dreams of affection. It was not a matter of a moment or an hour,
but of days and weeks continually; not the assertion of one imaginative
mourner or two, but of a numerous and variously constituted body of
people. The story, if it was not true, was not delusion, but imposture.
We certainly cannot be said to know much of what happens in the genesis
of religions. But that between such a teacher and such teaching there
should intervene such a gigantic falsehood, whether imposture or
delusion, is unquestionably one of the hardest violations of
probability conceivable, as well as one of the most desperate
conclusions as regards the capacity of mankind for truth. Few thoughts
can be less endurable than that the wisest and best of our race, men of
the soberest and most serious tempers, and most candid and judicial
minds, should have been the victims and dupes of the mad affection of a
crazy Magdalen, of "ces touchantes demoniaques, ces pecheresses
converties, ces vraies fondatrices du Christianisme." M. Renan shrinks
from solving such a question by the hypothesis of conscious fraud. To
solve it by sentiment is hardly more respectful either to the world or
to truth.

We have left ourselves no room to speak of the best part of M. Renan's
new volume, his historical comment on the first period of Christianity.
We do not pretend to go along with him in his general principles of
judgment, or in many of his most important historical conclusions. But
here he is, what he is not in the early chapters, on ground where his
critical faculty comes fairly into play. He is, we think, continually
paradoxical and reckless in his statements; and his book is more
thickly strewn than almost any we know with half-truths, broad axioms
which require much paring down to be of any use, but which are made by
him to do duty for want of something stronger. But, from so keen and so
deeply interested a writer, it is our own fault if we do not learn a
good deal. And we may study in its full development that curious
combination, of which M. Renan is the most conspicuous example, of
profound veneration for Christianity and sympathy with its most
characteristic aspects, with the scientific impulse to destroy in the
public mind the belief in its truth.

XIII

M. RENAN'S HIBBERT LECTURES[15]

[15]
_Guardian_, 14th April 1880.

I

The object of M. Renan's lectures at St. George's Hall is, as we
understand him, not merely to present a historical