gatives and
its spirit, and partly its machinery. We should hardly gather from this
picture that there was, besides, a widespread Catholic Church, with its
numerous centres of life and thought and teaching, and with very slight
connection, in the early times, with the Church of the capital. And, in
the next place, we should gather from it that there was little more in
the Church than a powerful and strongly built system of centralised
organisation and control; we should hardly suspect the existence of the
real questions which interested or disturbed it; we should hardly
suspect the existence of a living and all-engrossing theology, or the
growth and energy in it of moral forces, or that the minds of
Christians about the world were much more busy with the discipline of
life, the teaching and meaning of the inspired words of Scripture, and
the ever-recurring conflict with perverseness and error, than with
their dependent connection on the Imperial Primacy of Rome, and the
lessons they were to learn from it.

Disguised as it may be, M. Renan's lectures represent not history, but
scepticism as to all possibility of history. Pictures of a Jewish
Ghetto, with its ragged mendicants smelling of garlic, in places where
Christians have been wont to think of the Saints; ingenious
explanations as to the way in which the "club" of the Christian Church
surrendered its rights to a _bureau_ of its officers; exhortations to
liberty and tolerance; side-glances at the contrasts of national gifts
and destinies and futures in the first century and in the nineteenth;
felicitous parallels and cunning epigrams, subtle combinations of the
pathetic, the egotistical, and the cynical, all presented with calm
self-reliance and in the most finished and distinguished of styles, may
veil for the moment from the audience which such things amuse, and even
interest, the hollowness which lies beneath. But the only meaning of
the lectures is to point out more forcibly than ever that besides the
obvious riddles of man's life there is one stranger and more appalling
still--that a religion which M. Renan can never speak of without
admiration and enthusiasm is based on a self-contradiction and deluding
falsehood, more dreadful in its moral inconsistencies than the grave.

We cannot help feeling that M. Renan himself is a true representative
of that highly cultivated society of the Empire which would have
crushed Christianity, and which Christianity, vanquishe