nlimited developments, even for the
physical well-being of men. No one has extended wider the limits of
Christian generosity, forbearance, and tolerance. But, on the other
hand, what is striking is, that all this is compatible, and is made to
appear so, with the most profound and terrible sense of evil, with
indignation and scorn which is scathing where it kindles and strikes,
with a capacity and energy of deliberate religious hatred against what
is impure and false and ungodly, which mark one who has dared to
realise and to sympathise with the wrath of Jesus Christ.

The world has been called in these later days, and from opposite
directions, to revise its judgments about Jesus Christ. Christians, on
the one hand, have been called to do it by writers of whom M. Ernest
Renan is the most remarkable and the most unflinching. But the
sceptical and the unbelieving have likewise been obliged to change
their ground and their tone, and no one with any self-respect or care
for his credit even as a thinker and a man would like to repeat the
superficial and shallow flippancy and irreligion of the last century.
Two things have been specially insisted on. We have been told that if
we are to see the truth of things as it is, we must disengage our minds
from the deeply rooted associations and conceptions of a later
theology, and try to form our impressions first-hand and unprompted
from the earliest documents which we can reach. It has been further
urged on us, in a more believing spirit, that we should follow the
order by which in fact truth was unfolded, and rise from the full
appreciation of our Lord's human nature to the acknowledgment of His
Divine nature. It seems to us that the writer of this book has felt the
force of both these appeals, and that his book is his answer to them.
Here is the way in which he responds to both--to the latter indirectly,
but with a significance which no one can mistake; to the former
directly and avowedly. He undertakes, isolating himself from current
beliefs, and restricting himself to the documents from which, if from
any source at all, the original facts about Christ are to be learned,
to examine what the genuine impression is which an attempt to realise
the statements about him leaves on the mind. This has been done by
others, with results supposed to be unfavourable to Christianity. He
has been plainly moved by these results, though not a hint is given of
the existence of Renan or Strauss. But