nature and activity has paramount attractions for
him. His interest in it has furnished him with ample and varied
materials for comparison and generalisation. He is a scholar and a man
of learning, quick and wide in his sympathies, and he commands
attention by the singular charm of his graceful and lucid style. When,
therefore, he undertakes to relate how, as a matter of fact, the
Christian Church grew up amid the circumstances of its first
appearance, he has simply to tell the story of the progress of a
religious cause; and this is a comparatively light task for him. But he
also lays before us what he appears to consider an adequate account of
the origin of the Christian belief. The Christian belief, it must be
remembered, means, not merely the belief that there was such a person
as he has described in his former, volume, but the belief that one who
was crucified rose again from the dead, and lives for evermore above.
It is in this belief that the Christian religion had its beginning;
there is no connecting Christ and Christianity, except through the
Resurrection. The origin, therefore, of the belief in the Resurrection,
in the shape in which we have it, lies across M. Renan's path to
account for; and neither the picture which he has drawn in his former
volume, nor the history which he follows out in this, dispense him from
the necessity of facing this essential and paramount element in the
problem which he has to solve. He attempts to deal with this, the knot
of the great question. But his attempt seems to us to disclose a more
extraordinary insensibility to the real demands of the case, and to
what we cannot help calling the pitiable inadequacy of his own
explanation, than we could have conceived possible in so keen and
practised a mind.

The Resurrection, we repeat, bars the way in M. Renan's scheme for
making an intelligible transition, from the life and character which he
has sought to reproduce from the Gospels, to the first beginnings and
preaching of Christianity. The Teacher, he says, is unique in wisdom,
in goodness, in the height of his own moral stature and the Divine
elevation of his aims. The religion is, with all abatements and
imperfections, the only one known which could be the religion of
humanity. After his portraiture of the Teacher, follows, naturally
enough, as the result of that Teacher's influence and life, a religion
of corresponding elevation and promise. The passage from a teaching
such as M