t perhaps in one
instance--the raising of Lazarus--attempted to be accounted for or
explained, but simply left out and ignored. On the second, the fact
from which there is no escape--that He whom M. Renan venerates with a
sincerity which no one can doubt as the purest and greatest of moral
reformers, did claim power from God to work miracles--is harmonised
with the assumption that the claim could not possibly have been a true
one.

M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which
the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men
were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed
upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power
of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of
Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of
the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed
unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in
detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects,
the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what
Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the
Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity,
and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and
creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no
shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the
range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in
its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an
one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history,
overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which
M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon
our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel.

His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and
countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with
which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom,
first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native
beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against
falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his
own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and
perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity
and