ers in
inflexible opposition to the intensest worship of the State that the
world has ever known?

To tell us the conditions under which all this occurred is not to tell
us the cause of it. We follow with interest the sketches which M. Renan
gives of these conditions, though it must be said that his
generalisations are often extravagantly loose and misleading. We do
indeed want to know more of those wonderful but hidden days which
intervene between the great Advent, with its subsequent Apostolic age,
and the days when the Church appears fully constituted and recognised.
German research and French intelligence and constructiveness have done
something to help us, but not much. But at the end of all such
inquiries appears the question of questions, What was the beginning and
root of it all? Christians have a reasonable answer to the question.
There is none, there is not really the suggestion of one, in M. Renan's
account of the connection of Christianity with the Roman world.

II[16]

[16]
_Guardian_, 21st April 1880.

M. Renan has pursued the line of thought indicated in his first
lecture, and in his succeeding lectures has developed the idea that
Christianity, as we know it, was born in Imperial Rome, and that in its
visible form and active influence on the world it was the manifest
product of Roman instincts and habits; it was the spirit of the Empire
passing into a new body and accepting in exchange for political power,
as it slowly decayed and vanished, a spiritual supremacy as unrivalled
and as astonishing. The "Legend of the Roman Church--Peter and Paul,"
"Rome the Centre in which Church Authority grew up," and "Rome the
Capital of Catholicism," are the titles of the three lectures in which
this thesis is explained and illustrated. A lecture on Marcus Aurelius,
at the Royal Institution, though not one of the series, is obviously
connected with it, and concludes M. Renan's work in England.

Except the brilliant bits of writing which, judging from the full
abstracts given in translation in the _Times_, appear to have been
interspersed, and except the undoubting self-confidence and _aplomb_
with which a historical survey, reversing the common ideas of mankind,
was delivered, there was little new to be learned from M. Renan's
treatment of his subject. Perhaps it may be described as the Roman
Catholic theory of the rise of the Church, put in an infidel point of
view. It is Roman Catholic in concentrating all