shame upon the thaumaturgist in Caper- 
 
244 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 naum, in Cana, in Nain. Character, in 
 this strange world of ours, is often mys- 
 teriously complex — the good and the evil 
 lying side by side in startling and per- 
 plexing combination — but the mournfulest 
 contradictions of character that the world 
 has ever witnessed would be outrivaled by 
 the contradiction which the character of 
 Christ would thus present. The "highest 
 consciousness of God that has ever existed 
 in the bosom of humanity," allied to the 
 tricks of the wonder-worker, the impos- 
 tures of the exorcist — who does not feel 
 his spirit shudder at such a thought; who 
 does not feel, at such a suggestion, the 
 shadows of the world's mystery to darken 
 over him, and the idea of the divine to 
 go out of his heart in the blackness of an 
 inexplicable confusion? Mixed as are the 
 representations of human history, and 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 245 
 
 strangely combined as are the possibilities 
 of good and evil in many a soul, such an 
 association as that of imposture with the 
 name of Jesus exceeds all the limits of 
 human credibility. 
 
 The old infidelity, which was audacious 
 to deny any divine excellence to Christ — 
 which would have repudiated as super- 
 stitious the concession of M. Renan, that 
 he had the highest consciousness of the 
 divine — was, in reality, more consistent 
 than this new infidelity. It hated the 
 Gospel, and it called Christ deliberately an 
 impostor. It recognized nothing divine, 
 nothing good in him; and so at least it 
 was consistent as it w^as audacious. His- 
 torical criticism has driven such an infi- 
 delity out of the field. It is no where 
 to be found now, save in the ranks of 
 ignorance and irreligion. The character 
 
246 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 of Christ, in all moral attributes, reveals 
 itself the greater, the more it is studied in 
 the full light and by the higher methods 
 of modern historical inquiry. M. Renan 
 is forced, amid all his inconsistencies, to 
 admire its surpassing excellence, its divine 
 beauty. It appears to us impossible to 
 do this, and yet to deny the supernatural 
 claims of Christ. His morality and his 
 miracles are inseparably bound up to- 
 gether — the complementary attributes of 
 the same divine personality. The critical 
 solvents which avail in other cases do not 
 avail here. It is possible, for example, 
 to recognize, with the modern spirit of 
 historical inquiry, the genuine greatness 
 of Mohammed, and the species of divine 
 enthusiasm, so to speak, which carried 
 him forward in his marvelous career. It 
 is possible in his case to do this, and at 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 247 
 
 the same time to deny to him any super- 
 natural or divine mission; for he did not 
 claim to be himself endowed with miracu- 
 lous powers; he did not appeal to the 
 works which he did as attestations of his 
 divine mission; he did not, in fact, profess 
 to work miracles, although he professed to 
 be the "prophet" of God, and to hold 
 special communications mth heaven. He 
 claimed merely what many enthusiasts 
 have claimed, what Socrates claimed, what 
 Cromwell claimed; and the historical sense 
 is not offended in recognizing even the 
 moral greatness of such characters, while 
 questioning the reality of their supposed 
 divine communications. An exalted en- 
 thusiasm, frequently losing itself in the 
 divine, explains all, or nearly all. The 
 same is true of such characters as St. 
 Francis of Assisi, Joan of Arc, and others 
 
248 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 which M. Renan uses as parallels. But it 
 is impossible to place Christ on the level 
 of such characters J and to explain his 
 career on the same principles ; and for 
 the simple reason that the supernatural 
 in his case is no mere temporary access 
 of divine enthusiasm ; no possible self- 
 creation of a divine madness in the brain. 
 It is the sphere in which he lives; it is 
 the constant manifestation of his activity; 
 it is the test of his mission clearly recog- 
 nized and urged by himself Let any one 
 only take up the Gospel of St. Matthew — 
 we appeal to it because M. Renan so uni- 
 formly appeals to it, and professes to put 
 it above the others — and notice how the 
 very commencement of our Lord's min- 
 istry* witnesses itself in a cluster of 
 miraculous acts. The hour of his divine 
 
 * Matt, viii, 9 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 249 
 
 manifestation is come, and this shows it- 
 self in an outburst of supernatural love 
 and power : cleansing the leper, healing 
 the sick, stilling the tempest, casting out 
 devils, raising the dead, restoring sight to 
 the blind and speech to the dumb. As 
 he himself said, w^hen the imprisoned Bap- 
 tist sent his disciples to make sure anew 
 whether he was the Messiah or Avhether 
 they should look for another: "The blind 
 receive their sight and the lame walk, the 
 lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the 
 dead are raised up, and the poor have 
 the Gospel preached to them." These 
 acts were not accidents in his career, 
 but "mighty works," wrought with a con- 
 scious aim, and to which he constantly 
 appealed. 
 
 There can be only one possible ex- 
 planation of miraculous claims^ such as 
 
250 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 these, consistently with the honesty of the 
 person who makes them — namely, their 
 reality. The idea of mere enthusiasm or 
 of lofty self-exaltation will in no degree 
 explain them. From such enthusiasm — 
 indeed, from any thing of that divine 
 madness, that sibylline rapture which is 
 the recognized attribute of the ordinary 
 prophetic enthusiast — the character of 
 Christ is singularly free. Its type is that 
 of serene majesty — of calmly-conscious, 
 clear, profound, steadfast intelligence, in 
 which the divine is mirrored with pellucid 
 consistency. The historical sense, there- 
 fore, at once rejects the idea of ranking 
 such a character with any of those that 
 have been mentioned. Its canons of ex- 
 planation fail here. The moral purity of 
 such a character can only be vindicated in 
 
 ft-' 
 
 combination with the reality of the divine 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 251 
 
 acts which illustrated it. If Jesus was a 
 true man — still more, a man in whom the 
 divine consciousness was more than in any 
 other man — he was also divine ; for he 
 wrought the works of God, and these 
 works bore witness to him that he came 
 from God, and that God was in him. 
 
 There are other points of view in which 
 this argument of consistency might be 
 urged, and in a very striking manner. 
 We only allude to one more at present. 
 The modern theory of Christ's character, 
 by those who deny his divinity, is that 
 of a great religious hero and martyr — one 
 who died to vindicate human liberty and 
 the right of spiritual intelligence against 
 the oppression of priestcraft and the ser- 
 vilities of a godless material power. This 
 is so far the view of our author. In the 
 closing period of his career Christ is to 
 
252 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 him something of such a hero and martyr. 
 But he is conscious also how imperfectly 
 such a character fits Christ, and especially 
 the Christ of the Passion. There is a 
 feeling, scarcely of awe, for that could not 
 be, but of softened solemnity, that moves 
 even his pages, as he recounts the story 
 of the Passion. And what a story is 
 that! What a picture of infinite, myste- 
 rious sorrow — of shadow deeper than all 
 other shadow that has ever lain on our 
 earth — as Jesus withdrew from his dis- 
 ciples "about a stone's cast," and fell 
 on his face and prayed, saying, "0, my 
 Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass 
 from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but 
 as thou wilt." How does the soul go forth 
 in ineffable tenderness toward the bearer , 
 of such a burden as bowed the Son of man 
 to the earth; when his spirit groaned in 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 253 
 
 incomprehensible travail, and "the sweat 
 was as it were great drops of blood falling 
 down to the ground." But is this the 
 characteristic spirit of the hero and mar- 
 tyr? Do we feel, as we read the story 
 of the Passion, that we are contemplating 
 merely the struggles of a great human 
 soul? Is that "agony and bloody sweat," 
 that cry of impassioned mystery, that 
 weakness and shrinking as from death, 
 and finally that horror of great darkness 
 as he hung upon the cross, and felt that 
 God had forsaken him — is all this of the 
 nature of heroic martyrdom? Is it not 
 something entirely different from the stead- 
 fast rejoicing willingness of a Paul: "I am 
 ready to be offered up, and the time of my 
 departure is at hand?" From the blind, 
 headlong rapture of an Ignatius : " Suffer 
 me to be the food of wild beasts; do not 
 
254 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 intercede for me : fire and the cross, the 
 assaults of wild beasts, the tearing of 
 my limbs, the breaking of my bones, the 
 grinding of my whole body — I welcome 
 them all?"* Assuredly it is. As we 
 stand in spirit by the side of the sleeping 
 disciples and watch their suffering Lord — 
 as we hear him cry from the cross, "My 
 God, my God, why hast thou forsaken 
 me?" before he bowed his head and gave 
 up the ghost — we feel we are entering 
 into the communion of a deeper and more 
 mysterious sorrow than the world has ever 
 known— a sorrow which is not weakness — 
 a sorrow in which no notes of mere 
 martyr-triumph mingle, which no gleam 
 of rejoicing heroism illumines, but which 
 becomes bright with an awful meaning, 
 then and only then, when we recognize 
 
 * Ignatii Epist. ad Romanos, c. 4, 5, 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 255 
 
 in it the reality of a divine sacrifice for 
 the sins of the world; the offering up of 
 Him who, "though he knew no sin, yet 
 was made sin for us, that we might be 
 made the righteousness of God in him." 
 
 III. But, finally, the portrait which 
 M. Renan has given us in his volume is 
 not only unintelligible and inconsistent, 
 but, moreover, inadequate. It fails to 
 explain the effects which have followed 
 from the character and doctrines of Christ. 
 These effects have always been consid- 
 ered as a legitimate evidence of the divine 
 origin of Christianity. Nothing but a 
 divine power, it has been argued, could 
 originate such a world-transforming influ- 
 ence as Christianity; and the argument 
 is perfectly valid in the view of what we 
 have said — namely, that Christianity has 
 
256 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 spread, and continues to spread, mainly 
 by virtue of its spiritual attractiveness. 
 It was the divine life, the moral might in 
 it, which first subdued the Roman world, 
 and then molded into new and higher 
 forms of civilization the Northern races - 
 that overspread it, and have since devel- 
 oped into the great European nations. 
 By the same means it continues to this 
 day to move these nations- and the wide- 
 spreading nationalities that have sprung 
 from them in other hemispheres — to color 
 and exalt all their highest thoughts, and 
 all their social and legislative activities. 
 Not only so; but gradual, and even here 
 and there reactionary, as may seem the 
 course of missionary enterprise, Christian- 
 ity continues to manifest throughout the 
 world, and, in contact with other religions, 
 a spiritually -subduing and transforming 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 257 
 
 force, which is altogether unparalleled. 
 Unlike other religions — particularly those 
 great Eastern religions, whose spread and 
 power, in point of mere magnitude, present 
 the only parallel to it — it radiates from 
 the highest centers of human intelligence, 
 carrying with it not merely a new faith, 
 but the highest attributes of intelligence, 
 wherever it penetrates. Other religions 
 radiate from centers of comparative igno- 
 rance, and show themselves utterly power- 
 less in contact with the awakened energies 
 of humanity in other regions. Christianity 
 remains the only vitalizing spiritual power 
 in the world; and, apart from the living 
 energy that lies in it, it may be doubtful 
 whether there is any reality of moral 
 progress in the world. Thought and 
 science, with all their advances, would 
 
 prove but poor factors in this progress, 
 
 17 
 
258 CHARAGTEB OF JESUS. 
 
 were it not for the impulses which they 
 borrow from Christian philanthropy and 
 enterprise. 
 
 And all this sum of spiritual influence 
 our author supposes to have sprung from 
 a man, half enthusiast, half charlatan — 
 a man himself, indeed, of the noblest 
 spiritual impulses and the highest divine 
 consciousness, but who yet condescended 
 to spread his doctrine by falsehood, and 
 to excite attention by artifices and im- 
 posture ! This Jesus whom M. Renan 
 pictures beside the grave of Lazarus — 
 half the dupe and half the impostor in 
 the disgraceful scene — he is to be con- 
 ceived as standing at the head of this un- 
 exampled moral development of humanity ! 
 It is all the result of the fine thoughts and 
 beautiful sentiments which he promulgated. 
 This is not merely our way of putting it. 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 259 
 
 M. Renan distinctly claims for the Jesus 
 whom he has described such an unexam- 
 pled influence. "Christianity," he says, 
 in his concluding chapter, "has become 
 almost synonymous with religion. Apart 
 from the great and good Christian tradi- 
 tion, we should know nothing of religion. 
 It would be mere barrenness. Jesus has 
 founded religion in humanity, as Socrates 
 has founded in it philosophy, and Aristotle 
 science. Since Socrates and Aristotle, 
 philosophy and science have made im- 
 mense progress; but all has been built 
 upon the foundations which they laid. In 
 the same manner, before Jesus, religious 
 thought had passed through many revo- 
 lutions. Since Jesus it has made great 
 conquest; but we have not left behind, 
 we shall never leave behind, the essential 
 idea which Jesus created. He has fixed 
 
260 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 forever the idea of pure worship. In this 
 sense his religion is without limits. The 
 Church has had its epochs, its phases, its 
 symbols, which have been, or will be, but 
 temporary; but Jesus has founded abso- 
 lute religion, excluding nothing, defining 
 nothing, save only the sentiment."* 
 
 This religion of humanity — the only 
 religion worthy of man, or ha,ving any 
 elements of performance in it — has yet 
 been founded in imposture! Is this con- 
 ceivable ? Is it not utterly incredible ? 
 Many powers have moved the world, 
 and left tracks of light behind them on 
 its darkened history. As we look back 
 upon them, we are forced to recognize 
 the strange mixture of the evil with the 
 good which they present. They are of 
 
 * Pages 445-46. "N'excluant rien, ne determinant 
 rien, si ce n'est le sentiment." 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 261 
 
 the world, and we are not surprised to find 
 the taint of the world's error — it may be 
 of the world's vice — upon them. But 
 here is a power which has moved the 
 world to unexampled good — which in it- 
 self, and so far as it has been unspoiled 
 by other admixture, has shone with a 
 stainless luster upon all the world's dark- 
 ness; and we are to believe that not only 
 error but falsehood has mingled in its 
 origin! Say what we will of the differ- 
 ence of the Oriental nature — of its inca- 
 pacity of distinguishing truth from false- 
 hood in our European sense — is it not 
 mockery in such a case to urge such pallia- 
 tions, or to suppose that they have any 
 application?* The world has been regen- 
 erated. Christendom, wdth its beautiful 
 sanctities, its blessed charities, its wise 
 
 * Page 252. 
 
262 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 and beneficent institutes, its peaceful and 
 glorious aspirations, has been created. The 
 temple of humanity — all that is high, and 
 pure, and noble in human thought, and 
 feeling, and enterprise — has been built 
 upon "the foundation of apostles and 
 prophets — Jesus Christ the chief corner- 
 stone." And yet we are to suppose that 
 delusion, that falsehood lies below all this; 
 that the incarnation is a dream, the resur- 
 rection a legen-i! May we not say, with- 
 out exaggeration, that the difficulties of 
 unbelief are far greater than those of 
 faith; that it makes in the end demands 
 upon our understanding far more impor- 
 tunate and amazing? 
 
 Infidelity, in the course of its rapid 
 developments in recent years, seems to 
 make this more and more apparent; and it 
 is well that it should do so. Deplorable 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 263 
 
 as are the wounds which it inflicts upon 
 many hearts and consciences, it is better 
 that it should have in this way its perfect 
 ^ork — better far, certainly, than that it 
 should experience any material checks, or 
 be met by other arguments than those 
 of reason and faith, in that great and 
 apparently -progressive conflict between 
 truth and error, which God has seen 
 meet to suffer in the world. The truth, 
 as Milton long ago said, has no need to 
 fear save when other weapons than its 
 own are employed in its defense. "If 
 my kingdom were of this world, then 
 would my servants fight. But now is 
 my kingdom not from hence. To this 
 end was I born, and for this came I into 
 the world, that I should bear witness of 
 the truth." The truth is every-where and 
 in all ages its own witness. It fights 
 
264 CHARACTER OF JESUS, 
 
 with its own weapons, which are never the 
 weapons of material force, of social perse- 
 cution, or of official penalties. These only 
 degrade and weaken it. In itself alone, 
 in its own intrinsic rationality and spiritual 
 consistency and influence, it is eternally 
 strong — "sharp and powerful as any two- 
 edged sword, piercing to the dividing 
 asunder of soul and spirit, of the joints 
 and marrow — a discoverer of the thoughts 
 and intents of the heart." It will never 
 fail to vindicate this strength, sooner or 
 later, against any attack, however subtile 
 or strong, that may be directed against it. 
 There have been attacks made upon it, 
 and there may still be attacks made upon 
 it, far more formidable than the "Vie de 
 Jesus" of M. Renan. But there has been 
 seldom any book which has put the issue 
 between Christianity and unbelief more 
 
CHARACTER OF JESUS. 265 
 
 plainly than this one. Whatever be M. 
 Renan's defects, there can be no doubt 
 that he has set forth, in a singularly-direct, 
 perspicuous, and intelligible form, the great 
 historical problem of the origin of Chris- 
 tianity. If he is wanting in the gravity 
 and scientific earnestness of the German 
 theologians, he is also free from their 
 pseudo-abstractions, and the vague gener- 
 alities in which they so often lose them- 
 selves and weary the world. The problem 
 is reduced by him to its naked historical 
 aspects. That he has failed in working 
 it out from his point of view, notwith- 
 standing all his resources of learning and 
 literary art — failed historically to render 
 any adequate, consistent, or satisfactory 
 account of the origin of Christianity and 
 of the character of its great Founder — is 
 negatively one of the strongest testimonies 
 
266 CHARACTER OF JESUS. 
 
 to its divine origin that could have been 
 given. For this is the only historical 
 alternative that remains. If Christianity 
 be not of the Jews, of whom concerning 
 the flesh Christ came — if it be not a 
 natural product of Judaism — it is from 
 God directly and extraordinarily — a living 
 seed, planted by the Divine hand, and 
 growing up into all the fair proportions 
 of Faith, Hope, and Charity, with which 
 it has blessed and beautified the world. 
 
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