uring the time I spent at Paris, between young Renan and
myself. Though I did not go with him in his reconstruction of the
history of the Jews and the Jewish religion, and of the early
Christians and the Christian religion, I agreed with him in principle,
objecting only to his too free and too idyllic reconstruction of these
great religious movements. Besides, before all things, I was at that
time given to philosophical studies, chiefly to an inquiry into the
limits of our knowledge in the Kantian sense of the word, the origin
of thought and language, the first faltering and half-mythological
steps of language in the search for causes or divine agents. All this
occupied me far more than the age of the Fourth Gospel and its
position by the side of the Synoptic Gospels. I had talked with
Schelling and Schopenhauer, and little as I appreciated or understood
all their teachings, there were certain aspirations left in my mind
which led me far away beyond the historical foundations of
Christianity. What can we know? was the question which I often opposed
to Renan at the very beginning of our conversations and controversies.
That there were great truths in the teaching and preaching of Christ,
Renan was always ready to admit, but while it interested me how the
truths proclaimed by Christ could have sprung up in His mind and at
that time in the history of the human race, Renan's eyes were always
directed to the evidence, and to what we could still know of the early
history of Christianity and its Founder. I could not deny that,
historically speaking, we knew very little of the life, the work, and
the teachings of Christ; but for that very reason I doubted our being
justified in giving our interpretation and reconstruction to the
fragments left to us of the real history of the life and teaching of
Christ. To this opinion I remained true through life. I claimed for
each man the liberty of believing in his own Christ, but I objected to
Renan's idyllic Christ as I objected to Niebuhr's filling the canvas
of ancient Roman history with the figures of his own imagination.

Naturally, when I came to Oxford, I thought these things were familiar
to all, however much they might admit of careful correction. Nor have
I any doubt that to some of my friends who were great theologians,
they were better known than to a young Oriental scholar like myself.
But unless engaged in conversation on these subjects, and this was
chiefly the case with my