r the prominence given to the Resurrection in
the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the
supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to
deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the
portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the
seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior
as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and
transmitted to us His principles. And this is something much more than
can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to assume
the supernatural and the miraculous. The way in which the Resurrection
is circumstantially and unceasingly asserted, and made on every
occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something
very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or
saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct
agency of heaven in health or disease. It is too precise, too
matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be
resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations. The various
recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the
appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed
from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.
It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.

M. Renan's method is--whilst of course not believing them, yet not
supposing conscious fraud--to treat these records as the description of
natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but
who believed what they wished to believe. They are the story of a great
mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in
the world, from excess of "idealism" and attachment. Unaffected by the
circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more
straightforwardly real--that they seem purposely framed to be a
contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the
possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the
alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repetition and
variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the
appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the
hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and
passion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one
or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitem