M. Rénan accordingly depicts the Author of our religion in the warmest and brightest colours. So far from attempting to lessen the beauty of His character, he sets it forth, as we have said, with graceful enthusiasm, elaborating many a charming vignette by the way of that fair Eastern landscape, which he concludes to have imparted so much of its reflective calm and pastoral beauty to the soul of the young Nazarene. He describes to us, in very full detail, what Jesus knew and did not know, and the processes of thought and growth of ideas in His mind. He touches lightly, with a tender regret, on those unfortunate moments in which, beguiled by the wiles of his friends and the necessities of the time, this wonderful Reformer permitted Himself to be seduced into thaumaturgical performances and pretences of miracle. By these means, by the beauty of Christ's character, and even, for M. Rénan is bold, of His person-by the enthusiasm of His followers, and the ingenuity of His disciples, and the mingled wants and credulity of the age, the new biographer of Jesus of Nazareth does his best to account for Christianity. We do not at present pause to notice the still more profound difficulties he plunges himself into-difficulties much darker and uglier than those which he gets clear of by ignoring any sort of divine agency in the matter. We do but state the conditions under which he works, and the nature of the production thus evolved. He depicts to us a world busy and full, teeming with unintelligible creatures, each of them a profound secret to his neighbours, most of them unspeakably mysterious to themselves—all running their heads from time to time against the dead walls of law and order, which encompass their blind existence, yet by times addressing wistful looks towards a sky which, to the poetic souls among them, looks to have

something behind its unfathomable depths. If any one ever made it, that unknown Being has retired behind His cloudy curtains, and left it to its own devices. But then amid the crowd there arises a Man, who not only marks Himself everlastingly upon the broad canvass, but affects the lives and fills the thoughts of myriads of people hundreds of years after, people more enlightened in many particulars than Himself—all this without any sort of influence in the matter except the ordinary laws of human influence-the power of natural greatness, genius, and truth. This is the picture M. Rénan draws, without, perhaps, quite perceiving all its difficulties; and indeed it is no light task for any historian to account for a wonderful and continuous religious movement in a world left all by itself to its own devices, without the possibility of any interference on the part of God.

It is this assumption, to start with, against which Dr Tulloch opens his protest. He complains that, while M. Rénan professes to enter upon the consideration of his subject with a mind entirely impartial and unbiassed by theory, it is in reality upon a foregone conclusion that he bases his entire argument. "The Gospels are partly legendary, because they are full of miracles ;" such is the primary statement of the historian who proposes to interpret anew the life of Christ. a life wholly miraculous, according to Christian conception. To reject a certain miracle, or even all miracles, as insufficiently proved, is a different thing from the rejection of every miraculous possibility in the world, which is the conclusion with which M. Rénan sets out. The real meaning of this conception of the universe is ably set forth by Principal Tulloch in the following passage:—

"Here there can be no doubt of M. Rénan's philosophical sentiments, and as little doubt of the manner in which

he applies them to history. It is his evident principle, as it is that of the whole school to which he belongs, to ignore the reality of any spiritual or divine government of the world. The order of the universe is fixed in certain laws, which exclude all personal intervention, and remain unchanging for ever. It is the business of science to discover these laws; it is the function of the historian to recognise their operation, and to interpret by them the whole course of past phenomena; for it admits of no question, that they are the same laws which we now see operating round us, which have been without deviation operating from the beginning. There is and can be no room, therefore, in history for miracle. There is no room even for God, save as the poetic or philosophic ideal of an inflexible system of law. This is Positivism in its general conception-the startling creed of a widely-prevailing philosophy. Not only Christianity, but Theism, is held to be a philosophical mistake. The world has not advanced, nay, has retrograded, from the days of the great schools of Greek science. It is the spirit of Lucretius, the recognition of his inexorabile Fatum, which is the highest point of wisdom, and to which the world must return, as the spring of its highest progress, and the consummation of all knowledge. It is somewhat hard for the Christian apologist to be thus continually dragged from the fair field of historical evidence to a discussion of the ultimate principles of all truth. And yet it is a very instructive fact, that every school of unbelief is now driven to this resource. It makes its chief attack upon Christianity from behind general principles, not merely inimical to the Church and the supernatural foundation upon which it rests, but inimical to all religion-inimical, in fact, to all spiritual philosophy and every noble creative art and product of civilisation which has its root in the spiritual life of man-the sphere in which man is allied to a higher divine life than the mere nature around him which he can see and handle. For this is the real question involved in Positivism. It is not, as writers like M. Rénan ingeniously put it, a question between law and caprice, order and arbitrariness, in the government of the world. There is no Christian thinker who believes that the government of the world is otherwise than by general laws. The universe of nature is conceived by all reflective minds as a great order or cos

mos, and the course of history, apparently irregular as it has been, as a consistent development in the great system of things. The Theist recognises the principle of order quite as plainly as the Positivist; but what he does not admit is the merely material character of this order. He maintains, on the contrary, that order is everywhere the direct expression of a living Divine will, which rules in and by the order. He acknowledges, equally with the Positivist, that the material facts or phenomeua in the midst of which he lives are capable of classification into general laws, continually subsisting, and of which they may be regarded as the issue or manifestation; but he does not allow that these material phenomena or their laws exhaust the realities of being. On the contrary, he holds that the highest being of man is not contained in them, but is a part of, and is closely allied to, a higher order of being, transcending and embracing the and embracing the other. Every higher activity of our nature presupposes and springs from this higher order of being. Religion has no meaning apart from it. Philosophy, as it has been conceived by all the highest minds of the human race

by a Socrates or a Pascal, or even by a Pythagoras or a Kant-has no basis without it. Art of every kind, poetry, painting, sculpture, imply and appeal to it, and, save for the inspiration they draw from thence, would be merely the toys of an idle and frivolous luxury. Civilisation in its legislative and judicial institutes, and in all the more characteristic and elevating forms of its manifestations, rests upon it, grows with its growth, and decays with its corruption. That man is something more than matter, that there is a divine spirit in him, and a divine spirit above him, in whom alone he lives, and that this divine order of being is higher than the mere material order, and may for wise and beneficent purposes supersede and traverse this lower order; that, in short, there is a living Supreme Will directly governing all things, and communing with and controlling the will of man-an Almighty and Personal hand, which none can stay from working,—such a faith is indeed eminently Christian. But it also lies more or less obscurely at the root of every form of religion, and every conception of man as a being capable of rational and moral progress. And this is what Positivism, if not in all cases expressly, yet in its essential character implicitly denies; for it acknowledges nothing higher than nature,

and the system of laws into which nature may be resolved.

Such a philosophy, if philosophy it can be called, necessarily excludes all idea of miracles. It rejects the miraculous from history because it has already rejected God from the world. Let it pretend as it may not to impose theory upon history, it does so in the most obvious and sweeping manner. For why are miracles incredible? Not because they have been examined and found to be devoid of credit, but because the world proceeds by general laws, and not by personal agency. Deny this latter fact, and of course no miracle can have ever happened-for a miracle in its very idea presupposes personal agency. But admit the reality of Divine Intelligence and Will governing and acting in every manifestation of nature and of history, and it is impossible to exclude the idea of miracle, or at once set it aside."

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Principal Tulloch follows up this statement of the entire basis of the question by entering into M. Rénan's special argument in respect to the miracles of the New Testament, which is in its way a skilful and specious piece of writing, with all that apparent candour and abstract air of justice which is so captivating to an inexperienced reader. "No miracle," he says, has ever been performed before an assembly of men capable of verifying the miraculous character of a fact; and he proceeds to state the circumstances under which it might be possible to convince himself, or any other person similarly enlightened, of a miraculous event. "Were a worker of miracles to present himself in these days," he says, "with pretensions sufficiently serious to be discussed, and to announce himself, we shall suppose, as capable of raising the dead, what should we do? We should appoint a commission composed of physiologists, physicians, chemists, and persons trained in historical criticism. This commission would choose a dead body; would assure themselves that it was in reality a dead body; would select a room for the experiment, and arrange

an entire system of precautions necessary to place the result beyond doubt. If under such conditions the raising of the dead was effected, a probability nearly equal to cerHowtainty would be obtained. ever, as an experiment must be always capable of repetition, as those who have once done a thing must be able to do it again, and there can be no question of easy or difficult in regard to miracles, the miracle-worker would be invited to reproduce the miraculous fact in other circumstances upon other dead bodies in another company.” To this singular proposal, in which the strength and weakness of M. Rénan's mode of argument is very remarkably shown, Dr Tulloch replies by a very lucid and striking description of the difference between historical and scientific facts:

"M. Rénan has here fallen into so plain a confusion as to confound a fact of experience, a profound historical incident, with a scientific conclusion. Facts of incident and contingencyand all historical facts, miraculous or otherwise, are of this class-belong to a sphere of their own, different from the scientific, and rest on their own characteristic and appropriate proof. Whether anything has happened or not is a question of contingency to be settled by the evidence of those who profess to have seen the thing happen. Did they really see it? were they truly cognisant of it? And were they capable of judging, not by scientific tests, but by the ordinary exercise of their senses and their judgment, whether what they saw was a reality, and not an illusion? Are they honest men, and have they no inducement to say that the thing happened if it did not happen? Such is the nature of historical evidence. Scientific evidence is of a different character; the evidence not of

personal testimony but of continual demonstration. Scientific facts, unlike facts of mere contingency or incident, are truths of nature, which, once discovered, admit of repeated verification, because they rest on the constitution of things-the existing laws of the material universe: they are equally true at all times, therefore, and their proof can be demonstratively exhibited at one time as well as another. In the case of

such facts personal evidence is of no consequence. No amount of such evidence, apart from scientific experiment and demonstration, could establish, for example, the law of gravitation, or the law of equilibrium of fluids. You or I may believe these scientific truths, because of Newton's statements on the one hand or Pascal's statements on the other; but any number of such statements does not form the appropriate evidence of such truths. They rest,

on the contrary, on the evidence of direct observation and experiment, capable of constant repetition, and of being exhibited in formulæ of the utmost exactness and certainty. M. Rénan asks with triumph, 'Who does not know that no miracle has ever been performed under the conditions laid down by him?' May we not ask with a more justly-founded confidence, Who does not see that a miracle performed under such conditions would be no miracle at all? So soon as you can reduce any fact within scientific laws and conditions, it necessarily ceases to bear the character of a miracle. It is the very idea of miracle that it transcends these laws and conditions; that it is an incident or occurrence appearing within the sphere of human experience, but incapable of being resolved by the ordinary laws which govern this experience. If it can be so resolved, it loses all pretension to be miraculous, or even marvellous. If the case supposed by M. Rénan could really occur, the conclusions which he draws from it are not those which would really follow. The true inference would be, not that miraculous powers had been intrusted to certain persons, but that raising the dead was a natural or scientific process, and not an exhibition of miraculous or supernatural power at all. How could it be, if capable of spontaneous repetition in the manner suggested? for is not this capacity of repetition just the characteristic of a scientific fact? Is not the process described the very process by which some new truth or law of science is discovered and verified? A miracle, on the other hand, implies as its essential idea a special and extraordinary exercise of divine power which, from its very nature, it is absurd to suppose repeated with a view to verification. It pleased God Almighty, let us suppose, with a view to man's good and the demonstration of His own glory, to interpose in human affairs, arresting the ordinary action of the laws of nature, as in the case of immediate

recovery from sickness or restoring the dead to life again. The operation of the natural forces which make up the course of human experience, and which only subsist at any moment, because God who appointed them continues them, is temporarily set aside for some wise end, so that the,Original Will-of whom alone all these forces are, and whose power alone they express--is made bare, stands forth, as it were, in direct demonstration and authority. This is the Christian idea of a miracle-the will of God in direct and extraordinary exercise. This is the nature of the fact which M. Rénan insists upon calling together an assembly of scientific persons to settle. Is this the hand of God? They are to determine the question by experiment, and by an application of scientific tests. If the hand of God raises a dead man to life, it must repeat the process under a more rigorous and vigilant scientific scrutiny before the scientific notables can determine whether the thing has been really done or not. It is surely needless to add, that no miracle has hitherto been performed under such conditions, for the conditions entirely divest the supposed act of all divine character-nay, of all moral import.'

Dr Tulloch does not conclude this clear and striking discrimination without an example. He takes from the Gospel the simple narrative of one of those resuscitations to which M. Rénan refers. It is the story of the widow's son :—

"Our Lord in the course of His journeys went into the city of Nain, and as He went (and many of His discples and much people went with Him'), He met a funeral procession, with the dead body of a young man carried on an open bier, according to the custom of the East, and his weeping mother following the bier 'And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. And He came and touched the bier and they that bare him stood still. And He said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak. And He delivered him to his mother. there came a fear on all: and they glorified God, saying, That a great prophet is risen up among us; and, That God hath visited His people.' Think of this scene, a touching and memorable incident, one among many, though few so striking, in the life of our Lord;

And

then recall for contrast M. Rénan's laboratory and assembly of scientific commissioners prepared to investigate the alleged resuscitation of a dead body, carefully selected and scientifically scrutinised. The contrasted facts are of an entirely different order, and the issue contemplated in the one case is quite distinct from the issue alleged in the other."

This, it appears to us, is meeting the question in its fullest and clearest signification with a quiet force, which is infinitely more powerful than any heat of indignation. There is, however, besides this ably-indicated difference, a certain peculiarity in the story of the evangelist, which in this case neither M. Rénan nor his critic take note of. It is the entire simplicity and the spontaneous what one might call accidentalcharacter of the whole transaction. No thought of proving anything, even His own divine mission, appears in the words or in the act of the merciful visitor, whose compassionate heart was suddenly touched by the mother's tears. Of all the miracles of the New Testament, it is perhaps the one most entirely unconnected with conscious purpose and intention. The divine traveller stands before us, giving out of His liberality, as a human traveller, benevolent and sympathetic, might have given tears or alms to the desolate woman. He had the higher gift in His power, and He bestowed it out of the pity of His heart. He does not turn round to say, "Believe in me since I have raised this man from the dead," but goes silent upon His way, one may well believe, with sad thoughts of that infinite sea of human suffering, of which he had dried up one bitter drop, but with which the broader balance of nature and necessity forbade Him to interfere more largely. The miracle came out from Him like rays from the sun, or like, what is a better image, kindness and consolation from a good man, spontaneously, with no purpose beyond. And if one were but to take the narration simply, without the need of proving anything

by it, it would not be difficult to perceive in most of the miracles of the Redeemer, not only this spontaneous, unprepared character, but along with it a wonderful sadness, as if the very solace He gave made Him but mourn the more over the awful margin of anguish which it did not consist with the purposes of Providence that He should relieve. What other meaning could be in those otherwise unnecessary tears which He wept over the grave He was about to open? It is unquestionable that the miracles are referred to both by Himself and His disciples as proofs of His mission; but yet it is only in a very few instances that He seems to have propounded them with this secondary end in view. Otherwise the story reads in most cases as if it had been a certain relaxation of divine self-control, a certain human susceptibility bursting into the composure of Godhead, which constrained Him to touch and heal-accompanied always by that divine melancholy, the grief of God over that grief of man which in the maintenance of His own larger order and universal system it was not meet to cure.

Such an idea is, however, so far from the thoughts of M. Rénan, that it does not seem for a moment to occur to him that there are still a great many people in Christendom who believe unfeignedly that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God as much as the Son of Mary; not a man of wonderful genius and high originality, but actually a Divine person. He does not recognise the possible existence of such an idea, but addresses himself as calmly to the narrative of that young life in Galilee, of the influences that went to the formation of so beautiful a character, and the circumstances which combined to beguile it from its natural rôle of tender reform and pious contemplation, into the more tragical Messianic character, as if it was agreed that all rational persons were of his way of thinking, and any other