THE BEGINNINGS OF THE CHURCH.

THIS second volume of M. Renan's Origines du Christianisme' will scarcely rival the first in the rapidity and extent of its circulation. It was not only its glittering style, its animation, its picturesqueness, its light audacity, its novelty of interpretation, that gained for the 'Vie de Jésus' its extraordinary success; it was the unique interest of the Life treated for the first time in so surprising a manner. The history of the first beginnings of the Christian Faith and Church is not so favourable a subject for the genius of an artist. And M. Renan works in the spirit of an artist rather than of an historian. He is eager, he tells at the close of this volume, to take in hand 'the great Christian Odyssey, the unequalled Epopea' of St. Paul's adventures. The intermediate history wants the artistic unity that may be given to a Life of Jesus or to a Pauliad: but there 1 The Contemporary Review, June 1866.

2 Les Apôtres. Par M. Ernest Renan. Paris: M. Lévy.

1866.

is no falling off in the remarkable faculties which M. Renan has brought to the execution of his work; nor has he at all shifted his position as an interpreter of the sacred history.

It is due to M. Renan to bear in mind what he himself describes as his design. His aim is not to sift the records of our Christian 'Origines,' and to set forth what is logically deducible from these records, but to reconstruct the living history from the suggestions of the fragments which remain. In executing a work of the historical imagination he claims the freest use of hypothesis. To object, therefore, to anything that he has written, 'This is merely M. Renan's fancy,' would be to commit a critical blunder. The question is, whether his restoration of our Parthenon is truly artistic; whether the additions or corrections which he has supplied to the received history are in harmony with the genuine fragments or not; whether his idea of the Life of Christ and of the early Church is or is not consistent with itself and with recognised facts. He himself would have the whole question considered as a purely scientific one, as a matter of exclusively speculative interest. He has no desire to proselytize, no desire to shake the faith of a single Christian, no thought of

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exercising any influence upon the direction of things. He holds to the full the doctrine which Mr. Matthew Arnold has been trying to teach us, that the region of ideas ought to be kept separate from that of practice. La théorie n'est pas la pratique. L'idéal doit rester l'idéal; il doit craindre de se souiller au contact de la réalité.' And he seems to breathe, to a degree which even Mr. Arnold might envy, the serene atmosphere of that dispassionate region of ideas. He is able to smile from his Olympus upon those who have attacked him most angrily. 'Often,' he says, 'seeing so much naïveté, so pious an assurance, such ingenuous anger of souls so beautiful and so good, I have said, like John Huss at the sight of an old woman who was toiling along with a faggot for the fire in which he was burning, "O sancta simplicitas!" We who cannot, and perhaps would not, rise to the same heights, may at any rate learn that by throwing hard words at M. Renan, we should not succeed in making him angry, but should only expose ourselves to his pity or admiration.

There is still a central figure for the earlier portion of this volume. M. Renan is occupied with explaining the rise of the Christian belief

The life of

in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Jesus, which, as a real life, ended with the Crucifixion, has a term of apparitional existence in the imaginations of his followers. M. Renan sketches with his old lightness of touch and his old profuse sentimentality this phantom-life, ‘la vie d'outre-tombe,' of Jesus. In this part he is perfectly lucid, and his meaning cannot be misunderstood. But when he proceeds to describe the character of the early Church, and of the world in which it was planted, having to deal, no doubt, with complex and contradictory phenomena, he seems to lose his clearness. If the bewildering effect of some of his chapters is partly due to the variety of facts to be taken into account, it is partly occasioned, as I shall endeavour to show, by a want of firmness and consistency in his conclusions.

M. Renan clears the way for his historical inquiries by laying down a preliminary axiomatic principle. It is an absolute rule of criticism to give no place in historical narratives to anything miraculous.' The term 'miracle' has proved a very difficult one to define, and the ordinary account of a miracle-that it is a suspension of the laws of nature-has been of late

1 P. xliii.

very generally repudiated. Some of us have thought it best to renounce the use of the term as a philosophical name for acts or events of a particular kind, and simply to employ it in its original sense of a wonder.' But there is no uncertainty as to what M. Renan means, or as to the application of his principle. This absolute rule affirms that Christ did not rise from the dead in any sense or manner whatever except in the delusions of his friends. It makes it simply impossible that he should have had any relations to the Divine Being except those dependent on an organization somewhat finer and more delicate than that of other men. It is not M. Renan's creed that there is nothing mysterious, nothing inexplicable, in the world; but that a will has never interfered for a special purpose in the course of things. 'That God is in everything, especially in all that lives, in a permanent manner, is precisely our theory; we only say that no particular interference of a supernatural power has ever been established.'1 He disbelieves in a moral or spiritual, as much as in a physical, miracle. Christianity, he holds, is only unique in degree; it is a greater religion than Buddhism, but it is of the same class

1 P. xlvii.