e, a Greek by
culture, a Frenchman in heart," he furnishes another illustration of
that strain of genius which seems like a compensatory gift to the Jewish
folk for its manifold buffetings at the hand of Fate.

ERNEST RENAN

From 'Selected Essays': copyrighted 1895 by Houghton, Mifflin and
Company

The mistaken judgments passed upon M. Renan are due to the fact that in
his work he did not place the emphasis upon the Good, but upon the True.
Men concluded that for him, therefore, science was the whole of life.
The environment in which he was formed was forgotten,--an environment in
which the moral sense was exquisite and perfect, while the scientific
sense was _nil_. He did not need to discover the moral sense,--it was
the very atmosphere in which he lived. When the scientific sense awoke
in him, and he beheld the world and history transfigured by it, he was
dazzled, and the influence lasted throughout his life. He dreamed of
making France understand this new revelation; he was the apostle of
this gospel of truth and science, but in heart and mind he never
attacked what is permanent and divine in the other gospel. Thus he was a
complete man, and deserved the disdain of dilettantes morally dead, and
of mystics scientifically atonic.

What heritage has M. Renan left to posterity? As a scholar he created
religious criticism in France, and prepared for universal science that
incomparable instrument, the Corpus. As an author he bequeathed to
universal art, pages which will endure, and to him may be applied what
he said of George Sand:--"He had the divine faculty of giving wings to
his subject, of producing under the form of fine art the idea which in
other hands remained crude and formless." As a philosopher he left
behind a mass of ideas which he did not care to collect in doctrinal
shape, but which nevertheless constitute a coherent whole. One thing
only in this world is certain,--duty. One truth is plain in the course
of the world as science reveals it: the world is advancing to a higher,
more perfect form of being. The supreme happiness of man is to draw
nearer to this God to come, contemplating him in science, and preparing,
by action, the advent of a humanity nobler, better endowed, and more
akin to the ideal Being.

JUDAISM

From 'Selected Essays': copyrighted 1895 by Houghton, Mifflin and
Company

Judaism has not made the miraculous the basis of its dogma, nor
installed th