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to invite, an infallible purity of feeling rectified the traditional conception, and made him shrink from any but spiritual methods. The time came,-it is marked by the Transfiguration, -when persistency in this holy abstinence could plainly lead to but one result: the very moment of Peter's exulting confession is the moment of the Master's foreboding of Calvary: and Peter's instant expostulation shows how sharply the two feelings clash. The conflict of that crisis is little penetrable by us: must he deny the part that the apostle gave him?-that might be to betray his appointed part; who precisely he was in the Divine reckoning he could not tell; but that he was the organ of his Father, and had a witness to bear, he knew assuredly out of that inner guidance he must live on: if it disappointed apocalyptic visions, apocalyptic visions must step aside and wait: men should force nothing upon him: and if already in view there was "a decease which he must accomplish at Jerusalem," it would but associate him with Moses and Elias, immortal prophets who also were in reserve for the great day of the Lord. So far therefore as the Messianic idea affected him then, it affected him thus: that rather than aim to realise it unfaithfully, he dismissed it to the other side of death, and would not suffer an imagination of God's outward Providence to disturb the clear tones of his inward Spirit. And so the Messianic theology, without formal cancelling, was from hour to hour neutralised and negatived by the pure ascendency of diviner light. And the via dolorosa was all the darker, that it had no ideal light of theory upon it, but was rather a passage right away from theory, into a night that was only not terrible because it was the hiding-place of God. That the great controversy and agony of Christ's spirit was essentially of this nature is suggested even at an earlier period than the transfiguration. Whatever other meaning may be drawn from the remarkable scene called the Temptation, it plainly denotes the dismissal of seducing proposals from the Messianic side, -the rejection of all questionable means,-of ostentation or compromise, for advancing the kingdom of heaven. That Satan of the wilderness, abashed before the pure eye of the Son of God, departed "for a season." Doubtless there were moments when he returned: he spoke again in Peter's word, "Be it far from thee, Lord: this shall not be unto thee." But the answer is ever the same, "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men." And these are words plainly revealing the nature of the conflict in the soul of Jesus. They are not the words of one embracing death because it cut the knot of a hopeless entanglement, and ended the fever of a conscience no longer transparent: but of one to whom the path of sacrifice was the

only heavenly road; who must decline deliverance by "selfassertion" not compelled by inward authority. The feeling which they express is not, that he has become committed to pretensions which at all hazards he must press into the advance: but just the opposite resolve, of abstinence, in the face of death, from every claim, even though it might be true, which would turn outside the "kingdom within," and make dependent upon "signs" the divine things he had to signify. It is needless to point out how that resolve was kept. The last period is full of a sad and tender inspiration. The reported miracles visibly abate. He parries questions about his "authority" without a self-assertive word. He speaks the pure truth of heaven, and applies it straight to men and things around, heedless whom it may provoke. He brings his unsullied "idealism" into the very throng of Solomon's porch, and abashes beneath his clear eye the priests' officers, if not the priests:-and falls at last through that sublime saying about the built and unbuilt temples, which expresses the imperishable essence of his religion.

Perhaps, after all, M. Renan's suspicion of a decline in the character of Jesus from its first pure enthusiasm springs less from study of the history, than from a certain melancholy theory of his own, to which more than once he gives pathetic expression. "At bottom," he says, "every ideal is a eutopia.' Rather would we say, "At bottom every ideal is an inspiration." He looks with sympathy indeed, but with poetic sadness, on the aspirations of devout and prophetic men after a more satisfying life and a more righteous world than ours; and regards them as unsubstantial fancies of the human mind. We know not why we should part with the natural trust that they are divine glimpses rather than human illusions, escaped rays from the higher light instead of dreams painted on the night; or cease to recognise, in the intuitive visions and untiring prayer of the supreme spirits of our race, the border-land of communion between the immortal thought and the mortal eye that scans it. Here surely, if any where, on the commanding summits and in the unclouded moments of prophetic minds, is the meeting-place of Man and God, where the real meaning of the world is seen, and the stream of tendency may be widely traced. And if it be so, then the so-called "idealist" is, in the end, the truest realist: for the essence of the universe, -the Eternal Will,-is on his side: he speaks to the most enduring affections: he touches the latent powers whose time it is to wake. Nor can we allow that "every ideal must lose something of its purity" in its aim at realisation. On the contrary, we say, it is cleared and ennobled by its perpetual strife with resisting conditions; suffering, it may be, under limiting necessities

and painful incompleteness, but in proportion as it is faithful, made perfect by suffering; glorifying reality without quenching itself. Did our author mean no more than that in actual execution something must always remain behind the original thought, he would truly enough describe the hindrances of a refractory world. But the application of his maxim gives it a more questionable meaning. It is his general formula for proving that Jesus could not fail, unless he died in his early "idealism," to descend to a lower level of conscience; humouring, for instance, the popular demand for miracles, and otherwise tampering with veracity. He could not otherwise, it is said, have acted on mankind at all; and we have no right to find fault till we have done as much with our scruples as he with his imperfect sincerity. In this sense we must dispute both the fact and its maxim. Jesus, far from condescending to any moral compromise with the Messianic idea, declined its requirements, and became a sacrifice to his refusal; he could not stoop, but he could die. Instead of sinking deeper and deeper into the traditional illusion, he rose higher and higher above it. If, like a mirage inseparable from the atmosphere of his land, it still hovered before his eye, he followed it not, but step by step surrendered himself to the guidance of the Holiest within. As he thus advanced, it receded from him into the distance: it passed beyond the margin of this life; and so, flying before his personal perfection, began that retreat from the earth which left at last the spirituality of the gospel disengaged from the dreams of Judaism. As for his action on the world, he acted on that age precisely because he sincerely shared some of its transitory ideas; he has acted upon every other, because he was faithful to a divine light, lonely for the moment, but revealed in him for all time. Not humouring and connivance, but truth in every way,-truth with his age, truth with his God, truth with himself,-was the condition of his power, as indeed of all moral power. The managers of the world, hour by hour, must act by adaptation to lower minds; its saviour and inspirer, who lifts it into a new mood for ever, must be the pure organ of a Will higher than his own. He will never reach the seats of any fresh original reverence in others but by artless simplicity of faith and devotion; he is what he is because he just reports eternal things which he did not make and cannot alter: did he even think for a moment of trimming them to his will, he would sink from the prophet to the charlatan. In administering an established system, resting on existing pieties, there may be fearful mixtures, as the history of every priesthood shows, of enthusiasm and artifice; but to extend such experience to religious creation, to suppose that the purest truth can flow from

the courses of a turbid conscience, and the highest worship be raised from the wreck of a ruined "idealism," is to throw all ideas of moral causation into the dreariest confusion. This is to us the most painful feature of M. Renan's book. That he is Platonist in taste does not restrain him from cynicism in morals; his imagination lingers in the upper world of divine ideas, but his belief keeps its footing on the ground, and trusts no power but the mixed motives of an infirm and self-deceiving humanity. We venture to say that his real world lies in the wrong place for an historian of religion; the true causes of what he seeks he leaves behind in his dream-realm, and descends for them to a level where they are not to be found. His moral construction is, in consequence, deficient in compactness. He combines incompatible attributes in one person, and then apologises by commonplaces about the contradictions of human nature. one time he seems to attribute the marvellous success of Christianity to the fortunate errors and fanaticisms, perhaps even unscrupulousness, of its Founder: at another to the sublimity of his character and the imperishable truths at the heart of his religion. That ultimately he will rest, with less wavering, in the higher doctrine of moral dynamics, we cannot but hope when we read such a comment as the following on the words of Jesus to the woman of Samaria, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father;" "but the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth" (John iv. 21, 23):

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"The day when he pronounced this word he was truly Son of God. He spoke for the first time the sure word on which the edifice of eternal religion shall rest. He founded the pure worship, of no land, of no date, which all lofty souls will practise to the end of time. His religion that day was not only the religion good for humanity, it was Absolute Religion and if other planets have inhabitants endowed with reason and morality, their religion can be no other than that which Jesus proclaimed at Jacob's well. Man has not been able to abide by it, for the ideal is tenable but for an instant. The word of Jesus has been a gleam in a dark night; it has needed eighteen hundred years for the eyes of mankind (what do I say?-of an infinitely small part of mankind) to accustom themselves to it. But the gleam will become the full day; and, after having run through the whole circle of errors, mankind will return to that word as the imperishable expression of its faith and its hopes" (pp. 234, 235).

CURRENT LITERATURE:-BOOKS OF THE QUARTER SUITABLE FOR READING-SOCIETIES.

1. Fortune's Journey to Yedo and Peking.

2. Eleanor's Victory. By M. E. Braddon.

[It is difficult to say why people should read Miss Braddon's novels, and easy to show why they should not be read. Yet they are, and will be so.]

3. Alexander's Incidents of the Maori War.

4. Andrew Deverell.

[An amusing book by an American. Ill-written, but not without interest. He writes to a young lady to ask her to wait and marry him, and she does wait.]

5. Ansted's Great Stone Book of Nature.

6. Shakespeare's Home. By J. C. M. Bellew.

[A careful book on a subject of which but little can be known.]

7. Browning's Poetical Works.

[Reviewed in Article VII.]

8. Carey's late War in New Zealand.

9. Border and Bastille. By the Author of "Guy Livingstone." [Written with energy, but saying little.]

10. Carey's Four Months in a Dahabeek.

LA dahabeek is an Egyptian boat, and Mr. Carey amused himself there, and amuses his readers.]

11. The Footsteps of Error. By Dean Close.

[The author's name suggests the nature of this book.]

12. Davis's Tracks of M'Kinlay across Australia. [Interesting, though rather heavily written.]

13. Chesney's View of the Virginian Campaigns. [Interesting and valuable.]

14. Davidson on the Old Testament.

[Reviewed in Article I.]

15. Denise. By the Author of " Mademoiselle Mori." [A very interesting novel, written with artistic grace.]

16. The Fairy Book. By Dinah M. Muloch.

[An excellent set of fairy tales, happily without morals.]

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