d
astronomical details. We must be content to know and feel that, in the
Bible, we find a basis of inspiration which is none the less
substantial though surrounded by intruding weeds, or fragments of stone
and mortar. But Tholuck's work is not a fair specimen of his writings.
Besides its literary defects, the author concedes much more to the
Rationalists here than he is accustomed to do in his many superior
publications.

Again we meet with the revered name of Neander. His _Life of Christ_
appeared in 1837. He published it not only as a reply to Strauss, but as
an independent treatise upon the person of the Messiah. He announced
himself as the mediator between those bitter partisans who, on the one
side, would grant no rights to reason, and on the other, would leave no
space for the exercise of feeling and faith. His work stands in the same
relation to criticism which Schleiermacher's _Discourses_ occupies to
dogmas, and as the latter appears sometimes to lean toward Rationalism,
so do we find in the former traces of concession to the destructive
method of criticism. Neander's work, despite everything which he grants
to his enemies, was the transition-agent toward a purer comprehension of
the life of Christ. While we lament that he interprets the early life of
Christ as a fragment derived from an evangelical tradition; that he
believes the influence of demons in the gospel period susceptible of a
psychological explanation, that the miraculous feeding of the five
thousand is but the multiplication and potentialization of substances
already at hand, that the feeding of the four thousand is a mistaken
account of the former, and that the changing of the water into wine at
Cana of Galilee was nothing more than an increase of power in the water,
as we find sometimes in mineral fluids,--granting these and all the
other interpretations which Neander makes on the score of nature or
myths, we must attach an importance to his _Life of Christ_ second only
to his _History of the Christian Church_. One closes the reading of his
account of the Messiah with a profound impression that the author had a
true conception of the divinity and authority of the Founder of
Christianity. We cannot doubt his sympathy with those words of Pascal
which he quoted frequently with exquisite pleasure: "En Jesus Christ
toutes les contradictions sont accordees."

Ullmann, in his treatise _Historical or Mythical_, will not accept the
alternative that the