1 
 
"(Breat Winters." 
 
 LIFE AND WRITINGS OF 
 ERNEST RENAN 
 
Life and Writings 
 of 
 
 Ernest Renan 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS ESPINASSE 
 
 II 
 
 £ondon and felUng-on-Cjf^ne: 
 
 THE WALTER SCOTT PUBLISHING GO., LTD 
 
 NEW YORK AND MELBOURNE 
 
 (All rtghls reserved.) 
 
Zfr^p/'j/? ^/cf^-nnuj 
 

 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Renan born at Treguier, 28th February 1823; his parentage; 
 death of his father, and family difficulties; becomes a ward 
 of St. Yves, the patron-saint of the widow and the orphan ; 
 first school-days; the See of Treguier; stories of the 
 Breton saints ; old Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet 
 in Paris, and changes effected therein by the Abb6 
 Dupanloup; Renan, as a promising pupil, recruited for 
 the Seminary (1838) II 
 
 CHAPTER H. 
 
 Dfiscription of Renan as a lad by his early friend the Abb^ 
 Cognat; early days at the Seminary; influence of M. 
 Dupanloup; transferred to branch of the Seminary of St. 
 Sulpice at Issy ; Renan alarms his professors by his argu- 
 ments ; goes to St. Sulpice in Paris; begins to waver from 
 the Faith J takes first steps towards priesthood ; writes to his 
 friend Cognat to explain his conduct; learns Hebrew and 
 studies German exegesis under the influence of Le Hir; 
 extract from the Souvenirs relating to influences of his 
 new studies ; his sister's help and influence ; confides his 
 doubts to his friend Cognat; leaves St. Sulpice (i845)» 
 and finally abandons all intention of entering the priest- 
 hood ; his character and attitude ; comparison with those 
 of Voltaire ; influence of his clerical education ; respect for 
 the Roman Catholic priesthood 22 
 
 38^701 
 
; : /\Cp}/TENTS. 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Renan begins life as tutor in the Quartier Latin (1845) ; friend- 
 ship with Marcellin Berthelot ; studies assiduously, espe- 
 cially languages, and wins Volney prize; much impressed 
 by events of 1848; contributes essays to periodicals; 
 La LiberU de Penser; first contribution, " The Origin of 
 Languages"; description of L^Avenir de la Science ; his 
 criticism of Strauss in article on '* The Critical Historians 
 of Jesus"; other contributions; acts as temporary professor 
 at the Lycee of Versailles; appointment on commission 
 of literary inquiry in Italy and England, and visits those 
 two countries (1850); obtains post in the Department of 
 Oriental MSS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale (1851); 
 De philosophid peripateticA apud Syros commeniatio his- 
 torica and Averroes et V Averro'isme ; his sister keeps house 
 for him ; first acquaintance with Levy the publisher, and 
 engagement with him 52 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 Renan thrives apace ; is now in position to marry ; his wife a 
 niece of Ary Scheffer, the painter; his sister continues to 
 live with him ; publishes (in 1855) " General History and 
 Comparative System of the Semitic Languages " ; theories, 
 etc , therein propounded ; Renan becomes member of the 
 Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres; more periodical 
 literature ; ** Studies of Religious History" and " Ethical 
 and Critical Essays "; quotation from essay on Calvin ; 
 essays on *'The Poetry of the Exhibition" and "The 
 Poetry of the Celtic Races"; quotation from the former; 
 Renan translates the Book of Job and the Song of 
 Solomon ; his theory of the authorship of the former; quota- 
 tions from both . 66 
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 Renan commissioned to explore ancient Phoenicia (May i860) ; 
 his intimacy with Prince Napoleon and Madame Cornu, 
 and partial adhesion to the Empire; journey to Syria; 
 Mission de Phthu'cie; can now realise his wish to visit the 
 Holy Land ; begins his Life of Jesus ; his sister's affec- 
 tionate sympathy; she is attacked by fever and dies; 
 dedication to her of the Vie de Jhus . . . .87 
 
CONTENTS. 7 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 The College de France; Renan appointed (1857) to the chair 
 of Hebrew and cognate Semitic languages; his first lecture 
 on the part played by the Semitic nations in the history of 
 civilisation; delight of the students, but disapproval of the 
 clergy; Renan's course suspended; he earns his salary by 
 giving private lectures; Life of Jesus published in 1863 ; the 
 miraculous discarded and story reconstructed by the help 
 of imagination and learning ; general character and scope 
 of the book; quotation from the closing passage; imme- 
 diate and immense success of the work ; anger of the 
 French Roman Catholic Church ; displeasure of the 
 Emperor ; Renan deprived of his professorship ; offered 
 a post in the Bibliotheque Imperiale, and declines it; 
 criticisms on the Life of Jesus by Sainte-Beuve and 
 Edmond Scherer ; references to it by Prosper Merimee 
 and George Sand ; Renan's idea of the universe given in 
 "The Natural Sciences and the Historical Sciences"; 
 his interest in the Higher Education in France . . 92 
 
 CHAPTER VIL 
 
 Renan goes again to the East at the end of 1864 ; the second and 
 third volumes of the Origines du Christianisme^ entitled 
 respectively "The Apostles" and "St. Paul"; his refer- 
 ence in the preface to criticisms on the Vie de Jesus ; effect 
 of criticism upon these volumes; his views upon the author- 
 ship of materials for history of the apostolic age ; description 
 of early Church ; praises the spirit that presided over its 
 organisation ; the conversion of St. Paul ; St. Paul's mission 
 in the Church; verdict on his character . . . .123 
 
 CHAPTER VHL 
 
 *' Questions of the Time " ; Renan's opinion of the political state 
 of France ; becomes a candidate for the constituency of 
 Seine-et-Marne (1869); his anti-revolution policy; fails to 
 secure election ; result of general election; Renan's article, 
 "Constitutional Monarchy in France"; is travelling with 
 Prince Napoleon when the war of 1870 breaks out ; fall of 
 Sedan ; Renan's comparison of France and Germany, as 
 
CONTENTS, 
 
 PAGE 
 
 reported by M. de Goncourt ; denies truth of such reports ; 
 his controversy with Strauss upon the subject of the 
 war; monitions to his countrymen embodied in **The 
 Intellectual and Moral Reform of France"; political 
 views . . . 139 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 Renan visits Rome ; writes V Antichrist ; Nero ; analysis of 
 the Apocalypse ; the revolt of the Jews and its effect on 
 Christianity ; is invited to attend a Scientific Congress at 
 Palermo ; gives his observations in " Twenty Days in 
 Sicily" (1875); accepts invitation to the bi-centenary of 
 the death of Spinoza (1877) ; his address ; publishes *' The 
 Gospels and the Second Christian Generation " (1877) ; his 
 theories of the authorships of the Gospels; interwoven with 
 history of the Roman Empire ; growth of the authority of 
 the Bishops of Rome ; the " Miscellanies of Travel and 
 History"; subjects treated of therein . . . .156 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 Renan's philosophy of life ; sudden change of theory as to 
 the moral aims of Nature; the Dialogues Philosophiques ; 
 •* Caliban," ** Eau de Jouvence," " Le Pretre de Nemi"; 
 ' ' L' Abbesse de Jouarre " ; VEglise Chritienne ; theories 
 of the authorship of the Gospel of St. John ; heresies which 
 sprang from Gnosticism ; Marcion ; sketch of character and 
 career of Adrian ; Renan comes to London (April 1880) to 
 deliver the Hibbert Lectures on Christianity and Rome; 
 extracts of reminiscences of his visit from the Pall Mall 
 Budget; his lectures; *' Marcus Aurelius and the end of the 
 Roman World"; explains the hatred of Marcus Aurelius for 
 the Christians ; state of the Church at his death ; rise of mon- 
 asticism ; views of the severance of Church and State, and 
 the religion of the future; elected to the French Academy ; 
 address upon Claude Bernard ; subsequent addresses upon 
 Pasteur and Lesseps; Ecclesiastes; writes the Souvenirs 
 (PEnfance et dejeunesse to indicate the steps of his mental 
 and moral growth ; preface to that book ; Renan finds him- 
 self reconciled to the French Republic ; publishes Nouvelles 
 Eitttdes d' Histoire Religieuse ; essay on Buddhism ; on 
 
CONTENTS, 9 
 
 PAGE 
 
 St. Francis of Assisi ; Kenan's popularity ; miscellaneous 
 lectures and addresses ; is feted at Treguier ;. takes a 
 house at Rosmapanon ; writes Fetiilles Ditachees ; his 
 later conceptions of the universe ; Histoire du Peuple 
 <V Israel (1887-94); difficulty of extracting history from 
 legend; r/j«w/ of the book 173 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 Renan's sufferings, and death on the 2nd October 1892; a 
 state-funeral ; his remains removed from Montmartre 
 to the Pantheon ; Renan's character ; his patriotism and 
 devotion to higher education ; his hatred of controversy ; 
 personal appearance ; philosophical speculations ; style 
 and qualities as a writer ; faithfulness to truth . . . 226 
 
LIFE OF RENAN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 [1823-36.] 
 
 JOSEPH ERNEST RENAN was, like Chateaubriand 
 and Lamennais, a native of Celtic Brittany, the 
 Wales, so to speak, of France. He was born on the 
 28th February 1823, at Treguier {Cotes du Nord\ a 
 little town at the southern extremity of a bay and a few 
 miles from the English Channel, with a harbour fre- 
 quented by vessels engaged in the coasting trade. The 
 ancestors of Ernest Renan came, it is supposed, to 
 Brittany in the great migration thither during the fifth 
 century from Wales, and one of the migrants was St. 
 Renan (originally Ronan), a famous Breton saint, after 
 whom was named, among other places, the town of St. 
 Renan in Finisterre. 
 
 In the registry of births at Treguier Renan's father is 
 
12 LIFE OF 
 
 described as a marchand-epicier (retail grocer). But, like 
 his immediate progenitors, he was also a mariner, the 
 owner of a coasting vessel and of the house in which 
 his son was born. The wife managed the shop, a 
 "general" one, in which, besides groceries, were sold 
 the miscellaneous articles in demand by seafaring men 
 and their wives. According to Ernest Renan, one of 
 the chief characteristics of the Bretons is "idealism 
 which brings with it a contempt for riches because 
 generally acquired by ignoble means, and produces an 
 incapacity for trade and commerce." In this respect the 
 modern Renans were true Bretons : " they were all as 
 poor as Job," was the pithy description given of them to 
 Ernest by his mother. His paternal grandfather was a 
 "patriot" after the first French revolution broke out. 
 But though he had then a Uttle money, he refused, 
 unlike his neighbours, to have anything to do with the 
 purchase of the confiscated property of the Royalists as 
 an investment vitiated by its origin. In the ensuing war 
 with England Ernest's father volunteered for the naval 
 service, and was taken prisoner by the English. In later 
 years he was fond of witnessing the drawing of conscripts 
 by lot, and delighted in reproaching the new recruits 
 with the contrast between his voluntary and their com- 
 pulsory enlistment. " In the old days this was not our 
 way of doing things," and he shrugged his shoulders over 
 the degeneracy of the times. A "mild and melancholy" 
 man, he had the true Renan incapacity for business. He 
 was in his fiftieth year, and had just returned from a long 
 voyage, when Ernest was born. At his birth things were 
 going ill with the family. "When you came into the 
 
RE NAN, 13 
 
 world," the mother told her son, after she had lived to 
 see him a distinguished man, "we were so downcast that 
 I took you on my knees and cried bitterly." Cheerful- 
 ness, however, was her ordinary mood. Through her 
 father she had Gascon blood in her veins, and inherited 
 the joyous Gascon temperament, the very opposite of 
 that of the sombre Breton. " This complexity of origin," 
 Renan says, "is in a great measure the cause of my 
 apparent inconsistencies. I am of twofold nature; one 
 part of me laughs, while the other weeps. As there are 
 in me two men, one of them is always bound to be 
 contented." He says somewhere that the Gascon 
 element gained the upper hand in him; but this was in 
 later years; in earlier he approved himself, it will be 
 seen, a genuine Breton. 
 
 The distress of the Renan family reached a climax with 
 the disastrous death of its head when Ernest was a child 
 of five. His father was drowned one dark night while 
 returning to his coasting vessel from the quay at St. 
 Malo. The creditors waived their claim to dispose of 
 the house and shop at Tr^guier in consideration of the 
 offer made by Ernest's sister, Henriette, a clever and 
 resolute girl of fifteen, to pay off her father's debts by 
 degrees. For twenty years, beginning by opening a 
 school for little boys and girls at Treguier, she added 
 to her struggles for herself and her family the trying 
 fulfilment of this self-imposed obligation. Henriette 
 inherited her father's melancholy, and, while sympa- 
 thetic, cultivated solitude. She was passionately attached 
 to her brother Ernest, and afterwards gave him spiritual 
 guidance as well as material aid. She had been qualified 
 
14 LIFE OF 
 
 for teaching through having been tolerably taught French 
 and church-Latin by one of the ci-devant nuns who had 
 survived the suppression of the convents during the first 
 French Revolution. 
 
 The death of his father first brought the little Ernest 
 into a semblance of relations with one of the many saints 
 revered in Brittany. This was St. Yves, who as a lawyer 
 pleaded the cause of the poor, and after an ecclesiastical 
 career received what is said to be the unique honour 
 bestowed on a lawyer, that of being canonised. He 
 became the patron-saint of lawyers, and was regarded 
 in his native district of Treguier as the champion of 
 the poor, of the widow and the orphan, and as the 
 great redresser of wrongs. To his chapel near Treguier 
 came the injured one, and having said to him, "Thou 
 wert just in thy lifetime; show that thou art so still," 
 after this appeal went away with the comfortable though 
 rather unchristian belief that the enemy prayed against 
 would die within the year. All the desolate and forsaken 
 became his wards. The fatherless Ernest was taken by 
 his mother to the chapel of the saint and was con- 
 stituted his ward. "I cannot say," Renan wrote long 
 afterwards, "that the good saint worked marvels in the 
 management of our affairs, or, above all, that he 
 endowed me with a remarkable understanding of my 
 own interests. But I owe him what is better. He 
 gave me a contentment which passeth riches, and 
 a good nature which has kept me cheerful until 
 now." 
 
 After various changes of residence, mother, daughter, 
 and son found themselves again at Treguier. The boy, 
 
RENAN. 
 
 15 
 
 very intelligent as well as dreamy, had been taught to 
 read and almost knew T^lemaque by heart when, prob- 
 ably about the age of eight, he was placed in the 
 ecclesiastical seminary of his native town, a friendly 
 priest and his good sister (of her more hereafter) paying 
 his school-fees, from which slender burden he soon 
 relieved them by gaining a small scholarship. The 
 teachers were venerable priests, for whom, long after he 
 had ceased to believe in their narrow creed, and had 
 recognised the insufficiency of their programme of 
 secular instruction, he cherished the warmest and most 
 grateful regard. They taught him Latin in the old- 
 fashioned way, ** out of detestable elementary books, 
 without method, almost without grammar, just as it was 
 learned in the fifteenth and sixteenth century by Erasmus 
 and the humanists, who since the time of the ancients 
 have known it best.'' He was thoroughly grounded in 
 mathematics. The writing of Latin verses was en- 
 couraged, but that of French verses was sternly 
 forbidden. Even Chateaubriand was distrusted, since, 
 although he had written the Genie du Christianisme^ 
 was he not also the author of such mundane fictions as 
 Atala and Rene ? The suspicions entertained of Lamar- 
 tine were still stronger. They doubted the soundness of 
 his faith and foresaw his ultimate outbreaks. " All these 
 views did credit to their orthodox sagacity, but the result 
 was for their pupils a singularly contracted horizon." 
 What history they learned was from Rollin, and so 
 rigorously excluded were they from any knowledge of 
 recent history, that on the eve of the Revolution of 1830, 
 Kenan knew scarcely anything more of Napoleon and 
 
i6 LIFE OF 
 
 the Empire than he gathered from the gossip of the 
 college-porter. For the rest, Renan says: — 
 
 **I learned from my teachers something infinitely more valuable 
 than criticism or philosophical sagacity. They taught me the love of 
 truth, respect for reason, and the seriousness of life. This is the 
 one thing in me which has never varied. I issued from their hands 
 with a moral feeling so proof against all trials that the jewel might be 
 rudely handled but could not be tarnished by contact with Parisian 
 levity. I was so fashioned for the Good, for the True, that it 
 would have been impossible for me to follow any career not devoted 
 to incorporeal things. My teachers made me so unfitted for any 
 and every temporal employment that I was irrevocably stamped for 
 a spiritual life. That life appeared to me as alone noble; every 
 lucrative profession seemed servile and unworthy of me. " 
 
 Ernest's fellow-pupils were chiefly of the peasant class, 
 and for the most part learning with an eye to the priest- 
 hood. They were proud of their bodily strength, and 
 somewhat contemptuous of femineity and of what they 
 thought effeminacy. Ernest was a delicate and studious 
 boy. He did not join in the games of his school- 
 fellows, and they were given to teasing " Mademoiselle," 
 as they scornfully called him. From an early age, indeed, 
 he preferred the company of little maidens to that of 
 children of his own sex. Of these damsels, the one who 
 fascinated him most, and with whom he formed a childish 
 friendship, was the Noemi charmingly described in his 
 Souvenirs, She was two years older than himself. Had 
 it not been for the consciousness of a coming vocation 
 which ought to detach him from all earthly things, he 
 would in a few years have fallen in love with Noemi, 
 before the parting of their paths in life and her prema- 
 ture death. He held her memory dear, and when he became 
 
RE NAN. 17 
 
 a father he called his only daughter Noemi. But thoughts 
 of love, still less of marriage, could not be harboured by 
 one destined, as he and his believed, for the priesthood 
 and cehbacy. " I was a born priest," he says of himself, 
 and a priest he did become, though it was not in any of 
 the churches of the nations. Meanwhile, just as melted 
 wax takes the impression of the seal, his natural devout- 
 ness took the shape given it by his spiritual pastors and 
 masters. " Every word of theirs seemed to me an oracle. 
 Such was my respect for them that, until I was sixteen 
 and came to Paris, I never doubted the truth of what 
 they told me." 
 
 Beyond the school-walls there was much to minister to 
 the boy's natural and acquired devoutness, which was 
 strongly tinged with romanticism. Before the first 
 French Revolution Treguier was the seat of a bishopric, 
 and was full of monasteries and convents. The Revolu- 
 tion swept away the bishopric and much else that was 
 clerical and monastic. But under the Empire and the 
 Restoration, Treguier recovered to a great extent its 
 old ecclesiastical aspect. There was the ancient 
 cathedral, reconstructed in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
 centuries, and the young Renan passed many a happy 
 hour in it, especially in its noble cloisters, with their 
 tombs of knights and dames of the olden time. Outside 
 Treguier, as elsewhere in Brittany, with its devoutest and 
 most superstitious of populations, clinging tenaciously to 
 ancient worships and ways, there were in lonely and desert 
 places numbers of half-ruined chapels, dedicated to local 
 saints unknown to the rest of Christendom, and to whom, 
 worshipping them with strange rites, the Breton peasant 
 
l8 LIFE OF 
 
 prayed for a cure of this and the other disease; the clergy 
 tolerating such practices reluctantly. When Renan wrote 
 his Soiwe?u'rs, he remembered vividly his emotion when, 
 through a half-ruined door of one of those chapels, he 
 gazed at the stained glass or the images of painted wood 
 which decorated the altar. " The strange and terrible 
 physiognomies of those saints, more Druid than Christian, 
 savage, vindictive, haunted me like a nightmare." Most 
 of them had been real persons, but their biographies 
 had become the subjects of the wildest of legends. A very 
 strange one was connected with an incident in Ernest's 
 own family. He was told how his father, when a child, 
 had been cured of a fever. On the day appointed he 
 was taken, before dawn, to the chapel of the saint 
 from whom the cure was expected. At the same time 
 came a blacksmith with forge, nails, and tongs. He 
 lighted his furnace, made his tongs red-hot, and holding 
 them before the image of the saint, said : " If thou dost 
 not draw forth the fever from this child, I shall forthwith 
 shoe thee as I would a horse ! " The saint obeyed 
 immediately ! Ernest's mother as a Breton liked the 
 legends of the saints, but as a Gascon she laughed at the 
 grotesque in them, and when telling them to her eagerly 
 listening son, she took care to distinguish between what 
 might be real and what was certainly fictitious in them — 
 a lesson not thrown away upon him when in after years 
 he had to deal with legends infinitely more important 
 and widely accepted than those of the obscure 
 saints of Brittany. These stories "gave me early," 
 Renan says, " a taste for mythology," and some of them 
 were utilised by him long afterwards when engaged 
 
RENAN. 19 
 
 in one of his favourite occupations, that of tracing 
 the resemblance between the workings of the mythopoeic 
 faculty in races far apart from each other in space and 
 time. 
 
 But for an unexpected incident Renan would have spent 
 an obscure and blameless life as a parish priest, or at 
 highest as a professor in the College of Tr^guier. He was 
 in his fourteenth year when something which had 
 occurred in distant Paris substituted for that modest 
 career one very different. 
 
 The old Seminary of St. Nicolas du Chardonnet, close 
 to the church of the same name, in the Rue St. Victor, 
 and one of the poorest quarters of transpontine Paris, 
 became with Napoleon's re-establishment of Catholicism 
 in France a training-school for priests of the diocese of 
 Paris. Through too frequent changes in the principal- 
 ship, ending in the intermittent and feeble administration 
 of a valetudinarian, the teaching and discipline of the 
 seminary had rendered it inefficient for its object, and 
 the number of pupil-inmates was dwindling accordingly.^ 
 About 1837 the Archbishop of Paris, in order to reform 
 this state of things, gave the seminary a vigorous Superior 
 in the person of the Abbe Dupanloup, afterwards the 
 rather famous Bishop of Orleans. In the prime of life, 
 and perhaps the most popular preacher in Paris, 
 ambitious, and a man of the world, he was at that 
 time an ultramontane and a legitimist, and had been 
 confessor to the Due de Bourdeaux. But he found 
 favour in the eyes of Orleanists as well as of legitimists 
 of distinction, and was admitted to intimacy by the 
 
 ^ Adolphe Morillon, Souvenirs de Saint-Nicolas (1859), chap. i. 
 
20 LIFE OF 
 
 Duchesse de Dino, the high-born Russian wife of Talley- 
 rand's nephew. One of Dupanloup's greatest achieve- 
 ments of those years was the successful stroke of spiritual 
 diplomacy by which he managed to persuade the dying 
 and long recalcitrant Talleyrand to receive the last 
 sacraments, and sign a confession of faith. Among 
 his first endeavours in the administration of the semi- 
 nary was to provide a classical and literary education 
 for aspirants to the priesthood, at the expense of the 
 scholastic and mystical instruction previously given. 
 But he carried out a still more vital change. He 
 determined that the seminary should be no longer a 
 mere training-school' for the priesthood, but that there 
 should be admitted youths belonging to the wealthy 
 middle-class, and to the higher class, whose parents 
 desired them to have, without any view to taking 
 orders, at once a sound Catholic and a superior classical 
 and literary education. He was thoroughly successful. 
 No sooner had he effected these internal reforms than he 
 was besieged by applications for the admission of boys 
 belonging to aristocratic families as well as to the 
 wealthier bourgeotste. Many parents were willing to 
 pay a high price for the privilege, and their payments 
 went to aid the education and support of boys of an 
 inferior social grade who were, or were likely to become, 
 candidates for the priesthood. These, moreover, were 
 to be youths of proved or promising ability. To 
 obtain such the Abb^ Dupanloup sent forth to several 
 parts of France educational recruiting sergeants, so to 
 speak. Let Renan tell in his own words the rest of the 
 story: — 
 
RE NAN. 21 
 
 '* In the year 1838,^ as it happened, I won all the prizes of my 
 class in the College of Treguier. The list of prizes came under the 
 notice of one of the men of penetration whom the zealous general 
 employed to recruit for his young army. In a minute my fate was 
 decided. * Make him come,' said the impetuous Superior. I was 
 fifteen-and-a-half: we had no time for reflection. On the 4th of 
 September I was spending my holidays with a friend, at a village 
 near Treguier. In the afternoon I was sent for in haste. I 
 remember the return home as if it were " yesterday. I had before 
 me a country- walk of a league. The pious chimes of the 
 evening Angelus, spreading from parish to parish, infused into the 
 atmosphere something of calmness, of sweetness, of melancholy, 
 \maging the life which I was about to quit for ever. Next day 
 I started for Paris ; and on the 7th I beheld things as new 
 to me, as if I had been suddenly flung into France from Tahiti or 
 Timbuctoo;" 
 
 ^ Renan himself says, " 1836," a misprint or a slip of the pen. 
 A few lines further on he was then, he says, fifteen-and-a-half years 
 old, and he was born in 1823. Moreover,, it is certain (see Morillon, 
 uhi supra) that the Abbe Dupanloup did not become Superior of 
 the seminary before the session 1837-38. 
 
CHAPTER II, 
 
 [1838-45.] 
 
 LJ IS seven years of study, begun with a view to the 
 priesthood, are described by Renan pretty fully in 
 his Souvenirs. Moreover, some side-lights on his career 
 as a Seminarist are thrown by one of his most intimate 
 friends and fellow-students of those years, who, unlike 
 Renan, did enter the priesthood. The comments of the 
 Abb^ Cognat on Renan's reminiscences of his student- 
 life display a certain acidity, due to Renan's abandon- 
 ment of his early belief, but in the Abbe's recollections 
 (given in Le Correspondant during 1883) are embedded 
 facts and impressions which supplement, in a more or 
 less interesting way, Renan's own statements. Here, for 
 instance, is an unflattering sketch of the personal appear- 
 ance and characteristics of the Breton boy when he 
 entered the Seminary of Saint Nicolas du Chardonnet : 
 " He looked pale and sickly. His puny frame was sur- 
 mounted by an enormous head. His eyes, almost always 
 downcast, were raised only to give sidelong glances. 
 Timid to awkwardness, pensive to the verge of dumbness, 
 he seemed a burden to himself," etc. Renan has himself 
 
LTFE OF RE NAN. 
 
 23 
 
 described his misery on being transplanted from his 
 quiet home and his mother's side, from Treguier with its 
 environment of green hills and pleasant fields, to the 
 school-prison of the Rue St. Victor, with its rigid dis- 
 cipline and indoors confinement. Home-sickness was 
 followed by bodily sickness, and but for a fortunate 
 incident things might have gone very ill with the poor boy. 
 His chief consolation was to write long letters to his mother, 
 the loss of whose companionship was his greatest sorrow. 
 It so happened that the Abbe Dupanloup was deeply 
 attached to his own mother, whom he visited every day. 
 All letters written by the pupils were read by masters before 
 being despatched. The deep affectionateness of one of 
 Renan's to his mother made an impression on the master 
 who read it, and he brought it under the notice of the 
 Abbe Dupanloup. He received it on the evening which 
 he was wont to devote to commenting, before the 
 assembled and eagerly listening two hundred pupils, on 
 the masters' reports and on the school incidents of the 
 week. Renan had that week been unsuccessful with his 
 school exercise, and was only fifth or sixth in the order 
 of merit "Ah," said the Abbe Dupanloup, "if the 
 subject had been that of a letter which I read this 
 morning, Ernest Renan would have been first." "Thence- 
 forth," Renan adds, "he took notice of me. I existed 
 for him; he was for me what he was for all of us, a 
 principle of life, a sort of God. One worship was substi- 
 tuted for another, and weakened considerably my feelings 
 towards my first teachers." 
 
 In the vivifying studies of the place, in the ardour 
 of emulation, and in the sympathetic communings of the 
 
24 LIFE OF 
 
 Abbe Dupanloup with the pupils, Renan soon found 
 his home-sickness vanish. The studies were purely 
 literary, but their range was wide, and the Abbe, seconded 
 by excellent teachers, practised every possible device that 
 could make school-tasks interesting to the learners. Greek 
 and Latin were carefully taught, and the classics of 
 Greece and Rome instructively commented on. History 
 too, ancient, mediaeval, and modern, had a foremost place 
 in the school studies along with the great French classics, 
 Bossuet and Fenelon in particular. " I had finished my 
 classical studies," Renan says, "without having read 
 Voltaire, but I knew by heart the Soirees de Saint- 
 Petersbourg^^^ full of orthodoxy and legitimism. News and 
 knowledge of what was being said and done in literary 
 Paris entered the seminary so amply that the war then 
 raging between the Romanticists and the Classicists was 
 a frequent theme of the familiar addresses made for 
 half-an-hour every evening by the Abbe Dupanloup to 
 the assembled pupils. On this subject the Abbe Cognat 
 has something rather malicious to say of his old friend 
 and fellow-pupil a propos of Renan's statement in his 
 Souvenirs^ that writing exercises on themes not personally 
 interesting to him was distasteful, and that he gladly 
 turned from rhetoric to history. According to the Abb^, 
 Renan was distinguished thus early by a " literary hetero- 
 doxy," that is, by a passionate preference of the Roman- 
 ticists to the Classicists. In order to check this devotion, 
 which was prominently illustrated in the young gentleman's 
 exercises, one of these was, to the great amusement of 
 his fellow-pupils, ridiculed by his teacher, who laughed 
 at what the Abbd calls " the youthful innovator's prose. 
 
REN A IV. 25 
 
 pretentious, trivial, and bristling with neologisms." 
 Further, according to the Abbe, Renan adhered to his 
 romanticism, but in dudgeon abandoned " the serious 
 study of letters," and devoted all his energies to history, 
 in which department, adds this candid friend, "finding 
 himself in company with rivals less prepared than him- 
 self, he easily obtained the first place." Certainly to 
 history he did turn with avidity, and long afterwards he 
 remembered the delight with which he listened while 
 his Professor read out striking extracts from the fifth and 
 sixth volumes of Michelet's History of France, those in 
 which is told, among other things, the story of Joan of 
 Arc, and the expulsion of the English from France, where 
 of all their former possessions Calais alone was left 
 them. 
 
 Of the religious observances of the seminary and the 
 part which he took in them, Renan says in his Souvenirs 
 little or nothing. Speaking of the Abbe Dupanloup's 
 system of education, Renan remarks, " You would have 
 said that his two hundred pupils were destined to be 
 poets, authors, orators." But with all his classicism 
 the future Bishop of Orleans made the most ample pro- 
 vision for the spiritual needs of those entrusted to his 
 charge, whether they were destined for the priesthood 
 or not. A glance at this sphere of things is given by 
 the severe Abb^ Cognat when commenting on a passage 
 in the Souvenirs, in which Renan contrasts the simple 
 austere religion of his priest-teachers at Treguier with 
 that presented to him at St. Nicolas, "a religion of 
 calico-print, a piety scented with musk, decked out with 
 ribbons." 
 
26 LIFE OF 
 
 *' If such," says the critical Abbe, '*was M. Kenan's impression 
 on entering the Seminary in 1838, it must be admitted that he was 
 an excellent dissembler and played his game skilfully. At chapel, 
 from the beginning of the service, he took his place among the 
 most serious and devout. By his piety he even made himself a 
 place apart in the opinion of his fellow-pupils and his masters. In 
 this way he did not fail to receive encouragement and distinction. 
 I have not forgotten with what an envious eye I saw my friend 
 among the dignitaries of the Fraternity of the Holy Virgin, which 
 was established in the Seminary, when I myself had as yet, and with 
 great difficulty, attained the modest grade of aspirant in that pious 
 institution. And it was not only at chapel where, like another 
 Eliakin, invested with the linen alb, 'decked out with ribbons' the 
 colours of the Virgin, he discharged the envied functions of chorister, 
 that M. Renan figured as the fervid disciple of a * religion of 
 calico-print,' — during play-hours, at class-time, and everywhere, he 
 appeared to be animated by a feeling of sincere devoutness. I have 
 had the curiosity to consult the honourably-mentioned exercises in 
 which were given the best of those produced in each class from 
 1838 to 1 84 1, and I was not surprised to find among several other 
 religious compositions of Ernest Renan a hymn in Greek verse to 
 the Virgin. I add a detail apparently trifling, yet characteristic : M. 
 Renan never neglected to introduce a cross into his signature." 
 
 Nevertheless, when he left the Seminary of St. Nicolas 
 du Chardonnet a great change had been worked in the 
 young Renan. 
 
 ** For three years," Renan writes, '* I was subjected to a profound 
 influence which effected a complete transformation of my being. 
 M. Dupanloup had literally transfigured me. He had evolved a 
 quick and active intelligence out of the poor little provincial torpidly 
 encased in his shell. Certainly there, was something wanting to 
 this education, and as long as I had to put up with it my mind 
 always felt a void. There were wanting positive science, the idea 
 of a critical search after truth. That superficial humanism for three 
 years condemned my reasoning faculty to inertia, while at the same 
 
time destroying the original simplicity of my faith. My Christianity 
 underwent a process of great diminution; nevertheless, there was 
 nothing in my mind which as yet could be called doubt. Every 
 year, with the holidays, I went to Brittany. In spite of more than 
 one perturbation, I found myself again wholly what my first teachers 
 had made me, in regard to religion at least." 
 
 With the close of his studies at St. Nicolas, Renan 
 stood at the parting of the ways. Of his fellow-pupils 
 who had arrived at the same stage, many embraced 
 a secular career. Many also, bent on becoming priests, 
 resolved to continue their studies in a purely ecclesiastical 
 seminary, and among them were Renan and his then 
 young friend, afterwards the Abbe Cognat. 
 
 The Seminary of St. Sulpice, which Renan now entered 
 as an aspirant to the priesthood, had a branch establish- 
 ment at Issy, near Paris. Here the student devoted two 
 years to "philosophy" before receiving a mainly theolo- 
 gical training at headquarters in Paris. Life at Issy was 
 very different from that led at the Seminary St. Nicolas. 
 The students being young men from eighteen to twenty- 
 four, and having selected from choice a sacred vocation, 
 nothing of the discipline known at St. Nicolas was 
 enforced on them, and they did not abuse the liberty 
 allowed them. Moreover, anything like emulation 
 was sternly discouraged; intellectual modesty and self- 
 reprpssion were among the things chiefly encouraged. 
 For the varied literary culture of St. Nicolas was sub- 
 stituted scholasticism, a Cartesianism mitigated a la 
 Bossuet, and further modified by the psychology of 
 'Thomas Reid and the Scottish School, with lectures on 
 physics, natural history, and physiology. Renan's favourite 
 
28 LIFE OF 
 
 reading was in Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke. He 
 was an ardent student, spending the recreation-hours in 
 reading and meditation, and during his two years at Issy 
 never once availing himself of the permission frequently 
 given to visit Paris. The results of his studies and 
 meditations he has summarised thus : — 
 
 " The vivid attraction which philosophy had for me did not blind 
 me to the uncertainty of its results. I early lost all confidence in 
 the abstract metaphysics which claims to be a science outside 
 all other sciences, and able to solve by itself alone the highest 
 problems of humanity. The basis of my nature was the scientific 
 spirit. ... I had received from my first teachers in Brittany 
 a pretty deep mathematical education. Mathematics and physical 
 induction have ever been the fundamental elements of my intel- 
 lect, the only stones of my mental masonry which have never 
 changed position and which always avail me. What of general 
 natural history and of physiology I learned initiated me into the 
 laws of life, I perceived the insufficiency of so-called spiritualism. 
 The Cartesian proofs of the existence of a soul distinct from the 
 body always appeared to me to be very weak. Thenceforward I 
 was an idealist, and not a spiritualist in the usual meaning of the 
 word. An eternal yf^r/, an endless metamorphosis seemed to me to 
 be the law of the world. Nature appeared to me as a whole in which 
 there is no room for special creation, and in which consequently 
 everything is in course of transformation. How was it that such a 
 conception, already tolerably clear to me, of a positive philosophy, 
 did not expel from my mind scholasticism and Christianity? It was 
 because I was young, inconsequent, and lacking the critical spirit. 
 I was kept back by the example of such a number of great intellects 
 with so profound an insight into nature, which nevertheless had 
 remained Christian. I thought above all of Malebranche, who 
 celebrated the mass all his life, while holding and expressing as to 
 the providential government of the world ideas little different from- 
 mine. . . . Indeed, I cannot say that my Christian belief was in 
 reality diminished. My faith was destroyed by historical criticism. 
 
RE NAN. 29 
 
 not by scholasticism or philosophy. The history of philosophy and 
 the kind of scepticism by which I was attacked retained me in 
 Christianity rather than repelled me from it. ... A certain modesty 
 kept me back. That question of questions, the truth of the Christian 
 dogmas and of the Bible, never obtruded itself on me. I admitted 
 revelation in a general sense, like Leibnitz and Malebranche. 
 Certainly my philosophy of the Jieri was heterodoxy itself, but I 
 did not follow out its consequences. After all, my teachers were 
 satisfied with me." 
 
 Nor had these excellent men — to whose piety, ethical 
 purity, and kindness of heart Renan does due justice — any 
 reason to be dissatisfied with him. He appeared to them 
 a modest and devout, an intelligent and studious young 
 man, in whom anything which they could have wished to 
 be otherwise was an over-devotion to study, since this 
 might somewhat unfit him for the active duties of the 
 priesthood. At Issy, according to his friend Cognat, 
 his piety was more fervent than ever; at chapel and in 
 the religious exercises of the place he appeared absorbed in 
 prayer, and he was a fervent communicant. His teachers 
 had not the slightest suspicion of what was passing half 
 unconsciously in the depths of his mind until it was 
 suddenly revealed to one, the most keen-sighted of them, 
 and the shock which it gave him was felt as vividly by 
 Renan himself Among the privileges enjoyed by the 
 young seminarists of Issy was a considerable liberty of 
 discussion, although the theological teaching given was 
 of the most dogmatic orthodoxy. Every Sunday the 
 students assembled to hear theses defended and im- 
 pugned. At other times one of the most silent of the 
 community, Renan appears to have been generally an 
 impugner, and his aggressive attitude made the Professor 
 
30 LIFE OF 
 
 already referred to keep a vigilant eye on the champion 
 who thus delighted in contesting the positions of 
 orthodoxy. On one occasion — Renan does not say what 
 was precisely the subject of the thesis which he attacked 
 — he put his objections so forcibly, and the replies to 
 them were so feeble, as to produce symptoms of amuse- 
 ment among the auditors. The Professor present on the 
 occasion was alarmed, and abruptly closed the discussion. 
 In the evening he took Renan aside, and spoke earnestly 
 to him, in the strain to be expected, about reliance on 
 reason as being unchristian and so forth. He reproached 
 the young man with his love of study. This perpetual 
 seeking after truth — what is the good of it } " All that 
 is essential has been already found. It is not knowledge 
 that saves souls.'' And then, adds Renan, "gradually 
 exciting himself," he said, in a passionate tone, "You 
 are not a Christian ! " 
 
 This terrible apostrophe was to the sensitive and 
 conscientious young man like a thunderbolt falling at 
 his feet. All night long he kept repeating to himself 
 the fateful words. Next day he confided his agonised 
 thoughts to the principal of the Issy establishment, who 
 was also his confessor, an old and extremely amiable 
 ecclesiastical gentleman, much attached to Renan. He 
 took the matter rather lightly, and was even a little 
 displeased with the plain-spoken Professor for having 
 troubled the conscience of one for whose spiritual 
 condition he, as Renan's confessor, was responsible. 
 His comfortable and comforting theory was that a 
 young man's theological doubts were of little import- 
 ance unless they were persisted in, and that they dis- 
 
REAGAN. 31 
 
 appeared when the duties of the priesthood and a definite 
 career were entered on. After the incident Renan found 
 him more affectionate than ever. Another trusted Pro- 
 fessor took the matter calmly, and only admonished 
 Renan not to allow his faith in Christianity to be dis- 
 turbed by "objections of detail." The upshot was a 
 decision that when Renan had finished his two years 
 course of "philosophy" at Issy, he should proceed to 
 headquarters, the Seminary of St. Sulpice in Paris, and by 
 following the prescribed course of theological and cognate 
 studies qualify himself for the priesthood. Renan without 
 demur accepted the decision, and acted on it so far as to 
 proceed to St. Sulpice, with what result will be seen 
 further on. But when nearly forty years afterwards he 
 wrote his Souvenirs he admitted the penetration of the 
 Professor who had read him more accurately than Renan 
 had read himself. He regretted that he had not profited 
 by the warning indirectly given him, and had not 
 resolved on abandoning the career which a residence at 
 St. Sulpice pledged him to adopt. He even fancied that 
 if, with his love for physiology and the natural sciences, 
 he had studied them persistently he might have arrived 
 at some of the results which were obtained by Darwin, 
 and of which in those early years, he avers, glimpses 
 were vouchsafed to him. 
 
 To St. Sulpice Cognat accompanied Renan, with 
 whom he remained for several years afterwards, and 
 had been for several years before, on terms of close 
 and confidential intimacy. It is Cognat who discloses 
 concerning his friend's arrival and residence at St. Sulpice 
 several significant facts to which Renan in his Souvenirs 
 
32 LIFE OF 
 
 has made no reference. When a Seminarist left Issy for 
 St. Sulpice he was preceded by some written remarks, in 
 which his old teachers, for the benefit of his new teachers, 
 commented on his character and conduct. In this 
 document the Superior of the Issy Seminary, who is 
 represented by Renan as having treated his doubts so 
 lightly, indicated to the head of the St. Sulpice Seminary 
 certain undefined but dangerous intellectual tendencies 
 as having been detected in Renan, a careful supervision 
 of whom was recommended. The suggestion was acted 
 on, but with no other result than the knowledge that the 
 young man was a model Seminarist, answering questions 
 in his class without displaying the slightest taint of 
 heresy, gentle to his fellow-students, respectful to his 
 teachers, and earnestly devoted to study. In discharging 
 one function, indeed, which was assigned to him, doubtless 
 as a preparative for the active duties of the priesthood, he 
 seems to have broken down. He was commissioned to 
 catechise the young people of the parish of St. Sulpice, 
 but he did this with so little satisfaction to his superiors 
 that they relieved him of the duty. Cognat adds as a 
 proof of Renan's humility that he accepted his super- 
 session without complaining and as warranted by the 
 circumstances. The precise cause of his failure is not 
 given, nor is it hinted, at least by Cognat, that it was due 
 to any exhibition of heterodoxy. Renan was punctual and 
 earnest in his public devotions, and there was nothing in 
 his conduct to make his superiors suspicious of his 
 sincerity. But in the inmost recesses of his mind he 
 was beginning to be greatly disquieted by a doubt whether 
 his theory of the universe, and certain conclusions at 
 
KENAN. 
 
 33 
 
 which he \Yas arriving concerning the dogmas of Roman 
 CathoHcism, could be honestly reconciled with the 
 assumption of even the slenderest ecclesiastical functions. 
 He accepted the tonsure and took those minor orders 
 which did not pledge him to celibacy, or advance him 
 further than the threshold, so to speak, of the priesthood. 
 But if he remembered rightly w^hat was his consciousness 
 at the time, it was with vital reservations that he went thus 
 far. A year or two later, in one of those letters to his 
 friend Cognat, which are deeply interesting contributions 
 to Kenan's spiritual autobiography, and of which further 
 use w^ill be made hereafter, he thus described his feelirgs 
 when he took his first step towards the priesthood : — 
 
 ** At the moment when I advanced to the altar to receive the 
 tonsure, terrible doubts were already working within me. But I 
 was pushed forward, and was told that it is always good to obey. 
 Therefore I went forward. But I call on God to bear testimony to 
 the inmost thought which possessed me, and to the vow which I 
 made in the depths of my heart. I took for my portion the truth 
 which is the hidden God. I consecrated myself to its quest ; re- 
 nouncing for its sake whatever is only profane, whatever can turn 
 man away from the holy and divine destination to which his nature 
 summons him. It was thus that I heard nature speak, and my soul 
 assured me that I should never repent of my promise. And, my friend, 
 I do not repent of it, and constantly with perfect happiness I repeat 
 the delightful and pleasant words, Domimis pars (*The Lord is 
 the portion of mine inheritance,' etc., Psalm xvi. 5), and I believe 
 myself to be thus quite as agreeable to God as he who pro- 
 nounces them with a vain heart and a frivolous mind. Only in 
 one event will they be a reproach to me, and that is if, prostituting 
 my mind to vulgar cares, I should allow my life to be shaped 
 by one of those gross motives which suffice the common herd, 
 and should prefer meaner enjoyments to the holy pursuit of truth 
 and beauty. Until that happens, my friend, I shall recall without 
 
 3 
 
34 LIFE OF 
 
 regret the memory of the day on which I pronounced those words. 
 Man can never be so sufficiently assured of the course of his thoughts 
 as to swear fidelity to this or that system, which for the time being 
 he may regard as the true one. All that he can do is to consecrate 
 himself to the service of Truth, whatever she may be, and to incline 
 his heart to follow her wherever he thinks that he sees her, and 
 this though at the cost of the most painful sacrifices." 
 
 A touching apologia for a momentary lapse from per- 
 fect truthfulness. When, however, it came to taking 
 sub-deacon's orders, which pledged to celibacy and bound 
 irrevocably to the service of the Church, Renan recoiled, 
 though pressed to take the step by his spiritual director 
 at St. Sulpice, who doubtless thought that if that hap- 
 pened the young man would succeed in stifling his 
 doubts and scruples. To a young friend at Treguier, 
 who after some hesitation had taken orders, Renan, 
 in March 1845, between two and three years after his 
 admission to St. Sulpice, and just entering his twenty- 
 third year, thus unbosomed himself when announcing 
 what proved to be a fateful decision : — 
 
 " Nothing would be wanting to my happiness were it not for the 
 deeply distressing thoughts by which my mind is tormented, and 
 which increase at a frightful rate of progression. I have quite 
 decided not to enter the sub-diaconate at the next ordination. No 
 one will think that singular, since my age would compel me to 
 allow an interval to elapse between my first and second ordination. 
 After all, what does the opinion of others matter to me? I must 
 accustom myself to brave it, so that I may be prepared for any 
 and every sacrifice. Many a cruel moment do I pass. This Holy 
 Week, above all, has been for me a painful one, since whatever 
 snatches me from my ordinary course of life submerges me again in 
 anxiety. I console myself by thinking on Jesus, on him so beauti- 
 ful, so pure, so ideal in his sufferings, whom under every hypothesis 
 
REN AN, 35 
 
 I shall always love. Even did I arrive at abandoning Him, that 
 ought to please Him, for it would be a sacrifice to conscience, and, 
 God knows, a costly one. You, I think, will understand it. Oh I 
 my friend, how little is man free to choose his destiny. Here i^ 
 a child who acts only from impulse and imitation, and yet it is at 
 such an age that he is made to stake his whole life. A power 
 higher than himself enmeshes him in indissoluble toils, silently 
 carries on its work, and before he has begun to know himself he is 
 bound he knows not how. At a certain age he awakes, he wishes 
 to act. Impossible ! He is bound hand and foot in a network 
 from which no extrication is possible. It is God himself who holds 
 him fast. The merciless opinion of others converts the fancies of 
 his childhood into an irrevocable decree, and will laugh at him if 
 he desires to be done with the toy which amused his earliest years. 
 Ah ! if it were only the general verdict ! But all the dearest ties are 
 in the tissue of the net which surround him, and he must tear out 
 half his heart if he is to liberate himself from it. How often have I 
 wished that man at his birth were either wholly free or wholly with- 
 out freedom ! He would be less to be pitied if he were born like 
 the plant, unalterably attached to the soil which is to nourish it. 
 My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? How is all 
 this to be reconciled with the supreme government of a Father ? 
 Mysteries are these, my friend. Happy he who has to fathom 
 them only in speculation. 
 
 **For me to tell you all this, you must indeed be my friend. I 
 need not ask you to preserve silence. You understand that my 
 mother must be tenderly dealt with. I would rather die than cause 
 her a moment of pain. O God, shall I have strength to give duty 
 a preference over her ? I commend her to you. " 
 
 Externally, there was nothing to betray the terrible con- 
 flict, thus touchingly described, which was raging in the 
 young man's breast. He performed all his duties, and 
 took part in the services of the Church as punctually as 
 ever. Even Cognat was not taken into his confidence. 
 On the evening before Cognat's own consecration to the 
 
36 LIFE OF 
 
 subdiaconate, the two, he reports, had a long and 
 serious conversation. Renan, indeed, advised his friend 
 to pause before taking a step that was irrevocable, and 
 which, with changing opinions, he might regret. But 
 Cognat did not then suspect the real ground of this 
 advice. " Nothing," he says, " in my relations with M. 
 Renan had prepared me for it. In truth, he had never 
 confided to me his doubts respecting the very foundations 
 of Christianity." The time, however, was at hand when 
 they were to be not only confided to Cognat, but to 
 sever Renan's connection with St. Sulpice, to the great 
 astonishment and sorrow of his teachers there, most 
 worthy and amiable men, on whose excellent qualities of 
 head and heart he bestow^ed afterwards the amplest 
 recognition, and whose misfortune rather than fault, it 
 was that their training and position had made them 
 spiritually narrow-minded. 
 
 Hebrew, as the language of the Old Testament, formed 
 part of the instruction given at St. Sulpice to its budding 
 theologians. The principal of the establishment, a very 
 aged as well as amiable ecclesiastic, and, like all his col- 
 leagues, rigidly orthodox, delivered lectures on Hebrew, 
 while a much more erudite Semitic scholar, M. Le Hir, 
 taught the class of Hebrew grammar. Renan, who says 
 of himself that he was born a philologist as well as a 
 priest, was one of the most eager and diligent of Le 
 Hir's pupils. So promising a student was he that when 
 in course of time the aged principal surrendered the 
 Hebrew lectureship to Le Hir, he gave over the class of 
 Hebrew grammar to Renan. To his great surprise he 
 was offered by the authorities, when he entered on his 
 
RE NAN, 37 
 
 new and congenial duties, a salary of three hundred 
 francs (;£i2). The unworldly young man thought the 
 sum so extravagant that he declined the offer, and with 
 difficulty was brought to accept a hundred and fifty 
 francs (a modest ;^6) for the purchase of books. 
 
 Naturally he contracted an intimacy with Le Hir, like 
 himself a Breton, under whom he prosecuted his higher 
 Hebrew studies, and who taught him Arabic and Syriac. 
 It so happened that Le Hir had familiarised himself 
 with modern German exegesis, so much of which was 
 heterodox. But while it enriched his knowledge it never 
 influenced his orthodoxy. What Le Hir found in German 
 exegesis compatible with Catholic orthodoxy he appro- 
 priated; what he found incompatible he rejected utterly, 
 not without indignant protests. It was only natural 
 that such a pupil of such a teacher should be curious 
 to know at first hand something of German exegesis, 
 samples of which doubtless abounded in the ample 
 library which Le Hir amiably placed at Renan's dis- 
 posal. But for a knowledge of the kind that of German 
 was indispensable. Renan set to work to learn it, and with 
 the aid of a fellow-seminarist from Alsace he mastered it. 
 In his intense curiosity to know what had been discovered 
 in Germany respecting the Bible he grappled first of 
 all with German exegetics. Strauss's famous Leben 
 fesu, it may be noted, had been published some ten 
 years before. The results of his new studies were to 
 Renan a revelation. Here is his own account of it, given 
 retrospectively in the Souvenirs : — 
 
 "Literature was so secondary a matter, in the midst of the 
 burning inquiry which absorbed me, that at first I paid little 
 
38 LIFE OF 
 
 attention to it"— that is, to German non-theological literature. 
 *' Nevertheless I was sensible," in that literature, "of the pres- 
 ence of a new kind of genius, very different from that of our 
 seventeenth century. I admired it all the more that I could 
 see no bounds to it. I was struck by the peculiar intellectualism of 
 Germany at the end of the last century and during the first half of 
 this. I thought myself entering a temple. There indeed was what 
 I was seeking for, the reconciliation of a highly religious with the 
 critical spirit. Now and then for a moment I regretted that I was 
 not a Protestant, so that I could be a philosopher without ceasing 
 to be a Christian. . . . 
 
 *' In point of fact, everything is true in a book which is divine in 
 its origin. In such a book there must be no contradictions, since two 
 contradictions cannot at one and the same time be both of them 
 true. Now the attentive study which I gave to the Bible," read in 
 the light thrown on it by German exegesis, ** while it revealed to 
 me historical and aesthetic treasures, also proved to me that it was 
 no more than any other ancient book free from contradictions, 
 inadvertences, mistakes. There are to be found in it fables, 
 legends, traces of a wholly human authorship. It is no longer 
 possible to maintain that the second part of Isaiah is by Isaiah. 
 The book of Daniel, which all who are orthodox attribute to the 
 time of the captivity, is an apocryphal work composed in the year 
 169 or 170 before Jesus. Christ. The book of Judith is an historical 
 impossibility. The ascription of the Pentateuch to Moses cannot be 
 maintained, and to deny that several portions of Genesis have a 
 mythical character is to be compelled to treat as narratives of events 
 which actually happened, the accounts, for instance, of the terrestrial 
 paradise, of the forbidden fruit, of Noah's ark. But you cannot be 
 a Catholic if on a single one of these points you depart from the 
 traditional statement. What becomes of the miracle so very much 
 admired by Bossuet, Cyrus named two hundred years before his 
 birth? What becomes of the fifty weeks of years on which are 
 based the calculations of Bossuet's Histoire Uiiiverselle^ if the por- 
 tion of the book of Isaiah in which Cyrus is named was actually 
 written in the time of that conqueror, and if the pseudo-Daniel was 
 a contemporary of Antiochus Epiphanes ? According to orthodoxy, 
 
RE NAN. 39 
 
 it is obligatory to believe that the books of the Bible are 
 the handiwork of those to whom the titles attribute them. 
 The mildest Catholic teaching respecting inspiration forbids the 
 admission that the sacred text contains any pronounced error, or 
 any contradiction even in matters which concern neither faith nor 
 morals." 
 
 The crisis was near at hand in the autumn of 1845, 
 six months after he wrote to a young friend at Treguier 
 the letter from which an extract has been given 
 (ante, p. 34). Renan spent his holidays, as usual, at 
 Treguier with his much-loved mother, who began 
 sorrowfully to suspect, without understanding, what 
 was passing in his mind. He had so distanced 
 spiritually his old teachers, the good priests of Tre- 
 guier, that he found it difficult to converse with them, 
 and they, too, had glimpses of the change which 
 had come over him. He was far removed from the 
 influences of St. Sulpice, and from his spiritual director 
 there, who, to his avowal of doubt, had replied much in 
 the same way as that of the principal of the Issy seminary, 
 " Temptations against the faith ! Pay no attention to 
 them ! go straight on ! " advising him by way of cure to 
 take those sub-deacon's orders from which it has been 
 seen Renan recoiled. 
 
 The extracts which have just been given from the 
 Souvenirs are interesting in themselves, and as a calm 
 retrospect forty years later of those two years of inward 
 struggle, a period which he called at the time one of devo- 
 tion to the study of Hebrew and the Old Testament. But 
 far more valuable to those interested in Renan's character 
 and career are the letters which he wrote while his in- 
 
4o LIFE OF 
 
 ternal struggle was proceeding and was ending. They 
 are diffuse and sometimes a little rambling, but they 
 mirror wdth perfect accuracy the varying emotions pro- 
 duced in Renan by that conflict between Faith and 
 Doubt which in modern times has raged in many a 
 mind, but which oOv'^. knows not to have been anywhere 
 else than in Kenan's letters of 1845-46 recorded with 
 such fidelity and transparent clearness. Several men 
 and women of letters in our own country have made 
 the conflict the theme of works of fiction, or of prominent 
 episodes in them. But whatever may have been the 
 ability, the knowledge of the questions at issue, as well 
 as of human nature, shown in their delineations, they 
 must yield in interest to the transcript from stern and pain- 
 ful reality given in Kenan's correspondence. This is not 
 a novel-hero made to think and speak for the amusement 
 or the excitement of miscellaneous readers. Kenan's 
 letters are not products of literary art, the skilfully con- 
 trived efl*usions of an imaginary character, the figments 
 of a novelist's brain, but the genuine utterances, given 
 in the strictest confidence, and not in the slightest 
 degree meant for publication, of a living man in travail 
 and in sore trouble, beset by the direst perplexities, in- 
 ternal and external. 
 
 By those who have followed thus far Kenan's bio- 
 graphy, the extract about to be given from one of his 
 letters will need no elucidation unless in the case of the 
 tutorship in Germany. This connects itself with the 
 story of his sister, of whom nothing has been said in 
 these pages since they chronicled the old life at Treguier, 
 and to whom Renan makes but few and scanty references 
 
RE NAN. 41 
 
 in i\\Q Souvenirs J though in the preface to it, and while 
 palliating this reticence in regard to her, he speaks of her 
 as the " person who has had the greatest influence on my 
 life." On leaving Tr^guier she became a teacher and 
 then a school-mistress in Paris, but finding her position 
 distasteful she accepted a situation as governess in a 
 family in Poland. She paid, with her pupil, frequent 
 visits to Germany, and acquired a strong taste for 
 German philosophical speculation. The result w^as a 
 deep sympathy with her brother's efforts to shake himself 
 free from the shackles of Catholicism. In her letters she 
 warmly encouraged him to be done with Christian dogma, 
 so that in the step which he was contemplating he had 
 the earnest approval of his dear and cultivated sister 
 to counterbalance, in some degree at least, the regret- 
 ful anticipations of their simple-minded mother. As at 
 once a provision for him, if he decided on abandoning 
 an ecclesiastical career, and to give him a domicile in 
 the country to the literature and philosophy of which he 
 owed so much, she procured him the offer of the tutorship 
 in Germany incidentally referred to in the following letter. 
 The offer, it will be seen, was not ultimately accepted. 
 It was during his sojourn at Treguier in the autumn of 
 1845 — his last sojourn there for many a long year — when 
 the thought of entering the Roman Catholic priesthood 
 had become intolerable to him, that for the first time he 
 confided his doubts to his friend Cognat, who was startled 
 and saddened by the unexpected disclosure. 
 
 '* My dear Friend, — Few events of importance have occurred, 
 but many reflections and emotions have been crowding in upon me 
 since we parted. I yield to the need which I feel of imparting them 
 
42 LIFE OF 
 
 to you all the more willingly that there is no one here to whom I 
 can confide them. Doubtless, with my mother by my side, I am 
 not alone, but how many things there are on which my affection for 
 her bids me be silent, and which, after all, she would not be able 
 to understand. 
 
 "There has been no fact of importance to advance the solution of 
 the great problem which so justly absorbs me. I have learned 
 nothing new, unless it be the enormity of the sacrifice which heaven 
 was about to exact from me. A thousand vexations which I did 
 not anticipate have complicated my situation and made me feel that 
 the course which my conscience dictated was opening before me an 
 abyss of suffering. To make you understand them I should have to 
 enter into long and painful details ; suffice it to tell you that the 
 obstacles about which we have sometimes talked are nothing com- 
 pared to those which have suddenly started up before me. To 
 make light of a verdict on me which will be a very severe one, to 
 pass through long years of painful life to arrive at a doubtful goal, 
 was already much, but it was not to be enough. God further com- 
 mands me to pierce with my own hand a heart on which all the 
 affection of my own has been poured out. In me filial love had 
 absorbed all the other affections of which I was capable, and which 
 God has not called on me to feel. Besides, there were between my 
 mother and myself quite special ties connected with a thousand 
 delicate things which can be only felt, not expressed. Well ! there 
 it is that God has fixed the most painful of my sacrifices. Germany 
 is all that hitherto I have spoken of to her, and that has been enough 
 
 to distress her deeply. O vton dieu, what will happen when 
 
 Her caresses make me unhappy, her fine dreams of her son a priest, 
 of which she is always speaking to me, and which I have not the 
 courage to contradict, make me feel broken-hearted. There she is, 
 quite close to me, while I am writing you these lines. Ah ! if she 
 knew ! I would sacrifice everything to her except my duty and my 
 conscience. Yes, if to spare her this pain, God asked me to extin- 
 guish my thinking-power, to condemn myself to a simple and vulgar 
 life, I would consent. But is it in the power of man to believe or not 
 to believe ? I wish that I had the power to stifle the faculty which 
 compels investigation : that is the faculty which has made me miser- 
 
RE NAN. 
 
 43 
 
 able. Happy the children in spirit who all their lives do nothing 
 but sleep and dream ! Around me I see pious and simple-minded 
 men, to make whom virtuous and happy Christianity has sufficed, 
 but I have observed that not one of them possesses the critical 
 faculty; let them thank God for that. 
 
 " Here I am made much of and caressed more than I can tell you. 
 Ah ! if they knew what is pressing in my heart. Sometimes I 
 tremble at the sight of a kind of hypocrisy in my behaviour, but I 
 have seriously argued the matter out with my conscience. God pre- 
 serve me from scandalising these simple people ! 
 
 "When I consider in what an inextricable net God has enmeshed 
 me, then I am visited by the thought of fatalism, and often as I may 
 thus have sinned I never doubted my Father who is in heaven, nor 
 his goodness. On the contrary, I have always thanked Him, and was 
 never nearer Him than in those very moments. The heart learns 
 only by suffering, and I think, like Kant, that God is only learned 
 through the heart. At that time, too, I was a Christian, and I have 
 sworn always to be one. But is Catholic orthodoxy critical ? Ah ! 
 if 1 had been born in Germany, and a Protestant. That would have 
 been the proper place for me. Herder was really a bishop-super- 
 intendent of the Lutheran consistory at Weimar, — assuredly he was 
 just a Christian ; but in Catholicism one must be orthodox. It is 
 inflexible, and not to be reasoned with. . . . 
 
 " I continue to have the courage to go forward with my thinking. 
 Nothing will make me abandon this occupation, even though I were 
 forced to appear to sacrifice to it the acquisition of my daily bread. 
 To support me at this critical moment God kept in reserve for me a 
 genuine even^ of importance, intellectually and morally, I have 
 studied Germany, and studying it I felt myself entering a temple. 
 Whatever I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful, 
 and affecting. Yes, O my soul, German thought is a treasure, 
 the continuation of Jesus Christ. The morality of the German 
 thinkers enchants me. How strong they are and how mild ! I 
 believe that it is thence the new Christ will come to us. I regard 
 this apparition of a new spirit to be a fact analogous to the birth of 
 Christianity in all but the difference of form. But this difference 
 matters little, for it is certain that when the fact which is to renovate 
 
44 LIFE OF 
 
 the world returns, it will not in the manner of its accomplishment 
 resemble that which has already taken place. . . . 
 
 " Yes, that Germany gives me transports of delight, less in its 
 scientific achievements than in its ethical spirit. The ethics of 
 Kant are far superior to his logic and metaphysics; and yet we 
 French have not had a word to say about them. That is easily under- 
 stood ; the men of to-day are without a moral sense. France seems to 
 me more and more pledged to do-nothingism in the great work which 
 is to renovate the life of humanity." ... In France, "Jesus Christ 
 is nowhere to be found. I have been tempted to think that he 
 would come to us from Germany, not that I imagine that his coming 
 will be that of an individual, it will be that of his spirit, and when 
 we say ' Jesus Christ ' we mean of course to denote less an individual 
 than a spirit of a certain kind, that of the Gospel. Nor do I mean 
 that this apparition will involve either a reversal or a discovery ; 
 but Jesus Christ neither reversed nor discovered. One must be a 
 Christian, but one must not be orthodox. What we must have is a 
 pure, an unadulterated Christianity. " 
 
 Such a passage calls to mind the hopes which, some 
 fifteen years before Renan wrote thus, Carlyle, after 
 quitting Presbyterian orthodoxy and the Scotch kirk, had 
 based on the higher literature of Germany, as " the be- 
 ginning of a new revelation of the God-like." 
 
 And time pressed. Renan would soon have to return 
 to St. Sulpice and make up his mind to do one thing or 
 the other. " It is with unspeakable terror," he wrote to 
 Cognat, " that I see the approach of the end of the holi- 
 days, an epoch when I must translate into most decisive 
 action the most indeterminate of internal states of mind. 
 It is this complication of external and internal that makes 
 the whole cruelty of my position." If he gave up a 
 clerical career, what was he to do ? For practical life he 
 felt unfitted. Loni^ afterwards, when he had rubbed 
 
RENAN. 45 
 
 shoulders with the world for many years, a friend told 
 him, and he admits told him truly, that he thought like a 
 man, felt like a woman, and acted like a child. It is a 
 characteristic illustration of the spiritual sensitiveness of 
 this child in the ways of the world, that he is found, in the 
 same letter to Cognat, expressing his dread lest, even if 
 he were successful in practical life, contact with his asso- 
 ciates might destroy, he said, "the purity of my heart 
 and my conception of life," as he thought it ought to be 
 led. " And even," he added, " if I were sure of myself, 
 can I be sure of the environment which acts so fatally on 
 all of us?" He was almost tempted to complain of the 
 Deity for having placed " a poor child " in his then pre- 
 dicament. " It matters not," he continued, " I love him, 
 and am persuaded that all he has done is for my good, 
 in spite of the contradiction of facts. . . . Courage lies in 
 this — no one but myself can make me do evil." A true 
 and brave thought, which served him in good stead at 
 this great crisis of his probation, and afterwards. 
 
 A fortnight later than the letter to Cognat describ- 
 ing the conflict which was raging within him, he 
 addressed another to his spiritual director at St. Sulpice. 
 It was merely a calmer and more formal restatement 
 of what he had said to Cognat, and therefore need 
 not be quoted. The duties of the tutorship in Germany 
 could not be entered on until the following spring, and 
 he was unwilling to pass at St. Sulpice the months that 
 must intervene until spring came. The scheme which he 
 favoured was to spend in Paris a year of studious freedom, 
 the conditions of which he left undefined, and during 
 which he could come to some definite conclusion as 
 
46 LIFE OF 
 
 well as take his university degrees. On arriving at St. 
 Sulpice at the beginning of October (1845), he was 
 forced to act precipitately on the decision which he had 
 already formed. He was told that he had ceased to 
 belong to St. Sulpice, and had been appointed to a 
 Carmelite establishment which had just been founded 
 by the Archbishop of Paris. Of course this appointment 
 had to be refused, and reticence was now impossible. 
 All was told. After the letter to his Director the 
 authorities of St. Sulpice were not astonished at Renan's 
 defection from the faith, and Le Hir kindly gave him good 
 advice as to his future studies. Renan had an interview 
 with his former principal of the St. Nicolas seminary, 
 the Abbe Dupanloup, and appears to have confided to 
 him more fully than to any one else his doubts as to 
 the truth of Christianity. The Abb^ knew nothing of 
 German exegesis, but after having heard ^11, he told 
 Renan plainly that his was a total loss of faith, that he 
 had ceased to belong to the Church, and that he ought 
 not for a single day longer to pass himself off as a cleric. 
 To the Abb^ Dupanloup's honour, be it added, that 
 otherwise he behaved to Renan with fatherly kindness. 
 When Renan was working at his Souvenirs, he had before 
 him a little note which the Abbe wrote to him just as he 
 was leaving St. Sulpice for ever. "Are you in want of 
 money?" it ran; "in your situation that would be very 
 natural. My poor purse is at your disposal. I wish 
 that I could offer you something much more valuable. 
 My offer, one very natural, will not, I hope, hurt your 
 feelings." Renan declined the offer with thanks, for his 
 good sister, to aid him in taking the step which his con- 
 
REIVAN, 47 
 
 science dictated, and which she approved, had sent him 
 out of her Httle savings 1 200 francs (nearly ;^5o).^ One of 
 the Directors of St. Sulpice, who, unhke the Abb^ Dupan- 
 loup, did not think Renan irrevocably lost to the Church, 
 recommended him to a situation in a preparatory school 
 annexed to the College Stanislas. It suited him in 
 every respect but one, but that one constituted a vital 
 objection. He had to make externally an open pro- 
 fession of clericalism. After a brief trial, for conscience' 
 sake he threw up the appointment, though not without 
 regret, and abandoned the clerical garb for ever. 
 
 As a critic of the history of Judaism and Christianity 
 Renan was destined to be the French successor of 
 Voltaire. But, as often happens, even with royalty, the 
 procedure of the successor was very different from that of 
 him whom he succeeded. Much of this result was due 
 to the different idiosyncrasies of the two men, but much 
 also to the difference in the influences brought to bear on 
 them in early life, and to the fact that Voltaire lived 
 before the first French Revolution, while Renan arrived 
 at manhood after a third one. Voltaire was by nature 
 
 1 Renan himself says little or nothing of any spiritual influence 
 exerted on him at this time by his sister; but in this connection, 
 Mrs. Crawford, of Paris, gives, in an interesting article on Renan 
 {Fortnightly Review for November 1892), some details, apparently 
 furnished by the Abbe Icard, the only one of Renan's St. Sulpice 
 teachers then alive, and a nonagenarian. Renan at St. Sulpice is 
 said to have *' received letters from his sister, and books of German 
 philosophy that she smuggled in to him. The Abbe Icard, who 
 never saw her, deems her to have been a tool of Satan. She had 
 plunged into the philosophical movement of Germany, a country 
 she often went to stay in with her pupils." 
 
48 LIFE OF 
 
 sceptical, ambitious, pushing, thirsting for literary fame, 
 fond of the good things of this world, and bent on 
 gaining a fair share of them. Renan was by nature 
 believing, docile, modest, disinterested, and his most 
 powerful aspiration was to prove all things and hold fast 
 that which is true, without any hankering after worldly 
 success or fear of worldly failure. Voltaire received his 
 early education from the Jesuits, and always spoke 
 gratefully of them, and appreciatively of their worth as 
 men and as teachers. But he was a scoffer when he 
 went to the College Louis le Grand, and he remained 
 a scoffer when he left it. He seems never to have 
 been visited by any spiritual emotion derived from 
 the Christian religion, and in early manhood he was 
 thrown, indeed he cheerfully threw himself, into the 
 dissolute and incredulous society of the Regency, and of 
 the age of Louis XV. His first pleadings for the free 
 expression of thought, in the sphere not merely of 
 theology but of philosophy and science, were treated as 
 crimes, and he who might have been merely a frondeur 
 was exasperated into a rebel. It was the bigotry of 
 the orthodox that obstructed his meritorious attempts to 
 diffuse a knowledge of the now universally accepted 
 discoveries of Newton, and that threatened him with 
 the direst penalties for even a temperate promulgation 
 of the truths of Natural Religion. What wonder if he 
 turned on his persecutors, and, when purchasing for 
 himself a kind of uneasy exile in Switzerland, proclaimed 
 without reserve his disbelief in their dogmas, denied the 
 authority of the books on which these were founded, and 
 resolutely, if unfortunately, shut his eyes to the good 
 
RENAN, 49 
 
 that had been worked in the world when orthodoxy 
 swayed the best intellects and hearts, as well as the 
 ignorant and superstitious masses ? It is not when your 
 enemy attacks you, when he has his hands upon your 
 throat, and is bent on choking the life out of you, 
 that you are likely to reflect on what may be his excellent 
 qualities, or on the benefits which in former years he may 
 have conferred on society! Renan, on the other hand, 
 from childhood lived, moved, and had his being in the 
 Christian religion. The services of the Roman Catholic 
 Church, its public and private worship, devout medita- 
 tion on the transcendent holiness and beautiful character 
 of the Founder of Christianity, had been his joy and 
 support. His ultimate rejection of the dogmas of the 
 Romish Church did not alter his view of that char- 
 acter, or impair his knowledge of the good done by 
 Christianity in the past and the present. He could 
 reverence Christianity without believing in its supernatural 
 origin, just as in a lower degree he reverenced Buddha 
 without believing in the legends which had grown around 
 his birth and biography. Voltaire^s character and circum- 
 stances unfitted him to form a right estimate of Chris- 
 tianity and its saints and martyrs; while for the formation 
 of such an estimate Renan was excellently fitted by his 
 character and circumstances. Where Voltaire had over- 
 turned, Renan reconstructed, and gave the new structure 
 a shape that commended itself to very many rational and 
 thinking men. And if Renan's rejection of the dogmas of 
 orthodoxy procured him a host of enemies, he was far 
 more fortunate in his age than Voltaire had been in his. 
 Even under the Second Empire Renan could speak his 
 
 4 
 
so LIFE OF 
 
 mind freely in books and periodicals, if not officially in 
 the lecture-room. The worst that the bigots could do to 
 him was to bombard him with virulent pamphlets, and 
 these never disturbed his peace of mind, or in the least 
 fettered his freedom, personal and intellectual. In 
 regard to the expression of opinion, three French re- 
 , volutions made the absolutism of Napoleon III. a very 
 different one from that of Louis XV, Renan reaped 
 fame and profit by saying, without let or hindrance, what 
 Voltaire, even in his mildest and least aggressive moods, 
 could say only by bringing into play the machinery of 
 secret printing-presses and surreptitious distribution, 
 while running the risk of having his works confiscated 
 and burned by the public executioner in his own country, 
 and of seeing those w^ho promoted their circulation 
 subjected to the severest pains and penalties which 
 French bigotry could inflict. 
 
 Kenan's training in exclusively ecclesiastical seminaries 
 not only enabled but induced him to do justice to the 
 Roman Catholic priesthood. From early boyhood to 
 early manhood he was constantly associated with priests, 
 and never once, he says, did he find scandal associated 
 with any of them. From the humble priests of Tr^guier to 
 his highly cultivated teachers at St. Nicolas, at Issy, and 
 at St. Sulpice, all were the best of men, and at St. 
 Sulpice, in particular, "there was virtue enough," he 
 declared, " to govern the world," if such a world as ours 
 could be governed by virtue. From first to last an 
 austere morality, based on religion, was strenuously 
 inculcated on Renan by all his teachers, and when he 
 gave up rehgion, at least religion as taught by them, the 
 
REN AN. 51 
 
 morality continued to abide with him like a second 
 nature. 
 
 "St. Sulpice," he says, "had left on me so powerful an impres- 
 sion that for years I remained a Sulpician as regards not belief 
 but morals. That excellent education had given my docile nature 
 an indestructible tendency. Faith disappearing, morality remains. 
 My programme for long was to surrender as little as possible of 
 Christianity, and to preserve all of it that can be practised without 
 faith in the supernatural. I sorted out in some fashion the virtues 
 of the Sulpician, discarding those which connect themselves with 
 a positive belief, and retaining those which a philosopher can 
 approve." 
 
 The training which Ren an had received was not only 
 fruitful for the world, but invaluable to himself, sud- 
 denly emancipated as he was from all control, and left to 
 his own devices in such a city as Paris. 
 
CHAPTER III. 
 
 [1845-52.] 
 
 YVTITH the opening of November 1845, and having 
 ^^ shaken from off his feet the dust of orthodoxy, 
 Renan accepted the modest position of tutor in a board- 
 ing-house of the Quartier Latin, in which were domiciled 
 pupils of the neighbouring Lyc^e, called after Henry IV. 
 He was boarded and lodged gratis^ but received no 
 salary. " I had," he says, " a little room, and took my 
 meals with the pupils. My duties occupied me for 
 scarcely two hours out of the twenty-four, and I had 
 therefore a great deal of time for work. I was com- 
 pletely satisfied." Not a whisper of complaint at this 
 meagre and forlorn-looking existence ! In one of his last 
 letters to Cognat, his intimacy with whom was soon to be 
 dissolved by his altered views, he speaks of fits of melan- 
 choly, springing not from his poverty but from his spiritual 
 and personal isolation, and from the grief of his mother at 
 his abandonment of a clerical career. But happier moods 
 intervened. "Since my sacrifice was completed," he 
 wrote, " and in the thick of troubles which were greater 
 than would be readily believed, and which perhaps a false 
 delicacy forces me to conceal from every one, I have 
 
LIFE OF RE NAN. 53 
 
 tasted an inward peace unknown at epochs of my life 
 apparently more serene.'' In the course of a year he 
 began to wonder that he could ever have believed what 
 he had believed. He consoled by little artifices his dear 
 mother, who fancied his position even more difficult than 
 it was, and that he must be suffering intolerable hardships. 
 By degrees he convinced her, moreover, that he was as 
 good and affectionate a son as ever, and the wound in 
 her heart was healed. Then there was always the loving 
 sympathy of his kind sister to cheer and encourage him, and 
 last, not least, the enjoyment of a pure and true friend- 
 ship was vouchsafed him in that rather dreary domicile 
 in which he spent, he says, three years and a half. 
 His new friend was Marcellin Berthelot, seven years 
 Renan's junior, who was studying at the Lycee Henri 
 IV., and has since risen to eminence as a chemist and a 
 public man. Young Berthelot was devoted to science 
 without any ulterior object, a disinterestedness very con- 
 genial to Renan, and the closest intimacy sprang up 
 between junior and senior. Each was interested in his 
 friend's pursuits. Berthelot taught Renan chemistry 
 among other things, and Renan tried to teach him 
 Hebrew, but devotion to the laboratory impeded his 
 progress. Berthelot's father was a Galilean Christian 
 of the old school, but the son's slender remains of 
 orthodox faith vanished in the course of a little com- 
 mune with Renan. "After the first months of 1846," 
 he says, " the clear scientific view of a universe in which 
 no volition superior to that of man acts in any appreciable 
 fashion became the immovable anchor from which we 
 never wandered." His sister's love and Berthelot's 
 
54 LIFE OF 
 
 friendship were sunshine on the path of the struggling 
 and brave young Renan. 
 
 Apart from these sources of happiness, work, steady 
 and manifold, was Kenan's chief, nay, only enjoyment. 
 He had to study for his academic degrees, to improve his 
 knowledge of languages, especially the Semitic, and to read 
 far and wide in pursuance of what he already regarded as 
 the one great object of his life — that of making clear to 
 himself, and possibly to others, the origin and develop- 
 ment, irrespectively of any supernatural revelation or 
 intervention, of the Jewish and Christian religions. 
 Christianity had sprung out of Judaism, and Hebrew 
 being the language in which mainly the Old Testament 
 was written, that and the cognate Semitic forms of 
 speech had naturally an irresistible attraction for the 
 young inquirer. From another point of view Renan 
 saw in the history of languages the history of the mind 
 of man, and that, therefore, philology, especially com- 
 parative philology, might be of the highest philosophical 
 importance. Bopp's Comparative Grammar of the Indo- 
 Germanic Languages probably suggested to him the execu- 
 tion of a work on the comparative history as well as grammar 
 of the Semitic languages which he had been studying 
 ardently at St. Sulpice, and after he left it, under ex- 
 cellent professors. His first laurels were won in the field 
 familiar to him, and in the following way: — Volney, 
 though best remembered by his Ruins of Empires, was 
 also a zealous philologist. He aimed at originality, and 
 among his philological schemes was one ingenious but 
 impracticable, the establishment of a universal alphabet for 
 all languages. Eastern and Western. He bequeathed to 
 
RE NAN. 55 
 
 the French Institute a yearly prize of 1200 francs (;£48) 
 to be given to the author of the best essay on his favourite 
 linguistic problem. It was found that the competitors 
 were few, and their productions unsatisfactory, so the 
 subject of the prize was altered to one for the best 
 philological essay, especially in the department of com- 
 parative grammar. Renan competed for the prize to be 
 given in 1847, and he won it. I do not know that his 
 prize essay was ever published, but it was the germ 
 of his great work on the history of the Semitic lan- 
 guages, of which more hereafter. ^ The ability dis- 
 played in the prize essay led to a friendship with, and 
 opened to Renan the lectures of, Eugene Burnouf, the 
 Professor of Sanscrit at the College de France, and 
 one of the greatest of modern Orientalists. Burnouf 
 initiated Renan into a knowledge of the older Indian 
 literatures, religions, and mythologies. With the chief 
 Semitic languages, Hebrew, Arabic, and Syriac, and 
 much of what had been written on them, Renan was 
 already familiar. Burnouf 's lectures opened up to him 
 a new world of thought and imagination. At this point, 
 it may be mentioned, the Souvenirs close, and the rather 
 fitful light which they throw on Renan's career is hence- 
 forth w^anting. 
 
 The events of the Revolutionary year, 1848, made of 
 course a great impression on the susceptive Renan, and 
 led him to take a deep interest in the political and 
 social movements to which the rise of a second French 
 
 ^ Max Muller and Bopp were in subsequent years among the 
 distinguished philologists who competed for, and won, the Volney 
 prize. 
 
56 LIFE OF 
 
 republic gave a sudden impulse. The year was a busy 
 one for him. During much of it he was occupied 
 with an essay on a subject proposed for competition 
 by the Academic des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 
 into whose transactions, so often utilised by Gibbon 
 in his great work, had been poured, as into a reservoir, 
 the results of the erudite research of successive gener- 
 ations of French scholars. The subject was "The 
 history of the study of the Greek language in the 
 West of Europe from the end of the fifth to that of 
 the fifteenth century." This finished, he had to prepare 
 for the "aggregate competition'' in philosophy in the 
 autumn. He won the prize for the essay, and came out 
 first in the "philosophy" examination, two feathers more 
 in the young man's cap ! 
 
 1848 was also the year of the first of Renan's many 
 contributions to the periodical literature of his country. 
 Some of them are of considerably more mark than is 
 usual with the initial efforts of young authors. The 
 most noticeable are contained in an interesting peri- 
 odical, La Liberie de Penser (Freedom of Thought), 
 which was founded in 1848 somewhat on the lines of 
 the then long-established Revue des Deux Mondes^ 
 but paying more attention to philosophy and theology. 
 As in the case of his fellow-contributors, among whom 
 was Jules Simon, Renan's articles were signed. His 
 first contribution was " The Origin of Languages," which 
 was reprinted separately at the time, and, considerably 
 expanded, re-appeared in volume-form in 1857. Accord- 
 ing to the theory defended in the essay, and developed 
 in the volume with additional wealth of illustration. 
 
RENAN, 
 
 57 
 
 language was neither a supernatural gift from the Creator 
 nor gradually developed, but came into being, grammar 
 as well as roots, simultaneously with man. As we know 
 nothing of the first man or men, the theory can neither 
 be proved nor disproved, and it is not supported by 
 what we do know, or can surmise, of early man. 
 
 The Revolution of February 1848 was followed by the 
 frightful and sanguinary insurrection of the June of the 
 same year. Great was the ferment which the chaotic 
 state of France, political, social, and intellectual, pro- 
 duced in Renan's at once ardent and contemplative 
 mind. The result was that he spent the last months 
 of 1848 and the first of 1849 in composing a book, 
 into which he threw all the notions on the philosophy 
 of life, and on the past, present and future of society, 
 which much meditation, enriched by already vast reading, 
 had yielded him. In July 1849 he contributed to La 
 Liberie de Fenser an article on the " Intellectual Activity 
 of France in 1849," ^^e editor of the periodical intimating 
 in a note that the article was part of a volume, LAvenir 
 de la Science (The Future of Science), which was to 
 appear in a few days. But the book thus promised was^ 
 not pubHshed until 1890, forty years after the announce- 
 ment; the reason for the long delay will be explained 
 hereafter. The Avenir de la Science remained in 1890 
 to all intents and purposes the same work as when it 
 came from its author's pen. so long before. It teems 
 v/ith reflections and suggestions on almost every subject 
 of human interest, with illustrations furnished by almost 
 all the literatures of almost all ages. It was an extra- 
 ordinary work, especially to have come from a young 
 
58 LIFE OF 
 
 man of five-and-twenty. Its philosophy was already that 
 which he inculcated during most of the remainder of his 
 life, and will often have to be reproduced in these pages, 
 but some references must be made to it at the stage now 
 reached of Renan's mental development. Society, he 
 proclaimed, in opposition to the socialists, was not to 
 be reformed by attempts to correct the unequal distribu- 
 tion of wealth, but by the universal diffusion of intellectual 
 and moral culture. Man was not made for earthly enjoy- 
 ment. Let us bring about a state of things in which 
 wealth must appear insignificant and secondary, and 
 culture, becoming a religion, will satisfy all the legitimate 
 wants of humanity. But if all are to be philosophers, who 
 is to do the daily work of the world ? Let manual labour be 
 adjoined to philosophy and intellectual culture. Spinoza 
 polished spectacle glasses ; a still more singular illustra- 
 tion to have suggested itself to a young French scholar, 
 " Robert Burns, while following the plough, sang in the 
 furrows, like a lark." The world was to be reformed 
 by science ; that is, by knowledge in the widest accepta- 
 tion of the word. The old religions had vanished, but 
 the new religion of science had more to give than the 
 most venerable beliefs. "In my childhood and first 
 youth I tasted the sweetest joys of the believer, but, 
 and I say it from the bottom of my soul, such joys 
 were nothing to those which I have felt in the pure con- 
 templation of the beautiful and the passionate search 
 after truth." This was the new heaven and the new 
 earth announced by the young enthusiast in his garret. 
 Already he was flinging out one of those audacious 
 phrases which, viewing the cosmos and its soul as not 
 
RENAN. 59 
 
 actually being but merely becoming, he was often to use 
 in later life. " The universal work of all that lives is to 
 make God perfect." This to ordinary mind unimaginable 
 enterprise was to be effected by Reason, and Reason, in 
 Renan's view, was first ascending her throne with the 
 Revolution of 1848. Alas, for the young man's fond 
 expectations! With 1851 came the presidency of Louis 
 Napoleon, and with 1852 the Second Empire. 
 
 But for a biographer of Kenan the most important of 
 his contributions of 1848-49 to La Liberie de Fenser was 
 his article on "The Critical Historians of Jesus" ("Les 
 Historiens critiques de Jesus," reprinted in Etudes dHis- 
 wire Religieuse, 1857). Here he is seen already preparing 
 himself for his own Vie de Jesus, He pronounces Strauss's 
 book to be at bottom an attempt to apply to the Gospel 
 narratives the philosophy of Hegel, of which Renan gives 
 in a page or two, so far at least as is needed for his 
 purpose, an admirably luminous account. Strauss's 
 theory was that most of the incidents recorded in the 
 Gospels are mythical, mere crystallisations of floating 
 notions in the Jewish mind of what the Messiah, 
 looked for before the birth of Jesus, was expected to 
 be and to do, Renan, on the other hand, m.aintains 
 that such a theory is not justified by the state of the 
 Jewish mind at the birth of Christ, and he discriminates 
 with great acuteness between the circumstances in which 
 mythical theories are permissibly applicable and those in 
 which they are not. In many cases he would prefer to 
 "myth," a product of pure imagination, the term 
 "legend," denoting a nucleus of truth round which fabu- 
 lous matter has accreted. 
 
6o LIFE OF 
 
 To sum up: — 
 
 " Strauss shows himself a rather unphilosophical historian when he 
 neglects to explain how Jesus came to be regarded by those among 
 whom he lived as an adequate realisation of the Messianic ideal. 
 . . . There is one fact which can only have been the effect of a 
 powerful individuality — namely, the appearance of the new doc- 
 trine, the impulse which it gave, the spirit of sacrifice and devoted- 
 ness which it succeeded in inspiring." 
 
 Then follows the decidedly interesting passage in 
 which the method of Kenan's own Vie de Jesus was 
 adumbrated : — 
 
 *' It may be affirmed that if the composition of the life of Christ, 
 written in a scientific manner, had been undertaken by France, 
 better endowed than Germany with the feeling of practical life and 
 less inclined to substitute, in history, ideas for the action of the 
 passions and of individualised characters, she would have displayed 
 a method of greater precision, and in avoiding to transfer the 
 problem, as Strauss has done, into the domain of abstract specula- 
 tion, she would have made a much nearer approach to the truth." 
 
 Some of these articles attracted so much attention that 
 from time to time in 1849 they were republished separ- 
 ately. The same year distinction was conferred on an 
 essay, which displayed minute and curious erudition, 
 contributed to the semi-ofificial Journal de V Instruction 
 Fublique^ elucidating by means of the Semitic languages 
 some points in the pronunciation of Greek. With the 
 prizes which he had won, and his striking literary work, 
 Renan was quite a notable young man only four years 
 after he had crept, sorrowful and solitary, into that little 
 room in the Quartier Latin. He was offered a chair in 
 some provincial college, but he declined exile from Paris. 
 
RENAN. 6i 
 
 For a few months of 1849 he acted as substitute for a 
 friend who was professor of philosophy at the Lyc^e of 
 Versailles. It is significant of Kenan's caution as an 
 oral instructor of youth at this stage of his career that 
 his friend having begun a course of lectures on the being 
 and attributes of God, and leaving Renan to continue 
 them, he avoided treatment of this thorny subject, 
 especially as the Lycee was a government institution, 
 and gave instead a course of lectures on aesthetics, 
 having a deep feeling for art in all its chief departments. 
 Renan was rising in the estimation of "men of light 
 and leading.'' Among those whom his abilities, scholar- 
 ship, and industry had made his friends, was the erudite 
 Victor Le Clerc, with whom Renan afterwards collaborated 
 in the massive work, Hisioire Litteraire de la France au 
 xiif' siecle^ begun by the Benedictines. The 'friendship 
 of Le Clerc, and his own reputation, contributed to 
 obtain for him a new and public honour. Among the 
 admirable aids to struggling and meritorious scholarship 
 provided by French institutions was the system of 
 Missions of literary and scientific exploration at home 
 and abroad, the members of which were appointed by 
 the Ministry of Public Instruction, a system zealously 
 developed when the ministers were such men as Guizot, 
 Villemain, and Cousin, and continued by their successors. 
 Towards the close of 1849, on the recommendation of 
 Victor Le Clerc, the Academic des. Inscriptions drawing 
 up the needful instructions, Renan was appointed one 
 of a commission of two ordered on a roving tour of 
 exploration among the libraries, public and monastic, of 
 Italy. His chief duty was to report on curious unedited 
 
62 LIFE OF 
 
 Syriac and Arabic manuscripts which he might come 
 across, but he was also to keep his eyes open to any 
 iroiivaille of literary or historic interest which might be 
 utilised for the Histoire Litteraire de la France. Not 
 only among dusty manuscripts, but enjoying the new 
 world of art opened up to him, he spent much of 1850 
 in Italy, and subsequently some months in England, to 
 which apparently his mission was extended. In his 
 report to the Minister of Public Instruction he declared 
 that his Oriental " finds " in the manuscript department 
 of the British Museum far exceeded all those which he 
 had lighted on in Italy. In all probability it was the 
 skill which these reports displayed him to possess in the 
 manipulation and knowledge of Oriental manuscripts, 
 that led to his appointment (in 185 1) to a post in 
 the department of Oriental MSS. in the Bibliotheque 
 Nationale, no longer, of course, du Roi. 
 
 A private as well as a public object guided Renan in 
 these assiduous and multifarious explorations. For his 
 degree of Doctor of Letters (the " Doctorat ^s Lettres "), 
 which would complete his academic status, he had to 
 compose two theses, one in Latin, the other in French. 
 The materials for both were dihgently accumulated during 
 his foreign mission, and both were published in 1852 
 with his acquisition of the Doctor's degree. That in 
 Latin was quite a small volume, though full of smelted 
 Oriental learning, De philosophid peripafetica apud Syros 
 commentatio hisiorica^ in which was abundantly proved 
 a favourite theory of Renan's that the knowledge of 
 Aristotle, and indeed of anything else Hellenic, pos- 
 sessed by the mediaeval Arabs, was wholly derived from 
 
RENAN, 63 
 
 Syriac translations. The other and French thesis, the 
 far more elaborate work which first gave Renan a 
 place among the most erudite of European scholars, was 
 Averroes et P Averrdisme. Renan was attracted to this 
 twelfth-century sage of Mohammedan Spain (Dante gave 
 him a few words of appreciation in the Inferno) as a 
 philosopher who, to a partial reproduction of Aristotle 
 and his commentators, based on Arabic versions of 
 Syriac translations from the Greek, added doctrines of 
 his own and founded a school of advanced thought, 
 which for several centuries exerted a great influence 
 on European speculation. Strange phenomena and 
 phases of thought had always an attraction for Renan, 
 whose intellectual inquisitiveness was unbounded, and 
 his volume is full of curious information respecting 
 the philosophical and other sects of mediaeval Moham- 
 medanism and the interaction of Averroism and scholas- 
 ticism. The range of erudition and the knowledge of 
 the history of mediaeval philosophy in Europe displayed 
 by Renan are enormous, and he treats the abstrusest 
 questions with an ease and animation which make the 
 book instructive and interesting to students of the arcana 
 of thought, and, it must be admitted, to them alone. 
 
 With his return from his continental mission Renan's 
 good sister appears to have made up her mind to devote 
 herself entirely to her brother. They set. up house 
 together in Paris in a little domicile at the bottom of a 
 garden. Many years afterwards, when Renan's merits and 
 fame procured him admission to the French Academy, 
 the colleague, who, as usual on these occasions, addressed 
 him an elaborate welcome, reminded him of their 
 
64 LIFE OF 
 
 acquaintance in those early days. " I see you again," he 
 said, "in a little garden-house of the Rue du Val de 
 Grace, where the maternal care of a sister, capable of all 
 devotedness, had procured for you a shelter at a decisive 
 hour of your youth. You passed a part of your days 
 in the Biblioth^que Nationale. The whole evening was 
 consecrated to work. Far on into the night the light of 
 your lamp told the passers-by of the persistence of your 
 laborious vigils. A skilful and intrepid tenderness satis- 
 fied all your needs, without requiring from you any 
 exertion that could distract your studies, and spared you 
 even the care of material things." Of what still more 
 striking self-sacrifice Henriette Renan w^as capable will 
 be seen a little further on. Nor was her usefulness to him 
 confined to household affairs. She was a Mary and a 
 Martha in one. She seems to have revised what he 
 wrote, and to have exerted a wholesome influence on his 
 mode of composition. She advised him to cultivate 
 simplicity of style and to check that love of irony to 
 which he was prone, and in which during his later years 
 he indulged too often and too much. • 
 
 The book on Averroes and Averroism was the first 
 w^ork of any kind from Renan's pen w^hich was pubHshed 
 by Michel Levy, who became one of the foremost of 
 French publishers, who until his death remained Renan's 
 sole publisher, and who was followed in that function by 
 his brothers and successors in business. Of his first 
 connection with Michel L^vy, Renan gives in his 
 Souvenirs an account which is interesting, but which 
 would be more instructive if, with a provoking reticence 
 or negligence not uncommon in his references to 
 
RENAN, 65 
 
 himself, he had not omitted to give, even approxi- 
 mately, the date of the following incident. He was still 
 in a garret, he says, when one fine day he received a 
 visit from Levy, who was a stranger to him. He had 
 not until then fancied that he could make money by 
 writing. To his great surprise Levy offered to publish 
 any of his future books, and to republish his contribu- 
 tions to periodicals. Renan might have looked coldly 
 on the overture, but Levy having brought with him a 
 stamped agreement by which Renan constituted his 
 visitor his sole publisher on certain terms, Renan con- 
 sented. In course of time Levy voluntarily offered to 
 make his terms more favourable to Renan, who says that 
 his publisher, he had reason to believe, did not lose by 
 the bargain. L^vy can scarcely have lost by Aver roes 
 et r Averrdisme^ for, devoid as it was of anything like 
 actuality, and in manner and matter "caviare to the 
 general," it went in course of time to a third edition. 
 
CHAPTER IV. 
 
 [1852-60.] 
 
 YVTHILE continuing to lay up among the Oriental manu- 
 scripts of the Biblioth^que new stores of Oriental 
 and other lore for his great book on the Semitic languages, 
 Renan became, in intervals of graver work, what the 
 French call a publicist, and a distinguished one. Accord- 
 ing to his own account, having still on his hands the Avenir 
 de la Science^ only a slight fraction of which had been 
 printed in La Liberie de Penser^ he showed it to his 
 friend Augustin Thierry, who strongly dissuaded him 
 from publishing it. Silvestre de Sacy, son of the great 
 Orientalist, and very influential in the councils of the 
 Journal des Debats, tendered him the same advice. They 
 further advised him to give from time to time in the 
 Revue des Deux Mondes and the Journal des Debats 
 such small doses of the work as could be swallowed 
 by the French public, to whom the whole volume would 
 be inevitably distasteful. Renan took their advice, the 
 more cheerfully that the lapse of a few years had 
 considerably chilled some of his hopes of 1848. He 
 attached himself the more keenly to the great fortnightly 
 and the great daily organ of moderate liberalism in 
 
LIFE OF RE NAN. 67 
 
 France, because just as he began to contribute to them 
 came Louis Napoleon's conp d'etat of 2nd December 
 1 85 1, and Renan was disgusted by the attitude on that 
 day of the people of Paris, whom he saw enjoying rather 
 than otherwise the blow dealt at public liberty. 
 
 Between the salary of his post in the Bibliotheque 
 Nationale (so soon to become Imperiale) and the income 
 which he derived from literary work, Renan found himself 
 in a position to marry. The lady of his choice was a 
 niece of the famous painter, Ary Scheffer, and a daughter 
 of his brother Henri, also an artist. Mademoiselle 
 Scheffer was, perhaps fortunately, a Protestant. Renan's 
 biographers assign 1856 as the date of the marriage. 
 By more than one of them a touching story is told in 
 connection with the event. For several years Renan's 
 devoted sister Henriette had shared his dom.icile, sym- 
 pathising with and aiding his studies, and making his 
 home attractive; — Sainte-Beuve says that it was to her 
 that he owed his first acquaintance with Renan, an 
 acquaintance which ripened into intimacy. When her 
 brother told her of his contemplated marriage, she showed 
 so much grief at the thought of ceasing to have him all 
 to herself, that he generously declared his intention to 
 remain single for her sake. Mademoiselle Renan out- 
 vied her brother in generosity. She rushed to Made- 
 moiselle Scheffer and begged her not to give up Renan. 
 It was the sister who now did her utmost to bring about 
 the union, the thought of which had at first pained her 
 so much. The marriage took place and proved a very 
 happy one; two children were born of it, a son and a 
 daughter. Henriette Renan appears to have remained 
 
68 LIFE OF 
 
 in the home of her wedded brother, and was by his 
 side until her death. 
 
 In 1855, the year before the date assigned to his 
 marriage, appeared what was until then Kenan's opus maxi- 
 mum^ his " General History and Comparative System of 
 the Semitic Languages " {Histoire Gen er ale et Systeme 
 Co7iipare des Langues Shnitiques), a very important ex- 
 pansion of the essay which had gained him the Volney 
 prize. A second volume was to have done for the com- 
 parative grammar of the Semitic languages, dealt with 
 in the first volume, what Bopp had done for the Indo- 
 . Germanic languages, but no second volume ever appeared. 
 The volume which did appear received the honour of 
 being crowned by the Institute, and excited the atten- 
 tion not only of scholars qualified to estimate the 
 erudition displayed in it and to pronounce on the 
 value of its conclusions, but of others. A knowledge 
 of one of these conclusions was diffused among culti- 
 vated readers everywhere. Renan elaborated in the 
 volume his favourite theory that the essential differences 
 in race and language between Indo-Europeans (or, as 
 they are now called, Aryans) and Semites were accom- 
 panied by a fundamental difference in their way of regard- 
 ing the universe. The Semitic races were by nature 
 monotheistic: the Indo-European were polytheistic. The 
 latter from the first deified the powers of Nature; the 
 former detached the Deity from the universe, and their 
 characteristic formula is the first verse of Genesis — 
 " In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
 earth." The three great monotheistic religions, the 
 Jewish, the Christian, and the Mohammedan were of 
 
RENAN, 69 
 
 Semitic origin, and no member of the Indo-European 
 family had ever embraced monotheism except through 
 a member of the Semitic family. It was not by reflec- 
 tion but by following an instinct of head and heart 
 that the Semites were monotheists. On the other hand, 
 they had neither philosophy nor science, neither mythology 
 nor epic poetry. The faculties which beget mythology 
 also beget philosophy, and India and Greece produced the 
 richest of mythologies side by side with the profoundest 
 systems of philosophy. The poetry of the Semites was 
 entirely subjective. They lacked creative imagination. 
 The epic, a product of mythology, and the drama are 
 unknown to them, and in fiction they get no further 
 than the apologue. Monotheism made painting and 
 the plastic arts repugnant to them. They have not 
 founded great polities like the Greeks and Romans, or 
 organised great empires like the Persians. Society with 
 the Semite was an affair of the tent and the tribe. In 
 short, their characteristics are chiefly negative. But 
 their one great positive characteristic outweighs all their 
 deficiencies. Mankind owes monotheism to the Semites, 
 — a debt of incalculable value. The popular acceptance 
 of this striking theory of Renan was accompanied, how- 
 ever, by statements from experts strenuously controvert- 
 ing it. The objections urged against it then have been 
 strengthened by others which the progress of knowledge, 
 especially of Assyriology, has suggested. Renan, while 
 defending his theory in the main, slightly modified it, as 
 will be seen hereafter. 
 
 His history of the Semitic languages procured Renan, 
 at the early age of thirty-six, the honour of being elected 
 
70 LIFE OF 
 
 a member of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles 
 Lettres, in succession to Augustin Thierry, who, old and 
 blind, had been assisted by Renan in his historical re- 
 searches, and who introduced him to the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes, 
 
 From 185 1 to i860, when there was a new departure 
 in his career, Renan contributed more or less steadily 
 to the Journal des Debats and the Revue des Deux 
 Mondes^ and in both cases found himself in distinguished 
 company. So select was the public addressed by the 
 Debats that Silvestre de Sacy (son of the Orientalist), 
 a fastidious as well as accomplished gentleman of the old 
 school, told Renan to write as if he were only to have 
 five hundred readers ! The exclusiveness of the Revue was 
 of a very different kind. Buloz, its founder, proprietor, 
 and editor, was a hard-headed and hard-fisted man of 
 business, not at all cultivated, but with a quick eye for 
 what he thought would suit the readers of his periodical. 
 "A deux cent lieues de cet imbecille de Buloz*' (Two 
 hundred leagues away from that fool of a Buloz) is the 
 heading of one of the private letters of Alexandre Dumas 
 pere I The first paper which Renan presented to Buloz 
 was an elaborate study on Buddha, Buddhism, and the 
 Buddhists, themes the mastery of which he had begun 
 under his much-prized teacher Eugene Burnouf. Buloz 
 read the paper and rejected it, declaring it to be 
 impossible that there could be such silly people as 
 the Buddhists ! The essay remained in Renan's desk 
 until 1884, when he published it in his Nouvelles Etudes 
 d^Histoire Reiigleuse, in the preface to which he told 
 the story of its rejection. But this was a solitary rebuff. 
 
RENAN. 71 
 
 Many of Kenan's contributions to the Revue dcs Deux 
 Maudes and to Sh^ Journal des Debats were collected and 
 republished in his " Studies of Religious History" {Etudes 
 d' Histolre Religieuse^ 1857), and some more of them in 
 his " Ethical and Critical Essays " {Essais de Morale et 
 de Critique^ 1^59)- 
 
 These essays, both as they appeared and when col- 
 lected, procured for Renan a very much larger circle 
 of readers and admirers than his works on Averroes 
 and the Semitic languages. The range of subjects was 
 extraordinary, from the religions of antiquity, the primi- 
 tive grammar of India, the history of the people of Israel, 
 Mohammed and Mohammedanism, to Feuerbach and 
 the neo-Hegelians, and the future of Metaphysics and of 
 Religion; from the Lives of the Saints to Calvin and 
 Channing; from the poetry of the Celtic races 10 the 
 poetry of the Paris Exhibition of 1855, while interspersed 
 were critico-biographical sketches of such men as Cousin, 
 Augustin Thierry, and Lamennais. " He who brings 
 much,'' says the theatre-manager in Faust, " brings some- 
 thing to every one," and the cultivated reader must be 
 fastidious indeed who does not find something to interest 
 him in these essays of Renan. His graceful and pellucid 
 style had a flexibility that fitted it for the expression of 
 all thought and all emotion. Renan had the faculty of 
 making his subject, whether it were one for narrative or 
 disquisition, perfectly clear to himself, and his wealth and 
 felicity of expression rendered it delightfully clear to his 
 readers. Religious themes are those which he treats 
 most congenially, for with him religion in all its phases 
 and developments was the truest expression of the 
 
72 LIFE OF 
 
 individual and the national mind. One of the most 
 interesting of the essays is on the history of the 
 people of Israel, and is based on Ewald's well-known 
 work. Renan always maintained that the universe had 
 become more and not less grand and beautiful with 
 the passing away of the old mythologies, — the "fair 
 humanities of old religion," — and the substitution for 
 them of rigid, scientific law. In the same spirit he begins 
 his essay on the history of the people of Israel by throw- 
 ing down the gauntlet to the orthodox, and declaring his 
 conviction that in destroying the old accepted notions, 
 as to both the inspiration of the Old Testament, and 
 the authorship and dates of the books contained in 
 it, modern criticism has enhanced, not diminished, their 
 value : " Jerusalem has issued more brilliant and beauti- 
 ful than before from the work, seemingly destructive, of 
 modern science. The pious narratives with which our 
 childhood was cradled have become, thanks to a sane 
 interpretation of them, lofty truths, and it is we who 
 see Israel in its real beauty, it is the critics who are 
 justly entitled to say, Stantes erant pedes nostfi in atriis 
 tuts, Jerusalem ! "^ 
 
 The essay on Calvin is perhaps in those two volumes 
 that which gives the best notion of Renan's con- 
 scientious attachment to truth in the formation of 
 his judgments, and of his catholic appreciation of 
 men against whom his own intellectual and ethical 
 prepossessions would naturally prejudice him. No 
 
 ^ The Authorised Version makes a future of what in the Vulgate 
 is a past tense. ** Our feet shall stand in thy gates, O Jerusalem !" 
 (Psalm cxxii. 2). 
 
RENAN, 73 
 
 personal and theological characteristics could be more 
 antagonistic to Renan than those of Calvin. Calvin 
 was harsh, austere, vindictive, a relentless persecutor, 
 the preacher of predestination, in fact, everything that 
 Renan was not. Yet see how fair the French free-thinker 
 of the nineteenth century is to the French fanatic 
 of the sixteenth! After cataloguing Calvin's faults of 
 character, and some of his tyrannical acts, Renan pro- 
 ceeds thus: — 
 
 *' The inevitable result of the character and position of Calvin 
 was intolerance. Whenever man allows himself to be domin- 
 ated by an idea which he believes to be truth so complete, 
 absolute, and evident that whoso does not embrace it is either 
 blind or culpable, he is necessarily intolerant. At the first glance 
 there is a strange inconsistency in Calvin's demand for liberty 
 of thought and speech for himself and his, while refusing it 
 to others. But in reality the matter is quite a simple one. He 
 believed otherwise than the Catholics did, but he believed quite as 
 firmly as they. What is very erroneously regarded as the essence of 
 nascent Protestantism, freedom of belief, the right of the individual 
 to construct for himself his own religious symbol, was scarcely 
 thought of in the sixteenth century. No doubt the appeal of the 
 Church to Scripture could not but ultimately bring profit to criticism, 
 and in that sense the first reformers were veritably the ancestors of 
 free-thought. But they were so without their knowledge and without 
 their will. . . . And what was Calvin's tyranny at Geneva to the 
 contemporary persecutions of his fellow-Protestants in France under 
 Francis I., the voluptuary and sceptic who had not even Philip II. 's 
 excuse, that of believing, but who from mere motives of secular 
 policy sanctioned a sanguinary, and worse than sanguinary, perse- 
 cution ? Let us remember the state of excitement in which the fer- 
 vent disciple of the Reformation must have lived when there came 
 to him from Paris, from Lyons, from Chambery, etc., news of the 
 tortures endured by those of his religion. History has not sufficiently 
 insisted on the atrocity of these persecutions, and on the resignation, 
 
74 LIFE OF 
 
 the courage, and the serenity of the sufferers. Pages are there 
 worthy of the first ages of the Church, and I do not doubt that 
 a simple and instructive narrative of those sublime struggles, com- 
 piled from the documents and correspondence of the period, would 
 equal in beauty the ancient martyrology. During those times of 
 trial and probation the voice of Calvin attains a fulness and a lofti- 
 ness which are truly admirable. His letters to the martyrs of Lyons 
 and of Chambery, and to the female prisoners of the Chatelet, seem 
 like an echo from the heroic periods of Christianity, like pages 
 extracted from the writings of TertuUian or Cyprian." 
 
 In the Critical and Ethical Essays there are two, in 
 close juxtaposition, which offer a contrast not only 
 very striking but singularly characteristic of Renan. 
 The one is on "The Poetry of the Exhibition" ("La 
 Poesie de I'Exposition," that of Paris in 1855), the 
 other on " The Poetry of the Celtic Races." This last 
 is the only composition in which Renan deals with a 
 theme which must have been very dear to him as a 
 Breton, for Brittany was, and is, one of the chief homes 
 of Celtic song, and of romantic as well as of monastic 
 and other ecclesiastical legend. The most recent re- 
 searches, indeed, tend to confirm the theory that the 
 cycle of Arthurian legend was born in Brittany, and there 
 King Arthur still lives in the minds and memories of 
 the people, as is testified by an interesting anecdote of 
 Renan's own telling. In 1887, thirty years after the 
 period in his biography now arrived at, he delivered an 
 address of welcome to the members of a Welsh Archaeo- 
 logical Association, who, in the course of a trip to Brittany, 
 paid him a visit there. "You come from Lannion," 
 not very far from Treguier, and a region famous as the 
 scene of the mythical Arthur's exploits — "you come," 
 
RE NAN. 
 
 75 
 
 he said to his guests, " from Lannion, my mother's native 
 town. I shall now give you a reminiscence of that little 
 town, which was told me by your great poet Tennyson. 
 In the course of an excursion in Brittany he spent a 
 night at Lannion. On leaving he asked his hostess for his 
 bill. * Oh ! nothing, Monsieur,' was her answer. * It was 
 you who sang of our King Arthur ! ' " It shows how 
 strongly ecclesiastical was Kenan's bent in boyhood that 
 while the earlier section of his Souvenirs teems with legends 
 of Breton saints which impressed his youthful mind, he 
 says nothing of King Arthur, of the many other secular 
 legends of Brittany, or of its abundant popular songs. 
 In his riper years, however, of severance from the 
 Catholic Church he revelled in Lady Charlotte Guest's 
 Mabinogion^ in the stores of Celtic literature accumulated 
 by Welsh scholars, and of Breton legends and songs 
 collected by Villemarque. In the essay on Celtic 
 poetry, which perhaps suggested to Matthew Arnold, 
 who calls it "beautiful," his volume On the Study of 
 Celtic Literature^ Renan dilates lovingly on the charac- 
 teristics of the Celts as reflected in their poetry, and with 
 the pride of race exults over the profound influence 
 which it exerted on the early literature of Europe. If 
 genius and enthusiasm could achieve such a feat the 
 Celt has been rehabilitated by Renan. 
 
 The essay on the Paris Exhibition of 1855 is the most 
 emphatic of Renan's numerous protests against the ex- 
 aggerated estimate of the value attached in our age to 
 the products of mechanical and manual industry, and 
 against the worship of what, obliged to borrow an English 
 phrase, he calls "the comfortable." Renan had too 
 
76 LIFE OF 
 
 much good sense not to see that the ancients were 
 altogether wrong in regarding as ignominious one of 
 the most honourable and estimable of all things, labour. 
 Nor does he for a moment deny that "when industrial 
 progress raises the lower classes to a higher level, and 
 brings the nations nearer to each other, it subserves a 
 religious and ethical purpose, and is therefore worthy of 
 respect." 
 
 '* The mistake lies not in proclaiming industry to be excellent 
 and useful, but in exalting it beyond measure, and in attaching too 
 much importance to perfecting its processes. If the aim of human 
 life is well-being, it has been excellently realised in the past without 
 any of these superfluities. . . . The useful does not ennoble: that 
 only ennobles which presupposes in man intellectual or moral worth. 
 Virtue, genius, science, when it is disinterested, and its only object 
 is to satisfy the desire which leads man to penetrate the enigmas of 
 the universe, military valour, holiness, all these are things which 
 correspond with the moral, intellectual, or aesthetic needs of man, 
 all these can ennoble. . . . But what is merely useful will never 
 ennoble. On the front of that ephemeral palace, and by the side of 
 names immortal in science, I see others, no doubt honourable, which 
 it is wished to inscribe in the livre d^or of glory; they will not 
 figure in it. Industry renders immense services to society, but they 
 are services which after all are repaid in money. To every one 
 his own reward; to the man whose usefulness is of the earth, 
 earthy, wealth, happiness in the earthly meaning of the word, all 
 earthly blessings; to genius, to virtue, to glory, nobleness. The 
 man of genius has a right to only one thing, that life shall not be 
 made for him impossible or insupportable. The man of utility has 
 a right to only one thing, that of being rewarded in proportion to 
 his services. This is so true that the only members of the industrial 
 order who have really forced their way into the Temple of Glory are 
 those who have been persecuted or unrecognised. It was supremely 
 unjust that Jacquard," the ill-fated inventor of the silk-loom which 
 
RENAN, yj 
 
 bears his name, "should not have been rich, and because he lived 
 and died poor glory has been justly decreed to him. In point of 
 fact, the qualities which make the industrialist do in no way exclude, 
 but they do not necessarily presuppose a great moral elevation, 
 and Jacquard's poverty proves more in favour of his character 
 than even the name of the machine to which his own remains 
 attached. . . . Far from us be those lamentations of the peevish, 
 whose sympathies are confined to one epoch or one form of the past, 
 who persist with a sort of defiance of opinion in calling perversion what 
 others call progress. Of what use would history be to us if it did 
 not teach us the greatest caution in distributing praise and blame to 
 revolutions which are in course of accomplishment, and the last 
 results of which have not yet been made clear ? Besides, censure 
 would be here as misplaced as enthusiasm. Our century is tending 
 neither towards the good nor the bad; it is tending towards medi- 
 ocrity. Whatever succeeds in our day is mediocre. It cannot be 
 denied that a great deal of evil has been removed from the world by 
 a general application to pursuits which, though trivial, are inoffensive 
 enough. But has this been profitable to what is great in the develop- 
 ment of man ? Is this hurrying crowd beneath those crystal arches 
 more enlightened, more moral, more truly religious than people 
 were two centuries ago? It may be doubted. It does not seem 
 as if many persons came out of the Palace of the Exhibition better 
 than they entered it. It must even be added that the object 
 of the exhibitors would not have been exactly attained if every 
 visitor had been wise enough to say as he left the building : * What 
 a number of things there are which I can do without ! ' " 
 
 A Strange gospel to preach to luxurious and glittering 
 Paris in the palmiest days of the Second Empire ! 
 
 Kenan's Semitic studies had been hitherto devoted 
 to subjects interesting mainly to scholars. They were 
 now to contribute to the instruction and enjoyment 
 of a much wider circle of readers. In 1859 and i860 
 appeared the translations into his own beautiful French 
 
78 LIFE OF 
 
 of two books of the Old Testament, most diverse in 
 matter and manner, Job and the Song of Solomon. 
 His French versions of them were preceded by elabor- 
 ate and elucidatory dissertations. A brief statement may 
 be given of Renan's view of the authorship and age of 
 the Book of Job, which by common consent is to be 
 considered one of the noblest of literary works. Renan 
 regards the author as a Hebrew, deeply versed in the 
 wisdom of such Semitic tribes bordering on Palestine 
 as the Temanites, to whom Eliphaz, one of the chief 
 interlocutors, belonged — wisdom with which Solomon was 
 familiar, and to the Idumean reputation for which 
 Jeremiah bore testimony when he wrote, " Concerning 
 Edom thus saith the Lord of hosts : Is wisdom no 
 more in Teman ? is counsel perished from the prudent } 
 is their wisdom vanished ? '' The scene and personages 
 of the poem are Idumean, and but for the Hebrew name 
 by which the Deity is called, and the fact that the book as 
 we have it is in Hebrew, there is such an entire absence 
 in it of references to anything specifically Jewish, that 
 it might have been written by an Idumean sage. As 
 regards the time at which the Book of Job was written, 
 Renan refers, on grounds interesting chiefly to experts, 
 the date of its composition to or about the year 770 
 before Christ, towards the epoch of Uzziah, King of Judah, 
 and of Menahem, King of Israel, in the age of Amos, of 
 Hosea, and of Isaiah. "Rome did not as yet exist, 
 Greece possessed harmonious songs, but did not know 
 how to write. Egypt, Assyria, Iran (enclosed in Bac- 
 triana), India, China, were already old with intellectual, 
 political, and religious revolutions, when an unknown 
 
RE NAN. 
 
 79 
 
 sage, who had remained faithful to the spirit of the days 
 of yore, wrote for mankind that subhme controversy in 
 which the doubts and sufferings of all the ages were to 
 find so eloquent an expression." 
 
 The writer of the Book of Job believed no longer 
 in the old patriarchal theory, which associated worldly 
 prosperity with goodness, and inflicted earthly penalties 
 on the evil-doer. This theory broke down, according to 
 Renan, when the Semites came into contact with, and to 
 some extent adopted, an alien and corrupt civilisation, 
 about ten centuries before Christ. "Then were seen 
 fortunate scoundrels, tyrants rewarded, robbers borne in 
 honour to the tomb, whilst the just man was despoiled 
 and reduced to beg his bread." The feeling of injustice 
 created by such a state of things might have been silenced 
 if the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, and of 
 a future state of rewards and punishments, had been 
 firmly held. But with the Semites " man after death 
 descended to Sheol, a subterranean abode which it is often 
 difficult to distinguish from the tomb, and in which the 
 dead retained a vague existence analogous to that of the 
 Manes of Greek and Roman antiquities, and, above all, 
 to that of the shadowy beings of the Odyssey.'' 
 
 " For a moment, now and then, Job seems to uplift the veil of 
 beliefs that are to come. He hopes that God will give him in 
 Sheol a place apart, where he will remain in reserve until he returns 
 to life. He knows that he will be avenged, and, overleaping death 
 in his vivid intuition of future justice, he declares that his skeleton 
 will behold God. But these flashes of light are always followed by 
 the profoundest gloom. The old patriarchal conception returns and 
 weighs upon him with all its weight. The spectacle of man's 
 
8o LIFE OF 
 
 misery, the destruction worked by nature, that horrible indifference 
 of death striking down alike the just man and the sinner, the happy 
 and the unfortunate, bring him again to despair. In the epilogue 
 he simply falls back on the theory which he tried for a moment to 
 overleap. Job is avenged. His fortune is restored to him doubled. 
 He dies old and full of days." 
 
 Renan thinks that in this way the problem is not 
 solved. The close of the poem is but a return to the 
 old patriarchal theory, worldly prosperity rewarding the 
 just man, — a doctrine against the truth of which all that 
 Job has said and all experience protest. The problem, 
 indeed, is, according to Renan, insoluble. 
 
 *' There are problems which we cannot solve, but which we can 
 transcend. The destiny of man is one of them. Those whom it 
 holds fast perish. The secret of life is to be reached by those 
 alone who know how to stifle the sadness within them, how to do 
 without hope, how to silence those enervating doubts which arrest 
 the progress of only the feeble-minded and of epochs of weariness. 
 What matters the reward when the work done is so beautiful that 
 it holds within itself the promise of the infinite ? . . . 
 
 " Three thousand years have passed since the problem exercised the 
 sages of Idumea, and in spite of the progress of the philosophical method 
 ' the problem cannot be said to be a step nearer solution. Regarded 
 from the point of view of individual rewards and punishments, it is 
 with an energetic denial that God will for ever visit the clumsy 
 apologists who desire to defend Providence on that hopeless basis. 
 The shock felt by the Psalmist on beholding the peace of the sinner^ 
 Job's wrath at the prosperity of the wicked, are in all ages justifiable 
 feelings. But we have learned that which neither the Psalmist nor 
 the author of the Book of Job could understand, that which could 
 be revealed only by the sequence of schools of thought following 
 each other, by the blending of races, by a long education of the 
 moral sense. It is, that beyond the chimerical justice which the 
 superficial common sense of every age has been desirous of finding 
 
RE NAN. 8 1 
 
 in the government of the universe, we find a far higher law and regu- 
 lating tendency, without a knowledge of which human affairs are no- 
 thing more than a tissue of iniquity. The future of the individual 
 man has become no clearer, and perhaps it is well that a veil should 
 cover for ever truths which have a value only when they are the fruit 
 of a heart that is pure. But there is one word, pronounced neither 
 by Job nor his friends, which has acquired a lofty significance and 
 value. Duty, with its incalculable philosophical consequences, by 
 imposing its authority on all, resolves every doubt, reconciles every 
 contradiction, and serves as a foundation on which to reconstruct 
 what reason destroys or allows to crumble away. Thanks to this 
 revelation which has in it nothing equivocal or obscure, we declare 
 that he who chooses the Good is the true wise man. He will be 
 immortal, for his works will live in the ultimate triumph of justice, 
 the sum of the divine work which is accomplished by humanity. 
 Humanity produces the divine as the spider spins its web. The 
 march of the world is enveloped in darkness, but its progress is 
 towards the divine. While the wicked, the silly, or the frivolous 
 man will wholly die, in the sense that he will leave nothing to the 
 general result of the labour of mankind, the man devoted to what- 
 soever is good and beautiful will participate in the immortality of 
 that which he has loved. Who is there to-day that lives with as 
 much of life as the obscure Galilean, who eighteen hundred years 
 ago cast into the world the sword which divides us, and the word 
 which unites us ? Thus the works of the man of genius and of the 
 man of worth alone escape the general decay, for they alone count 
 for anything in the sum of the acquisitions of the race, and the fruit 
 of their labours continues to grow even when forgotten by ungrateful 
 humanity. Nothing is lost. The good done by the most unknown 
 of virtuous men weighs more in the everlasting scales than the most 
 insolent triumphs of untruth and of evil. Whatever the form he 
 may give to his beliefs, in whatever symbol he may choose to 
 clothe his averments regarding the future, the just man has thus the 
 right to say with the old patriarch of Idumea, 'For I know that 
 my avenger liveth, and will appear at last upon the earth. When 
 my skin shall have fallen into shreds, and my flesh be taken from 
 me, I shall see God. I shall see him by myself; my eyes, not 
 
 6 
 
82 LIFE OF 
 
 another's, shall behold him. With waiting my reins are consumed 
 within me.* " ^ 
 
 In my humble judgment the patriarch's speech in 
 Kenan's own version may have more meaning than he 
 has just assigned to it. But to be virtuous for the sake of 
 virtue alone, without regard to any reward possibly attend- 
 ant on it; to avoid evil, without any regard to the punish- 
 ment possibly awaiting it ; to be content with an immortality 
 of result, and to pine for no other immortality; — this was 
 the noble doctrine then taught by Renan to a genera- 
 tion delivered over to superstition or unbelief. In- 
 deed, in one of his books Renan makes the curious and 
 suggestive remark that if goodness inevitably brought 
 worldly prosperity in its train, mere cunning and 
 calculation would make the earthiest and most worth- 
 less of men take to the practice of virtue, as the safest 
 of speculations and investments. Where, then, would 
 be the charm and the value of righteousness ? 
 
 From the Book of Job, with its passionate questionings 
 of destiny, its gloom broken only by a few rare flashes of 
 lightning, the distance is great to the Song of Solomon, 
 redolent of Love and Spring. Following the German 
 
 ^ It may be as well to give the words of Renan*s translation of 
 the famous passage which has been the theme of unending con- 
 troversy: — "Car, je le sais, mon vengeur existe et il apparaitra 
 enfin sur la terre. Quand cette peau sera tombee en lambeaux, 
 priv^ de ma chair, je verrai Dieu. Je le verrai par moi meme; 
 mes yeux le contempleront, non ceux d'un autre; mes reins se con- 
 sument d'attente au dedans de moi." In an explanatory note 
 Renan adds, "Job surrenders himself to the hope that some day, \ 
 when he is reduced to a skeleton, God will descend to earth \ 
 and avenge Jol) of his adversaries," 
 
RENAN. 83 
 
 critics, especially Ewald, Renan dismisses all the allegorical 
 interpretations of this unique product of Hebrew genius, 
 especially that interpretation which resolves the love of 
 the Shulamite and her swain into an allegory of the 
 mystic union of Christ and the Church. Many years 
 before Renan, Ewald had, by ingenious rearrangements 
 and transpositions of the otherwise perplexing and inco- 
 herent original, framed out of it a lovely lyrical drama, in 
 which Renan sees a certain political significance. The 
 Shulamite, a beautiful rustic maiden from the North, has 
 l)een carried off by the satellites of Solomon and added to 
 his harem. He addresses her in language of passionate 
 admiration, and offers her all that his wealth can bestow; 
 but in spite of this she remains faithful to her shepherd- 
 lover, and at last is reunited to him. Ewald's four acts 
 become five in the hands of Renan, who makes several 
 alterations in Ewald's rearrangement of the original, and 
 thus one of the obscurest books of the Old Testament 
 becomes a most intelligible, interesting, romantic, and 
 delightful Hebrew vaudeville of true love resisting 
 temptation and triumphing at last. Renan supposes it to 
 have been written in Northern Palestine about the middle 
 of the tenth century B.C., soon after the separation of 
 Israel from Judah. The Shulamite's rejection of Solomon 
 and her disdain of the Jerusalemite women who play the 
 part of chorus in the little drama, harmonise with the 
 feeling in the new kingdom against the personal extrava- 
 gance of Solomon, and the exactions which had driven 
 Israel to revolt. The scene is, of course, laid in Jeru- 
 salem, but the home of the Shulamite, and most of the 
 localities mentioned in the poem, are in the northern 
 
84 LIFE OF 
 
 kingdom, and its beauty and fertility, with its wealth of 
 woodland and meadow-land and running w^aters, were 
 better calculated than the sterile region of the South to 
 inspire the pastoral poetry with which the Song of Solomon 
 teems. 
 
 To his French version of the Canticle, divided, like an 
 ordinary drama, into acts and scenes, with the speeches, 
 as in an ordinary play-book, properly assigned to the 
 dramatis personcB, and the lyrics to the chorus, Renan 
 prefixes not only an essay on the plan, the age, and the 
 character of the poem, but a second French translation 
 in which the order of the accepted text is preserved. 
 This was for the benefit of those who might reject 
 Renan's theory of the dramatic origin of the poem, or 
 who would like to form a theory of their own, or who 
 adhered to the orthodox allegorical interpretation. It is 
 interesting to see Renan in his preface sympathising, and 
 evidently in all sincerity, with the orthodox, whose 
 time-honoured beliefs he was here and elsewhere con- 
 scientiously, but almost regretfully, disturbing. Much in 
 the tone and tenor of some of his subsequent, and more 
 important writings, is explained in the following extract 
 from the preface to his translation and adaptation of 
 the Song of Solomon. Speaking of those who have 
 " known the Canticle only through the mystic veil with 
 which it has been surrounded by the religious conscious- 
 ness of centuries," he continues : — 
 
 " These are the persons to collide with whose habits of thought, 
 naturally costs me most. Never can one, without a scruple, raise 
 a hand against those sacred documents on which the hopes of 
 
RENAN. 85 
 
 eternity have been founded or supported, or rectify, in the name of 
 scientific criticism, those mistakes which for ages have consoled man- 
 kind, have aided it to traverse so many barren deserts, and have 
 enabled it to conquer truths far superior to those of philosophy. It 
 is better for men to have hoped for the Messiah than to have 
 correctly understood such and such a passage of Isaiah, in which they 
 thought they saw him announced; it is better for them to have believed 
 in the resurrection than to have correctly read and understood 
 such and such an obscure passage in the Book of Job, through a belief 
 in which they asserted their future deliverance" from Sheol. * * Where 
 should we be if the contemporaries of Christ had been as excellent 
 philologists as Gesenius? Faith in the resurrection and in the 
 Messiah have led men to do much greater things than have been done 
 by the scientific accuracy of the grammarian. But the greatness of 
 the modern spirit consists in not sacrificing one of the legitimate 
 needs of human nature to another ; our hopes no longer depend on 
 the right or wrong interpretation of a text. Besides, every one puts 
 his belief into a text much more than he extracts a belief from it. 
 Those who require the authority of Job for their faith in the future 
 will not believe the Hebrew scholar who exhibits to them his doubts 
 and his objections. Without troubling themselves about various 
 readings they will boldly say with humanity : De te^rd surrecturus 
 sum?- In the same way the Song of Solomon, endeared to so many 
 devout souls, will remain what it was in spite of our demonstrations. 
 Like an antique statue, habited like a Madonna by the piety of the 
 Middle Ages, it will continue to command respect even when the 
 archaeologist has proved its profane origin. For my part, my object 
 was not to withdraw the veneration paid to an image which has 
 become sacred, but to disencumber it of its wrappings, so as to show 
 it in its chaste nudity to the lover of ancient art." 
 
 ^ The reference is again to the passage. Job xix. 25. Here, 
 instead of the Vulgate "I shall arise," the Authorised Version has, 
 " I know that my Redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the 
 latter day upon the earth." The Douay Version is, ** I know that 
 my Redeemer liveth, and in the last day / shall arise out of the 
 eartt." 
 
S6 LIFE OF REN AN, 
 
 Many men, once attached to the Christian faith, turn 
 on their old credo and, like Lamennais, rend it when they 
 have abandoned it. Renan was not one of these. 
 When he parted from his early faith it was in sorrow not 
 in anger, and he generally thought and spoke of it with a 
 regretful reverence, arising from a perfect knowledge of 
 its value, as held in perfect sincerity by simple-minded 
 people who, like himself, had received it without 
 examination. 
 
CHAPTER V. 
 
 [1860-61.] 
 
 TTHE time was now come when an unforeseen stroke 
 of good fortune was to hasten the execution of the 
 great task which had floated before Renan's mind ever 
 since he left St. Sulpice, and which had acquired con- 
 sistency during years of preparatory study prosecuted in 
 the midst of multifarious intellectual and literary labours. 
 ( In the May of i860, the year in which was published his 
 version of the Song of Solomon, Renan was commissioned 
 by the Imperial Government to explore the ancient 
 Phoenicia in search of inscriptions and monuments. 
 There had been previously a few " finds" of Phoenician 
 inscriptions in regions where the Phoenicians had settle- 
 ments; if Phoenicia proper were explored more might be 
 expected, along with discoveries of memorials and monu- 
 ments of that interesting people of Semitic speech. 
 
 Renan and his colleagues oiXh^ Journal des Dkbats were 
 Liberals, and had resented the coup cPetat of Napoleon 
 III. (185 1). But as the years wore on they began to 
 hope for, and even to believe in, the establishment of 
 a Liberal empire. With Prince Napoleon (" Plon-Plon"), 
 
88 LIFE OF 
 
 whose Liberalism was decidedly advanced, and who 
 courted the company of men of letters, Renan seems 
 to have been becoming so intimate as to accompany the 
 Prince some years afterwards on a yachting tour to Northern 
 Europe. But the person to whom Renan appears to have 
 been mainly indebted was a lady, a Madame Cornu, 
 whose mother had belonged to the household of Queen 
 Hortense, the mother of Napoleon III., and who herself 
 was brought up in, and for many years after the downfall 
 of the First Empire remained a member of, that house- 
 hold. A year younger than the mfant who was to 
 become Napoleon III., she and Louis were close friends 
 from childhood. They played together and learned their 
 lessons together, and their innocent intimacy survived in 
 all its strength even after she became a wife, until the 
 coup d'etat. This she viewed with a repugnance which 
 estranged her from its author. She is described by 
 Renan, in an interesting sketch of her, as a woman of 
 great accomplishments, a thorough Liberal in politics 
 and religion, whose absorbing desire was to see France 
 occupying an intellectual primacy in Europe. Partly to 
 forward this consummation she resumed her intimacy 
 with her old playmate, now Emperor, and she exerted 
 over him an influence always directed to promote worthy 
 objects. (The improvement of the higher education of 
 France, and the re-establishment of scientific missions 
 during the closing half of the Second Empire, were largely 
 due to her, and among these missions was Renan's 
 to Phoenicia, which, with a heart softened towards the 
 empire, he accepted, receiving at the same time the Cross 
 of the Legion of Honour. ") 
 
RE NAN. 89 
 
 A rather curious coincidence of circumstances favoured 
 the success of his Phoenician mission. In the autumn of 
 i860 there were very serious disturbances in the Lebanon. 
 That mysterious tribe, the Druses, had been massacring 
 their old enemies, the Maronites, whom, as they were, 
 after a fashion, Latin Christians, the French government, 
 following its traditional policy in Syria, decided on pro- 
 tecting; and the massacre was followed by a very san- 
 guinary one of the Christian population of Damascus. 
 After the usual diplomatic controversy, a French force 
 landed in August at Beyrout, and was there when Renan 
 reached it in October. He found himself not only among 
 his countrymen, but the French general in command told 
 off little contingents of soldiers to protect his person and 
 give him manual aid in the conduct of his explorations. 
 The results of these, and they yielded him much more 
 in the way of Phoenician memorials and monuments than 
 of inscriptions, were given to the world in the magnificent 
 volume, with an accompanying one of plates, the Mission 
 de Phenicie^ the issue of which began in 1864. The 
 book is geographical, topographical, historical, ethnologi- 
 cal, and descriptive, as well as archaeological, and much of 
 it is interesting to the general reader. From his observa- 
 tion of two different types among the inhabitants Renan 
 was confirmed in an old theory of his, that although the 
 language of the Phoenicians was Semitic, they were 
 originally Hamitic, and of a race kindred to that of the 
 population of ancient Egypt. If this were so, Renan's 
 theory of the monotheism of the Semites would not be 
 disturbed by the polytheism of the Phoenicians. 
 
 But for Renan his Syrian sojourn afforded an episode 
 
90 LIFE OF 
 
 of travel far more important to himself and to the 
 world than his excursions Jn search of inscriptions and 
 monuments in Phoenicia. He had now the long-wished- 
 for opportunity to visit the Holy Land, and to famili- 
 arise himself with the aspects of regions and places 
 associated for ever with the biography of the Founder 
 of Christianity. His affectionate and sympathetic sister 
 had accompanied him and Madame Renan to Beyrout, 
 and she remained with him when his wife was forced 
 to return home. It was in his sister's company that 
 he wrote the first draft of his Life of Jesus, during 
 a holiday sojourn on a spur of the Lebanon, some 
 eight hours from Beyrout, and near Byblos, the head- 
 quarters of the ancient worship of Adonis. She had 
 listened to the story with sympathy and admiration, and 
 his Phoenician explorations being finished, both of them 
 were preparing to return home, when she was struck 
 down by fever. Almost at the same moment Renan 
 succumbed to the same disease and lay unconscious by 
 her side. When, thirty-two hours afterwards, he recovered 
 consciousness his sister was a corpse. Her memory will 
 long be kept green by her brother's touching and beautiful 
 dedication of the Vie de Jesus^ which made its first 
 appearance a year or two after her death. 
 
 " To THE PURE SOUL OF MY SISTER HeNRIETTE, 
 WHO DIED AT ByBLOS, 24TH SEPTEMBER, 1861. 
 
 " In the bosom of God, where thou art resting, dost thou re- 
 member those long days at Ghazir, when alone with thee I wrote 
 the pages inspired by the places which we had visited together ? 
 Thou wast silent by my side, and each page was read and copied 
 by thee as soon as written, while sea, villages, ravines, and mountains 
 
RENAN, 91 
 
 were unrolled at our feet. When the dazzling light gave way to 
 the innumerable starry host, thy subtle and delicate questions, thy 
 discreet doubts, led me back to the sublime object of the thoughts 
 of both of us. One day thou saidst to me that thou wouldst love 
 the book because it had been written along with thee, and also 
 because it was a book after thine own heart. If sometimes thou 
 wert afraid of the narrow judgment which the frivolous might pass 
 on it, thou wast ever persuaded that the truly devout would end by 
 taking pleasure in it. Amid these pleasant meditations death struck 
 at both of us with his wing. At one and the same time the slumber 
 of fever seized on us ! When I awoke I was alone. Now thou 
 sleepest in the land of Adonis, near holy Byblos, and the sacred 
 waters with which the women celebrating the antique mysteries 
 came to mingle their tears. To me, O kind genius, to me whom 
 thou didst love, reveal the truths which subjugate death, which 
 prevent us from fearing it, and which make us almost love it." 
 
 Sad and solitary, but restored to health, and carrying 
 with him the manuscript of the Vie de Jesus in its first 
 form, Renan returned to France after a twelvemonth's 
 absence. 
 
CHAPTER VI. 
 
 [1861-64.] 
 
 T^HE College de France, which is intimately connected 
 with Kenan's biography, was founded by Francis I., 
 who, whatever his faults, was a patron of the Renaissance. 
 The study of Greek and Hebrew, though the languages 
 of the Old and New Testaments, was considered by the 
 University of Paris to be dangerous, as tending to destroy 
 the authority of the Vulgate, and chairs of Greek and 
 Hebrew were first instituted in his new college by 
 Francis I. Subsequent Kings of France added new 
 chairs to the institution, which, remaining independent 
 of the University, was allowed considerable liberty of 
 teaching, and thus attracted eminent men to its chairs 
 and studious youth to listen to their prelections. The 
 only control over it was exercised by the government. 
 After somewhat less than three centuries since its 
 establishment the teaching of the College de France, 
 with its twenty-five chairs, embraced nearly the whole 
 area of modern culture, and the list of its illustrious 
 professors ranges from Ramus in the sixteenth century 
 
LIFE OF RENAN. 93 
 
 to Cuvier, Cousin, Ampere, Burnouf, and Michelet in the 
 nineteenth. 
 
 The chair of Hebrew and cognate Semitic languages 
 became vacant in 1857 through the death of M. Quatre- 
 mere, Renan's old teacher. The way in which such 
 vacancies were filled was the following : — When the 
 Minister of Public Instruction decided on having the 
 vacancy filled he asked the whole body of professors 
 to furnish him with the names of those whom they 
 thought most fitted for the chair. The authorship of 
 the History of the Semitic Languages, to say nothing of 
 his other writings, gave Renan an undoubted claim to be 
 named as a candidate. ' One of the chief dreams of his 
 early life was to restore to France the place in the 
 cultivation of Semitic studies which she had filled until 
 the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, when it was 
 surrendered to Germany and Holland. To attempt this 
 restoration the way lay through the Chair of Hebrew in 
 the College de France, and Renan resolved never to 
 accept any other. Accordingly, on the death of Quatre- 
 m^re he paid the customary visits to the professors of 
 the college, and informed them of his aspiration. For 
 some reason or other several years elapsed before 
 the Minister of Public Instruction decided on filling 
 the vacancy, and in the interval the duties of the chair 
 were performed provisionally. At last the Minister 
 asked that candidates should be nominated. Both the 
 professors of the College and the Academic des Inscrip- 
 tions placed Renan at the head of their lists, and in 
 January 1862 he was appointed to the chair. 
 
 By his brilliant and somewhat daring contributions to 
 
94 LIFE OF 
 
 periodicals, of which two collections in volume-form had 
 been issued and were very popular, as well as by his 
 versions of, and dissertations on, the Book of Job and 
 the Song of Solomon, Renan was known to the studious 
 youth of academic Paris as a foremost champion of 
 freedom of thought in religious matters. The Imperial 
 Government, on the other hand, leant upon the Church 
 and the priesthood; a severe religious orthodoxy was at 
 least professedly, and in the case of the Empress Eugenie 
 no doubt sincerely, dominant in high places. This gave 
 a piquancy to the announcement that Renan's intro- 
 ductory lecture was to be on the part played by the 
 Semitic nations in the history of civilisation. On the 
 2 1 St February 1862, the hall in which the lecture was 
 delivered was crowded with eager listeners, many of them 
 young. Renan's thesis was one with which his readers 
 were already familiar. There was the old contrast 
 between the Indo-European (Aryan) and the Semitic 
 races, a contrast, except in one respect, very unfavour- 
 able to the latter. Monotheism, once more Renan 
 declared, the Indo-European races owe to the Semitic, 
 an enormous debt of incalculable value. With the 
 Roman Empire the myths of paganism had become 
 mere amusing stories, stripped of all religious or moral 
 significance. It was then that the civilised world was 
 confronted by Judaism, with its clear and simple faith in 
 divine unity. The Jews had a law, a book replete with 
 an elevated moral sentiment and a lofty religious poetry, 
 which gave them an incontestable superiority over the 
 Indo-Europeans. Indeed, it was possible that the world 
 would have been converted to Judaism had not there 
 
RE NAN, 9$ 
 
 sprung from it Christianity. Then came the following 
 passage, the words italicised being those which most of 
 all shocked the orthodox: — 
 
 " In the midst of the enormous fermentation in which the Jewish 
 nation was steeped under the last of the Asmonseans, the most extra- 
 ordinary moral event of which history has preserved the memory, 
 took place in Galilee. A reform of Judaism, one so profound and 
 so peculiar that it was in truth a complete creation,, was worked by 
 a man to whom no other can be compared, a vian so great that^ 
 alihongh in this place everything ought to be judged from the 
 poifit of view of positive science ^ I should not wish to contradict those 
 who^ struck by the exceptional character of. his work, call him God. 
 Having attained the highest religious altitude ever reached by man 
 before him, having arrived at a contemplation of God as standing to 
 himself in the relation of father to son, devoted to his work with 
 a complete forgetfulness of everything else and an abnegation of self 
 which has never been practised on so lofty a scale, Jesus founded 
 the everlasting religion of humanity, the religion of the spirit, 
 liljerated from everything belonging to priesthood, to ceremonial, 
 and to ritual, accessible to every caste, in one word, absolute. 
 * Woman, believe me, the hour cometh when ye shall neither in 
 this mountain nor yet at Jerusalem worship the Father. . . , The 
 hour cometh . , . when the true worshipper shall worship the Father 
 in spirit and in truth.' Constituted was now the fruitful centre from 
 which for centuries mankind was to derive its joys, its hopes, its 
 consolations, its motives for righteousness." 
 
 Sprung from Judaism and Christianity in the brain and 
 heart of the Arabian prophet, a third Semitic religion, 
 the Mohammedan, converted, and in Africa is converting, 
 large masses of mankind to monotheism. But whatever 
 its services in the past, Renan from study, and from 
 personal observation of its working in Syria, had come to 
 the conclusion that Islam is hostile to science and to 
 
96 LIFE OF 
 
 civilisation, and that war must be waged against it " until 
 the last son of Ishmael shall have died of misery, or shall 
 have been relegated by terror to the depths of the 
 desert." "Islam is the most complete negation of 
 Europe." And to Europe, to Europe alone, Renan 
 proclaimed, the future belongs. \ The religion which 
 Europe is to diffuse throughout the world has nothing 
 to do with ancient dogmas; it means a recognition of 
 freedom and of the rights of man. In its theological 
 sense it is to become less and less Jewish, and more and 
 more the religion of the heart, divorced from any con- 
 nection with the State. ( Science was to be the religion of^ 
 the head. ^ 
 
 The lecture delighted the youthful among his hearers. 
 They saw very clearly that Renan had broken with the 
 past and present of the Roman Catholic Church, and 
 indeed with all Christian churches] and that in spite of 
 his eloquent eulogium on Christianity as the everlasting 
 religion, he was in reality substituting for it the religion 
 of science. 'The admirers among his student-hearers, not 
 content with applauding his lecture, enthusiastically con- 
 ducted him home in triumph. It was with other feelings 
 that Renan's deliverance was regarded by the ecclesiastics 
 who had the ear of the Emperor or of the Empress. 
 The tone and tenor of his prelection were utterly dis- 
 tasteful to them ; they looked on it as a gage of defiance 
 flung in their faces. Two passages in it were obnoxious 
 to them: the one in which the separation of Church 
 and State was foreshadowed ; the other, that in which the 
 Founder of Christianity was spoken of as a "man"; 
 though, as Renan afterwards reminded them, he had on 
 
RENAiY. 97 
 
 his side the authority of St. Peter, who, addressing a 
 Jerusalem audience on the day of Pentecost, had called 
 Jesus "a man approved of God among you" (Acts ii. 
 22). Cardinals and bishops had audiences of the 
 _Empress, and insisted that Renan should be punished. 
 LFour days after the delivery of the opening lecture 
 Kenan's course was suspended by authority. 
 
 Renan took the suspension with philosophical calm- 
 ness. He addressed to his fellow-professors of the 
 College de France a long and admirable defence of him- 
 self, in which not an angry word escaped him. He 
 referred to the subject in a letter written at the time to 
 Mr., now Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, who had made 
 his acquaintance some years before, and who has given 
 in an interesting volume,^ memorials of an acquaintance 
 with Renan which ripened into friendship. 
 
 "It is,'' Renan wrote, *'the Emperor whom I most willingly 
 forgive. Amid the burning passions which rend the country, his 
 position is one of the most difficult. Every act of his which has a 
 liberal tendency recoils upon him as a misdemeanour. In nomin- 
 ating me, in spite of the energetic opposition of the Catholic party, 
 he acted almost courageously. . . . No other French government 
 would have done as he did. " 
 
 Being suspended, not dismissed, Renan was to receive 
 his salary until further notice, and he honourably resolved 
 to earn it. As he told the students at the time, his opening 
 lecture was exceptional in its subject. For the future he 
 would confine himself strictly to the special duty of his 
 chair, that of giving instruction in Hebrew and other 
 
 ^ Ernest Renan: In Me?noriam. By the Right Honourable Sir 
 Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, G.C.S.I., F.R.S. (1893). 
 
 7 
 
98 LIFE OF 
 
 Semitic grammar and philology, and he expected only 
 a small class of pupils. Now that he was suspended he 
 invited those who would have attended his class at the 
 College de France to come to him at his domicile, and 
 receive the instruction which he was debarred from 
 giving them officially. The invitation was accepted, and 
 for years this domiciliary instruction was given. The sub- 
 sequent story of the chair itself wdll be told further on. 
 
 For a year after the suspension from his chair Renan 
 was busy completing his Life of Jesus. It appeared a 
 little before the summer of 1863. The book was the 
 w^ork of a poet and an artist, as much as of a patient and 
 erudite scholar. To long and thorough study of the 
 texts had been added personal knowledge of the scenery 
 and other aspects of the Holy Land, viewed, too, in the 
 light thrown on it by its ancient describers as it was in 
 the time of Jesus. The old landscapes were revived on 
 Kenan's canvas, the village life, the life of the synagogue; 
 the Jerusalem of the Herods was brought near to us in 
 the clear mirror of Renan's pages, and the panorama of 
 Jesus's Palestine was unrolled to the music of a style 
 incomparable in its union of simplicity and beauty. (_In 
 accordance with a deep conviction which years before he 
 had arrived at, and except in the very few cases in which 
 the marvellous is not necessarily the miraculous, Renan 
 rejected, with the supernatural element in the birth and 
 biography of Jesus, the miracles which in the Gospels 
 he was recorded to have worked. _) On the other hand, 
 Renan brought into play an imagination capable of 
 working genuine wonders when aided by a lynx-eyed 
 as well as far-extending research. The many gaps 
 
RENAN. 99 
 
 in the gospel narratives he fills up with marvellous 
 ingenuity. Out of their contradictions and variations he 
 evolves a coherent and consistent whole. He gathers 
 into a focus their scattered rays of light. Their often 
 vague topography and their hazy chronology, he seems to 
 rectify with admirable ingenuity. Almost more wonderful 
 is the skill with which he illuminates his subject by 
 hints and statements gathered from the most unlikely 
 sources. Of course he made use of the Old Testament, 
 and of those Jewish apocalyptic books the composition 
 of which began after the cessation of prophecy — to say 
 nothing of the Fathers, of the fragments of ancient and 
 mostly lost gospels, apocryphal and other, of Talmudic 
 literature which he had diligently explored with unex- 
 pectedly successful results, of Philo and Josephus, and 
 of modern explorations in Palestine. What is still more 
 unexpected, and to quote only two of the instances of his 
 successful vigilance, Renan finds in the chronicles of the 
 Crusaders testimony borne to the retention, in the Middle 
 Ages, by the Lake of Gennesareth, of 'a reputation for a 
 piscine wealth as great as when Peter and Andrew and the 
 sons of Zebedee cast their nets into it before they were 
 made fishers of men. From a Roman inscription found in 
 Algeria Renan deduces the remote conclusion that the 
 soldiers of Pontius Pilate who outraged Jesus so grossly, 
 were auxiliaries, and, not like the legionaries, Roman 
 citizens, who would not have been guilty of such 
 indignities. The fascination of his style tempted some 
 people, especially the Germans — a nation v^hos^ forte is not 
 style — to regard Renan as superficial. But he was justly 
 appreciated by such a scholar as Mommsen, who, says 
 
loo LIFE OF 
 
 Sir Mountstuart Grant Duff, " called him, in conversation 
 with me as far back as January 1862, a true savant in 
 spite of his beautiful style ! " From an earnest desire to 
 figure to himself as flesh and blood realities the person- 
 ages of his Christian epic, and to give completeness to 
 the fragmentary Gospel narratives, Renan is often con- 
 jectural. His pages are full of such expressions as 
 " perhaps, probably, no doubt," and so forth, and a faint 
 hint is expanded and transformed into a copious and 
 confident statement. But these conjectures and ex- 
 pansions are the handiwork not only of a man of genius 
 but of one whose great object is to bring with perfect 
 clearness before himself, and before his readers, the 
 personages of whom, and the incidents of which, he is 
 writing. Renan has evidently done his utmost to shake 
 himself free of prepossessions and prejudices. He has 
 not, like the heterodox Strauss or the modern orthodox 
 biographers of Jesus, a preconceived theory to uphold. 
 He is no advocate, holding and speaking from a brief. 
 Here really seems to be a man who, treating of one of 
 the most controverted and difficult as well as the highest 
 of themes, has no object but the attainment of truth. 
 Daring though the^_book be, it is not in the slightest 
 degree polemical. \ More than once, mdeed, Renan 
 speaks of the pain given him by the thought that he may 
 possibly be undermining the priceless faith of honest 
 believers; and he seems perfectly sincere in the expression 
 of the hope that they will neglect his Life of Jesus, and 
 leave it to be read only by scholars and thinkers. 
 
 To the book Renan prefixed an introduction^n his 
 authorities. Of course they were chiefly the Four 
 

 RENAN, loi 
 
 Gospels, but his matured opinions on their genuineness 
 and value were given in a subsequent volume of the 
 Origines, and may be reserved until it calls for notice. 
 To these Gospels had been added one of his own. The 
 personality of Jesus came out with startling distinctness 
 as Renan traversed the regions in which the Gospel 
 history is laid: — 
 
 I "Thus it was," he writes, "that the whole of that history, which 
 
 I in the distance seemed to hover in the clouds of an unreal world, 
 — acquired a substantial body and a solidity which astonished me. 
 The striking agreement between the text of the Gospels and the 
 localities, the marvellous harmony between the Gospel-ideal and the 
 landscape which had served it for a frame, came upon me like a 
 revelation. I had before my eyes a fifth Gospel, mutilated but still 
 legible, and across the narratives of Matthew and Mark, instead of 
 an abstract being, who might have been supposed never to have 
 existed, I saw, living and moving, a human figure worthy of all 
 admiration." 
 
 In the Galilee of Renan's visit he found traces of the 
 tree-clad, verdant, flowery, fruitful, and populous land 
 which it was before occupied and made desolate by " the 
 demon of Islam," nor could this mar the aspects of the 
 mountains on which Jesus loved to muse, to worship, 
 and to pray. The race which, with foreign admixtures, 
 unsophisticated while intelligent, inhabited Galilee in 
 the olden time was as far superior to the narrow-minded 
 and bigoted Jews of Jerusalem as its arid environs were 
 inferior in picturesqueness and beauty to the northern 
 region in which Jesus was born and bred. He grew to 
 maturity in constant contact with Nature, and its products 
 furnished him afterwards with many an illustration of doc- 
 trine. Almost certainly he knew no language except his 
 
I02 LIFE OF 
 
 own, the Aramaic dialect generally spoken in Palestine, but 
 in that sequestered Nazareth he learned much that Athens 
 and Rome could not have taught him. From reading 
 the prophets he learned to value a pure heart and a humble 
 mind far more than the ritual which he had seen in 
 operation during his boyish visits with his parents to 
 Jerusalem. Doctrines of the same kind, taught by such 
 great Rabbis as Hillel, were orally promulgated in his 
 time. The Jewish mind was deeply stirred by hopes 
 and anticipations of the coming of a Messiah, and was 
 much occupied with attempts to discover, from supposed 
 Messianic prophecies in the Old Testament, in what 
 form the promised Deliverer would appear. The 
 mind of the young Jesus was specially impressed by the 
 Book of Daniel, and the apocalyptic vision in which a 
 kingdom never to be destroyed was to be set up by God. 
 The Ancient of Days gave everlasting dominion over all 
 the nations to " one like the Son of Man," the appella- 
 tion by which Jesus afterwards loved to call himself. 
 
 What were the first steps of Jesus in his prophetic 
 career, Renan does not venture to conjecture. But he 
 supposes that the earlier religious conception of Jesus was 
 that of God as a father. " That is his great original act; in 
 that he nowise belongs to his race. Nor Jew nor Mussul- 
 man ever understood this delicious theology of love. The 
 God of Jesus is not the terrible governor who slays us, 
 who damns us when it pleases him. The God of Jesus 
 is Our Father. The God of Jesus is not the unimpartial 
 despot who has chosen Israel for his people, and protects 
 them against all the world. He is the God of mankind. " 
 The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, 
 
KENAN. 103 
 
 these and what follows from them were the themes of the 
 first preaching of Jesus, and in the Synagogue open to all, 
 with an audience ready to listen to any one who had any- 
 thing to say, he found his first pulpit. A group of 
 sympathetic hearers, men and women, gathered round 
 him. In his twenty-eighth year he was subjected to- 
 a new and stimulating influence, that of a man, not of 
 a book or of current apothegms. He was attracted to 
 the terrible Baptist declaiming on the banks of the 
 Jordan. He now learned the effect that could be produced 
 on the multitude by an earnest preacher. He heard not 
 only the representatives of the two great religious parties, 
 Pharisees and Sadducees, told to their faces that they 
 were vipers, but something like a proclamation of the 
 doom of Judaism, when they were also told to be proud 
 no longer of their descent from Abraham, since the very 
 stones could be turned into children of Abraham. 
 John's imprisonment taught Jesus what the preacher 
 of a pure social morality might expect from the powers 
 of this world. After a sojourn in the desert, John being 
 thrown into prison, Jesus returned to his native Galilee. 
 Rejected by the people of Nazareth, his birthplace, he 
 settled at Capernaum, one of a group of little towns on 
 the western bank of the Lake of Gennesareth (Lake 
 of Tiberias, Sea of Galilee), the Windermere of 
 Palestine. Renan describes, in all its ancient beauty 
 and picturesqueness, the region in which this ever- 
 memorable sheet of water lies, and contrasts what it and 
 its banks were in the time of Jesus with their generally 
 desolate appearance as Renan saw them under the 
 withering rule of the unspeakable Turk. 
 
I04 LIFE OF 
 
 It was at Capernaum, Renan thinks, that really 
 'Cgan the public life of Jesus, then on the verge of his 
 thirtieth yearA His conceptions both of himself and of 
 the Kingdom of Heaven which he was to found, had 
 received a great expansion. He was the long-expected 
 Messiah, and the Father had given him authority over 
 all terrestrial things. He figured himself to be that 
 Son of Man to whom God was to delegate the 
 power of judging the world, and of governing it for 
 ever. The final catastrophe he proclaimed to be 
 approaching. This was one form of the advent of the 
 Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven, which 
 plays so great a part in the discourses of Jesus. But 
 there was another form of it on which he laid a still 
 greater stress — "The Kingdom of God is within you." 
 Every one who so transformed his nature as to make him- 
 self capable of embodying in act the pure and lofty 
 morality which Jesus taught, had the Kingdom of God 
 within him, and might look forward, without fear, 
 to the final catastrophe which should extirpate evil and 
 the wicked, and leave nothing but a Kingdom of 
 Heaven everywhere. / Renan regards the sojourn of 
 Jesus at Capernaum as the second period, and a very 
 happy one, of his career, y Here he was surrounded by 
 the believing disciples from whom he chose his apostles, 
 and by the devout women, some of whom followed him 
 until his death. The magnetism of his personality, and 
 the magic of his words, having gained them over, they 
 soon recognised in him the superhuman person whom he 
 represented himself to be, and they did whatever he bade 
 them. He preached or taught in parables throughout, 
 
RENAN. 105 
 
 in the little towns on the banks of the lake, sometimes from 
 a boat on the lake itself, occasionally on the mountain-side, 
 without dogma, without ritual; the Sermon on the Mount 
 being the summary of the doctrine which he taught. 
 His converts were chiefly among the poor, and he 
 announced that part of his mission was to preach his 
 Gospel to them. In them, in the outcast men and 
 women whom the Pharisees rejected, but who had 
 accepted him, in publicans and sinners, not in the rich 
 and powerful, lay his hope. Riches indeed were a need- 
 less encumbrance, since the great catastrophe was at 
 hand.r So passed the days of the sojourn at Capernaum ; 
 Jesus and his ** joyous company of children" being 
 described by Renan as leading an idylHc life^ 
 
 A point is now reached at which it seems opportune 
 to indicate Renan's views on two startling phenomena in 
 the career of Jesus, one of them the prediction, on the 
 fulfilment of which he insisted, of the approaching end 
 and judgment of the world; the other the series of miracles 
 which he is said to have worked. That Jesus was mis- 
 taken in predicting the end of the world as then near at 
 hand, goes without saying. But this mistake had a 
 powerful effect in strengthening the faith in him, and the 
 devotion to him, of his disciples who believed in his pro- 
 phetic accuracy, to say nothing of the generations which, 
 after his death, awaited his coming with a perfect assur- 
 ance of its approach. Yet it must be remembered, Renan 
 remarks, that although Jesus announced the approaching 
 consummation of all things, he framed a code of ethics 
 and gave directions to his apostles for continuing their mis- 
 sion, just as if he believed that the world was to endure. 
 
io6 LIFE OF 
 
 "There is no attempting to deny the existence of a contradiction 
 between the belief in the near approach of the end of the world, on 
 the one hand, and, on the other, the ethics habitually inculcated by 
 Jesus, and conceived as if a stable condition of humanity were con- 
 templated. It was precisely this contradiction which secured the 
 success of his work. The millenarian alone would have produced 
 nothing durable ; the moralist alone would have produced nothing 
 that had potency. Millenarianism gave the impulse, morality made 
 the future assured. Thus Christianity combined the two conditions 
 of great successes in this world, a revolutionary point of departure 
 and the possibility of continuing to live. Whatever is intended to 
 succeed should supply these two wants, for the world desires at once 
 lO alter and to last. While announcing an unparalleled subversion 
 of human affairs, Jesus proclaimed the principles on which for 
 eighteen hundred years society has reposed." 
 
 In dealing with the question of miracles Renan felt 
 that he was treading on delicate ground. He could easily 
 have evaded the difficult problem by asserting that the 
 narratives of miracles in the Gospels did not form any part 
 of them in their original form, and had been intruded 
 into them by pious interpolations of the second Christian 
 generation. Allowance being made for many such in- 
 terpolations, it is however impossible, Renan declares, 
 with such testimony as is accumulated in the Gospels, not 
 to believe that Jesus played the part of a miracle-worker, 
 and Renan does not believe in miracles at all.\ Since he 
 thought so it was courageous and candid in him to speak 
 of Jesus as a "thaumaturgist," for Renan knew both that 
 the statement would give great offence even to friends, and 
 that it did not harmonise with the pure and lofty morality 
 of which he always, except in this case, represents Jesus 
 to have been a pattern. /But he accompanies his painful 
 admission with all sorts of reservations, modifications, 
 
RENAN. 107 
 
 and palliations. Every religious founder, from Buddha 
 to Mahomet, is believed by his followers to have worked 
 miracles. If Jesus had not been supposed to have 
 worked miracles his mission would have failed. He had 
 not that knowledge of the laws of nature which every 
 school-boy now possesses. He believed that his Father 
 in Heaven had bestowed on him all power over the lower 
 world, a power which he was even allowed to delegate to 
 his apostles. Many of his alleged miracles, moreover, were 
 cures of diseases, and the science of medicine being then 
 unknown in Judea, it was supposed that, disease being 
 often regarded as the work of demons in possession of 
 the bodies of the afflicted, it was part of the functions of a 
 man of superior sanctity to cure them. In such cases is 
 it not natural, Renan asks, that the contact of a saintly 
 personage should so work on the imagination of the 
 patient as to give him relief? Above all, those who 
 narrate the miracles tell of the frequent reluctance of 
 Jesus to attempt them, and on the injunction which he 
 sometimes lays on those whom he seems to have 
 cured not to spread abroad the news of their recovery. 
 On the whole, Renan thinks that if Jesus played the 
 part of a " thaumaturgist," it was much against his 
 will. 
 
 The third period of the career of Jesus opens with his, 
 important sojourn in Jerusalem, when he was in his 
 
 L thirty-second year, according to Renan's hypothesis. 
 With faith in himself and his mission growing more 
 intense with time, Jesus felt ever, greater repug- 
 nance for the narrow-minded Jews of Jerusalem, for 
 hypocritical Pharisees and sceptical Sadducees, for a 
 
io8 LIFE OF 
 
 formalist priesthood, and for the wrangling disputants 
 in the Temple, itself polluted by money-changers and 
 vendors of living things to be offered as sacrifices. \ The 
 effect produced on him by this visit to Jerusalem was 
 such, according to Renan, that Jesus now resolved to 
 break for ever with Judaism and to pronounce the death- 
 warrant of the Law. Hence the beautiful parable of the 
 Good Samaritan, hence the memorable close of the 
 dialogue with the Samaritan woman, already quoted, 
 hence the scattered indications in his discourses 
 that, expecting nothing from the Jews as a nation, he 
 looked to the conversion of the Gentiles. In this frame 
 of mind, " full of revolutionary ardour " Renan phrases it, 
 Jesus returned to Galilee, and in the same frame of mind 
 left his native region for ever to proceed to Jerusalem for 
 the Feast of Tabernacles, which was celebrated at the 
 autumnal equinox. Disputes with Pharisees visiting 
 Galilee were followed by argumentations with the 
 Pharisees in Jerusalem which issued in their attempt to 
 stone him. '^During this last period of the life of Jesus 
 Renan fancies that he sees a change in the demean- 
 our and disposition of Jesus. ) Jerusalem, which had 
 neglected him, now persecuted him, and he saw no hope 
 of the advent of the Kingdom of God unless when he 
 himself should come in glory to reward his disciples and 
 to punish those who had rejected him. The tone of the 
 Sermon on the Mount was changed for one of denuncia- 
 tion. Renan even speaks of him as a "sombre giant." 
 His original gentleness disappeared. He was subject to 
 fits of agonised depression. His disciples themselves 
 were occasionally afraid of him. 
 
RENAN, 109 
 
 "His dissatisfaction with any resistance led him to actions 
 inexplicable and apparently absurd," such as the denunciation of 
 the fig-tree for bearing nothing but leaves at a time when it could 
 not bear fruit. " It was not that his nobleness of nature was on 
 the wane, but that his struggle maintained in the name of the ideal 
 against reality became insupportable. Contact with the earth 
 lacerated and revolted him. He was irritated by the obstacles 
 which confronted him. His conception of himself as Son of God 
 became confused and exaggerated. He felt the application of the 
 fatal law which condemns the idea to fall away as soon as it 
 attempts the conversion of men. By coming into contact with men 
 they lowered him to their own level. The tone which he had 
 adopted could not be kept up for more than a few months. It was 
 time for death to come and put an end to a situation the tension of 
 which had become excessive, time for it to come and release him 
 from the impossibilities of a path which led nowhere, and by 
 delivering him from too protracted a probation, conduct him, 
 thenceforth incapable of sin, to celestial serenity." 
 
 The remainder of the book contains a narrative of the 
 intrigues of the enemies of Jesus at Jerusalem and of the 
 other circumstances which resulted in his death on the 
 cross. The sad story is vividly told, and is elucidated 
 from the stores of Renan's extensive knowledge of things 
 Jewish; but in this case the Gospel narratives, taken 
 altogether, are ample and continuous, and do not readily 
 lend themselves to much originality of treatment. 
 
 Two points in Renan's later narrative may be touched 
 on. He suggests, or rather hijqts, not at all acceptably, 
 that what he regarded as theumaginary resurrection at 
 Bethany-Vthe report of which as a reality so exasperated 
 the Jewish hierarchy against Jesus — was a pious fraud 
 contrived by Mary and Martha to confirm the claim 
 of Jesus to superhuman power. Then as regards the 
 
no LIFE OF 
 
 Eucharistic procedure of Jesus on the occasion of the 
 Last Supper, Renan takes advantage of the singular 
 silence on the subject in the account given in the 
 Gospel of St. John to suggest that it was an ^observance 
 long practised by Jesus^leaving it to be implied that 
 on this point the narrative of the Synoptics is redundant. 
 Such is a brief and meagre outline of Kenan's famous 
 work, an outline intended to indicate to those who have 
 not read it his method of dealing with the Gospel narra- 
 tives, his theory of the spiritual development of Jesus, 
 and other characteristics of the epoch-making volume 
 which render it such a contrast to the modern orthodox 
 biographies of the Founder of Christianity. Finally, in 
 Kenan's own words, so far at least as I can reproduce 
 in English his inimitable French, let there be given the 
 closing passage of the book : — 
 
 *' The sublime personage, who still with each day presides over 
 the destiny of the world, it is allowable to call Divine, not in the 
 sense that Jesus absorbed all that is divine, but in the sense that it 
 is he by whom his species has been made to take the greatest step 
 towards the Divine. Collective humanity presents an assemblage 
 of mean and egoistic beings superior to the animal only in that their 
 egoism is more the result of reflection. But in the midst of this 
 uniform vulgarity there rise towards the sky columns which attest a 
 nobler destiny. Jesus is the loftiest of those columns which indicate 
 to man whence it is that he comes and whither he ought to 
 tend. In Jesus has been concentrated and condensed all that is 
 good and elevated in our nature. He was not incapable of sin. 
 The passions which he conquered are those against which we our- 
 selves make war. No angel of God other than his own righteous 
 conscience, comforted him. He was tempted by no Satan other than 
 the satan who is in the heart of each of us. And just as several of 
 his great characteristics have been lost to us through the defects of his 
 
REN AN. Ill 
 
 disciples, so too it is probable that many of his shortcomings have 
 been concealed. But never was there any one who so much as he 
 made the interests of humanity predominant in his life over the 
 pettiness of self-love. Unreservedly devoted to his idea, to it he 
 subordinated everything, to such an extent that towards the end of 
 his life the universe itself ceased for him to exist. It was because he 
 was thus possessed by a heroic will that he conquered heaven. 
 There never was a man, with perhaps the exception of Buddha, 
 who to that extent trampled under his feet the family, the joys and 
 cares of this world. He lived only in his Father and in the divine 
 mission which he was convinced it was for him to fulfil. 
 
 *'It is for us, children ever, condemned to impotence, who work 
 and do not reap, who will never see the fruit of what we have sown, 
 it is for us to bend the knee before these demi-gods. They knew 
 how to do what we know not how to do — they could create, affirm, 
 act. Will there be a renascence of that grand originality, or will 
 the world be content henceforth to follow the road opened for us by 
 those daring creators of the antique ages ? We know not. But 
 whatever may be the unexpected phenomena of the future, Jesus 
 will never be surpassed. His worship will unceasingly renew its 
 youth; his legends will be the source of endless tears; the best of 
 hearts will be melted by his sufferings ; all the ages will proclaim 
 that among the sons of men there has not been born one greater 
 than Jesus." 
 
 So closes the first volume of the Origins of Christianity, 
 the great work which Renan had been, in one way or 
 another, preparing for many years. The success of the 
 Life of Jesus was immediate and immense. Five months 
 after its publication Renan told Sir M. E. Grant Duff that 
 when the eleventh edition, then being issued, was disposed 
 of, there would be 66,000 copies m circulation, and that 
 there were already two German and two Dutch translations 
 of it, with one Italian. An English translation appeared in 
 the year of the publication of the original. An eighteenth 
 
112 LIFE OF 
 
 edition is before me, and it is credibly reported that of the 
 work in one way or another half a "million copies have been 
 circulated. A very numerous class, in France and out of 
 it, who could not accept the Christology of the orthodox 
 churches, felt that Christianity and its Founder deserved 
 other treatment than that received from Voltaire, and 
 they welcomed Renan's book as an adequate appre- 
 ciation of the character and career of Jesus with the 
 discredited supernatural element in his biography ex- 
 cluded. jEven because Jesus ceased in Renan's pages to 
 be God, he could be sympathised with and understood 
 as a man, a unique man, yet one of like passions with our- 
 selves. What else was required to complete the success of 
 the book was supplied by the exquisite art displayed in 
 the portrait of Jesus, in the sympathetic sketches of his 
 followers, in the picturesqueness of the description of his 
 and their surroundings, in the charm and music of a 
 style of magical fascination, and in the new light thrown 
 on the Gospel narratives by Renan's unwearied vigilance 
 of research. 
 
 But that which constituted for the mass of readers 
 a powerful attraction, aroused the wrathful indigna- 
 tion of the orthodox everywhere, and especially of the 
 Roman Catholic Church in France. Renan's possible 
 Jesus was preferred by multitudes to the impossible Jesus 
 of orthodoxy, but the spokesmen of Roman CathoHcism 
 treated Renan as an arch-blasphemer who had made of 
 the second person of the Trinity a mere peccable 
 man. French CathoHcism could not bring Renan 
 to the stake, but it exhausted the modern methods 
 of persecution. Archbishops and bishops fulminated 
 
RENAN. 113 
 
 against him in their charges, and an innumerable host of 
 vituperative and sometimes Ubellous pamphleteers de- 
 nounced him as actually bent on bringing about the reign 
 of the devil upon earth. One jealously orthodox lady 
 sent him periodically a missive containing only the brief 
 warning, " There is a hell ! " These denunciations 
 continued for months, and though Renan bore them 
 with silent equanimity, they issued in one result of a kind 
 more disagreeable to him than the ravings of bigotry. At 
 Court the Life of Jesus had been received, not with 
 favour, but with perhaps unexpected toleration. That 
 pillar of the Roman Catholic Church in France, the 
 Empress Eugenie, refused to attempt to stop the pub- 
 lication of the book, and even said to Madame 
 Cornu, who reported to Sir M. E. Grant Duff the 
 Imperial lady's remark, " It will do no harm to those 
 who believe in Christ, and to those who do not it will do 
 good." But the persistent, the passionate protests of the 
 Roman Catholic hierarchy told at last on the Emperor, 
 who looked on the support of the Church as one of the 
 bulwarks of his throne, and who, as Renan said, never 
 took a step forward without soon afterwards taking a step 
 backwards. Renan's free-speaking, in his inaugural lecture 
 as Professor of Hebrew at the College de France, had led 
 to his suspension. In deference to the loud and long-con- 
 tinued clamours against his Life of Jesus, he was now to 
 be deprived of his chair. Early in June 1864, nearly a 
 twelvemonth after the appearance of the book, there 
 appeared in the Moniteur a report addressed to the 
 Emperor by the Minister of Public Instruction. This 
 functionary recommended the establishment of a new 
 
 8 
 
114 LIFE OF 
 
 chair of Comparative Grammar and Philology in the 
 College de France. The salary of the new chair not 
 having appeared in the Budget, it was to be furnished 
 from the funds voted for the chair of Hebrew. This 
 chair had not been occupied for two years, and the 
 Minister very ungraciously spoke of the anomaly involved 
 in the reception of a salary for duties which were not 
 performed, ignoring the fact that, since his suspension, 
 Renan had been giving instruction, twice a week, at his 
 own house, to those who would have attended his prelections 
 had he been allowed to perform the duties of his chair 
 at the College de France. As a compensation to the 
 thus deprived professor the Minister proposed that Renan 
 should be appointed to the post of assistant-director in 
 the manuscript department of the Bibliothbque Imperiale, 
 " where his special erudition would enable him to 
 render real service to the public." Imperial decrees 
 followed, embodying the recommendations of the re- 
 port. This was in effect to deprive Renan of his pro- 
 fessorship, since it was not legal for an official of the 
 Biblioth^que Imperiale to be at the same time a professor 
 in the service of the State. It was impossible for Renan to 
 accept in silence his virtual dismissal, and the offer of com- 
 pensation attached to it. He addressed to the Minister a 
 dignified letter, declining both to resign his professorship 
 and to accept the new position offered him. He pointed out 
 that he had really been discharging the duties of his chair. 
 ^He added, with a touch of excusable if rather bitter sarcasm, 
 "Science measures desert by the results produced, not by 
 the more or less punctual execution of a regulaition, and if 
 ever you reproach a scholar with not earning the slender 
 
c 
 
 RENAN, 115 
 
 sum allotted to him, believe, M. le Ministre, that he will 
 give you the reply which 1 now give you, following an 
 illustrious example: Pecunia tua tecum sif^ — a judiciously 
 abridged version of the Apostle Peter's apostrophe to 
 Simon Magus, Pecunia tua tecum sit in perditionem^ the 
 rendering of which in our authorised version, " Thy 
 money perish with thee " (Acts viii. 20), is not easily, 
 as in the case of the Vulgate, robbed of its chief sting. In 
 a few days appears a final Imperial decree, setting forth 
 that after having been relieved of his professorial func- 
 tions at the College de France, and appointed to a post in 
 the Biblioth^que Imperiale, Renan has declined to accept 
 the post, and asserts that he still retains the first appoint- 
 ment, therefore his Majesty the Eirperor announces that 
 Renan's appointment to the Biblioth^que Impdriale is 
 revoked, and that his appointment to the College de 
 France remains revoked. Renan was now thrown again 
 on his own resources. His former post in the great 
 Bibliotheque he had resigned when appointed to the 
 Phoenician mission, and thus he had no longer an ofiicial 
 income. Fortunately, the pecuniary results of his highly 
 successful Life of Jesus were considerable. 
 
 Of course the chiefs of French criticism bestowed on 
 the Life of Jesus a reception very different from the 
 long-drawn howl of execration with which it was 
 greeted by the representatives of French clericalism. 
 The review of it by Renan's friend, Sainte-Beuve, was 
 a masterpiece of dexterous and appreciative criticism. 
 While warmly praising the extraordinary merit of the 
 book, he asserted that it pleased the sceptics just 
 as little as the believers. \The effect on members of 
 
ri6 LIFE OF 
 
 both these classes, and of a third indefinable one, he 
 illustrated in reports of confidences (possibly imaginary) 
 on the subject, bestowed on him by three friends. The first 
 is an orthodox Catholic, indignant but not abusive. He 
 maintains that to believe in the tradition of the Church, and 
 accept the universal assent based on the testimony of the 
 first and only witnesses of the Christian era, is as rational 
 as to believe in Renan's numerous hypotheses and 
 conjectures. The second friend is a sceptic who is 
 irritated by Renan's transcendent admiration of Jesus, 
 and complains that if Renan deprives Jesus of his God- 
 head he makes Jesus a man such as none has ever been, 
 above humanity, and divine in everything but name. 
 For his own part the sceptic likes the old Jesus quite as 
 much as the new. The third friend is a politician and 
 man of the world, who dilates on the benefits conferred 
 on society and individuals by the ancient faiths, and thinks 
 it therefore very dangerous to meddle with them. 
 
 The ablest of the criticisms by non-orthodox writers 
 on the Life of Jesus was that of Edmond Scherer, now 
 almost as well known in England as Sainte-Beuve. In 
 a few sentences he thus sums up the characteristic merits 
 of Renan's book:— )" He has sought for Christ beyond 
 the religion which bears his name, and the Gospel be- 
 neath what the Church has founded on it. He has 
 succeeded in restoring the physiognomy of Jesus, in^ 
 giving us a distinct, living, and verisimilar personality. "_[ 
 But with all his appreciation Scherer is not sparing of 
 more or less inculpatory criticisms. One of these com- 
 mends itself specially to English readers of the Life of 
 Jesus. Renan occasionally delineates Jesus from too 
 
RENAN. tiy 
 
 aesthetic a point of view, and even invests him with a 
 kind of prettiness which one is glad to see censured by a 
 French critic. The frequent use of the French equivalents 
 of such adjectives as delicious, delicate, etc., and the 
 reference to Jesus as "le charmant Docteur," are repugnant 
 to English taste if not to French. More important are 
 Scherer's comments on Kenan's treatment of the miracles 
 of Jesus. Scherer will not admit that ** Jesus lent himself, 
 though unwillingly, to play the part of a thaumaturgist." 
 His character, so full of simplicity and candour, so devoid 
 of personal ambition, refutes Kenan's theory. And why 
 detach the miracles of Jesus from the great mass of miracles 
 with traditions of which the history of the world is full? 
 Protestants accept the miracles of Jesus while they 
 wholly reject those recorded in the Acfa Sanctorum^ 
 though many of these are very much better attested 
 than any which figure in the New Testament. And 
 with regard to the miracles of the Acta Sanctorum Scherer 
 makes a very acute and pregnant remark. When reading 
 the lives of some of the greatest of the miracle-working 
 saints, Scherer observed that the simplest and most un- 
 pretending of the marvels, mostly cases of what were 
 more or less diseases of the nerves, are reported by those 
 v;ho were nearest to the time when the cures were 
 effected, and that as time rolled on the marvels become 
 more and more extravagant, in point of fact miraculous, 
 through the growth around them of legend upon legend. 
 Look at the miracles of the Gospels from this point 
 of view and the problem is almost solved. The true 
 miracles of Jesus were his cures of nervous and mental 
 diseases, the sufferers from which were supposed in his 
 
ii8 LIFE OF 
 
 time to be possessed by demons. Under certain psycho- 
 logical conditions, under the sway of an intense religious 
 life, there may have been manifested a curative power 
 which we cannot in these days study directly, because it 
 tends more and more to disappear with the growth of 
 modern civilisation. Admit these so-called miracles, and 
 reject as legendary all such as the stilling of a tempest or 
 the resuscitation of the dead. In this connection Scherer 
 thinks that while rejecting most of the discourses of 
 Jesus given in the fourth Gospel, Renan would have 
 done well also to reject the whole of its narrative, with 
 the exception of the four concluding chapters. In this 
 way the resurrection of Lazarus would have been rele- 
 gated to the world of legend, and Renan would not 
 have been tempted to hint that it was a pious fraud. 
 Let it be added that a cheap popular edition of the 
 Life of Jesus, abridged and simplified, was issued in 
 1864, the year after the appearance of the first, and 
 that Renan omitted in it the chapter on miracles and the 
 story of the resurrection of Lazarus. 
 
 In the correspondence of two more or less dis- 
 tinguished contemporaries of Renan in the French 
 world of letters, I have found some not uninteresting 
 references, made just after its appearance, to the Life 
 of Jesus. In one of his Lettres a une Inconnue the 
 sceptical and cynical Prosper Merimee speaks of the 
 book as at once " of little and of much importance." 
 It is a great blow dealt to the Catholic Church. So far 
 doubtless so good. But then, " the author is so terrified 
 at his own audacity in denying the divinity " of Jesus, 
 *' that he loses himself in hymns of admiration and adora- 
 
RE NAN. 119 
 
 tion, so that he is left without a philosophic sense with 
 which to judge the doctrine. However, it is interesting." 
 The other reference is in a letter of George Sand to 
 Prince Napoleon, with whom she was on terms of very 
 friendly intercourse, and who had asked for her opinion 
 of the book, one which he appears to have greatly 
 admired. Her remarks on Christianity in the following 
 passage must be taken in connection with the fact that, 
 when she wrote, the priesthood and Catholicism, partly 
 through the patronage extended to them under the 
 Empire, were regaining, even among the middle classes, 
 something of their old influence in the country of 
 Voltaire : — ■ 
 
 " M. Renan," she writes to her ^^ cher prince," *^has a little 
 lowered, on one side, his hero in my estimation, while raising him 
 on the other. I liked to persuade myself that Jesus had never 
 believed himself to be God, had never proclaimed himself to be 
 specially the Son of God, and that his belief in an avenging and 
 penal God was an apocryphal interpolation added to the Gospels. 
 This, at least, is the interpretation which I had always accepted 
 and even sought for ; but now comes M, Renan with the results of 
 deeper, more competent, more strenuous study and examination. 
 There is no need to be as learned as he is to be conscious in his 
 work of realities and appreciations forming a whole, and beyond 
 discussion. Were it only through its colouring and life, a perusal 
 of the book suffuses a clearer light on the age, the environment, the 
 man. 
 
 " I think then that he has seen Jesus better than we in our 
 anterior perceptions of him, and I accept the Jesus which he has 
 given us. Jesus is no longer a philosopher, a savant^ a genius 
 concentrating in himself what was best in the philosophy and 
 knowledge of his time; he is a dreamer, an enthusiast, a poet, 
 a man inspired and simple-minded. _ Be it so. I love him still, but 
 how small for me is the place which he fills in the history of ideas ! 
 
120 LIFE OF 
 
 how the importance of his personal work has diminished ! how 
 much more henceforth is his religion to be sustained by the accidents 
 of human events than by any of those great historical necessities 
 
 rhich we agree, and are a little compelled, to call providential. 
 , "Let us accept the true, even although it takes us by surprise and 
 alters our point of view. Verily, then, here is Jesus demolished ! 
 So much the worse for him ; for us, perhaps, so much the better ! 
 His religion has arrived at the point of doing at least as much evil 
 as it had done good, and since — whether it be M. Kenan's opinion 
 or not — I am to-day persuaded that it can only do evil, I think that 
 M. Kenan's book is the most useful that he could have written." 
 
 A few lines after this estimate of the Life of Jesus, 
 George Sand proceeds: — "Have you read the five or 
 six pages which M. Renan contributed last month to 
 the Revue des Deux Monies ? I like that article better 
 than anything which he has written hitherto. It is great, 
 great! I see, indeed, something to find fault with in 
 certain of its details; but it is so great that I resist 
 little and admire much." The piece which thus raised 
 George Sand's enthusiasm is a letter to Kenan's old 
 friend, Marcellin Berthelot, entitled "The Natural 
 Sciences and the Historical Sciences," republished 
 in Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques (1876). It 
 j is a stupendous illustration of Renan's favourite doctrine, 
 I that the universe does not exist in all its plenitude, but 
 I is ever growing, ever becoming, developing itself from 
 one unknowable in the direction of another. Carrying 
 himself in thought backward through innumerable aeons, 
 he arrives at a point in the illimitable past when the 
 All^ was a universe of atoms obeying only the laws of 
 mechanics, but containing the germ of all that was to 
 follow. The atoms become molecules, the molecules are 
 
RE NAN. 121 
 
 aggregated into suns, the suns throw off planets, each of 
 them having an evolution of its own. Among them is 
 our Mother Earth, something of the story of which is 
 told by geology and palaeontology until man arrives. 
 "Two elements, time and the tendency to progress, 
 explain the universe. Mens agitat fnolem. . . . Spiritus 
 inius alitJ^ Given time and progress, what may mankind 
 not attain to, w^hen science, a child of yesterday, shall 
 have grown with the growth of millions of aeons? The 
 universe will differ as much from the world which is now, 
 as the world which is now differs from that of the time when 
 neither sun nor earth existed. There will be something 
 which will be to the actual consciousness of man what 
 the actual consciousness of man is to the primeval atom. 
 Knowledge is power. Who knows whether science, in- 
 finitely developed, will not bring with it infinite power? 
 A single power will then govern the world; that power 
 will be science, will be the mind. 
 
 ** The triumph of mind is the true Kingdom of God. There will 
 be then a resurrection of us men of the idea who have contributed 
 to that end. Religion will have been found to be true. Virtue 
 will be explained. Then will be understood the meaning of that 
 strange instinct which impelled man, without any thought of self- 
 interest and reward, to renunciation, to self-sacrifice. The belief 
 in a God the Father will be justified. Our little endeavour to 
 forward the reign of the Good and the True will be a stone hidden 
 away in the foundations of the everlasting temple, but we shall have 
 none the less contributed to the Divine work. Our life will have 
 been a part of the infinite life, in which we shall have a place 
 marked out for us through all eternity." 
 
 Some months after the appearance of these soaring 
 speculations Renan contributed to the Revue des Deux 
 
122 LIFE OF RENAN. 
 
 Mondes an essay of quite a practical kind on the 
 history and future of the Higher Education in France 
 (" L'Instruction Sup^rieuFe en France, son Histoire et 
 son Avenir "). Renan maintained that the professorial 
 system in the Faculties of Letters and Science in the 
 University of France, fostered a merely superficial know- 
 ledge. The doors of the lecture-room were thrown open 
 to the public, who flocked to hear a Cousin, a Guizot, 
 a Villemain, a Michelet. But what could these dis- 
 tinguished men give a numerous ancj , miscellaneous 
 audience but brilliant generalities? Such popular 
 prelections did not develop a love of study, and their 
 success encouraged young men to aim at oratorical skill 
 and neglect research. Without saying a word on his 
 own grievance, Renan pleaded for the strengthening of 
 the College de France, for an increase of the number of 
 professors of high and special subjects presiding over 
 zealous students who would form schools of research, 
 and might be encouraged by scholarships to prose- 
 cute for terms of years studies which are in a worldly 
 sense unproductive. The French were of Celtic origin, 
 yet the College de France was without a chair of 
 Celtic languages and literature, while there was not in 
 Germany a university, not even a school of a superior 
 kind, without a specialist who lectured on the ancient 
 Germanic languages and literatures. In season and out 
 of season, and however occupied otherwise, Renan 
 throughout life advocated the improvement of the 
 higher education of his country on the lines pointed 
 out, and the much that has been done in that direction 
 is largely due to his appeals and to his efforts. 
 
CHAPTER Vll. 
 
 [1864-69.] 
 
 TTHE great success of his Life of Jesus encouraged 
 Renan to proceed energetically with the Origins 
 of Christianity, the second volume of which was to be 
 devoted to the Apostles. Before writing the biography 
 of the Founder of Christianity, Renan had been enabled 
 by his mission to Phoenicia to visit the localities conse- 
 crated by the presence of Jesus. It was desirable that 
 before writing the history of the Apostles he should 
 inspect the localities out of Palestine which had received 
 missionary visits from one or two of them, and, above all, 
 St. Paul; and this object Renan could now effect with- 
 out the aid of the Imperial Government. The Life of 
 Jesus was issued in 1863; towards the close of 1864 
 Renan set out for the East. The results of this topo- 
 graphical pilgrimage are agreeably visible in many a 
 picturesque sketch of Eastern scenery, European and 
 Asiatic, many a delineation of the places and people as 
 known to St. Paul, and often described as they are now 
 or were when Renan visited them — an interesting con- 
 trast 
 
124 LIFE OF 
 
 Three years after the pubhcation of the Life of Jesus 
 appeared, in 1866, "The Apostles" (Les Apotres), as the 
 second volume of the Origines dii Christianisme. Another 
 three years, and, in 1869, the third volume of the same 
 great work, " St. Paul," was given to the world. The con- 
 tents of these two volumes are so closely connected that 
 they may be fitly included in the same survey. In the 
 preface to "The Apostles," Renan referred, with great 
 calmness and dignity, to the chief criticisms on the Life 
 of Jesus. One of these was the conjectural character 
 of many of its statements. To this Renan replied that in 
 such a case, where only the truth of the general effect is 
 certain, and where, in consequence of the often legendary 
 character of the documents, much is doubtful, hypothesis 
 cannot be dispensed with. You cannot reproduce the 
 reality, but you can do your best to approximate to it. 
 The writer's conscience may be at rest when he has 
 presented as certain that which is certain, as probable 
 that which is probable, as possible that which is possible. 
 
 To the reproach, clothed often in most unseemly 
 language, that in writing his Life of Jesus he had a 
 polemical object — for instance, that he wished to destroy 
 the faith of the orthodox believer, Renan replies with 
 equal calmness and dignity, and even with a touch of 
 pathos. No such intention was his. He had received 
 a number of letters asking him what was his intention, 
 what was his aim. His answer is " the same as that of any 
 other historian," to discover the truth, and to make it live; 
 to work at making the great events of the past known as 
 accurately as possible, and exhibit them in a manner worthy 
 of them. To shake any one's faith was far from him. 
 
RENAN, 125 
 
 On the contrary, he sees regretfully the danger which 
 lurks in the promulgation of some truths, though the 
 duty to promulgate them is imperative. What is good 
 for those whose nobleness preserves them from moral 
 danger, might, in its application, be hurtful to the ignoble. 
 
 *' Great things are the fruit only of rigidly definite ideas, for 
 the human capacity is limited, and a man absolutely without pre- 
 judice would be powerless. Let us enjoy the freedom of the sons 
 of God, but let us guard against complicity in that diminution of 
 virtue by which society would be threatened if it came to pass that 
 Christianity were weakened. What should we be without it? 
 Who will replace such great schools of earnestness and reverence 
 as St. Sulpice, such a ministration of self-devotedness as that of 
 the Sisters of Charity ? Can we be otherwise than alarmed by 
 the aridity of heart and by the littleness which are invading the 
 world ? Our disagreement with those who believe in positive 
 religions is, after all, exclusively scientific. In heart we are with 
 them. We have only one enemy, and he is theirs also, vulgar 
 materialism, the baseness of the selfish man. . . . Those who cling 
 to their faith as to a treasure have a very simple method of defend- 
 ing it. It is to pay no heed to books written in a spirit different 
 from their own. The timorous do better not to read them." 
 
 By one criticism, emanating from his friends as well 
 as from his enemies, Renan was consciously or uncon- 
 sciously influenced, and the influence is traceable 
 throughout the volumes of the Origins published sub- 
 sequently to the Life of Jesus. This was in his treat- 
 ment of the miraculous. Always and everywhere Renan 
 continues to reject the miracle as a historical fact, but 
 he never again identifies it with a pious fraud, or treats 
 it as a phenomenon due to conscious imposture. At 
 the very threshold of his book on the Apostles he is 
 confronted by a mass of miraculous matter connecting 
 
126 LIFE OF 
 
 itself with the resurrection, and the subsequent appear- 
 ances of Jesus to his disciples. Renan explains it all 
 as a hallucination, of a kind frequent in ancient and 
 modern times, a hallucination which hardened into a 
 sort of genuine belief. Without a belief in the resurrec- 
 tion Christianity would have died in its cradle. The 
 greatest religion that the world has seen was based, 
 according to Renan, on a hallucination of the Magdalene, 
 one fruitful of a series of hallucinations. " But," he says, 
 "the material incidents which led to a belief in the re- 
 surrection were not the genuine cause of the resurrection. 
 It was love which made Jesus rise again. The love for 
 him was so potent that a little accident sufficed to build 
 the edifice of the universal faith." 
 
 Renan's chief materials for his work on the Apostles, 
 and the Apostle of the Gentiles who was added to 
 them, are of course the Acts of the Apostles and the 
 genuine Epistles of St. Paul. As regards the Acts, 
 the position of Renan towards the advanced and 
 destructive criticism of the Germans is as usual a con- 
 servative one. Renan thinks that the author of the 
 Acts is also the author of the third gospel, the same Luke 
 who was the disciple and companion of St. Paul. The 
 first twelve chapters of the Acts are full of legendary 
 matter. The remaining sixteen, narrating the missionary 
 travels of St. Paul, especially those in which the author 
 describes himself as an eye-witness, are of very consider- 
 able historical value. But mudh even of this latter 
 portion must be read with caution, since on such most 
 important points as the relations between the Apostles 
 at Jerusalem and the Apostle of the Gentiles, Luke is 
 
RENAN. 127 
 
 in flagrant disagreement with the infinitely more trust- 
 worthy statements of St. Paul himself in the Epistle 
 to the Galatians. This Renan attributes to Luke's 
 desire to play the part of a reconciler in the early 
 history of the Christian Church, and to minimise, or 
 indeed to ignore, the controversy between St. Paul and 
 the, so to speak, official Apostles. For the rest, Renan 
 considers most of the speeches reported in the Acts 
 to have been manufactured by Luke. The inferior 
 character of the manufactured article leads Renan to 
 estimate highly the genuineness of the speeches of Jesus 
 reported in the third Gospel, as very far above the 
 powers of invention displayed by Luke in the Acts. 
 
 The Apostles have bid farewell to Galilee, and have 
 settled at Jerusalem. Peter and John are the most 
 active of them. Among them is James, the so-called 
 brother, but more probably the cousin-german of Jesus, 
 and destined to become, if he was not so already, the 
 head of the mother church of Jerusalem. All of them 
 frequent the Temple, and practise the Judaic observances, 
 differing apparently from ordinary Jews only in the 
 behef that Jesus was the Messiah, and had been raised 
 from the dead. With the cessation of the supposed 
 appearances of Jesus after death, they acquired a 
 belief in the Holy Ghost as inspiring them : hence 
 their alleged power of working miracles, their prophesy- 
 ings, speaking with tongues, and other abnormal mani- 
 festations of enthusiasm, paralleled, Renan points out, 
 among Christians in modern times. A common love 
 for their Master, and a belief in his speedy re-appear- 
 ance to judge the world, united them in the closest bonds. 
 
128 LIFE OF 
 
 and formed them into a community apart, inhabiting a 
 quarter of their own and having all things -in common. 
 Whatever their possessions, these were sold, and the 
 money-proceeds were deposited in a fund, the largest 
 contributors to which drew no more from it than the 
 smallest. They took their meals together, and attached 
 to them the mystical meaning which Jesus had given to 
 the breaking of bread and the drinking from the cup. 
 Together they prayed, together they had ecstatic move- 
 ments and inspirations from above. No dogmatic 
 disputes disturbed their harmony. Joy was in all their 
 hearts, and Renan remarks that in no literature is the 
 word " joy " so often repeated as in that of the New 
 Testament. " The remembrance of these two or three 
 first years remained as that of an earthly paradise, which 
 Christianity will thenceforward dream of aiming to re- 
 store, and to which it will in vain endeavour to return. 
 Who in point of fact does not see that such an organisa- 
 tion could be applicable only to a very small church ? 
 But later the monastic life will for its own behoof 
 resume that primitive ideal which the Church Universal 
 will hardly dream of realising." 
 
 The spectacle of this pious and happy community, 
 aided by a vague propagandism, soon gained it adherents 
 beyond the little Galilean group which was the nucleus 
 of a church at Jerusalem. Some of these converts were 
 " Hebrews," Jews of Palestine, speaking Syro-Chaldaic, 
 the language of Jesus and the Apostles, and reading the 
 Hebrew Old Testament. But the majority of the 
 adherents were Hellenistic Jews and proselytes who 
 flocked to Jerusalem from the Jewish communities 
 
RE NAN. 129 
 
 scattered throughout the Roman Empire. They were 
 of two classes, one consisting of Jews by race, the other 
 of Gentile proselytes more or less affiliated to Judaism. 
 All of them spoke Greek, and used the Septuagint version 
 of the Old Testament. Through contact with these 
 Hellenistic converts the Apostles and Galilean disciples, 
 Renan supposes, gained a knowledge of Greek, which 
 was indispensable to Christian missionaries operating 
 beyond the confines of Palestine. Chief among the 
 earliest converts to Christianity were the proto-martyr 
 Stephen, Barnabas the Cypriote, and his cousin John 
 Mark, probably the author of the second gospel. 
 
 The administration of the affairs of the Christian 
 community was wholly in the hands of the Apostles 
 when something happened that led to the first systematic 
 organisation known to the early church. The majority 
 of its members being no longer Galileans, but consisting 
 of Hellenistic Jews and proselytes, these complained 
 that their widows were not fairly treated in the dis- 
 tribution of the funds or goods of the community. 
 The Apostles accordingly resolved to delegate this part 
 of their administrative functions to seven just men, chosen 
 chiefly from among the Hellenists; and the earliest of 
 Christian orders after the Apostolate was constituted in 
 the form of the Diaconate. Deaconesses perhaps belong 
 to a later era, but Renan surmises that they were 
 appointed "very early" in the history of the Church. 
 On the Diaconate, and this development of it, Renan is 
 enthusiastic and eloquent : — 
 
 ** Admirable is the tact which in all this matter guided the primitive 
 church. With a knowledge which was profound because it came from 
 
 9 
 
I30 LIFE OF 
 
 the heart, these good and simple-minded men laid the foundations 
 of what is pre-eminently great in Christianity — Charity. Nothing 
 had furnished them with models for such institutions. A vast 
 ministering organisation of beneficence and of mutual assistance, 
 for which the two sexes contributed their different qualities and 
 combined their efforts to alleviate human misery, this is the holy 
 creation which issued from the labours of these two or three 
 years. They were the most fruitful in the history of Christianity. 
 . . . The institutions which are regarded as a later fruit of 
 Christianity — associations of women, Beguines, sisters of charity, 
 were among its first creations, the principle of its strength, the 
 most perfect expression of its genius — in particular, the admir- 
 able idea of consecrating by bestowing a kind of religious character 
 on, and by subjecting to a regular discipline, women who are not in 
 the bonds of matrimony. The word ' widow ' became the synonym 
 of a religious person devoted to God, and consequently of a 
 deaconess. In those countries where the wife of four-and-twenty 
 is already faded, and there is no middle term between the child 
 and the old woman, it was as if a new life were created for that 
 half of human kind which is the most capable of devotedness." 
 
 The members of the Church of Jerusalem in the 
 course of two or three years were some thousands in 
 number. Its peace was disturbed by the Jewish per- 
 secution of the Christians, which was tolerated rather than 
 encouraged by the Roman authorities, and which pro- 
 duced the martyrdom of Stephen, conspicuous among his 
 murderers being Saul of Tarsus. This persecution dis- 
 persed throughout Palestine the Christians of Jerusalem, 
 where, however, the Apostles courageously remained. 
 At the same time the cenobitic life of the Jerusalem 
 church came, Renan thinks, to an end. The disper- 
 sion of all but the apostolic members of the Church led 
 to missionary effort. Philip evangelised Samaria, whither 
 he was followed by feter and John. But this propa- 
 
RENAN. 131 
 
 gandism was trifling in its area and results compared 
 with that which was to flow from the sudden and start- 
 ling conversion of Saul of Tarsus. 
 
 In the chapter devoted to that cardinal fact in the 
 history of the Christian Church, the conversion of St. 
 Paul, Renan displays to the utmost his imaginative and 
 descriptive powers. Paul, as he called himself when 
 he became the Apostle of the Gentiles, was wending 
 his way to wreak his wrath on the Christians of Damascus. 
 But doubts as to the righteousness of his persecuting 
 mission traversed his mind. Was it not possible that 
 after all he was thwarting the purpose of God ? Perhaps 
 he bethought him of the wise and benignant warning 
 against maltreating the apostles which his teacher Gamaliel 
 had given to the Sanhedrim (Acts v. 38, 39). He had 
 heard of the appearances of Jesus after death, and may 
 have believed in them, since in times and countries when 
 and where the marvellous is accepted, stories of miracles 
 affect even the opponents of the religion of those who 
 work the miracles; thus the Mohammedans of to-day are 
 afraid of the miracles of Elijah, and, like the Christians, 
 ask for miraculous cures from St. George and St. 
 Anthony. Paul may have fancied that he beheld the mild 
 countenance of the Master looking at him with an air 
 of pity and tender reproach. He was nearing Damascus, 
 and saw before him the houses, some of which were 
 tenanted by his intended victims. He had been jour- 
 neying for eight days, apparently on foot, and fatigue, 
 always greatest when the journey is ending, overpowered 
 him. In those regions attacks of fever, accompanied by 
 delirium, are sudden, and when the attack is over the 
 
132 LIFE OF 
 
 sufferer retains the impression of a profound gloom 
 traversed by flashes of lightning which illuminate images 
 traced on a background of black. Renan had such an 
 attack at Byblos, and but for his modern enlightenment 
 might have taken his hallucinations for visions. After 
 the same attack he forgot entirely all that had happened 
 on the day before that on which he lost consciousness. 
 Thus perhaps St. Paul, suddenly struck to the ground in 
 a fit of physical exhaustion, combined with mental agony, 
 may have forgotten what preceded the vision which he 
 believed that he saw and the words which he believed 
 that he heard. I spare the reader others of the perhapses 
 with which Renan seeks to explain the incident which 
 in its results changed the face of the world. He himself 
 says, "in such cases the external fact matters little. The 
 true cause of St. Paul's conversion was his remorse on 
 approaching the town where he was about to fill the 
 measure of his misdeeds." 
 
 Having preached his new religion with as much energy 
 as he had thrown into his persecution of its adherents, 
 Paul after three years visited Jerusalem for the first time 
 since he left it on his abortive mission to Damascus. This 
 sojourn at Jerusalem was brief. He was for a fortnight 
 the guest of Peter; James was the only other apostle 
 with whom he conferred; and the disciples looked 
 askance at him as a former persecutor. Renan lays 
 great stress on the conduct of Barnabas to him now 
 and hereafter. Barnabas smoothed the way for friendly 
 commune between Paul and the suspicious disciples at 
 Jerusalem. "By this act showing wisdom and pene- 
 tration, Barnabas was of the very highest service to 
 
REN AN 133 
 
 Christianity. It was he who divined Paul; it is to him 
 that the Church owes the most extraordinary of its 
 founders." Paul was at Tarsus when Barnabas sought 
 him out and brought him to Antioch (of which as it 
 was then Renan gives a brilliant description), where the 
 first great fusion between Jew and Gentile in the Church 
 took place, and where therefore, most appropriately, the 
 followers of Jesus were first called Christians. It was at 
 Antioch that Paul and Barnabas resolved on the earliest 
 of those missions to the Gentile as well as Jew which were 
 the starting-point in the conversion of the world to 
 Christianity. Antioch was then the third city of the 
 Roman Empire, being inferior to Rome and Alexandria 
 alone. The Church of Antioch was not only superior 
 in numbers to the Church of Jerusalem, but as that into 
 which Gentiles were first admitted on a large scale, 
 setting an example elsewhere, it exerted a dominant 
 influence on the develppment of the new religion. The 
 control of the Churches remained nominally with the 
 mostly Judaising apostles at Jerusalem, and notably 
 with James, whom Renan regards as little else than a 
 Pharisee. But, in spite of their opposition, Paul carried 
 out the nobler and more comprehensive policy, the 
 failure of which would have prevented the development 
 of Christianity into a universal religion, and have made it 
 a mere appendix to Judaism. In two of the concluding 
 > chapters of the volume on the Apostles, Renan points 
 out how circumstances favoured the missionary enter- 
 prises undertaken by Paul and Barnabas. The Roman 
 Empire, which was the one arena of their operations, 
 had on the whole destroyed those national institutions 
 
134 LIFE OF 
 
 of the subject provinces which would have constituted 
 a formidable obstacle to the spread of Christianity 
 among the Gentiles. The Jewish settlements, numerous 
 throughout the Empire, w^re so many fields in which 
 the Christian missionaries could sow the seed of the 
 new religion, rarely without some success. Among the 
 mass of Gentiles, monotheism and a system of practical 
 ethics, as embodied in Judaism, were proving so much 
 more attractive than the old immoral polytheism, that 
 Judaism was making converts, even among the higher 
 classes of Rome itself. All that was good in Judaism 
 w^as offered by Christianity, with a great deal more 
 which Judaism could not offer; and for the reception 
 of Christianity as preached by Paul there was not needed 
 that preliminary rite which was a stumbling-block to 
 many otherwise disposed to embrace the Jewish mono- 
 theism. 
 
 The volume on St. Paul, the sequel to The Apostles, 
 takes up his story at the departure with Barnabas from 
 Antioch to enter on the first of his great missionary 
 journeys. Renan dedicated the volume to his wife, who 
 had accompanied him during his journeys in the foot- 
 steps of the Apostle of the Gentiles. "Together we 
 have seen,'' he wrote, " Ephesus and Antioch, Philippi 
 and Thessalonica, Athens and Corinth, Colossi and Lao- 
 dicea. Never pn those difficult and dangerous routes 
 did I hear thee murmur; never in our journeyings any 
 more than in the free pursuit of truth didst thou say to 
 me * halt ! ' " This personal exploration of the regions 
 and places visited by St. Paul gives a peculiar charm 
 to Renan 's narrative of the self-appointed Apostle's three 
 
RE NAN. 135 
 
 missionary journeys, a narrative expanded from the Acts, 
 and from indications in the epistles of Paul himself. 
 But deeply interesting as is Renan's narrative, illuminat- 
 ing as it does the career of the Apostle by innumerable 
 descriptive touches, and by side-lights projected from a 
 vast erudition on the intellectual, moral, social, and 
 political condition of the populations among whom Paul 
 laboured, there is, as Renan views it, something still 
 more important in Paul's missionary career than its 
 exhibition of boundless energy and zeal, than the trials 
 and sufferings which he bore not only patiently but joy- 
 fully, than the frequent romance of the incidents, than 
 the statistical results of his proselytisings. Lesser men 
 might have founded churches. The names of the 
 founders of the churches of Rome and Antioch themselves 
 are unknown The actual number of permanent con- 
 verts to Christianity made by Paul is computed by Renan 
 to have been little more than a thousand, though the seed 
 sown by him was increased in time a thousand-fold. 
 Following in this matter Baur, Renan seeks to impress 
 on his readers the conviction that Paul's greatest achieve- 
 ment was the severance, not indeed completed in his 
 time, but begun by him, the definite severance of Judaism 
 from Christianity. 
 
 When Paul returned to Antioch after his first mission- 
 ary journey, the peace of the flourishing church of that 
 city was disturbed (Acts xv. i) by "certain men which 
 came down from Judsea," who insisted that circum- 
 cision was necessary to salvation. Paul was strenuously 
 opposed to this narrow theory, and it was decided that 
 the apostles and elders at Jerusalem should be consulted 
 
136 LIFE OF 
 
 on the question. Thither accordingly he proceeded with 
 his follower, the uncircumcised Titus. Renan describes 
 the state of things at Jerusalem in his usual animated and 
 conjectural way, maximising, as is his wont, the contrast 
 between the Judaising James and the anti-Judaismg Paul. 
 According to the Acts, the result was a compromise. The 
 Judaisers made the concession that so far as Gentile con- 
 verts were concerned, circumcision was not to be enjoined. 
 So far the victory was with Paul, and for the present the 
 Christian Church was spared a schism which might have 
 proved fatal to it. But, according to Renan, founding 
 on a statement in the Epistle to the Galatians (ii. 12), the 
 old controversy broke out again at Antioch more seriously 
 than ever, and in spite of the compromise supposed to 
 have been agreed on. This time "certain came from 
 James," and relighted the controversy. Before their 
 arrival, Peter " did eat with the Gentiles," but after that 
 arrival " he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them 
 which were of the circumcision." *' The other Jews " ap- 
 proved of his action, and with them even the loyal Bar- 
 nabas. Of Peter on this occasion Paul says, "I withstood 
 him to the face." With these incidents, Renan opines, 
 there began a division, which lasted for a century, of the 
 Christian Church into two parties, that of Paul and that 
 of the Judaisers. Nay, more, from the whole argument 
 of the Epistle to the Galatians, Renan draws the 
 inference that the agents of the party of Jerusalem 
 began, on quitting Antioch, a series of attempts to 
 destroy the authority of Paul among the very churches 
 which he himself had founded. Circular-letters were 
 despatched written in the name of the apostles, warning" 
 
REN AN 137 
 
 the faithful against Paul, and Renan goes the length of 
 supposing it possible that the denunciatory epistle of Jude 
 may have been one of these circular-letters ! Paul, after 
 his death, is mostly forgotten or ignored, Renan thinks, 
 until the third century, when he becomes, and during 
 the two succeeding centuries remains, the founder of 
 Christian theology. Forgotten again during the Middle 
 Ages, he revives with the Reformation and shapes the 
 theology of Luther and Calvin. 
 
 Renan's final verdict on Paul is unsatisfactory. He is 
 greater throughout the volume than in the closing 
 chapter. Justice had been done to his commanding 
 personality, to his missionary zeal, to his singular com- 
 bination of independence with a readiness to make 
 concessions when they were useful to the cause, while 
 resolute to make none when an essential principle was at 
 stake. It is disappointing to be told that Paul may say 
 what he pleases, he is inferior to the other apostles. He 
 was, we are further told, proud, rude, given to self-asser- 
 tion, to believing that he was always in the right, to 
 adhering to his own opinion, and so on. But had he 
 been other than he was, had he been one of those meek 
 and saintly persons like St. Francis of Assisi and the 
 author of the Imitation of Christy whom Renan actually 
 sets above him, he would have succumbed to the apostles 
 who had been the personal followers of Jesus, he would 
 not have resisted their Judaising tendencies, he would 
 not have " withstood" Peter " to the face," he would not, 
 as Renan felicitously says, have "torn to pieces the 
 strangling swaddling-clothes of infant Christianity, and 
 proclaimed it to be no mere reform of Judaism, but to be 
 
138 LIFE OF RENAN, 
 
 what it was, a religion complete in itself, existing by 
 itself." Paul had not, like the official apostles, ever 
 heard the words of the Master, but what is there in the 
 epistles of Peter, or John, or James, or Jude, so Christ- 
 like as that chapter on charity in the first epistle to the 
 Corinthians, which Renan admits to be, " in the whole 
 literature of Christianity, the only page that can be com- 
 pared to the sayings of Jesus." 
 
CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 [1869-71.] 
 
 T^HE publication of the volume on St. Paul was pre- 
 ceded by that of "Questions of the Time" {Ques- 
 tions Contemporaines\ a collection of contributions to 
 various periodicals, some of the most important of which 
 have been already referred to. In the preface to the 
 volume Renan did what he had never or seldom done 
 before — he spoke his mind on the political state of 
 France. A crisis was evidently approaching. The policy 
 of the Emperor, Napoleon III., was changing again, and 
 for the worse. Acting for a time against the wishes of 
 the adventurers who were his coadjutors in the coup 
 d'Stat and his councillors afterwards, the Emperor had 
 again succumbed to their influence and to that of the 
 priesthood. The party which in 1868 had the ear of the 
 Emperor, is described and censured by Renan in his 
 preface, as that which insisted on the Pope's unqualified 
 retention of the temporal power, which wished to under- 
 mine the new Ising lom of Italy, and, making itself still more 
 dangerous, insisted that France ought to have had some 
 territorial compensation for her inertia after Sadowa and 
 
I40 LIFE OF 
 
 her connivance at the formation of a North German 
 confederation under the hegemony of Prussia. The retro- 
 gressive tendencies of the Imperial pohcy, especially on 
 the Papal question, of course increased the exasperation 
 of the French Liberals at the personal government of 
 Napoleon III. and the triumph of the most reactionary 
 of his supporters. When there came the general election 
 of May 1869, the Liberals made a dead-lift effort to 
 increase the number, then very small, of their represen- 
 tatives in the Corps L^gislatif. 
 
 Renan had no love for the Empire, but he believed 
 that it could not be overturned without a revolution, and, 
 by two decades older than when he wrote LAvenir de la 
 Science^ of revolutions, in his view necessary evils at the best, 
 he thought that France had had enough. The Empire had 
 at least lasted nearly twenty years, and appeared to have 
 taken root. If its personal government could be trans- 
 formed into a constitutional one, Renan was ready to 
 support it. He had great hopes, moreover, of the 
 advanced Liberalism of Prince Napoleon, with whom 
 his intimacy had been steadily growing, and who much 
 admired him. Indeed, it was a standing reproach 
 of the clerical journals against the Prince that for 
 a series of years he was Renan's fellow-guest at an 
 annual dinner given by Sainte-Beuve on Good Friday, 
 when the company feasted instead of fasting! Renan 
 shared in the general excitement created by the political 
 situation, and became a candidate for the electoral dis- 
 trict, chiefly rural, of Seine-et-Marne, a department with 
 which he had no local connection beyond having some- 
 times spent in it a holiday. Canvassing and addressing 
 
RENAN. 141 
 
 meetings formed a new sphere of action for the refined 
 and rather secluded scholar, who while immersed in the 
 bustle of electioneering was correcting the proofs of his 
 volume on St. Paul. In the forefront of his electoral 
 manifesto, placarded on the walls of their villages, the 
 electors read the emphatic words — " No Revolution ! 
 No War! Progress! Liberty!^' which show that he 
 feared the results producible by the appeals of the 
 Chauvinists of the time — and they were to be found 
 out of as well as in the ranks of the Imperialists — 
 to the national susceptibilities of the French and 
 their jealousy of the new strength of their old 
 enemies the Prussians. It was doubtless a fear of this 
 kind which led him to say sadly, in the dedication of 
 St. Paul to his wife: — "In our youth we have seen 
 melancholy days, and I fear that long before we die 
 destiny will show us more of them. Several enormous 
 errors are dragging our country to the abyss, and 
 those who are warned against them reply with a smile." 
 Instead of advocating the revolution aimed at by the 
 Republican party, Renan asked for such a development 
 of the established state of things as, without disturbance, 
 would enable the country to carry out its will and to 
 effect profound reforms. Instead of encouraging the 
 Chauvinist spirit he called for a reduction of the army, 
 for a termination of the state of armed peace, and for a 
 shortening of the term of service (then nine years) 
 with the colours. He declared himself opposed to 
 distant expeditions (Mexico, Cochin-China), and ready 
 to vote for the immediate evacuation of Rome by the 
 French soldiers, whose bayonets supported the temporal 
 
142 LIFE OF 
 
 sovereignty of the Pope. He was for a strict parlia- 
 mentary control over the Budget, and a great develop- 
 ment of popular education. He was for liberty of the 
 press and of association. As regarded religion, he would 
 leave the priest master in his chapel, but without political 
 or municipal influence, and Renan pronounced in 
 favour of the separation of Church and State at a more 
 convenient season. The most formidable of Renan's 
 competitors were a Government candidate, and a Repub- 
 lican who was recommended to the electors by Jules 
 Simon and Hippolyte Carnot. The seat was won by 
 the Republican with 10,484 votes, the Government 
 candidate coming next with 9167, and Renan last with 
 6886. He was twitted during the election with his 
 court connections, which meant, I suppose, his intimacy 
 with Prince Napoleon. His reply to the taunt was more 
 candid than prudent : " How do you expect me to defend 
 your interests if I systematically avoid seeing the persons 
 who control them ? " The story is told that the Emperor 
 expressed regret to Renan for his failure, and that he 
 replied, "If your Majesty had withdrawn your candi- 
 date, I should have succeeded." 
 
 The result of the general election was to treble the 
 numerical strength of the Liberal opposition, and this 
 was partly due, perhaps, to the previous mitigation by 
 the Emperor of the severe restrictions on the liberty of 
 the press. The Emperor began to waver, and as the 
 year wore on he made some concessions in the direction 
 of parliamentary modifications of his system of personal 
 government. Renan took advantage of the opportunity 
 to contribute to the Revue des Deux Mondes an article on 
 
RENAN. 143 
 
 " Constitutional Monarchy in France " {La Monarchic 
 Constitutminelle en France)^ the gist of which was that he 
 doubted whether a republic could firmly establish itself 
 in France, that the general election of May had shown 
 the French resolved to have done with the mere 
 " simulacrum of parliamentary government " given them 
 by Napoleon, and that quite possibly he would give 
 them the reality instead of the semblance. A step in 
 that direction was taken by the appointment of Emile 
 Ollivier to the direction of affairs in January 1870. In 
 April a new constitution, allowing a parliamentary initia- 
 tive in legislation, was granted by the Emperor, and 
 approved by the plebiscite of May. On the nation the 
 result of the plebiscite had a very calming effect. The 
 legislative body, invested with its new power of initiation, 
 was busy with all sorts of Liberal measures, when sud- 
 denly the Empress, the hierarchy, the heads of the 
 military party, gained a victory over the hesitating 
 Emperor. In the July of 1870 France found herself at 
 war with Germany, and the beginning of the end was at 
 hand. 
 
 Some time previously in that year, in accordance with 
 the changed spirit of the Imperial regime^ Renan was 
 on the point of being restored to his chair at the College 
 de France. At the Easter of 1870 Sir M. E. Grant Duff 
 says, '* I took Sir John Lubbock to see him, and he 
 said to us, * I am going to begin my lectures as Luis 
 de Leon did when he resumed his, after having been 
 silenced for years by the Inquisition, with the words, 
 * As I was observing at our last meeting.'" But 
 some obstacle intervened, and it was only when the 
 
144 LIFE OF 
 
 Second Empire had fallen that Kenan's restoration 
 took place. After the plebiscite, and its confirma- 
 tion of the concession of something like constitutional 
 government, so little expectation was there, even among 
 those near the throne, of an approach to war, that Prince 
 Napoleon started, with Renan for a companion, on a long 
 tour to the far north. On the 19th of August, 1870, 
 when Renan knew that all was lost, from his little 
 country house at Sevres he wrote to Sir M. E. Grant 
 Duff the letter from which I translate the following 
 sentences: — 
 
 **You knew perhaps that six weeks ago I made with Prince 
 Napoleon a little tour in Scotland, to Aberdeen, Inverness, and 
 Banff. I need not tell you that I thought often of you, and that on 
 asking numbers of times I found that you were not in those 
 latitudes. The Prince, too, was very anxious to make your 
 acquaintance. 
 
 ' ' What a storm, dear friend, has come on us since then ! What 
 an attack of mental alienation ! What a crime ! The greatest 
 pang I ever felt in my life was when at Tromsoe," the port of 
 Hammerfest, northernmost of European towns, "we received the 
 dismal telegram informing us that war was certain and would be 
 immediate. I confess that I thought the danger of war averted 
 for years, perhaps for ever. The future of France appeared to 
 me depressing and commonplace, but such a cataclysm I did not 
 suspect. When he started the Prince had not a shadow of appre- 
 hension. What has happened has seemed to him, as to me, the 
 result of a sudden attack of madness." 
 
 A few weeks more and the news of the catastrophe 
 of Sedan reached Paris. Edmond de Goncourt describes 
 in his well-known Journal a melancholy gathering of 
 friends at an hotel where he and they were wont to 
 
RENAN, 145 
 
 dine. He found Renan alone (the approach of the 
 German army to besiege Paris had driven him from 
 Sevres), reading a newspaper and making gestures of 
 despair. Others of the party arrive, Berthelot among 
 them, and nothing is talked of but the great catastrophe, 
 the impossibility of resistance, the incapacity of the 
 new Repubhcan Government of National Defence, the 
 alleged cruelties of the Prussian victors. Some one 
 ascribed the defeats suffered by the French to the use 
 of arms of precision as not suited to the French tempera- 
 ment. To fire and then employ the bayonet was needful 
 for the French soldier, otherwise he was paralysed. To 
 be made a machine did not suit him. Hence the 
 superiority of the Prussians. Whereupon Renan took 
 up his parable and spoke of the superior intelligence 
 and work of the Germans in all the departments which 
 he had studied. It was not surprising that in the art 
 of war, which, after all, is an inferior but complicated 
 art, they should have always attained superiority. "Yes, 
 Messieurs," he concluded, " the Germans are a superior 
 race." " Oh, oh ! " exclaimed the rest of the party in 
 protest. "Yes, much superior to us," Renan rejoined 
 with animation. " Catholicism cretinises the individual. 
 Education by the Jesuits or by the Brethren of the 
 Ecole Chretienne checks and represses all virtue of 
 the highest kind, while Protestantism develops it." At 
 last Goncourt himself exclaims, "It is all over then. 
 Nothing remains for us but to educate a generation for 
 vengeance." "No, no," cried Renan, rising from the 
 table, with his face flushed, " not vengeance, — perish 
 France, perish the Fatherland. There is above both 
 
 10 
 
146 LIFE OF 
 
 the Kingdom of Duty, of Reason." He was interrupted 
 by a shout from the whole table, " There is nothing 
 above the Fatherland." Goncourt then describes Renan 
 as pacing round the table, waving his arms, reciting 
 in a loud voice fragments of Scripture, and declaring 
 that everything was to be found there. 
 
 Some ten years afterwards Renan declared publicly and 
 emphatically, but in general terms, that Goncourt's reports 
 (for there are several) of his prandial and post-prandial 
 talk are not to be trusted. In his perfectly natural and 
 legitimate indignation at the practice of printing during 
 the life-time of the speakers their free-and-easy conversa- 
 tions at the dinner-table, he added some strong and con- 
 temptuous language respecting the delinquent. . But, to 
 say the truth, it is clear that in reporting Renan's con- 
 versations in the company of their common friends, 
 Goncourt is often satisfactorily accurate. The proof 
 is that he reports thoughts as expressed, and phrases 
 as used by Renan which years afterwards made their 
 reappearance in Renan's writings. In the words attri- 
 buted above to Renan, except the " Perish France, 
 perish the Fatherland," there is really nothing that 
 Renan did not say subsequently in print Goncourt had 
 no grudge against Renan, though occasionally showing 
 signs of impatience with his exalted manner of express- 
 ing himself in the very mixed society of the dinner-table. 
 While the Commune was supreme in Paris, Goncourt 
 reports Renan as protesting, "with justice and eloquence," 
 against the want of courage of the parliamentary repre- 
 sentatives of Paris in not stirring a finger against the 
 shameful rule of the Commune. 
 
RE NAN, 147 
 
 " He said that they ought to have gone about in the city, and, 
 addressing groups, have made them offer resistance. He said that 
 if he had been honoured by the mandate of his fellow-citizens he 
 would not have failed in what he called a duty, I should have 
 wished, he added, to show myself among them, carrying on my 
 back something that would have spoken to their eyes, something 
 that would have been a mark, a sign, a language, something like 
 the yoke which the prophet Isaiah or Ezekiel bore upon his 
 shoulders."^ 
 
 How characteristic this last remark ! 
 
 At the end of April, 187 1, sick of the scene which 
 Paris presented, Renan left it for Versailles. There, in 
 deep depression of mind, he wrote the startling " Philo- 
 sophical Dialogues " {Dialogues Philosophiques\ which he 
 did not publish until five years later. Of them more here- 
 after. In 1870-71 Renan was engaged in a contro- 
 versy with Strauss (whom he always calls " The Master "), 
 so that nothing might be wanting to the sorrow with 
 which he had witnessed the war destroy all his hopes 
 of an intellectual alliance between France and Germany 
 in the cause of spiritual freedom and the highest 
 culture. The author of the Leben Jesu had sent Renan 
 the volume of lectures on Voltaire, which Strauss 
 read before the Princess Alice of England and Hesse 
 and her little court. Renan, in acknowledging the 
 reception of the book, praised it highly, and expressed 
 his deep sorrow at the war, which boded ill for the hoped- 
 for intellectual alliance of France and Germany. Strauss 
 made this expression of regret the text for a long letter 
 to Renan, written a fortnight before Sedan, but when 
 the triumph of the German arms was virtually achieved. 
 
 ^ See Jeremiah xxviii. 10. 
 
148 LIFE OF ^ 
 
 Nothing more friendly to Renan personally than the 
 tone of the letter, but nothing more disagreeable to 
 Renan as a Frenchman than its tenor. Strauss sketched 
 the history of the claim of France to the primacy of 
 Europe from the time of Louis XIV. onwards. To 
 maintain its political primacy France, under its successive 
 rulers down to Napoleon III., had endeavoured to weaken 
 Germany, to keep it disunited, and until the time of 
 Frederick the Great the old German Empire had per- 
 mitted France to annex sHces of German territory. The 
 primacy of France was now destroyed by the overwhelm- 
 ing victory of Germany. The war had been wantonly 
 begun by France, and to defend itself against future 
 attacks of the kind, Germany, reunited, would take back 
 the German provinces filched from her by France. The 
 French had many excellent qualities, but their great fault, 
 a thirst for glory, and for domineering over other nations, 
 had been fostered by circumstances, and especially by the 
 two Napoleons. Guarantees against French ambition 
 must be exacted. Then and only then could there be 
 any talk of a friendly union between France and 
 Germany for the promotion of culture and the arts of 
 peace. 
 
 In due course (the siege of Paris had just begun) 
 Renan replied. While admitting that France had 
 been to blame in going to war, which he attributed to 
 the Emperor, not to the nation, he laid stress on the 
 assent of Napoleon III. to the results of the Prusso- 
 Austrian war of 1866, as constituting a claim to more 
 consideration than he had received from Prussia. The 
 loss which the world would sustain by the annihilation 
 
RENAN. 149 
 
 of France, and the gain to the world from a European 
 intervention to prevent her dismemberment, were in- 
 sisted on. As one biographer of Jesus writing to 
 another, Renan concluded with a little homily on the 
 forgiveness of injuries enjoined in the Gospel. *' That 
 which admits to Valhalla excludes from the kingdom of 
 God. Have you remarked that neither in the beatitudes, 
 nor in the Sermon on the Mount, nor in the Gospels, 
 is there a w^ord giving a place to military virtues among 
 those which gain the kingdom of God ? " 
 
 Strauss took up his pen and wrote a rejoinder, still 
 personally friendly in tone, but in tenor even more drastic 
 than his former letter. Whatever the folly of their 
 governors, the French themselves were lovers of peace, 
 were they ? How came it then that Renan's pacific 
 countrymen had been claiming for fifty years the left 
 bank of the Rhine, and that after Sadowa, which cost 
 them not a soldier nor an inch of territory, they 
 demanded compensation? As to the annihilation of 
 France, which Renan predicted as the result of her 
 loss of Alsace and Lorraine, Strauss replied that they 
 were German provinces which had been taken from 
 Germany, and that if Germany had survived the loss of 
 them so surely might France. To Renan's proposal of 
 a Congress to settle the terms of peace, Strauss opposed 
 recollections of the Congress of Vienna, which imposed 
 on Prussia fetters not broken by her until 1866. 
 
 Renan's second reply to Strauss is a very clever and 
 suggestive lecture on the danger of pushing too far the 
 application of the principle of nationalities, involved in 
 Strauss's argument. That principle is only a hundred 
 
ISO LIFE OF 
 
 years old. In the days of yore the transfer of a province 
 from one sovereign to another v^^as a mere transfer of 
 soil, the inhabitants were for the most part indifferent to 
 the change. It is not so now. One nation has no 
 right to keep in subjection to it another nation against 
 that other nation's will. Hence, Renan says, French 
 Liberals were for the Venetians and the Lombards, against 
 Austria; for Bohemia and Hungary against the centralisa- 
 tion of Vienna, for Poland against Russia, for the Greeks 
 and Slavs of Turkey against the Turks. But the claim 
 of Germany to annex, say Alsace, is not founded on any 
 wish of the inhabitants to be separated from France; on 
 the contrary, they are powerfully attached to France. 
 Alsace is to be annexed to Germany because it is German 
 by language and race. If a country is to be dismembered 
 on such a pretext, where is such a policy to end ? Let 
 Germany look to it. Prussia has never assimilated 
 Posen as France has assimilated Alsace. Renan 
 threatens Germany with the Pan-Slavic movement, 
 which is a natural accompaniment of the Germanic 
 movement. France might have been Germany's ally 
 against Pan-Slavism; but henceforth, in consequence of 
 the policy of Prussian statesmen, France will for long have 
 no other objective than the re-conquest of her lost 
 provinces. The policy forced on her will be to foment 
 the ever-growing hatred of the Slavs for the Germans, to 
 encourage Pan-Slavism, and to minister unreservedly to 
 Russian ambition, — a prophecy of Renan's which has 
 since acquired a certain significance. With Renan's 
 rejoinder the controversy closed. Renan respected Strauss 
 too much to harbour any rancour against him. Only 
 
RENAN, 151 
 
 the year after the termination of the controversy he 
 prefixed an amiable introduction to a French translation 
 of essays by Strauss.^ 
 
 Having vindicated before the foreigner what he 
 regarded as the rights and claims of France, Renan, 
 with considerable courage, proceeded to address some 
 very frank monitions to his countrymen on the errors of 
 their past and on the necessity for amending them. In 
 187 1, the year of the Treaty of Peace between France and 
 Germany, Renan published " The Intellectual and Moral 
 Reform of France " {Refor7ne Intellectuelle et Morale de la 
 France). Its thesis was that France might become great 
 again, and profit by her very fall. The work included an 
 interesting sketch of French history from earlier to the 
 latest times. For the restoration of France to her place 
 among the nations, Renan recommends her to follow the 
 example of her Prussian conquerors after Jena, and to 
 
 ^ The one personal reproach, and it was delicately expressed, 
 which came from Kenan's pen during the controversy, was well 
 deserved by Strauss. He had published his correspondence with 
 Renan, so far as it had then gone, for the benefit of German soldiers 
 wounded in the war. In the last letter to his "illustrious master," 
 Renan thus gently twits him in regard to that proceeding : — * ' Heaven 
 preserve me from raising a quibble in connection with literary 
 copyright ! Moreover, the act to which you may have made me 
 contribute is an act of humanity, and if my poor prose has succeeded in 
 procuring a few cigars to those who plundered my little house at Sevres, 
 I thank you for having furnished me with an opportunity for making 
 my conduct conform to some of those precepts of Jesus which I take 
 to be the most authentic. But certainly if you had allowed me to 
 publish a product of your pen, never, oh never, should I have 
 thought of issuing an edition of it for the benefit of our Hotel des 
 Invalides " — the Chelsea Hospital of Paris. 
 
152 LIFE OF 
 
 think of nothing but internal re-organisation and reform. 
 There must be, to begin with, universal military service 
 as in Germany. Prussia, moreover, owed her triumph also 
 to her king and to her aristocracy. Renan dreamt of 
 the re-establishment of royalty in France, of a young king, 
 earnest and austere, supported by a patriotic aristocracy, 
 and summoning to his councils men devoted to the work of 
 reform. Renan's dream was not destined to be realised, 
 but a French noblesse did in some measure survive, and at 
 one time it seemed as if royalty might have been restored 
 in France but for the fanatic obstinacy of the Count 
 de Chambord, though the rule of Henri Cinq, 
 founded on divine right and leaning on the Roman 
 Catholic Church, would surely have been very little 
 relished by Renan. Universal suffrage he distrusted 
 thoroughly; it had given France Napoleon III. and all 
 the mischiefs that followed from his rule, yet it could not 
 be revoked. To improve its operation Renan recom- 
 mended a system of double election. This would give 
 80,000 electors, to be divided into electoral colleges, one 
 for each department. Their members were to be chosen 
 for fifteen or twenty years, which would ensure stability, 
 and as they would be the flower of the electoral popula- 
 tion, the local aristocracy, the local notables, their probity 
 could be relied on. Then there was to be a second 
 chamber, of whom thirty members out of three hundred 
 and sixty were to be survivors of ancient families, after a 
 historical and critical investigation of their pedigrees, and 
 their seats were to be hereditary. The others, members 
 only for life, were to be elected partly by the depart- 
 mental councils-general (a still existing institution some- 
 
RENAN. 153 
 
 what analogous to our County Councils), fifty by the 
 head of the State, the upper house would itself elect 
 thirty. The hundred and twenty or thirty remaining 
 members would represent the great interests and organisa- 
 tions of the country. The army and navy would send 
 marshals and admirals; the magistracy, the teaching 
 bodies, the ministers of religion would send their 
 heads. Each class of the Institute, each industrial 
 corporation, each Chamber of Commerce would con- 
 tribute a member. So would each great town with more 
 than a population of 100,000, Paris having four or five. 
 Such an Upper Chamber, Renan opined, would represent 
 whatever in the State possessed individuality; it would be 
 a " body truly conservative of all rights and of all Hberties." 
 ^' Two bodies thus formed would contribute to Liberal 
 progress and not to revolution." In consideration of 
 certain peculiarities of the French character, as he politely 
 phrased it, Renan even went so far as to propose the 
 non-publication of parliamentary debates, which would 
 avert prolixity and declamation, and what we call 
 " Buncombe " oratory. If France was to reform itself 
 and prepare for revanche, it should not waste its 
 strength in parliamentary contests. " Prussia would not 
 have effected its regeneration after Jena if it had adopted 
 the practice of parliamentary life. It went through forty 
 years of silence, w^hich contributed in a marvellous 
 degree to temper the character of the nation '* — quite a 
 Carlylean deliverance! On the other hand, with a 
 Parliament dumb, so far as the outer world was con- 
 cerned, Renan allowed the utmost liberty to the press, 
 but was doubtful of extending it to the clubs. 
 
154 LIFE OF 
 
 One of the most singular passages in Kenan's dis- 
 quisition is that in which he pleads for extensive 
 colonisation of a purely military kind. After his ex- 
 perience of the Commune he was no longer, as in the 
 days of his parliamentary candidature, opposed to "distant 
 expeditions." Men who created disturbances at home 
 could be both usefully and congenially employed abroad. 
 " A nation which does not colonise is irrevocably doomed 
 to socialism, to the war of rich and poor." The spectacle 
 of civilised nations conquering each other is horrible, 
 but the regeneration of inferior by superior races is "in 
 the providential order of humanity." The man of the 
 people is in France much more of a fighter than an 
 artisan. Rather than work he fights, behind barricades 
 or otherwise. Decant, Renan says with the utmost gravity, 
 this "devouring activity" of the French ouvrier into 
 countries which, like China, call for foreign conquest; a 
 curious monition when viewed in the light of contemporary 
 events. Nature has made the Chinese a race of work- 
 men, gifting them with wonderful manual dexterity, but 
 leaving them without a sense of honour. "Give them 
 a just government and they will be satisfied. The 
 European race is one of masters and soldiers; let it 
 conquer and rule the labouring races, the Chinaman, the 
 negro, the fellah. Every one of our revolutionists is 
 more or less a soldier who has missed his vocation, a 
 being intended for a heroic life, and one whom you set 
 to work in an occupation contrary to his race, a bad 
 workman, too good a soldier. Now, the kind of life 
 which drives our workers to revolt is happiness to a 
 Chinaman, to a fellah, who are not in the least military." 
 
RE NAN. T55 
 
 This plan for the cure or prevention of socialism possessed, 
 at the time when it was broached, a certain audacious 
 originality. Whether consciously or not, his countrymen 
 have since then been busily putting in practice Renan's 
 recommendation. 
 
CHAPTER IX. - 
 
 [1871-78.] 
 
 T7OUR years elapsed between the publication of 5/. Paul 
 and, in 1873, that oi L^ Antechrist (The Antichrist), 
 the fourth volume of the Origines. Renan prepared him- 
 self for its composition by a journey to Rome, and an 
 exploration of such of the localities of the Eternal City 
 as were associated with its early Christian Church, the 
 persecution of which by Nero, the Antichrist, contributed 
 largely to the production of the Apocalypse ascribed to 
 St. John. Renan received an enthusiastic welcome from 
 his friends and admirers in Rome. Such a reception 
 given to the author of the Vie de Jesus in the capital 
 of Roman Catholic Christendom, so scandalised the 
 faithful and irritated the Pope, that the Holy Father 
 issued an allocution in which Renan was denounced as 
 " the European blasphemer ! " 
 
 Nowhere in Renan's writings more than m LAntechrist 
 is there a greater exhibition of his power as a dramatic 
 historian and a vivid portrait-painter, and of his singular 
 skill in seizing in the huge mass of literature, even 
 though often apocryphal, to be read and ransacked, 
 whatever could give life and colour to his narrative. 
 
LIFE OF RENAN. 157 
 
 With the opening of the volume St. Paul reappears, 
 a captive at Rome. While still harassed by the rivalry 
 and enmity of the Judeo-Christians, the great apostle 
 is represented as preaching in his chains success- 
 fully to the Gentiles, and for a time made happy by 
 the gifts and sympathy of the churches which he had 
 founded far away, such, for instance, as that of Philippi. 
 Renan even supposes him to have been joined at Rome 
 by Peter, who then visited it for the first time, and who, 
 though inclining to the Judaic form of Christianity so 
 distasteful to Paul, is represented as heartily admiring 
 the Apostle of the Gentiles and readily following in his 
 footsteps. Renan thus rejects the tradition dear to the 
 Roman Catholic Church that Peter's arrival in Rome 
 preceded that of Paul by nearly twenty years, while at 
 the same time he repudiates a favourite Protestant 
 theory that Peter never visited Rome at all. From the 
 social isolation w^hich they practised, from their refusal 
 to join in the Pagan worship, the Christians were un- 
 popular at Rome, all the more so from the success of 
 their propaganda. In the popular imagination they 
 were guilty of crimes such as those which were ascribed 
 to the unfortunate and cruelly persecuted Jews of the 
 Middle Ages. It needed only a pretext to make the 
 Roman Christians victims of a persecution, and three 
 years after Paul's arrival there such a pretext was afforded 
 by the burning of Rome. Renan accepts the tradition 
 that if Nero was not, as is possible, the actual author of 
 the fire, he encouraged it when it had begun, in order to 
 gratify his insane vanity by building on the area of the 
 conflagration a new Rome which would be called after 
 
158 LIFE OF 
 
 him, or at least to provide himself with a site for a new 
 , palace of his own. In the matter of their temples and 
 other ancient memorials the Romans were highly con- 
 servative, and even a despotic emperor had to respect 
 their conservatism. No law of expropriation could have 
 cleared the spaces on w^hich Nero dreamt of carrying out 
 his architectural plans; the great fire of Rome did more 
 for him in this way than any law could have done. 
 Renan portrays with wonderful skill and vigour, as 
 if he had borrowed for the nonce the pen of Victor 
 Hugo, the character and career of Nero, his colossal 
 vanity developing a preternatural imbecility and jealousy, 
 to which ministered the cruelty of a savage and brutal 
 inventiveness unparalleled in the history of man. Renan 
 gives in all their horrible detail the varied atrocities of 
 the massacre, the cunningly devised, the unutterable 
 tortures and outrages to which the Christians of Rome, 
 young and old, male and female, were subjected by 
 Nero on the plea that they, the most innocent and harm- 
 less of his subjects, had been the incendiaries of Rome. 
 Renan supposes that Peter and Paul perished in that 
 Reign of Terror of July- August a.d. 64, and that the 
 Apostle John, if he had accompanied his brother Peter 
 to Rome, escaped and fled to Ephesus, where he 
 laboured to Judaise the churches of Asia Minor. 
 
 Four years after the perpetration of his atrocious 
 massacre Nero came to his dismal end. The monster, 
 there is no doubt, was popular with the lower classes of 
 Rome, principally because he had ministered to their 
 insatiable appetite for public games and shows. This 
 popularity encouraged belief in a report that he was not 
 
RE NAN. 159 
 
 dead, but had taken refuge with those old enemies of 
 Rome, the Parthians, and would return at the head of an 
 eastern army to punish his enemies. The report that 
 their persecutor was to re-appear victorious, spread con- 
 sternation among the Christians. A false Nero even 
 established himself at Cythnos, one of the Cyclades. 
 At Rome all was in confusion. Otho was disputing the 
 empire with Galba. The crisis would perhaps end in the 
 dreaded restoration of Nero. The advent of Antichrist 
 seemed at hand. This fear, in Renan's theory, inspired 
 the author of the oldest book (apart from the epistles) of 
 the New Testament, and the only one, without exception, 
 the date of which can be definitely fixed. Towards the 
 close of January a.d. 69 was launched what is known to 
 us as " The Revelation of St. John the Divine." 
 
 Renan gives an analysis of the Apocalypse, with long 
 passages of it translated into felicitous French, quotations 
 more needed in France than in England, where almost 
 every house contains a copy of the Bible in the verna- 
 cular. His analysis is accompanied by a commentary 
 which is generally ingenious (the identification of the 
 Beast and his number 666 with Nero had been effected 
 before Renan), and in which episodes of the book are 
 elucidated by references to contemporary events, pesti- 
 lences, physical portents, volcanic eruptions, and so forth. 
 The whole spirit of the Apocalypse is Judaic, according to 
 Renan, who sees St. Paul distinctly aimed at in such de- 
 nunciations as those hurled in the second chapter against 
 *'them which say they are apostles but are not," "which 
 say they are Jews and are not," " that hold the doctrine 
 of Balaam, who taught ... to eat things sacrificed 
 
i6o LIFE OF 
 
 unto idols." As to the vexed question of the authorship, 
 Renan thinks it " probable " that it was the work of the 
 Apostle John, or that at least it was accepted by him, 
 and addressed under his patronage to the churches of 
 Asia. Renan gives, evidently from personal observation, 
 a picturesque description of Patmos and its environ- 
 ment, as less suited to the composition of a work of the 
 gloomy grandeur of the Apocalypse, than to a " delight- 
 ful romance like Daphnis and Chloe, or to the pastoral 
 poetry of a Theocritus and a Moschus." 
 
 Many pages of L^ Antichrist are devoted to the revolt 
 of the Jews, with its sanguinary episodes of reciprocal 
 massacre, and to the finale of the struggle, the siege and 
 destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple. Renan's very 
 vivid narrative of these occurrences is varied by life-like 
 sketches of Vespasian and Titus, and by a skilful delinea- 
 tion of the career, and a discriminating estimate of the 
 character, of Josephus, in which it is shown that in his 
 narrative he often sacrifices truth to the wish to stand 
 well with his later patrons among the conquerors of his 
 country. The destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple 
 Renan considers highly favourable to Christianity. If 
 the Church of Jerusalem, which extorted from Paul him- 
 self concessions to Judaism, had with its heads remained 
 grouped around the Temple, it would have continued to 
 be the preponderant Christian organisation, to have kept 
 up a war against the liberal and comprehensive policy of 
 Paul, and to have claimed to exact from Christian con- 
 verts the observance of the Jewish Sabbath, and the re- 
 pulsive rite of circumcision. The incidents of the Jewish 
 rebellion drove the surviving relatives of Jesus, and 
 
RE NAN. I6l 
 
 the heads of the church of Jerusalem, to take refuge 
 beyond the Jordan, and the destruction of Jerusalem 
 prevented them from returning to it. The catastrophe 
 which befell the Holy City made possible the severance 
 of Christianity from Judaism. "The Temple once 
 destroyed, the Christians think no more of it. For them 
 Jesus will now be all in all." 
 
 The volume on the Antichrist off his hands, Renan 
 set to work on another to be devoted largely to the early 
 history of the Gospels. In the trying summer of 1875 
 his health broke down, and he resolved on a voyage for 
 its recovery. Just then he received, and accepted, an 
 unexpected invitation to attend a Scientific Congress at 
 Palermo. The literary result was the charming paper, 
 " Twenty Days in Sicily " ( Vingt jours en Sicile)^ which 
 he contributed to the Revue des Deux Mondes. Renan's 
 quick glance took in everything, beauty and grandeur in 
 scenery, archaeological remains, ancient and mediaeval, 
 church architecture of the time of the Norman occupation, 
 yet modelled on the style of the Mohammedan mosque, 
 a certain unity of national character evolved out of 
 the fusion of the most diverse races, Sicanians and 
 Phoenicians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, 
 French, Germans, Spaniards, Neapolitans. The people he 
 liked, and he was not at all of the opinion of the foreign 
 observer who, being consulted on the reforms needed to 
 improve the country, suggested, as the one necessary, " an 
 inundation which would reach the summit of Etna, and 
 clear Sicily of the Sicilians." The malpractices of the 
 Sicilians, their addiction to the vendetta, and to brigand- 
 age, Renan ascribed to bad government in general and 
 
1 62 LIFE OF 
 
 to a defective administration of justice in particular. He 
 praises their good-heartedness, their enthusiasm, and 
 above all, their intellectual quickness. At Girgenti, built 
 on the site of the ancient Agrigentum, he found held in 
 remarkable honour the memory of its illustrious citizen, 
 that mysterious and mystical philosopher, Empedocles. A 
 statue of him stands by the side of that of Victor Em- 
 manuel. In the nomenclature of public places the name of 
 Empedocles figures as largely as that of Garibaldi himself. 
 Renan regards the ancient sage as having, to some extent, 
 anticipated Newton, Darwin and Hegel, but admits that 
 the local popularity of Empedocles is also due to his 
 success in overthrowing the aristocracy of Agrigentum. 
 The little harbour of Girgenti, from which Sicilian 
 sulphur is, or was, largely exported, is called Porto 
 Empedocle, Renan visited the sulphur-mines, the opera- 
 tions at which, like everything else in Sicily, were of 
 primitive simplicity. He saw with pity a number of 
 children, each with a lamp attached to his brow, being 
 let down three or four hundred yards into the mines. 
 Thence they brought up the raw material which w^as 
 carried on asses' backs to the places where the sulphur was 
 extracted. " What toil might be spared," he exclaims, 
 " by a windlass and some rails ! " This is, perhaps, the 
 only philanthropic remark on a matter of industrial detail 
 to be found in all Renan's writings. 
 
 Renan's reputation was European, and in 1877 he 
 received and accepted another invitation to deliver at 
 the Hague an address in connection with the movement 
 then proceeding, under the auspices of Dutch royalty, 
 to celebrate the bi-centenary of the death of Spinoza. 
 
RE NAN. 163 
 
 In his fine address he dwelt on the purity and simplicity 
 of Spinoza's character, the unworldliness of the man who 
 philosophised, not only contentedly, but cheerfully, on two- 
 pence halfpenny a day. Renan pronounced him "the first 
 saint whom the modern philosophy of reason had pro- 
 duced." The Judaism which gave him birth cast him 
 out. "It is the way with religious communions, the 
 cradles of so much that is good. They claim to imprison 
 for ever the life which has had a beginning in them. 
 We hear the egg charging with ingratitude the chicken 
 which has escaped from it. The egg at its own time 
 was necessary. Then it becomes a hindrance : it must 
 be broken." Parted from the synagogue, Spinoza devoted 
 himself for twenty years to meditation on the idea of 
 God. He saw that the infinite could not be subjected 
 to limitations, that the Divinity is all or nothing. On 
 Spinoza's so-called Pantheism, in which the universe is 
 regarded as one substance, with two attributes, thought 
 and extension, Renan touches rather hghtly. The modern 
 distaste for systems, and abstract formulas, prevents, 
 he opines, an absolute acceptance of the propositions 
 which, Spinoza believed, contained the secret of the 
 universe. But, whatever his shortcomings, — he lived 
 in an age when physiology and chemistry were in their 
 infancy, an age in which reflection, even as developed by 
 Descartes, was too exclusively mathematical and mechani- 
 cal, — Spinoza had been pronounced by Goethe, Schelling, 
 and Hegel, " the father of modern thought." 
 
 In the same year (1877) was issued the fifth instalment 
 of the Origines, " The Gospels and the Second Christian 
 Generation " (" Les Evangiles et la Seconde Generation 
 
i64 LIFE OF 
 
 Chr^tienne"). In the introduction to the Vie de Jesus, 
 Renan had necessarily said something respecting the 
 origin, characteristics, and comparative value of the Gos- 
 pels. The new volume contains his matured opinion on 
 the Synoptic Gospels, leaving his final word on the Gospel 
 of St. John to be spoken in a subsequent sixth volume. 
 
 The heads of the Jerusalem Church who took refuge 
 beyond the Jordan, at Pella, and in the adjacent 
 province of Batanea, called themselves Ebionites and 
 were strict followers of the law, differing only from 
 ordinary Jews in that they believed Jesus to be the Mes- 
 siah, and anticipated his second coming. It was among 
 them, cherishing as they did memories of the sayings and 
 doings of the Master, that a written Gospel first arose. 
 This was the "Gospel according to the Hebrews," of 
 which, much altered from its original form, and there- 
 fore rejected ultimately by the Church, only fragments 
 survive. The Gospel of the Hebrews was written in 
 Syro-Chaldaic, the language of its compilers and of 
 Jesus; Renan assigns the date of its composition to 
 A.D. 75 or thereabouts. From the Greek Gospels, 
 which followed and supplanted it, it was distinguished 
 by the prominence given in it to the Apostle James. 
 But it is not likely that this Syro-Chaldaic Gospel 
 reached the far-off Western Church. For this Church a 
 Greek Gospel was needed, and the want was supplied by 
 Mark, about a.d. 76. Mark had been the disciple of 
 Peter, whom he followed, it is supposed, to Rome, and 
 probably there he compiled his gospel, after the death of 
 Peter, from whom he had learned much that he wrote 
 of the sayings and doings of the Lord. Renan adheres 
 
RENAN. 165 
 
 strongly to the view that Mark's is the oldest of the 
 Greek gospels, and that, as an historical document, it is 
 greatly superior to the others. 
 
 The gospel of Mark was, however, meagre in its 
 reports of the sayings of Jesus. To supply this, its chief 
 deficiency, the Gospel called St. Matthew's was com- 
 piled. In spite of the assertion of Papias and others that 
 Matthew wrote a gospel in "Hebrew" (Syro-Chaldaic), 
 and the accredited supposition that our gospel of 
 Matthew is a Greek translation of that *' Hebrew" one, 
 Renan rejects an authorship by Matthew, and ascribes 
 the gospel which goes by his name to an unknown 
 compiler, whom he calls pseudo-Matthew. There were, 
 in existence, according to Renan, collections of the 
 sayings of Jesus, classified according to their subjects. 
 Pseudo-Matthew took the gospel of Mark as he found it 
 to begin with, and intercalated, in the narrative, fuller 
 reports of the sayings of Jesus in those collections, and in 
 the Gospel of the Hebrews. Several additions to Mark, 
 such as the legends of the childhood of Jesus, pseudo- 
 Matthew made probably from the Gospel of the Hebrews. 
 When he had before him narratives of incidents more 
 fully recorded than in Mark, he thrust them into 
 the text of Mark, without expunging the narratives of 
 them already existing there; hence the "doubles" so 
 visible in pseudo-Matthew. Further, pseudo-Matthew 
 modified, and softened, several of Mark's versions of the 
 sayings and doings of Jesus, which, with the lapse of time, 
 had become distasteful to the early Christians. Renan's 
 critical acumen is nowhere more conspicuously displayed 
 than in the passages in which he indicates the use which 
 
i66 LIFE OF 
 
 the pseudo-Matthew makes of Mark and of the Gospel 
 of the Hebrews. Of course it is the amplitude of 
 the reports of the sayings of Jesus which renders the 
 Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew so far superior to that 
 of Mark, though inferior in the historical value of 
 its narrative. Renan supposes that the gospel of the 
 pseudo-Matthew was written in Syria after the arrival 
 there of the Gospel of Mark, the deficiencies of which 
 were observed, and that it was written in Greek for 
 Greek-speaking Judeo-Christians. In order to give it an 
 authority greater than that belonging to the name of 
 Mark, the new gospel w^as ascribed to St. Matthew. 
 Renan places about a.d. 85 the final redaction of the 
 Gospel as we now have it "according to St. Matthew." 
 
 The Gospel of the pseudo-Matthew had not, Renan 
 thinks, reached Rome from Syria by a.d, 95, about 
 which time Luke is supposed to have composed, at 
 Rome, the third gospel. Wherever Luke agrees with 
 Matthew, Matthew agrees with Mark. Luke knew only 
 Mark and not Matthew, whose admirable reports of the 
 sayings of Jesus are consequently not reproduced in 
 Luke. Luke adds much to Mark, from oral tradition 
 and otherwise; perhaps he had before him a Greek 
 translation of the Gospel of the Hebrews. Luke is the 
 most hterary of the evangelists. Much of his first three 
 chapters, the pastoral episode of the shepherds and 
 the angels, with the canticles which were to serve as the 
 basis of a new liturgy, are the invention of his genius. 
 Renan, with his quick eye and subtle sympathetic insight, 
 notes in Luke two characteristics. One, which might be 
 expected in a friend and follower of Paul, is his sympathy 
 
RE NAN, 167 
 
 with well-intentioned pagans and heretics; his is the 
 parable of the good Samaritan. Another is his glorifi- 
 cation of poverty, and sympathy with the lowly and with 
 the penitent sinner : his is the parable of Lazarus and 
 Dives. According to Matthew and Mark, both the male- 
 factors crucified with Jesus revile him; according to 
 Luke, one of them is penitent, and Paradise is promised 
 him. On the other hand, Luke softens what, with the 
 course of time, it seemed requisite to soften. The Eli^ 
 Eli^ lama sabachthani of Matthew and Mark had come 
 to appear discordant with the growing conception of the 
 divinity of Jesus. The despairing ejaculation, ^^My God, 
 my God, why hast thou forsaken nieV becomes, in Luke, 
 ^^ Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.^'' In his estim- 
 ate of the Synoptic Gospels, Renan considers the Gospel 
 of St. Matthew the most important, from its evidently faith- 
 ful and eminently ample reports of the sayings of Jesus. 
 Indeed, all things considered, it is, in Kenan's judgment, 
 not only the most important of Christian books, but the 
 most important book ever written. " The world has read 
 habitually a book in which the priest is always in the 
 wrong, in which respectable people are all hypocrites, while 
 those in authority show themselves to be scoundrels, and 
 all the rich are damned. The Catholic Church has 
 prudently put on one side this, the most revolutionary 
 and dangerous book that there is, but has not been alto- 
 gether able to prevent it from bearing fruit. ... In our 
 own day the twenty-third chapter of St. Matthew, against 
 the Pharisees, is still the most ferocious satire on those who 
 cover themselves with the name of Jesus, and whom, if he 
 returned to the world, he would pursue with scourges." 
 
i68 LIFE OF 
 
 With the story of the Gospels, and of the second 
 Christian generation, is artistically yet naturally inter- 
 woven that of the contemporary Roman Empire. There 
 are masterly sketches of the emperors of the Flavian 
 dynasty, the aged, awkward, and parsimonious Vespasian, 
 with his rather coarse jocularity, and his son Titus, 
 enamoured of the Jewish Berenice and tolerant of the 
 Jews. The Roman aristocracy looked down on these 
 two Flavii as parvenus, and the philosophers dreamt of 
 turning the Empire into a municipal republic ; but both 
 aristocrats and sages had reason to regret their moderate 
 rule when Vespasian and Titus were succeeded by the 
 last of the imperial Flavii, the diabolical Domitian, 
 whose reign Renan compares to " a vampire gorging 
 itself on the corpse of expiring humanity, an open war 
 declared against all goodness." At the same time the 
 monster played the part of a restorer of the decaying 
 pagan worship, a pretension which enhanced the cruelty 
 of his persecutions of the Christians. The empire 
 breathed again with the accession of Nerva, the first of 
 the five successive emperors by whom the Roman world 
 was governed so wisely and so well as to reconcile the 
 philosophers to the principate. Yet under these wise 
 emperors the Christians suffered a permanent persecu- 
 tion worse than the intermittent persecutions of Nero 
 and Domitian. From Nerva to Marcus Antoninus these 
 great and beneficent rulers were not only conservative 
 guardians of the pagan religions, but, for reasons of state, 
 were more severe than their predecessors in dealing with 
 private associations formed even for charitable and 
 philanthropic purposes. Of such the Christian churches 
 
RENAN. 169 
 
 naturally seemed the most dangerous, since their mem- 
 bers kept themselves apart, performed no civic duties, 
 refused to recognise the divinity of the emperors, and 
 dimly threatened to become an imperium in imperio. 
 Such a man as Tacitus could see nothing in Christi- 
 anity but a ** detestable superstition." Such a man 
 as Pliny, when Imperial legate in Bithynia, puts to 
 death, as a matter of course, those who are brought 
 before him charged with being Christians and refusing 
 to deny the charge. The great and wise Trajan approved 
 what Pliny had done. " There is no uncertainty now," 
 Renan says. " To be a Christian is to contravene the 
 law, to deserve death. From Trajan onwards, Christi- 
 anity is a state crime." The local authorities and the 
 fanatical populations of the provinces acted on this 
 presumption. ** Whoso never sacrificed, or when passing 
 before a sacred edifice did not send it a kiss of adoration, 
 risked his life." 
 
 Many pages of Renan's volume are devoted to the 
 birth and growth of those heresies touching the divine 
 and human nature of Jesus, which increased and multi- 
 plied as the years rolled on, and which make much of 
 the early history of Christianity so tedious, unedifying, 
 and even irritating. But in the letter of Clement to the 
 Corinthians, in the effect which it produced at the time, 
 and the immense authority which it wielded afterwards, 
 we see in Renan's pages the germ of what was to 
 become the predominating authority of the bishops of 
 Rome, an authority exercised with a practical wisdom 
 characteristic of Rome, and which, whatever else may be 
 said against it, was useful to the progress of Christianity 
 
I70 LIFE OF 
 
 in suppressing the war of sects and parties, and sub- 
 stituting for innumerable little religious and discordant 
 republics the unity given to the Christian world by a 
 powerful ecclesiastical monarchy at Rome, with general 
 councils for its parliaments occasionally. The time 
 came when, of course, this despotism of Rome proved 
 to be as maleficent as it had once been useful. 
 
 Renan's literary reputation was now so great that any- 
 thing from his pen was assured of a wide-spread welcome, 
 and the publishing house of Levy had no reason to regret 
 the bargain made with Renan by its deceased founder. 
 His new volume of collected essays. Miscellanies of Travel 
 and History {Melanges de Voyage et d^ Histoire)^ published 
 in 1878, the year after Les Evangiles, contained articles, 
 chiefly philological, of his earliest years, which he had 
 not ventured to reprint in the Essais de Critique et de 
 Morale^ or in the Essais d"* Histoire Religieuse, Travel is 
 represented in them by the " Twenty Days in Sicily,'' 
 noticed previously, and by " UAncienne Egypte " 
 (Ancient Egypt), in which he gave an account of what 
 he had seen, learned, and thought during his visit to 
 Egypt, with Mariette for his companion and guide. 
 The article contains an interesting parallel between 
 Egypt and China, as both of them exhibitions of 
 the reign of absolute mediocrity, and owing their 
 profusion of chronicles to their use of the art of 
 writing long before it was known to the Aryans. In 
 an article on the Caesars, Renan defends, a propos of 
 Augustus, the patronage of genius by princes. Patron- 
 age by the people would be better, but it is only 
 once or twice in Greece, and a little in the Italian 
 
RE NAN, 171 
 
 republics of the Middle Ages, that the people have 
 encouraged genius. The great modern republic, the 
 United States, lives, as far as art and pure science are 
 concerned, on borrowings from Europe. Other articles, 
 testifying once more to Renan's wide range of sympathy 
 and keenness of insight, deal with the Shah Nameh of 
 Firdusi, in which the poet of Mohammedanised Persia 
 seems to regret the old religion of Zoroaster, the Golden 
 Meadows of Magoudi, full of racy anecdotes and sayings 
 of the Abbaside caliphs (of whom the Haroun al Ras- 
 chid of the Arabian Nights is the popular type), while 
 in the article on Mohammedan Spain, the supposed 
 Christian hero, the Cid, is shown to have been a mere 
 adventurer, a condottiere, now fighting for Christ, now 
 for Mohammed. There is a very agreeable sketch of Ibn 
 Batuta, the Arab traveller of the fourteenth century, who 
 rambles from Tangier to China, finding everywhere 
 countrymen, for everywhere are Mohammedans, and *' the 
 Mussulman has no other country than Islam." The 
 Mohammedan lover of travel could in those days indulge 
 his taste for wandering very cheaply and pleasantly. Every- 
 where he finds his own language, and hospitality w^as a 
 duty which one Mussulman owed to another. For thirty 
 years Ibn Batuta led a delightful wandering life, and 
 among the interesting quotations which Renan gives 
 from his book is an account of Mecca during an 
 affluence to it of the customary pilgrims. A volume on 
 the Desert and the Soudan enables Renan, as its reviewer, 
 to exhibit the customs, language, and religion of the 
 Arabs, preserved in all their primitive purity in the Soudan, 
 and not losing, as in great towns, their best characteristics. 
 
172 LIFE OF RENAN, 
 
 Reviewing another volume on Kabylia, Renan takes 
 great pains, in an article on " Berber Society/' to sketch 
 the strange social condition of the Kabyles of Algeria, 
 a people descended from the Numidians of Massinissa 
 and Jugurtha, with a language and even an alphabet of 
 their own, neither of them Aryan or Semitic. The 
 modern Berbers are pure democrats, without chiefs 
 and without a military class. The tribes and villages 
 are always at war with each other, but within the tribe 
 and the village there is a plenitude of customs establish- 
 ing a close fraternity for mutual help and the support of 
 the poor by the community. Renan saw in the Kabyles 
 social democracy realised, and as they have been for 
 centuries as they are, they strengthened his favourite 
 belief that no great polity can issue from democracy as 
 democracy. One of the most interesting articles in the 
 volume is an article on Joseph Victor Le Clerc, the early 
 friend and patron of Renan, whose solid erudition and 
 patient labour were of the old school which Renan loved. 
 Reference has been already made to the Histoire Litter- 
 aire de la France^ edited by Le Clerc, with Renan's occa- 
 sional assistance. Among Renan's contributions to it was 
 a dissertation on the condition of the fine arts in France 
 in the fourteenth century, another proof of his versatility. 
 During some of the years of Renan's biography already 
 surveyed, and all those still to be surveyed, proceeded 
 the issue of the monumental work, the Corpus Semzticarum 
 Inscriptionum. Renan's only contribution to it was the 
 section containing Phoenician inscriptions, but he was 
 the founder of the opus magnum^ and to the end of his 
 life he watched over its development with parental care. 
 
CHAPTER X. 
 
 [1878-92.] 
 
 A FTER abandoning the Church and the Christian 
 "^^ faith, Renan found himself in possession of a 
 philosophy of life which, gradually developed, sustained 
 him in his difficult struggle. The true, the good, and 
 the beautiful were the new Trinity which he worshipped, 
 and to worship them was happiness enough. It has 
 been seen how, in the preface to his translation of the 
 Book of Job, he declared for Duty to be performed at 
 all hazards, without hope of reward here and hereafter. 
 Kant's categorical imperative had never a more earnest 
 devotee than Renan. He was not visited by that 
 longing, so often felt by the thoughtful, for a revela- 
 tion from above, dissipating all doubts, throwing 
 celestial light on the duty and destinies of man, and 
 annihilating the problematic in life. In the prayer which 
 closes his remarkable essay on " The Metaphysics of 
 the Future" {La Metaphysique de rAvemr\ written in 
 i860, he thanks his "Heavenly Father" because He 
 " has not chosen to bestow a clear reply to our doubts, 
 in order that faith in goodness should not remain with- 
 
174 LIFE OF 
 
 out merit, and that virtue should not be a calculation. 
 A distinct revelation would have assimilated the noble 
 to the vulgar soul : evidence in such a matter would have 
 been an attack on our freedom. Thou hast desired that 
 our faith should depend on our inward disposition." 
 To all this Renan added in time the hope expressed in 
 the letter to M. Berthelot, that beyond the grave there 
 might be a purely spiritual reward for devotion to the 
 spiritual in this life. Such was the creed which had 
 been fruitful for him in well-being and well-doing, in 
 noble effort not without result for the world, and in more 
 ways than the spiritual for himself. 
 
 Suddenly a change came over the spirit of his dream, 
 and educed from him utterances which gratified the 
 worldly, but perplexed and pained the grave and serious 
 among his friends. In former years Renan recognised 
 the aim of Nature to be good, and for its realisation, 
 however distant in the eternal future, she demanded 
 man's strenuous co-operation. But now Renan pro- 
 fessed to doubt whether Nature had any aim of that 
 kind at all, whether we were not being duped to no 
 purpose whatsoever, whether human existence was not 
 a **poor farce" in which our part was assigned us by an 
 unconscious artist, and which only gaiety could render 
 agreeable. Schopenhauer's pessimism prescribed the 
 extinction, so far as possible, of all earthly desire, and 
 promised everlasting repose in Nirvana. Renan's pessi- 
 mism led him to a very different conclusion. Gaiety 
 and good-humour, he proclaimed, were to be cultivated 
 by the select few who followed science and virtue, in 
 case these should turn out to be phantoms. As to the 
 
RENAN. 175 
 
 many, let them enjoy themselves. For them, whatever 
 might be the fate of the Cosmos, there were what even 
 the austere Wordsworth, extenuating the faults of poor 
 Robert Burns, called " the primary felicities of love and 
 wine." Time was that in almost the only indignant, not 
 to say ill-natured composition which Renan ever penned, 
 his paper on "The Theology of Beranger," he fell foul 
 of the genial song-writer, and reproached him for having, 
 with Lisette by his side and glass in hand, toasted, as it 
 were, the God whom Renan himself sought, he says, 
 "in trembling," and who, in Beranger's lyrics, had become 
 " a God of grisettes and topers." But now, in a public 
 address of his later years, Renan thus apologised to 
 Beranger and to his God of grisettes and topers: *'The 
 Frenchman is joyous; his favourite phrases imply a feel- 
 ing of the gaiety of life, and the idea that at bottom 
 nothing is very serious, and that a little irony admits 
 us to a knowledge of the intentions of the Eternal one. 
 . Formerly I slandered the Dieu des bonnes gens'' — 
 Beranger's genial deity. ^' Mon Dieu! how much in 
 the wrong I was. He is not at all a bad god, he never did 
 any harm," etc. Renan protested even against temperance 
 societies : why should not the poor man forget his sorrows 
 in a bumper ? though care should be taken that he gets 
 tipsy amiably, and does not, in his cups, beat his wife. 
 "Is Renan also among the Hedonists?" might well 
 be the exclamation of pleasure-lovers whom he had 
 offended by his censure of Beranger ! 
 
 The Dialogues Philosophiques^ which are among the 
 most singular of Renan's writings, were written, as already 
 mentioned, under most depressing influences, and lay in 
 
176 LIFE OF 
 
 his desk for five years, before they were published in 
 1876. Renan described them as conversations between 
 different " lobes " of his brain, and protested that no one 
 of the theories broached in them was to be fathered on 
 his brain as a whole. It would not be difficult, however, 
 to extract from the Dialogues Kenan's philosophy of life 
 and being at the time, but the proceeding is undesirable, 
 since something will be said hereafter of the ultimate 
 expression which he gave, not in dialogue but in mono- 
 logue, to that philosophy. Suffice it to say that in the 
 Dialogues the aim of the Cosmos was represented 
 to .be the evolution of a single organised entity, con- 
 taining in its infinitude all organised beings that had 
 existed or did exist. This, in very brief summary, 
 was Kenan's apocalypse, an apocalypse of science. The 
 sceptical world of Paris, looking beyond the grave 
 into nothingness or a blank futurity, hailed in the 
 Dialogues Philosophiques Kenan's record of his new 
 excursion into the unknowable, just as George Sand, 
 it will be remembered, welcomed enthusiastically the 
 letter to M. Berthelot. Kenan now resolved to give 
 the Dialogue a strictly dramatic form, which would 
 fit it for performance in a "philosophical theatre" — if 
 such were ever established — and, meanwhile, would in- 
 terest his legion of readers. Four contributions — to the 
 unacted drama of France, * 'Caliban" (1878), the "Eau de 
 Jouvence" (1881), "Le Pretre de Nemi" (1886), and 
 " L'Abbesse de Jouarre " (1886) — were the result. In the 
 preface to " Caliban " Kenan announces that philosophy 
 has arrived at the stage of knowing that nothing can be 
 affirmed, " Man sees clearly, at the hour which is striking, 
 
RENAN, 177 
 
 that he will never know anything of the supreme cause of 
 the universe, or of his own destiny. Nevertheless, he 
 wishes to be talked to about all that." So Renan talks to 
 him through quasi-dramatic puppets, who are the mouth- 
 pieces of various types of characters with their diverse 
 views of life, Renanesque and anti-Renanesque. In 
 " Caliban," Prospero has returned to his Duchy of 
 Milan, and is experimenting in his laboratory instead 
 of attending to affairs of state. The people murmur, 
 Caliban heads a successful revolution, and from a 
 drunken, brutal, mutinous savage is transformed into 
 an astute statesman. Instead of avenging himself on 
 Prospero, he protects his old tyrant both from the 
 populace and the Church! "Cahban" was written at 
 a time when the victory of the Republicans over the 
 Reactionaries seemed assured. Renan bows to the 
 inevitable, and in Caliban's protection of Prospero 
 adumbrates the freedom given by democracy to science. 
 In the "Eau de Jouvence" Prospero re-appears as the 
 inventor of a sort of elixir vitce, and is persecuted by 
 the Church as a magician. He is protected for the 
 sake of his elixir by a Pope, worldly and sensual, but 
 superstitious. The drama closes with Prospero's 
 euthanasia. As his end approaches, enter Caliban, who 
 with his old master exchanges friendly words. "With- 
 out Caliban," Prospero assures him, "there could be 
 no history. The grumbling of Caliban, the savage 
 hatred which impels him to supplant his master, form 
 the principle of movement in humanity" — Renan's 
 political philosophy at that date. The scene of "The 
 Priest of Nemi" is laid at Alba Longa, in the earliest 
 
 12 
 
178 LIFE OF 
 
 days of the legendary history of Rome. He is an 
 enlightened priest, with a horror of shedding blood, 
 even the blood of animals to be sacrificed to the God- 
 dess of whose shrine he is the keeper. Consequently 
 he is unpopular, and in the end he is assassinated, 
 having come to the melancholy conviction that in 
 so far as he has weakened — and it is not far — the 
 religious prejudices of his countrymen, he has also 
 weakened in them the moral fibre which those preju- 
 dices strengthened. The inference is obvious. The 
 story of the Abbesse de Jouarre must not be repro- 
 duced here. In spite of, nay because of its pruriency, 
 it was by far the most successful, commercially, of all 
 these dramatic pieces, and went through no fewer than 
 twenty-five editions ! 
 
 In 1879, the year after the publication of Caliban, 
 appeared the sixth and penultimate volume of the 
 Origines, LEglise Chretienne (The Christian Church). 
 In this volume Renan speaks, on the authorship 
 of the Gospel ascribed to St. John, the final word 
 which he did not speak in the preceding volume, Les 
 Evangiles. There he came to the conclusion that the 
 pro-Judaic Apocalypse, in which St. John's hand or 
 inspiration was clearly visible, could not have been 
 written or inspired by the author of the anti-Judaic 
 Fourth Gospel, but Renan left unanswered the question, 
 "Who then did write it? " Renan's matured conviction 
 is that the Fourth Gospel embodies the traditions of that 
 mysterious personage, the Presbyter John (who was 
 probably a disciple of the Apostle of the same name) and 
 those of a certain Aristion, both the presbyter and 
 
RENAN, 179 
 
 Aristion being in possession of an apostolical tradition, 
 probably derived from St. John, respecting incidents in 
 the life of Jesus. Renan adheres to his former statement 
 that the Gospel ascribed to St. John contains facts in 
 the life of Jesus which are historical, and which supple- 
 ment the narratives of the Synoptics, but also that the 
 sayings of Jesus in it are no more authentic than those 
 placed in the mouth of Socrates by Plato. To make 
 confusion worse confounded, Renan goes the length of 
 granting the possible truth of the theory of some later 
 sectaries, that Cerinthus, the known adversary of St. 
 John, was the author of the Gospel ascribed to him ! 
 Renan rejects the Johnian authorship of the General 
 Epistle ascribed to St. John, and supposes it launched 
 in his name to prepare the way for the pious fraud 
 which issued the Fourth Gospel as the work of that 
 Apostle. Renan thinks it likely that all the three 
 epistles ascribed to St. John are the handiwork of the 
 Apostle's homonym, the Presbyter John. The Fourth 
 Gospel, Renan says, introduced a new Christology. 
 Jesus, the incarnation of the Word who was God, ceases 
 to be human, to be a Jew, and can know neither tempta- 
 tion nor weakness. With the Gnostics he will become 
 an aeon, an emanation, a pure entity who made the body 
 of Jesus merely an earthly domicile from which he 
 escaped before the Passion. With wonderful patience 
 as well as abihty, Renan catalogues and characterises the 
 brood of heresies which sprang out of Gnosticism, and 
 which, ever multiplying by a sort of fission, were a danger 
 to the Church. The chief heresiarch was Marcion, whom 
 Renan calls great, and whose attempts, like those of other 
 
i8o LIFE OF 
 
 Gnostics, to bring over to them the Church into which 
 at first they sought and received admission, are skilfully 
 described. Marcion's Gnosticism was distinguished by 
 its simplicity as well ' as thoroughness. Jehovah, the 
 harsh and cruel Jewish God, the Demiurgus of the 
 world, was inferior to the supreme and beneficent God. 
 The aim of the rigid and loveless law given by this 
 God of the Old Testament, was to subject the other 
 nations to his favourites the Jews, and not having suc- 
 ceeded, he promised to send them his son. But the 
 supreme; beneficent God sent his son, in the seeming 
 form of a man, to introduce a law of charity and to 
 combat Jehovah. Jesus is not the Messiah promised to 
 the Jews : he came to abolish the law and the prophets 
 and all the work of Jehovah. Paul was his only Apostle, 
 but even PauFs teaching, inasmuch as he acknowledged the 
 law to have been divinely given, fell short of Marcion's. 
 Marcion took the Gospel of Luke as the most Pauline of 
 any, and re-fashioned it to suit his theory. In Marcion's 
 Gospel Jesus had neither ancestors, parents, nor pre- 
 cursors. He was not born ; birth, according to Marcion, 
 was a stain; he did not suffer, he did not die. Every- 
 thing that connected Jesus with Judaism was expunged 
 in Marcion's gospel. To such a length did Marcion 
 carry his detestation of the Old Testament, that when 
 his Jesus descended into hell, and then ascended 
 into heaven, the accursed of the Old Testament, Cain, 
 and so forth, accompanied him, while Abel, Noah, 
 Abraham, favourites of Jehovah, were left behind and 
 below ! Marcion, like other Gnostics, looked on matter 
 as evil. An evil, too, was human life led on the earth 
 
RENAN. i8i 
 
 which belonged to the Demiurgus Jehovah. To propa- 
 gate the species was to increase the subjects of the bad 
 Demiurgus, and it was condemned by Marcion. The 
 glorification of martyrdom was a prominent characteristic 
 of Marcionism, since martyrdom Hberated the Christians 
 from life which is an evil. 
 
 Marcion had followers in greater numbers than any 
 heresiarch before Arius. But he, and the crowd of heresi- 
 archswho preceded and succeeded him, were banned by the 
 Church of Rome, which combated their heresies, and these 
 in time died out. For the organisation of the Church of 
 Rome was being perfected, and its authority becoming 
 supreme. It is very acutely remarked by Renan that, as 
 the hopes of the re-appearance of Jesus to judge the world 
 faded away, the Church obeyed a tendency to make its 
 organisation durable. This was not aimed at so long as 
 such hopes prevailed; why work for the future when the 
 Second Coming is at hand? An effort was made by 
 forging the Second Epistle of St. Peter to strengthen 
 those hopes; but time worked against their fulfilment, 
 and a belief in the millennium, too, died out. Unless it 
 were heretical, or belonged to one of the decaying Judaeo- 
 Christian communities, every church had a bishop. Into 
 his hands had passed the powers of the Presbyters who 
 originally, with their subordinate deacons and deaconesses, 
 administered the affairs of a church. To exhibit, with the 
 authority belonging to a chief apostle, the power inherent 
 in a bishop, along with his duties, with those of the 
 functionaries of the church subordinated to him, and 
 last but not least, with those of each member of the 
 church, the three pastoral epistles were written, pur- 
 
1 82 LIFE OF 
 
 porting, and only purporting, to come from St. Paul, 
 though containing some things not unworthy of the 
 Apostle. Not only is there ordained in them a strict 
 surveillance of the morals of the flock, but a rule of 
 orthodoxy is established. The obstinate heretic is to 
 be rejected. Marcion and other heresiarchs who 
 flocked to Rome, found to their cost this monition 
 unsparingly put in force. 
 
 The volume opens with a vivid sketch of the 
 character and career of the Emperor Adrian, the 
 accomplished, the versatile, the witty, hovering like a 
 beneficent deity over the vast dominions subject to 
 him, building and re-building cities and temples, 
 promoting the execution of great public works, en- 
 couraging philosophy, and improving the laws and their 
 administration. Adrian, a sceptic at heart, was tolerant 
 and disinclined to allow the execution of the laws penally 
 aflecting the Christian to be pushed to extremities. It 
 was under the otherwise beneficent rule of Adrian's 
 successor, Antoninus Pius, that the persecution of the 
 Christians was carried out on a considerable scale. The 
 Christians as they increased in numbers became more 
 conspicuous, and therefore more unpopular. Their 
 seclusion from the world, their refusal to join in the 
 religious observances of their fellow-citizens, made these 
 Puritans of the Roman Empire disliked by the populace. 
 The dislike thus created was intensified by absurd 
 charges against their morals; their proceedings when 
 they met for worship being represented as stained 
 by the most dissolute practices and darkest crimes. 
 It was especially in the provinces, and unknown to the 
 
RENAN, 183 
 
 Emperor, that the persecutions were most frequent, 
 the authorities aiding and abetting the populace. Any 
 physical calamity was regarded as due to the wrath 
 of the Gods offended by the existence of a community 
 who refused to acknowledge them, and then arose the 
 terrible cry, " Christianos ad leones ! " Renan admits, as 
 most impartial students of the time admit, that the 
 Christians often voluntarily courted martyrdom as a 
 testimony to their sincerity, and as opening to them the 
 doors of heaven. But this was not the case with the 
 venerable and saintly Polycarp, of Smyrna, the friend of 
 the Apostle John, the well-known story of whose martyr- 
 dom is told by Renan with a pathetic simplicity. He 
 had always declared that martyrdom if not to be shunned 
 was not to be courted. He did not court it, but he did 
 not shun it when his choice lay between death and the 
 denial of his Saviour. A few years later the most 
 notable of the new school of Christian apologists, the 
 valiant but imprudent Justin, was martyred in Rome 
 itself. When recording the death of Justin, Renan 
 reminds his Roman Catholic fellow-countrymen that 
 their Church too could persecute cruelly when it had the 
 power, and through one of the best of French kings: — 
 " How many precursors of the future suffered equally 
 under the reign of the just and pious Saint Louis," 
 persecutor of Jews and heretics ! 
 
 In the April of 1880 Renan came to London to deliver 
 the Hibbert Lectures of the year; the subject, "Chris- 
 tianity and Rome." 
 
 "The moment chosen," says Sir M. E. Grant Duff, ** was an un- 
 Uicky one, for a good many people who would have liked to have 
 
1 84 LIFE OF 
 
 * sat under him ' were far away " — the country was in the throes of a 
 General Election followed by the change of ministry which sub- 
 stituted in the Premiership Mr. Gladstone for Lord Beaconsfield. " I 
 was myself in the North of Scotland, looking after my election, and 
 many of my friends were in a similar plight. I got back just in time 
 to hear the last lecture — 14th April— and to admire the extraordinary 
 perfection of the lecturer's enunciation. Every one in the room who 
 knew French must have heard every word. He came to stay with 
 me at Twickenham, and at a house which from the days of Lord 
 Chancellor Clarendon downwards has seldom, I think, opened its 
 door to a better man. I asked the Breakfast Club to meet him, but 
 the disturbance caused by the great political contest still kept people 
 away from London, and that body was represented only by Sir T. 
 Erskine May, Lord Arthur Russell, and myself." 
 
 Renan was, however, abundantly feted and caressed 
 by friends and admirers who remained in London in 
 spite of the poHtical crisis. From a paper on "M. 
 Ernest Renan at Home" {Pall Mall Budget, 28th 
 January 1892), I take the following reminiscence 
 of his visit to London. When the Rev. H. R. 
 Haweis paid him in Paris a return visit, Renan was 
 domiciled in the College de France as its Rector or 
 Director, an office to which he had been elected in 1873 
 by his brother-professors. He prized it above all other 
 French educational institutions, and looked on the dis- 
 tinction of administering its affairs as the greatest that 
 he had as yet received; and he received it from the 
 Third Republic. 
 
 **We spoke of those dear friends in England who had passed 
 away since M. Kenan's visit, especially of Dean Stanley, for whom 
 Renan had entertained a sincere admiration which was thoroughly 
 reciprocated by the versatile Dean. I remember dining with M. 
 Renan in London one night when the Dean sat opposite us. Dean 
 
RENAN. 185 
 
 Stanley's French accent left much to be desired, but his volubility 
 was indisputable, and although nothing but French was spoken, I 
 was filled with wonder and surprise at the brilliant flow of anecdote 
 and repartee which Stanley kept up across the table with M, Renan 
 in the least idiomatic and most fluent French which I ever heard. 
 Still both these illustrious men by sheer force of will and bonhom77iie 
 found out how to be thoroughly intelligible and interesting to each 
 other at dinner-time. 
 
 *' Mr. Henry Irving was another mutual friend the mention of 
 whose name recalled the interesting occasion on which I introduced 
 him to M. Renan. Mr. Irving had placed a double box at our 
 disposal. M. Renan watched the great actor's subtle impersonation 
 of the immortal Jew with the keenest zest and with such occasional 
 interjections as * Ah ! c'est admirable ! c'est fort ! c'est antique ! ' 
 At the close of the second act, Mr. Irving invited us to his private 
 room. Both began speaking simultaneously, but as Mr. Irving 
 spoke no French and M. Renan no English, an inevitable pause 
 ensued. Mr. Irving then turned to me and said, * I love M. 
 Renan; will you tell him that I think I acted perhaps better 
 than I do sometimes — I was so anxious to please him, and tried 
 to do my best.' After I had translated, M. Renan replied, 
 * Pray, assure Mr. Irving that I have made a special study of 
 the people of Israel for many years, but I never received so vivid 
 an impression of the cultivated Jew of that period as I have to- 
 night.* Mr. Irving replied, *I am glad M. Renan has seized my 
 point.'" 
 
 Of Kenan's acquaintance with Tennyson during this 
 visit to London a pleasant reminiscence has been 
 already given. Renan 's four Hibbert Lectures were 
 delivered, in French of course, in St. George's Hall, and 
 were well attended and duly applauded. He sketched 
 the history of Christianity in Rome and the Roman 
 empire from its beginning to its establishment by Con- 
 stantine. Evidently Renan did not give his hearers 
 credit for a familiarity with the six volumes which had 
 
i86 LIFE OF 
 
 then appeared of his Origines du Christianisme, unless, 
 perhaps, it were the Vie de Jesus. With the exception 
 of some introductory remarks on the thoroughly aristo- 
 cratic nature of the pagan religion of old Rome, so 
 little suited to attach the people to it, there was 
 scarcely anything in the four lectures which had not 
 been said in the six volumes, page after page of which 
 was read to his unsuspecting hearers. The lectures at St. 
 George's Hall were followed by one to the members of 
 the Royal Institution, on Marcus Aurelius. This lecture 
 gave Renan no more trouble than the other. He had 
 already prepared, though not published, his concluding 
 volume of the Origines, Marc AurUe et la Fin du Monde 
 Antique. The lecture at the Royal Institution was little 
 more than a summary of it. 
 
 That volume on " Marcus Aurelius and the End of 
 the Roman World," was issued in 1881, and nobly com- 
 pleted the great work which it closed. A deep and two- 
 fold interest is aroused by the spectacle of one of the 
 best of men, absolute ruler of the greatest empire that 
 the world had yet seen, and at the same time disclosing 
 in his Meditations his inmost thoughts on himself, on 
 human nature, and human life. His reign was that of 
 a philanthropist as well as of a philosopher. He reformed 
 the laws by humanising them. Institutions for aiding 
 the poor, adult and young, were made more effective 
 than ever. The cruel position of the slave was greatly 
 mitigated. Some way' was made with a reformation of 
 manners, although even Marcus Aurelius could not 
 wholly succeed in his efforts to put an end to the 
 savage brutalities of the amphitheatre. He summoned 
 
RENAN. 187 
 
 philosophers from all parts to Rome, and though the 
 gold of the philosopher was dimmed by many quacks 
 and impostors who thought of nothing more than the 
 rewards showered on the sect, Marcus selected only 
 those of genuine worth to be attached to his person 
 and to advise him in carrying out his reforms. "For the 
 first time," Renan says, " the ideal of Plato was realised, 
 the world was governed by philosophers." In point of 
 fact, philosophy had become a kind of religion, the only 
 religion of cultivated men. Great people had in their 
 households sages, who were to them at once guides, 
 philosophers, and friends. 
 
 The pacific emperor was summoned to the Danube 
 to confront a coalition of the barbarians against Rome, 
 and acquitted himself admirably of his uncongenial 
 duties as a general. But his ennui was great, and he 
 relieved it by writing his famous Meditations, The 
 vanity of all things is present to the mind of him who 
 wrote them, yet he is sustained and fortified by a deep 
 sense of his duty to himself as a man, and to others as an 
 emperor. For himself he is grateful to the gods, not for 
 making him an emperor, but from the first a philosopher, 
 for the good instructors whom he had in youth, for 
 having been enabled to share the old age of his mother, 
 for his affectionate (?) wife, and for having always at his 
 command wherewith to aid the poor and the affiicted. 
 He is not a man of systems or of dogmas, and hence 
 the "singular elevation" of his book. "Take away 
 the Christian dogmas from the famous Iinitation of 
 Christy and the book loses part of its charm. The 
 book of Marcus Aurelius, having no dogmatic basis, will 
 
i88 LIFE OF 
 
 preserve its freshness everlastingly. To all, from the 
 atheist, or him who thinks himself one, to the man most 
 engrossed by the particular creed of any religious com- 
 munion, it is fruitful in edification. It is the most 
 purely human of all books." But as the years rolled 
 on, as old friends died off, and Marcus felt that while 
 admiring him people were tired of him and his philo- 
 sophical rule, above all as his son Commodus, whom he 
 had proclaimed his successor by an act beyond recall, 
 displayed incorrigible vice, an infinite sadness is read- 
 able between the fines of the later Meditations, Marcus 
 sighed for death, and it soon came to him. 
 
 Christianity was never more extensively persecuted 
 or more severely punished than under this best of 
 emperors. Renan seeks to explain this flagrant ano- 
 maly. To begin with, Fronto, the preceptor of Marcus, 
 had a bitter hatred for the Christians. They were 
 hated too by the philosophers who surrounded Marcus, 
 and by the men of letters of the age, who regarded them 
 as the dupes of illiterate teachers. Marcus himself 
 adhered as an emperor to the Roman tradition, and like 
 his favourite sage Epictetus saw in the heroism of the 
 Christian martyrs only the obstinacy of deluded 
 fanatics. Renan compares the position of the 
 Christians in a centre of the Roman Empire, to that 
 of a Protestant missionary preaching against the Virgin 
 and the Saints in a fanatically Roman Catholic town in 
 Spain. Now that we know the ultimate destiny of 
 Christianity in the Roman Empire, we blame Marcus 
 for not having been more tolerant. " But," says Renan, 
 " we ought not to reproach a statesman for not having 
 
REN AN. 189 
 
 effected a radical revolution in anticipation of events 
 which were to happen several centuries after him. 
 Trajan, Adrian, Marcus Aurelius could not master 
 principles of general history and of state policy which were 
 not apprehended until the eighteenth century, and which 
 could be revealed only by our latest revolutions/' If the 
 Roman Empire was cruel to Christianity, the Christian 
 Louis XIV. persecuted his Protestant subjects. 
 
 When the wise, the good Marcus Aurelius died, a.d. 
 180, the Church so harshly persecuted during his reign 
 was more or less completely constituted. Episcopal 
 authority is everywhere, and is based on apostolical suc- 
 cession. A sort of primacy is conceded to the Church 
 of Rome. The canon of the New Testament is closed. 
 The divinity of Jesus is acknowledged. Christianity has 
 broken completely with Judaism; the sacred day of the 
 week is the first not the seventh, while baptism is substi- 
 tuted for circumcision. The eucharist is no longer 
 merely a commemoration but a sacrifice. The piety of 
 the Christian communities was of rather an ascetic kind, 
 and while marriage was invested with a high religious char- 
 acter, the tendency was to encourage ceHbacy. The 
 Christian communities were little groups of pious people, 
 leading pure lives and forming each a happy family, the 
 members of which, coming together once a week to join 
 in a simple and edifying worship, exerted a powerful 
 attraction on the better class of pagans outside them. 
 The national religion of Rome was aristocratic, not 
 popular, and the immoralities of the gods had become 
 repulsive. The philosophers endeavoured to appeal to 
 the higher religious aspirations of humanity, but they 
 
I90 LIFE OF 
 
 addressed the cultivated classes, not the uninstructed and 
 the poor. The Stoics, moreover, had nothing to say to 
 the sinner, whom Christianity pardoned and welcomed. 
 Neither stoicism nor paganism offered, like Christianity, a 
 life beyond the grave in which the anomalies of this life 
 were to be redressed, and those who loved each other 
 might meet again. In such a world as that of the Roman 
 Empire, such a religion as the Christian could not but 
 conquer the worship of Jupiter. Persecution itself aided 
 Christianity by showing with what courage and strength 
 it inspired its martyrs. 
 
 As the years rolled on, and the Christians increased 
 in numbers, conquering the world instead of being 
 conquered by it, while at the same time the expectation 
 of the approaching end of all things died out, the moral 
 fibre of the Christian community became relaxed. It 
 was no longer easy for the believer — indeed, he was no 
 longer expected as in the early days of the Church — to lead 
 the purely Christian life of poverty and abnegation of 
 every kind. Then monasticism arose. The monastery 
 was to the circumambient Christian communities what 
 these had been to the pagan world. Again the years 
 rolled on, Christianity became the state-religion of Rome, 
 and afterwards of the barbarians who overthrew the 
 Western Empire. The influx of barbarians into the 
 Church brought with it a tendency on the part of the 
 Church to compromise with the idolators. Their poly- 
 theism was transformed into the worship of saints. The 
 world from the sixth to the tenth century was, Renan goes 
 the length of saying, more grossly pagan than it had ever 
 been before. Along with the indulgence shown to 
 
RENAN. 191 
 
 barbarian polytheism, Greek metaphysical notions were 
 accepted, and in the Church councils "it is the dogma 
 which is most superstitious that carries the day." At 
 last the work of Jesus became so hidden in the additions 
 made to it by superstition, metaphysics, and priest-craft 
 that the reform of Christianity had for its aim to restore 
 the religion which he preached. Something in that 
 direction was effected by the sixteenth century reformers, 
 but they retained a faith in the miraculous, and, in our own 
 day, science has made miracle unbelievable. " Between 
 Christianity and science there is, therefore, an inevitable 
 conflict I one of the two adversaries must succumb.'' 
 
 As is not uncommon, however, with Renan, this 
 strong statement is qualified by another. Not only 
 is religion but a Church is to survive. Country and 
 the family are the two great bonds which knit men 
 together, but they are not all-sufficing. " Besides 
 them there must be an institution to give nourish- 
 ment to the soul, to console, to admonish. Such an 
 institution is the Church, which cannot be dispensed 
 with, except under the penalty of making life of a 
 despairing aridity, especially for women. The ecclesias- 
 tical association of the future is, however, not to be 
 allowed to weaken society as constituted in the State. 
 The Church is to have no temporal power, but on the 
 other hand is to be perfectly free." The State is to 
 have nothing to do with it, is neither to control it nor 
 patronise it. Renan's wish seems to be that the Church 
 should consist of a number of small and free com- 
 munities like those of the early ages of Christianity. 
 And the rehgion of the future? Renan thinks that 
 
192 LIFE OF 
 
 there will be a great schism in the Roman Catholic 
 Church. 
 
 ** One section of it will persist in its idolatry and remain by the 
 side of the modern movement like a parallel stretch of stagnant water. 
 Another section will remain alive, and abandoning the errors of super- 
 naturalism, will join itself to liberal Protestantism, to enlightened 
 Israelitism, to idealist philosophy, and march towards the conquest 
 of pure religion, a religion in spirit and in truth. But, whatever 
 may be the religious future of humanity, it is beyond doubt that the 
 place of Jesus in it will be immense. He was the founder of Chris- 
 tianity, and Christianity remains the bed of the great religious river 
 of humanity. There affluents coming from the most opposite points 
 of the horizon have commingled. In this combination no stream 
 can now say, * This is my water. ' But let us not forget the primi- 
 tive and original brook, the source in the mountain, the upper 
 course where in a little spot of earth there first flowed what has 
 become a river as broad as the Amazon. Of that upper course it 
 has been my wish to form a picture, happy if I have faithfully repre- 
 sented what on those lofty summits there was of strength and vigour, 
 of sensations now glowing, now icy cold, of divine life, and of com- 
 mune with the sky. Rightly do the creators of Christianity take their 
 place in the foremost rank of those to whom mankind do homage. 
 These men were very much our inferiors in the knowledge of reality, 
 but they had no equals in strength of conviction, in devotedness. 
 And this it is which makes the founder. The solidity of an edifice 
 is in proportion to the sum of virtue, that is to say, of sacrifices, 
 which has been deposited in its foundations." 
 
 In 1878, Renan's fame had been crowned by his 
 election to the French Academy, in succession to the 
 great physiologist, Claude Bernard. In the spring of 
 1879 the new Academician delivered his address on 
 being formally received. As usual, his address consisted 
 largely of a panegyric on his predecessor, and Renan's 
 versatility was once more displayed in his appreciative 
 
RENAN. 193 
 
 estimate of Claude Bernard's discoveries and scientific 
 method. At the same time he did not conceal his 
 heterodoxy when, after reiterating one of his earliest and 
 most cherished convictions, that modern science had 
 made the universe infinitely grander and more beauti- 
 ful than it appeared to the non-scientific ages, he added 
 that the disappearance of a faith in the supernatural 
 " will only bestow more sublimity on the ideal world," 
 and so on. Among the addresses of welcome which 
 Renan was called on to deliver on the reception of new 
 Academicians, was one on Pasteur, in which again 
 Renan showed his mastery of a subject apparently, and 
 only apparently, alien to his studies, and described 
 Pasteur's career as " a train of light in the great night of 
 the infinitely little, in those ultimate abysses of Being 
 in which life is born." In Renan's address of recep- 
 tion to Ferdinand de Lesseps there is a very noticeable 
 passage. While Lesseps himself, and so many others, 
 were hymning the Suez Canal as a great work of peace, 
 Renan took a very different view of it. One Bosphorus, 
 he said, had hitherto sufilced to trouble the world. 
 Lesseps had created another and a more important one. 
 In the event of a naval war the canal would be the point 
 which all the world would make for in order to occupy it. 
 Lesseps had marked out the arena for the great battles of 
 the future. 
 
 It was partly a symptom, partly a result of the seemingly 
 sceptical mood into which Renan had fallen for a time, 
 that he translated the most sceptical book in the Bible, 
 Ecclesiastes. Renan's EEcdesiaste appeared in 1879. 
 The Preacher, Renan's Cohelet, proclaims the vanity 
 
 13 
 
104 LIFE OF 
 
 of all things, knowledge, science, literature, power, 
 riches, the love of women, life itself. He sees wicked- 
 ness triumphant and virtue miserable. Nor has he any 
 hope that this anomaly will be redressed in a future life. 
 Man is as the beast: "As the one dieth so dieth the 
 other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath 
 no pre-eminence above a beast, for all is vanity." But 
 Cohelet does not, and in truth need not, like Job, 
 curse his day, and raise an indignant protest against the 
 decrees of the Creator. Cohelet's lot on earth has 
 taught him that there is something worth living for. 
 " Go thy way ; eat thy bread with joy and drink thy wine 
 with a merry heart. . . . Live joyfully with the wife 
 whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, 
 which .he hath given thee under the sun." And ever 
 and anon Cohelet rises into a graver strain, and for 
 moments preaches duty and reverence to the God 
 who judges all things. Cohelet's combination, or alter- 
 nation, of doubt and faith, Renan, in his preHminary 
 " study " on Ecclesiastes, pronounces to be " the true 
 philosophy." I deny, he seems to say, but at the same 
 time I not only allow you, but I wish you, to affirm. 
 " However the sceptic may argue, the necessary beliefs 
 are above all attack. . . . Ring out, church bells, the 
 more you ring, the more will I allow myself to say that 
 your warbling means nothing definite ! If I were afraid 
 of silencing you, ah ! then I should become timid and 
 discreet.*' Renan rejects altogethei the orthodox 
 ascription of Ecclesiastes to Solomon. He conjectures 
 it to have been written about B.C. loo by a Jewish 
 philosopher and Sadducee. He belongs to a class 
 
RENAN, 195 
 
 represented in the Bible only by Ecclesiastes, and re- 
 vived in the wealthy Israelites of Paris and other great 
 European towns of the nineteenth century. Of this 
 modern type of Jew Renan gives a very clever and, once 
 in a way, a somewhat sarcastic description, too long for 
 quotation here. 
 
 Renan was verging on sixty when he resolved on 
 writing the autobiographical volume, which appeared 
 in 1883, Souvenirs d^Enfance et de Jeunesse (Memoirs 
 of Childhood and Youth). One of his objects was 
 doubtless to indicate the steps by which a tonsured 
 seminarist had become the author of the Vie de Jesus, 
 and thanks to the Souvenirs, the reader of these pages 
 has been pretty amply enlightened on that subject. 
 Renan tells very little of his biography after he severed 
 his connection with the Roman Catholic Church, but 
 looking at himself as he was and as he is, he takes his 
 readers into his confidence and unbosoms himself very 
 freely. He avers that he has kept in spirit, if not in 
 letter, his first clerical vows, better indeed than many 
 priests leading a life to all appearance regular. He 
 has never sought after success; on the contrary, it bored 
 him. The pleasure of producing and living sufiices him. 
 On the whole, if he had to live his life over again, he 
 would alter nothing in it. He has every reason to be 
 satisfied with his lot, and, indeed, did not his principles 
 forbid it, he would believe that special providences had 
 guided him from a humble origin to be what he has 
 become. The age in which he has lived may not be 
 found to have been the greatest, but it will certainly be 
 found to have been the most amusing of all, and he 
 
196 LIFE OF 
 
 speaks of his own life as a charming promenade which 
 it has been accorded to him to take through this 
 mysterious world of ours. The autobiographical interest 
 of the volume, the sketches of scenes and persons of 
 many kinds, given in his own fascinating style, made the 
 Souvenirs one of the most successful of Renan's books. 
 
 In the preface to the Souvenirs^ the quasi-optimistic 
 mood in which, for the nonce, Renan finds himself, recon- 
 ciles him to the French republic, then apparently con- 
 solidated. After all, he says, our personal tastes, perhaps 
 our prejudices, ought not to lead us to run counter to 
 what our age is effecting. Perhaps our age is in the 
 right. The world, Renan thinks, is marching towards 
 "Americanism," towards Democracy pure and simple, 
 towards a state of things in which personal distinction 
 is little prized, in which politics are handed over to 
 inferior men, and the rewards of life are given to 
 vulgarity, charlatanism, and the art of puffing. But 
 democracy will at least offer to the intellect that which 
 the intellect chiefly requires, freedom. The royal patron- 
 age formerly extended to talent had its good side, but 
 also its bad. The concessions which in those days, 
 gone for ever, intellect had to make to the Court, to 
 society, to the clergy, were worse, in Renan's view, than 
 the little disagreeables to be suffered from democracy. 
 But there is one passage in his otherwise rather cheerful 
 confessions which breathes of deep regret, though not at 
 all bitterly expressed. He laments that when the pro- 
 fessor at Issy charged him with not being a Christian, 
 he did not forego the subsequent residence at St. 
 Sulpice. In such a case he would have followed his 
 
RENAN. 197 
 
 inclination for physiology and the natural sciences. But 
 he went to St. Sulpice, and was there drawn towards the 
 historical sciences, " small conjectural sciences which are 
 unmade as soon as made, and which will be neglected in 
 a hundred years." Renan sees the day dawning when 
 man will no longer attach much interest to his past. 
 The riddle of existence, of the world, of " God, as they 
 wish to call him," is to be read in chemistry at one end 
 of the scale, in astronomy at the other end, and above 
 all in general physiology. The regret of Renan's life 
 was that he had chosen inquiries, which will never be 
 more than interesting, "into a reality which has for ever 
 disappeared." But this regret, it will be seen, did not 
 hinder Renan from pursuing to the end of his days the 
 inquiries which engrossed him at the beginning of his 
 career. A mission had been assigned to him, and he 
 could not escape from fulfilling it. 
 
 In 1884 appeared the Nouvelles Etudes d^Histoire 
 Religieuse (New Studies of Religious History), another 
 volume of republished contributions to periodicals. 
 Among its miscellaneous contents, all of them full of life 
 and interest, is that essay on Buddhism which Renan offered 
 as his first contribution to the Revue des Deux Mondes, and 
 which was declined by its proprietor and editor. In this 
 essay Renan had summarised, in his own inimitable way, 
 that strange religion of Nihilism which, encrusted with 
 innumerable myths and legends, has more followers than 
 any other, and has gained such devotees as Schopen- 
 hauer in the Christian Europe of the nineteenth cen- 
 tury. Renan prizes highly the doctrines of abnegation, 
 humanity, and humility, taught by Sakya-Muni (the 
 
198 LIFE OF 
 
 Buddha), and places him among non-Christian teachers 
 by the side of Jesus. In an essay of much later date, 
 published in the same volume, he examined a recent 
 theory maintained in France, which went even farther 
 than Strauss had gone in his first Life of Jesus, 
 and while denying that the Buddha had ever 
 existed, resolved his biography into a series of myths. 
 Following his usual practice in such cases, Renan sub- 
 stituted for myths legends containing a kernel of truth, 
 and, considering the ethical superiority of Buddhism to 
 the Hinduism out of which it sprang (just as Christianity 
 sprang out of Judaism), he maintained that there must 
 have been a real historical personage who founded 
 Buddhism. The subject of another paper is St. Francis 
 of Assisi, Renan's favourite saint, whom he delights to 
 call a second Jesus. Here again, through all the legends 
 which have gathered round St. Francis, there is clearly 
 seen the resemblance of the saint to the portrait of him 
 painted by his biographers. Beautiful indeed is Renan's 
 sketch of the founder of the Franciscan order, one which 
 might have worked a revolution in the religious world 
 had not the astute Church of Rome transformed it into 
 something very different from the ideal conceived by St. 
 Francis. Renan paints him in his delicious valley in 
 Umbria, " the Galilee of Italy," realising in his daily life 
 the Sermon on the Mount, wedded to poverty, loving 
 not only men but all things that have life, with nothing 
 in him of the Eastern fakir or Buddhist ascetic, joyous, 
 companionable, sociable even with brigands, delighting 
 in the songs of the troubadours, and himself the author 
 of that lovely canticle of thanksgiving to the Creator for 
 
RE NAN, 199 
 
 all that he has created, from the sun and moon and 
 the elements to " our mother earth " with its fruits and 
 herbs and bright-blossoming flowers. The address on 
 Spinoza has been already adverted to. 
 
 Kenan's reputation and popularity were now at their 
 height. The chiefs of French literature who had 
 achieved fame when he began his career, Hugo and 
 Lamartine, Michelet, Quinet, and Littre, were in their 
 graves. Renan was recognised as indisputably the 
 foremost man of letters in contemporary France. Even 
 his superficial Hedonism, if it made his austerer friends 
 wince, increased his vogue with others. He was a 
 favourite guest in the highest circles, and Madame 
 Renan's receptions at the College de France rivalled 
 what had been the success of Madame Mohl in her 
 husband's life-time. The demands made on Renan to 
 deliver speeches and addresses on all sorts of occasions, 
 and to all sorts of audiences, were incessant. Besides his 
 frequent addresses on the reception of new academicians, 
 he delivered lectures to Jewish associations on the glories 
 of the Judaism of old and the composite character 
 which its ancient proselytism had given to the Jewish 
 race. At the Sorbonne he answered the question 
 " what is a nation ? " by showing, without even mention- 
 ing Alsace and Lorraine, that the inhabitants of provinces 
 constituted as these were formed a nation, which should 
 not be annexed without its w^ill by a foreign conquering 
 power. He distributed the prizes and gave good advice 
 to the pupils of the Lyc^e Louis le Grand (Voltaire's old 
 seminary), and addressing an association of Paris students, 
 he bade them avoid the prevalent pessimism, and enjoy 
 
200 LIFE OF 
 
 themselves while they were young as well as study hard. 
 To a society for the propagation of the French language 
 he showered praises not only on that graceful tongue, but 
 on French gaiety, and French wine. At a banquet in 
 honour of his old friend Berthelot, it is Renan who is 
 the mouthpiece of the company, and who dilates on the 
 merits of the guest and advantages of science. Renan is 
 the spokesman of the Acad^mie des Inscriptions at the 
 funeral of its distinguished member Villemain, and when 
 former hearers of Michelet, Quinet, and Mickiewicz 
 present to the College de France memorial-medallions 
 of those three of its former gifted professors, Renan, 
 in a graceful speech, returns thanks for the welcome 
 gift. It was Renan who pronounced the "Farewell" 
 to Tourgenieff at the Paris railway station when his 
 coffined corpse was borne homeward, happily character- 
 ising him as the interpreter of "that great Slav race 
 whose appearance in the front of the world's stage is the 
 most unexpected phenomenon of the century." 
 
 But the most personally interesting of all Renan's 
 addresses are two which he delivered in his native and 
 still-loved Brittany. In August, 1884, he was present at a 
 gathering held in his honour at Trdguier, his birthplace. 
 Forty years before he had quitted it for Paris, and in the 
 interval he had paid it only a rare flying visit. He found 
 the old ecclesiastical town outwardly very much the same 
 as in the days of his boyhood, and the Paris newspaper-men 
 who came to report the proceedings were lost in wonder 
 at the contrast between the brilliant city where they plied 
 their pens, and the survival of hoar ecclesiastical an- 
 tiquity which they found at sombre and lifeless Tr^guier. 
 
RENAN, 201 
 
 Renan's address of thanks was naturally a touching one. 
 While so much remained, so much else was gone for 
 ever; he had lost the mother — she died under his roof at 
 eighty-five — and the sister who had watched over his early 
 years. Of his excellent teachers only one survived. As 
 to himself, he was old in body — rheumatism made him 
 walk with difficulty — but in soul he was the same. His 
 ruling passion from first to last had been the love of 
 truth. Veritatem dilexi is the epitaph which he would 
 wish to have inscribed on his tomb — and this last resting- 
 place he should like so much to be in those old 
 cloisters of the cathedral which he had haunted as 
 a child and had been re-visiting; "but the cloister 
 is the Church, and the Church, very wrongly, will 
 have none of me.'* To obey truth he had snapped 
 asunder the dearest ties. In acting thus he was a 
 genuine Breton, one of " an unsophisticated race, which 
 is simple enough to believe in truth and goodness." 
 The Bretons are the true sons of the Celtic Pelagius, who 
 denied original sin. " A criticism which the Protestants 
 are always addressing to me is, * What does M. Renan 
 make of sin ? ' Mon Dieu^ I think that I know nothing of 
 these melancholy dogmas. I confess to you, the more I 
 think of it the more I find that all the philosophy of the 
 world is summarised in good humour," a remark very 
 characteristic of Renan in his old age. The great recipe 
 for happiness, such as he has fully enjoyed, he will 
 leave with them. " It is not to seek for happiness, but 
 to preserve an unselfish aim, science, art, the good of 
 our kind, to be of use to our fatherland." The cordiality 
 of his reception at Tr^guier led him to seek a summer 
 
202 LIFE OF 
 
 domicile in his native region, especially as he wished to 
 have once a year months of a quietude which Paris 
 would not allow for the composition of the second great 
 work of his life, of which more hereafter. He found 
 what he sought at Rosmapanon, on the Breton coast, 
 near Lannion, in a solitary house, only a few yards 
 from the sea, and among pleasant woods. Its former 
 occupant appears to have been a harsh man. The 
 neighbouring peasantry allowed no fruit to ripen in his 
 garden, nor a single vegetable to be gathered for his 
 table. With the substitution for him of the kind-hearted 
 Renan all this was altered, and the police no longer 
 needed to keep an eye on the kitchen-garden of that 
 house by the sea ! Here he received the Welsh Archaeo- 
 logical Association, to whom he told the anecdote of 
 Tennyson at Lannion, already given. In Paris, Renan 
 did not forget that he was a Breton. He was a 
 constant guest at the monthly dinner of Bretons 
 resident in Paris, founded by his friend, the Breton poet 
 Quellien, and samples of his speeches on those occasions, 
 full of gaiety and geniality, were printed in his Feuilles 
 D'etachees, 
 
 This volume of " Detached Leaves," stray papers, was 
 issued in 1892, the year of Renan's death. It contained 
 two essays, one a criticism on Amiel's well-known journal, 
 the other "Examen de Conscience Philosophique'' (Inter- 
 pretation of Philosophic Consciousness), containing more 
 matured expressions of his views on man and the Cosmos 
 than those in the Dialogues Philosophiques. In the pre- 
 face, morever, to the Feuilles Detachees, Renan speaks his 
 last word on those mysteries of Being, of life and of death, 
 
REN A IV. 203 
 
 which were seldom long out of Kenan's meditative mind. 
 The Examen was written away from Paris, at Rosma- 
 panon, in solitude by the sea. Once more, according to 
 Renan, there is no trace of a God in the visible universe, 
 least of all in the planet earth. " Atheism is logical. 
 The fieri — the process of Being always Becoming 
 by an internal development without external interven- 
 tion — is the law of the whole universe which we 
 perceive/* Yet this universe, which Renan insists on 
 calling almost unconscious, produces, he affirms (strangely 
 it appears to me), not only human consciousness, 
 but prescribes to man self-sacrifice, duty, virtue, and 
 takes care that these its commands are obeyed, al- 
 though poor man feels that in obeying them he is the 
 victim of illusion. Renan discovers an adequate image 
 of his almost unconscious, yet wonderfully creative uni- 
 verse, in so lowly an organism as the pearl-oyster : 
 
 " In the depth of the abyss, obscure germs create a consciousness 
 singularly ill-served by organs, but nevertheless prodigiously skilful 
 in attaining its ends. What is called a disease in this little living 
 cos7nos produces a secretion of ideal beauty which men seize on, 
 and for which they lavish gold. The general life of the universe is 
 like that of the oyster, vague, obscure, singularly obstructed, and 
 consequently slow. Suffering creates the mind, the intellectual and 
 moral movement of humanity. Disease of the world if you will, in 
 reality pearl of the world, the spirit of man is the aim, the final 
 cause, the last and certainly the most brilliant result of the universe 
 which we inhabit." 
 
 But Renan cannot rest satisfied, like the Positivist 
 and the Agnostic, with a knowledge of mere phenomena. 
 So far as I understand his abstruse ratiocination, and 
 on such matters it behoves one to speak with diffidence, 
 
204 LIFE OF 
 
 Renan finds in the varying orders of infinity established 
 by the infinitesimal calculus a symbolism which en- 
 courages him to hope. On the supposition that the 
 starry universe, sections of which we see with our eyes and 
 telescopes, is infinite (and the contrary supposition that 
 it is finite may be true), then it is conceivable, Renan 
 says, that there is a superior universe, a knowledge of 
 which may be reserved for us. 
 
 " Perhaps one day a God will reveal himself to us. The eternity 
 of our universe ceases to be assured from the moment we are allowed 
 to suppose that it is subordinated to an infinity. This superior 
 infinity may dispose of the inferior, utilise it, apply it to the 
 purpose of its superior. . . . From this point a God, with special 
 volitions of his own, and who does not appear in our universe, may 
 be held to be possible in the bosom of infinitude, or at least it is as 
 rash to deny as to affirm such a possibility." 
 
 In his critical essay on Amiel's Journal Renan had 
 expressed his dissent from the doctrme of the necessary 
 and universal immortality of the soul, and virtually said on 
 this point, " Plato, thou reasonest ///." Renan's preference 
 was for a bodily resurrection, and a resurrection only of 
 those who had been dominated by a love of the good 
 and the true. This seems to have remained Renan's 
 view when, two years afterwards, he wrote the Fxamen: — 
 
 *' To sum up, the existence of a superior consciousness of 
 the universe is much more probable than the immortality of 
 the individual. On this last point we have no other basis for our 
 hopes than the assumption, a large one, of the goodness of the 
 Supreme Being. For him one day everything will be possible. Let 
 us hope that he will then choose to be just, and that he will bestow 
 life and conscious feeling on those who shall have contributed to the 
 triumph of the good. It will be a miracle. But the miraculous, that 
 
RENAN. 205 
 
 is to say the intervention of a superior being, which does not take 
 place at present, may one day, when God will become conscious, be 
 the normal rule of the universe. The Judeo-Christian dreams which 
 place at the terminus of humanity the reign of God still preserve 
 their grandiose truth. The world, governed now by a blind or 
 powerless consciousness, may be governed some day by one more 
 reflective. Reparation will then be made for every injustice, every 
 tear will be dried. And God shall wipe away all tears from their 
 eyes " (Rev. xxi. 5). 
 
 What was a belief to the writer of the Revelation 
 ascribed to St. John was still, after nearly eighteen 
 centuries, a faint hope for Ernest Renan. 
 
 But if these great possibilities are held to be chimerical, 
 what remains for us poor sons of men to do and to 
 think? Time was when Renan, following Kant in his 
 second Kritik^ believed that the love of goodness and of 
 truth, that the determination of saints, martyrs, and the 
 noble-minded of all ages to sacrifice themselves for what 
 they deemed to be the good and the true, testified to the 
 existence of a deity who directly inspired those feelings. 
 For the Renan of the Examen, God has vanished from 
 our universe, though possibly domiciled, more or less 
 nascent, in another. Yet we are not now, as Renan 
 once advised, to accept the epicurean philosophy of 
 the Preacher. Renan's earlier nobleness shows itself 
 again, and he is not to be reproached for his inconsist- 
 ency. We are to be good, and true, and self-sacrificing 
 because the " voices of the universe bid us be good, 
 true, and self-sacrificing, in a language coming from the 
 infinite, perfectly clear in what it commands, obscure 
 in what it promises." In the preface to the Feuilles 
 De/achees^ a preface probably written two years after 
 
2o6 LIFE OF 
 
 the Examen, Renan approximates to a distincter theis- 
 tic faith. God is not visible in our Cosmos, but he may 
 have created it and be behind it, so to speak. The 
 following is the very ingenious illustration of Renan's 
 meaning, given not long before he was summoned to 
 the grave, and knew what there is to be known " behind 
 the veil.'' His denial of a supernatural intervention 
 is based, he says, on the experience of thousands of 
 centuries : — 
 
 " But thousands of centuries are a nothing in infinite time. What 
 we call long is relatively short by another standard of largeness. 
 When the chemist has arranged an experiment which is to last 
 a year, during the time fixed he does not any more touch his appar- 
 atus. All that goes on in his retorts is there regulated by the laws of 
 the absolutely unconscious; but this is consistent with the interven- 
 tion of a will at the beginning of the experiment, and with another 
 intervention at its close. During the interval millions of microbes 
 may have been produced in the apparatus. If these microbes 
 possessed sufficient intelligence they might allow themselves to say, 
 ' This world is not governed by any special volition. ' They would 
 be right as regards the short period granted to their observation, but 
 as regards the great totality of the universe they would be mis- 
 taken.'' 
 
 The chemist is, or may be, God, his apparatus our 
 planet, we the microbes. 
 
 ** What we call infinite time is perhaps," Renan adds, "a minute 
 between two miracles. * We do not know,' is all that we can 
 say as regards that which is beyond the finite. Let us deny 
 nothing, let us affirm nothing, let us hope.'* 
 
 If the Deity of this passage is not and cannot be 
 seen by us, he is at least the God of our own Cosmos. 
 
RENAN, 207 
 
 He is nearer to us than Kenan's former God of the 
 infinitesimal calculus. 
 
 However busy otherwise with his pen and with his 
 lips, Renan had for six years been steadily advancing 
 the last great work of his hfe, when, in 1887, was issued 
 vol. i. of his Histoire du Peuple d^Israel (History 
 of the People of Israel). In Kenan's view the Origins 
 of Christianity itself were set forth in this history of the 
 Jews from their first appearance in Asia to the coming 
 of Jesus. Christianity was not only the sequel, it was 
 the offspring of Judaism. From the great prophets of 
 Israel Jesus drew his earliest inspiration, and they had 
 their roots in the ^' antique ideas " of the patriarchal life 
 of the Hebrews. The books ascribed to Daniel and to 
 Enoch, and such a work as the Assumption of Moses, 
 suggested to Jesus his Messianic mission, and furnished 
 him with his eschatology. Strictly speaking, a history 
 of Israel should have preceded that of the Origins of 
 Christianity. But, Kenan says, in his fine preface, the 
 duration of life is uncertain, and he began at the 
 middle of his subject, specially attracted as he was by 
 the character of Jesus, and the constant spell cast on 
 him by "the dreams of a Kingdom of God which should 
 have for its law love and self-sacrifice." 
 
 Of the five volumes of the History of Israel the two 
 last appeared after Kenan's death; the first three seem 
 to have been prepared for the press during his lifetime. 
 Though composed by him in years of much physical 
 suffering, the book lacks none of the characteristics 
 which gave a charm and a value to the history of the 
 Origins of Christianity. The period, some 4000 years, 
 
2o8 LIFE OF 
 
 surveyed in the later work, is far more extensive than 
 the century and a half of which the story is told in 
 the earlier. The documents on which chiefly a history 
 of Israel must be based are the books of the Old 
 Testament, the accumulated literature of a thousand 
 years, in which, until the era of the prophets, masses of 
 legend are almost inextricably commingled with frag- 
 ments of genuine history. In the hands of successive 
 ancient editors, artlessly combining old documents and 
 new, altering and interpolating to make the text sup- 
 port their own view as to the manner in which events 
 ought to have happened, or had been said to have 
 happened, the narrative, and even the prophetic, sections 
 of the Old Testament, have been so transformed as 
 to perplex at every turn the interpreter. Though 
 aided throughout by the results of German research, 
 Renan found it immensely difficult, sometimes almost 
 impossible, to disentangle the true from the false, and 
 with nothing but the faintest and very often doubtful 
 indications to decipher the early history of the Hebrews. 
 For these reasons, and from the vaster period embraced 
 in it, conjecture had to play in it a far greater part 
 than in Kenan's history of early Christianity. In his 
 preface to the History of Israel he candidly avowed that 
 the reader must suppose the margin of the book strewed 
 with perhapses, even after the ample use which he him- 
 self had made of them in the text. But he brought 
 to his task the same commanding, if often daring in- 
 genuity, the same lynx-eyed research, the same dexterity 
 in throwing from the most unexpected quarters side-lights 
 illuminating the obscure, which were displayed in his 
 
REN AN. 509 
 
 earlier work. The book abounds, too, with admirable 
 French translations of passages of the Old Testament, 
 of which those from the Psalms are specially striking. 
 Renan's Hebrew scholarship, as well as wonderful 
 tact, enables him to suggest many emendations of the 
 original ; and of their merit, by comparing them with the 
 translations in our own Authorised Version, the un- 
 learned reader can judge for himself, often, I think, to 
 find them most felicitous. 
 
 About 4000 years ago, in Renan's view, the Aryan race 
 makes its appearance with its centre in Afghanistan, and 
 the Semitic race, with its centre in Arabia. In mental 
 endowments, in language, above all in religion, these 
 two races — Renan repeating once more his favourite 
 theory — present the greatest contrast to each other. The 
 Aryan is naturally a polytheist; the Semite tends to 
 monotheism. The Aryan deifies the elements and 
 powers of nature, and has a special god for every great 
 sphere of things. When in danger on the sea, the Aryan 
 Greek invokes Poseidon ; when he is sick, he offers vows 
 to Asclepius ; for a good harvest he prays to Demeter. 
 The Semites, as early as we know them, believe in a 
 myriad of spirits, called collectively Elohim, a plural 
 noun which by governing a verb in the singular 
 establishes their unity. But none of these Elohim 
 have names of their own like the Aryan gods, and 
 the Semite prayed to them in all cases as to a Sovereign 
 God. True, this Sovereign God has a different name 
 for each of the tribes who worship him. With one he is 
 Baal, with another Moloch, with another Chemosh, but 
 to save his theory of Semitic monotheism Renan explains 
 
 14 
 
iio LIFE OF 
 
 that all Semitic tribal names for the Deity signify the same 
 thing — the Highest, the Omnipotent, and so forth. 
 
 It was not at once, but in the course of time, that the 
 Elohim became for the tribe of the Semitic Israelites the 
 one God, who, in the language of the Elohistic writer of 
 the first verse of Genesis, " in the beginning created the 
 heaven and the earth/' Monotheism was founded by 
 the Semites, and received from Judaism by Christianity 
 and Islam has, outside India, triumphed over the poly- 
 theism of the great Aryan race to which the European 
 nations chiefly belong. The very language of the 
 Semites forbade the growth among them of mythology, 
 which is the mother of polytheism, nomina niunifia. For 
 the primitive Aryan every word enclosed a possible myth 
 The Semitic roots are hard, inorganic, realistic, infertile 
 both of mythology and metaphysics. The nomadic life, 
 which was that of the ancient Semites, strengthened their 
 tendency to monotheism. The very nature of that life 
 forbids the erection of temples and statues. 
 
 Semitic nomads wandering into Mesopotamia came 
 into contact with the inhabitants of the region of Padan 
 Aram — a sort of annex to Assyria — and there they found 
 a people in possession of Babylonian literature and 
 science, but speaking a language like their own. Hence 
 the new-comers could assimilate the Babylonian legends, 
 among them those of the creation, and the deluge, with 
 that of the probably mythical Abraham. To explain the 
 great superiority of the accounts of these matters given in 
 the book of Genesis to those which have been disclosed 
 to us by the decipherers of the cuneiform inscriptions, 
 Renan has an ingenious theory. The newly-initiated 
 
REN AN, 211 
 
 nomadic Semites, ignorant of the art of writing, and 
 dependent on memory, reduced the diffuse Babylonian 
 legends to something simple and concise which they 
 could easily carry about with them. They infused a moral 
 meaning into the story of the deluge, which became a 
 punishment for the sins of mankind. In addition to the 
 worship of the Elohim, these pastoral Semitic wanderers 
 were now endowed with a rational cosmogony which the 
 world has inherited from them. 
 
 Some of these tribes, known as Hebrews, tracing their 
 descent to Terah and his supposed son Abraham, 
 wandered into Syria. One of them, according to Renan, 
 distinguished from the rest of the Hebrews by its serious- 
 ness and attachment to the worship of the Supreme 
 God, was known as Israel. The Beni-Israel, sons of 
 Israel, is Kenan's favourite name for them. He will have 
 it that the Beni-Israel included a clan superior to the rest, 
 the Beni-Joseph, who, immigrating into Egypt, and finding 
 themselves well received there, invited the rest of the 
 tribe to follow them. They did so, and settled in the 
 land of Goshen, where they led a pastoral life. To this 
 is the beautiful and touching story of Joseph and his 
 brethren, reduced by modern criticism ! Renan restricts 
 to a century the sojourn of Israel in Egypt. This sojourn, 
 he considers, was injurious to the religion of the Beni- 
 Israel. They adopted from Egypt the golden calf, the 
 brazen serpent, the lying oracles, — all of them fatal gifts, 
 • — along with the Ark which plays so great and perhaps 
 useful a part in the subsequent history of Israel. With 
 the overthrow of the shepherd kings, whom Renan con- 
 siders to have been Semites, and the accession of a native 
 
212 LIFE OF 
 
 dynasty, began the maltreatment of the Israelites in 
 Egypt. Under harsh task-masters they had to slave in 
 the construction of the great works, urban and others, 
 undertaken by Rameses the Second, whom Renan calls 
 an Egyptian Louis XIV. In the anarchy which he be- 
 queathed to his successors, the Beni-Israel escape to the 
 peninsula of Sinai. Renan is not at all assured that 
 there ever was such a person as Moses ; but on the whole 
 is disposed to aamit his probable existence, though 
 it is likely that he was for the escaping Israelites a 
 sort of Abd-el-Kader much more than the legislator 
 whom tradition and imagination combined to make him. 
 Among the numerous *' perhapses " of this section of 
 Renan's narrative, one thing stands out as tolerably clear 
 to him. It is that with the march of the Israelites 
 through the desert of Sinai, this mountain becomes to 
 them the Olympus of their new national god Jahve 
 (our Jehovah), whose worship, mingled as it became with 
 that of the golden calf, of the brazen serpent, and the 
 national gods of Syria, for many centuries eclipsed that 
 of the Elohim. Renan can scarcely find language in 
 which to express his disgust at the degradation of the old 
 patriarchal religion. Jahve is a national, that is to say, a 
 wicked God. He perverts Israel. He makes it cruel, un- 
 just, treacherous, selfish, thinking only of its own interests. 
 
 " Happily," Renan exclaims in the midst of his sorrow and in- 
 dignation, "happily there was in the genius of Israel something 
 superior to the national prejudices. The old Elohism will never 
 perish ; it will survive, or rather will assimilate Jahveism. The 
 monstrous excrescence will be extirpated. The prophets, and in 
 particular Jesus, the last of them, will expel Jahve, the exclusive 
 
RE NAN. 213 
 
 god of Israel, and will return to the beautiful patriarchal formula 
 of a father, equitable and good, the one God of the universe and 
 of mankind." 
 
 But many centuries of legend and history have to be 
 traversed before Renan and his readers arrive at this 
 welcome consummation. 
 
 Each triumph of the Israelites in their gradual conquest 
 of Palestine was celebrated in songs which, with some 
 that arose out of their flight from Egypt, survived, unwrit- 
 ten, in the memory of the people. As the years rolled 
 on, these songs received legendary additions, the whole, 
 in the writing ages, assuming a narrative shape, prose con- 
 necting and elucidating the popular lyrics, and forming 
 such a work as the Book of the Wars of Jahve, which 
 contributes some material to the early chronicles of 
 Israel. Of these lyrics the chaunt of Deborah is the 
 grandest. Slowly coalescing into a nation, the Israelites 
 passed from the rule of the Judges, resembling, Renan 
 thinks, the Roman dictatorship, to a monarchical govern- 
 ment under Saul. Renan considers David to have been 
 a successful and fortunate bandit-chief, among whose 
 unscrupulous acts was his desertion to the Philistines, 
 the national enemy of Israel. But David gave Israel a 
 capital in Jerusalem, and by fixing the Ark there, made 
 it the centre of the religious worship of the nation. He 
 established a standing army, and founded a dynasty 
 which lasted five hundred years. Few men, according 
 to Renan, were less religious than David, though legend 
 made him a saint, and the authorship of psalms, only 
 one or two fragments of which he could possibly have 
 written, was ascribed to him. What David began in 
 
2T4 LIFE OF 
 
 making Jerusalem the religious centre of Israel, Solomon 
 completed by building the first temple, and installing in 
 it the Ark. But while doing this Solomon was by no 
 means a fanatical devotee of Jahve. Jahve might be 
 supreme in Jerusalem, but on the Mount of Olives, facing 
 Zion, pagan deities were freely worshipped, among them 
 Chemosh, the god of Moab, and of the famous Moabite 
 inscription. One of the functions of the prophets of the 
 future was to denounce such idolatry. 
 
 Solomon's reign was splendid but costly. Renan 
 compares it in both respects to that of Louis XIV., at 
 whose death his over-taxed subjects rejoiced. Solomon's 
 death was followed by the successful revolt of the ten 
 tribes, whom his exactions and forced labour had alien- 
 ated; and by their establishment of the kingdom of 
 Israel under Jeroboam, there was left only the little 
 kingdom of Judah to Solomon's successors, whose sove- 
 reignty did not extend beyond fifteen or twenty miles 
 from Jerusalem. The discontent of the northern tribes 
 with Solomon's luxurious harem had already probably 
 found expression in the Song of Solomon, and the 
 establishment of the kingdom of Israel was followed 
 by the execution of a much more important literary 
 work. Under David and Solomon the use of writing 
 had considerably extended. According to Renan, about 
 B.C. 930, some scribes of the new northern kingdom of 
 Israel committed to writing (i) a book of legends con- 
 taining those preserved by oral tradition from the beginning 
 of things to the exodus; (2) a book of heroes, coming 
 down to the kingship of David. Of this primal chronicle 
 of Israel more hereafter. 
 
REN AN. 215 
 
 Between the authority of the kings of Judah and 
 that of the kings of Israel there was a great difference. 
 While the kings of Judah became in a measure legitimate 
 sovereigns, ruling by a sort of right divine, it was not so 
 with the kings of Israel, the offspring of a rebellion, 
 though a successful one. It was therefore to the kings 
 of Israel, in so far as they encouraged the worship of 
 heathen deities, that the boldest resistance could be 
 offered in the name of Jahve by the prophets, who had 
 long ceased to be mere sorcerers or diviners. Samuel 
 himself, it will be remembered, had been consulted by 
 the youthful Saul as to the whereabouts of his father^s lost 
 asses. Since the time of Samuel the prophets of Jahve 
 had been more or less powers in the state. The struggle 
 between them and the kings of Israel, who encouraged, 
 or tolerated, pagan worship, came to a head when Ahab 
 was confronted by Elijah. Renan thinks that possibly 
 Elijah existed, but considers the accounts given of 
 him to be legendary, or distorted by long-subsequent 
 Jahveists, and is of the same opinion as regards Elijah's 
 successor, Elisha. " Wherever Elijah and Elisha enter, 
 the fabulous enters with them." The prophets, or pro- 
 phetism, triumphed in Israel and m Judah . in Israel 
 with the success of Jehu and the murder of Jezabel, in 
 Judah with the assassination of Athaliah and the accession 
 of a descendant of David to the throne. To Renan, 
 Ahab, calumniated by the Jahveist chroniclers, is a re- 
 markable sovereign, brave, mtelligent, moderate, who did 
 much for his people ; while Jehu, the protege of Elisha, 
 was in cruelty and treachery a worthy precursor of Philip 
 IL of Spain. 
 
2i6 LIFE OF 
 
 The two triumphs of prophetism just recorded 
 occurred between b.c. 860 and 850. About the latter 
 date, Renan conjectures, a writer in Israel, who from 
 his use of the name of Jehovah (Jahve) is in modern 
 times designated the Jehovist, undertook a very grand 
 task. It was to take the two books, one of legends, the 
 other of heroes, or of the wars of Jehovah, and adding to 
 them floating traditions of his time, with the results of 
 his own creative ingenuity, to construct a sacred history 
 from the creation onwards. Some twenty-five years 
 later, and without any knowledge of the work of his 
 predecessor, though a rumour of its existence may 
 have reached him, a notion of a similar kind occurred 
 to a writer in Jerusalem, probably a priest in the Temple 
 there, and called also in modern times the Elohist, because 
 in his narrative he speaks of Elohim, and does not use the 
 name Jehovah (Jahve) until he has reached the point at 
 which it was supposed to have been formally promulgated 
 by Moses. Much of the oral tradition possessed by the 
 Jehovist was also at the command of, and was used by, the 
 Elohist, who had over the other the advantage given by 
 documents existing at Jerusalem on the lives of David 
 and Solomon. Further, Renan supposes, about the time 
 of Hezekiah, the works of the Elohist and- the Jehovist 
 were combined in one, but yet so as to show in numerous 
 passages the handiwork of the Jehovist and of the Elohist 
 respectively. Since the acceptance of a theory of some 
 such kind it has been one of the main objects of biblical 
 critics to discover and assign to each of the two the 
 passages belonging to each. 
 
 Considerations of space forbid anything like a re- 
 
RENAN, 217 
 
 production of Renan's characteristics of each author, 
 and his indication of the passages which may be assigned 
 to each. Some of them, however, must be touched on. 
 The account of the creation in the first chapter of 
 Genesis is the Elohist's, the discrepant account of it in 
 the second chapter is the Jehovist's. To the Jehovist 
 is to be assigned the account of the garden of Eden 
 and of the fall. To the Pentateuch the Jehovist con- 
 tributed what Renan calls the Book of the Covenant 
 {L Alliance)^ the commands and code contained in 
 Exodus XX. 24 to xxiii. 19 inclusive. Here, while re- 
 maining the one God of Israel, Jahve shows himself 
 just, humane, merciful, the protector of the weak, 
 punishing injustice and cruelty. But it is not to be 
 supposed that, apart from its embodiment of the then 
 existing customary law, such a code had any legal force, 
 or represented anything more than the personal theories 
 of the Jehovist. Certainly the precepts respecting the 
 Sabbatical year were never applied in practice. While 
 the glory of framing this benevolent code belongs to 
 the Jehovist, to the Elohist belongs that of promulgating 
 the Decalogue, which is purely ethical, and in which 
 nothing is said of sacrifice or ritual. With the Decalogue 
 Jahve and Elohim become one. 
 
 Some fifty years (probably B.C. 800) after the composi- 
 tion of the Jehovist narrative of the early history of Israel, 
 there appeared in the person of Amos, " the herdsman of 
 Tekoah," the first of that new school of prophets 
 whose utterances have been preserved for us in writing, 
 who were teachers of the pure theology and morality, 
 which, in Renan's view, anticipated the teaching of 
 
2i8 LIFE OF 
 
 Jesus. In portraying these prophets, Renan puts forth 
 all his strength. He is struck with wonder and admira- 
 tion at the spectacle which they present. Here are 
 men deriving the great authority which they exert as 
 reformers of the popular creed and social ethics from 
 nothing more than their own assertion that they are 
 inspired by God, and are interpreters of His will. They 
 proclaim themselves called on to effect a profound 
 revolution in His worship, and another in the social 
 arrangements of the nation. The monotheism which 
 they preached, when all the world and many of their 
 own countrymen were sunk in idolatry, has become the 
 creed of the foremost nations of the Aryan race. In the 
 midst of Oriental tyranny and servility the Hebrew 
 prophets were the first to proclaim the rights of man. 
 Renan is not blind to their faults, and to the exaggera- 
 tion sometimes conspicuous in their teaching. Their 
 symbolism was sometimes grotesque, their denunciations 
 of the arts of life were often one-sided, and the theocracy 
 which they upheld was injurious to patriotism and national 
 self-reliance. In their occasionally blind fury and 
 fanaticism, Renan compares them to the Radical and 
 Socialistic journalists of his own contemporary France; 
 but their aberrations sink into insignificance in the 
 light of their transcendent merits. Save for them and 
 for what, so to speak, led up to them, Renan declares 
 that he would have disdained to write the history of 
 a petty nation whose ordinary life was in no way superior 
 to that of the Moabites and the Edomltes, and who, like 
 them, would have been forgotten but for the prophets. 
 The key-note of the new school of prophecy is struck 
 
RENAN. 219 
 
 by Amos. The Jahve, who was the tribal deity of the 
 Hebrews, just as Chemosh was of the Moabites, is now 
 the God not of Palestine merely but of the universe, 
 " he that formeth the mountains and createth the wind 
 and declareth unto man what is his thought, — that 
 maketh the morning darkness, and treadeth upon the 
 high places of the earth." The " Lord God " of Amos 
 is not, as Jahve had been, and as the Gods of the 
 Heathen were, to be propitiated by sacrifices, " Though 
 ye offer me burnt-offerings and your meat-offerings^ I ivill 
 not accept them; neither will I regard the peace-offerings of 
 fat beasts . . . but let judgment run doivn as waters^ and 
 righteousness as a mighty stream^ To " oppress the 
 poor, to crush the needy,'' is a crime of crimes. That 
 justice is venal, is among " the manifold transgressions," 
 and ** the mighty sins," denounced by Amos. Justice 
 is denied to the humble through a conspiracy of the 
 wealthy with the judges. *' They afflict the just ^ they take 
 a bribe, and they turn aside the poor from the gateP 
 After Amos Hosea represents God as saying: ^^ I will 
 have mercy and not sacrifceJ' To Amos and Hosea 
 nothing essential was added, Renan thinks, by subsequent- 
 prophets, not even by Isaiah, though, according to 
 Kenan, he is the greatest of them all, besides being 
 a man of superb literary genius : he " writes like a 
 Greek,'' Kenan's highest formula of praise. Under the 
 good Hezekiah, a king according to Isaiah's own heart, 
 the new piety of the prophets flourished practically as 
 well as theoretically, and to the saintly people who 
 surrounded the king Kenan assigns the authorship of 
 much of the book of Psalms, "perhaps the most beauti- 
 
220 LIFE OF 
 
 ful, and certainly the most fruitful creation of the genius 
 of Israel." After a reaction from the pietism of the 
 reign of Hezekiah, a successor worthy of him, the 
 iconoclastic Josiah, ascends the throne of Judah, and 
 with him appears the terrible Jeremiah. With the reign 
 of two reforming kings there had grown up a need 
 for a Law sanctioning the principles and practices of the 
 new theocracy. The Book of the Covenant was little 
 known beyond the Temple; indeed, Renan thinks that 
 it may have existed only in a single copy. The result 
 was the Book of the Law, which its composers ascribed 
 to Moses, which Josiah was told (b.c. 622) had been 
 fouiKi in the Temple, and which comprises all of 
 our present Deuteronomy, from verse 45 of Chapter 
 iv. to the end of Chapter xxviii. Renan thinks 
 that the book was manufactured by the priests, and 
 that, though Jeremiah's name is not mentioned in con- 
 nection with the transaction, he was the soul of the 
 whole of the " pious intrigue." The book of the Law 
 was, in Renan's opinion, ** the worst enemy of the 
 universal religion dreamt of by the prophets of the 
 eighth century." Jahve, though remaining as God of 
 the universe, a just deity, becomes again the special God 
 of Israel, therefore a partial one. He promises to heap 
 all possible prosperity on Israel, as a bribe to it to 
 remain faithful to him ; and infidelity to him is to be 
 punished by death. This part of the new code has 
 never been surpassed even by the code of the Dominican 
 inquisition in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. 
 Here again was a relapse from the old Elohim to the 
 old Jahve. 
 
RENAN. 22t 
 
 With the capture of Samaria by the Assyrians (b.c. 
 721), the kingdom of Israel disappeared, leaving the 
 kingdom of Judah, the inhabitants generally of which 
 may now be called Jews. With the capture of Jerusalem 
 by the Chaldeans (b.c. 588) came the final captivity 
 of the Jews, and their exile to Babylon. Ezekiel was 
 among the exiles who confidently expected a restoration, 
 w^ith a view to which was formed the book known as 
 Leviticus, " full of formalism and fanaticism," as usual 
 ascribed to Moses, and inspired by Ezekiel, as Deuter- 
 onomy had been inspired by Jeremiah. But a far greater 
 prophet of the captivity than Ezekiel was the unnamed 
 one whom Renan calls the second Isaiah — the real 
 author of Chapters xl.-lxvi. of the prophetic book 
 ascribed to Hezekiah's Isaiah. To the second Isaiah, 
 Jahve, the God who made the heavens and the earth, 
 takes a very special interest in the Jews, and assigns to 
 them the religious primacy of the nations. But ultimately 
 he is to bring to the worship of himself all the people 
 that on earth do dwell. " Look unto me, and be ye saved, 
 all the ends of the earth, I have sworn by myself that 
 unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear^ 
 Renan opines that in the second Isaiah, " the thought 
 of Israel reaches the greatest height that it has ever 
 attained." 
 
 With the restoration of the Jews, and the building of a 
 newtemple at Jerusalem, the compilation of the Book of the 
 Law, such as we now have it in the Pentateuch, was in all 
 essential respects completed, and once more Jahve was 
 substituted for Elohim in the national worship. " The 
 second Isaiah," says Renan, " had hoped for something very 
 
222 LIFE OF 
 
 different. His Jerusalem, open dayand night to receive the 
 nations, had nothing in common with that Httle shut-in Jeru- 
 salem to which no one could be admitted without all sorts 
 of formalities. The idealist seer would have been very 
 much astonished if he had been told that, to sacrifice to 
 Jahve on Sion, circumcision was a necessary preliminary." 
 For more than two centuries the Jewish nation slept a 
 deep sleep under the influence of the soporific ad- 
 ministered to it in the form of the Law. The very 
 completeness of their servitude to the Law roused them, 
 however, to revolt, when Antiochus Epiphanes crowned 
 his persecution of the Jews by polluting the temple at 
 Jerusalem. Renan traces to this heroic struggle under 
 the Maccabaeans the origin of a Jewish belief in rewards 
 and punishments after death. Hitherto the Jews had been 
 taught that loyalty to Jahve would bring them worldly pros- 
 perity; none of their teachers or prophets had promised 
 them a recompense beyond the grave. If they had been 
 punished in this Hfe, it was for their sins, or the sins of 
 their fathers. But how were they now sinning in shed- 
 ding their blood for the sake of their religion? They saw 
 apostates rewarded and the faithful subjected to the most 
 frightful punishments for not denying their faith. The 
 first distinct and emphatic expression in any Jewish writ- 
 ing of a belief in a future state of rewards and punish- 
 ments, is found in the so-called Book of Daniel. Three 
 centuries before, Ezekiel had spoken of an apparently 
 mythical Daniel as a wise and righteous man, worthy of 
 being ranked with Noah and Job. A pious Jew of the 
 time of the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, assumed 
 the name of Daniel to encourage his suffering country- 
 
RENAN. 223 
 
 men by writing of what he feigned that Daniel had 
 suffered, during the captivity, along with a mystical pro- 
 phecy, which foreshadows among other things the ultimate 
 triumph of the Jews. In this book (Chapter xii. 2) of 
 the pseudo-Daniel stand written the memorable words : 
 " Many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall 
 awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and 
 everlasting contempt'^ In time the faith thus expressed be- 
 came that of many Jews, the Sadducees rejecting it. As 
 a dogma it was accepted in spirit by the Founder of 
 Christianity, and became one of the corner-stones of the 
 Christian religion. No Jews, however, believed in the 
 necessary immortality of the soul. For them a life after 
 death was a mark of special favour to reward the good, or 
 of special reprobation to punish the bad. The Jews did 
 not believe in a soul apart from the body, hence their 
 doctrine of the resurrection, and those of the resurgents 
 who were to be rewarded were to enjoy themselves, not 
 in heaven, but on earth. Christianity in the third century 
 combined the doctrine of the resurrection of the body 
 with the Platonic belief in the immortality of the soul. 
 In Renan's opinion the dominant belief of the actual 
 Christian, especially of a spiritualist, is generally in the 
 immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body 
 is kept out of sight and mind. To the Maccabaean age 
 also belong, according to Renan, the quasi-monastic 
 Essenes, strict among the strictest followers of the law 
 (although they substituted offerings for sacrifices in the 
 Temple of Jerusalem), and carrying their asceticism so 
 far as to prohibit marriage, except under very singular 
 conditions. The superficial resemblance between 
 
 J 
 
224 LIFE OF 
 
 Essenianism and Christian monasticism has produced 
 a theory that the latter sprang out of the former, but 
 Renan will not allow the slightest influence to have been 
 exerted by the much earlier Essenes on the founders 
 of Christianity, who were probably ignorant of their 
 existence. 
 
 The capture of Jerusalem by Pompey (b.c. 63) ended 
 the Asmonaean dynasty founded by Jonathan, brother of 
 Judas Maccab?eus, and Palestine became a Roman pro- 
 vince, very tolerably administered. It is to this time 
 that Renan now assigns the composition of Ecclesiastes, 
 from which it is evident that the belief in a life 
 beyond the grave was not held by a writer who may be 
 regarded as a type of the educated and thoughtful Jew 
 of that age. The new dogma of the resurrection, and of 
 rewards and punishments after death, was accepted by 
 the Pharisees, who were the well-to-do bourgeois of Jeru- 
 salem, strict followers of the law, carrying the people 
 with them. To the wealthy official and hierarchical 
 classes belonged the Sadducees, worldly, sceptical, who 
 rejected the doctrines of the resurrection and made the 
 most of life on this side of the grave. 
 
 Towards the end of the work Renan gives a vivid 
 account of the character and career of Herod the Great, 
 whose reign in Palestine recalled, in its purely profane 
 splendour, that of Solomon himself. Renan com- 
 pares him to Mehemet AH, but acquits him of the 
 legendary massacre of the innocents : " Jesus was only 
 born four years after Herod's death." The History of 
 Israel closes with an interesting passage, in which, nearly 
 thirty years after the appearance of the Vie dejesus^ Renan 
 
RENAN, 225 
 
 makes the emphatic asseveration : — " After constant 
 reflection I persist in thinking that the general physiog- 
 nomy of Jesus was such as it is represented in the 
 Synoptic Gospels." Whatever Renan may have thought 
 earlier, Christianity, as well as Judaism, he now declares, 
 will disappear, but in the course of thousands of years 
 they have given birth to the cardinal phenomenon of 
 our age, SociaHsm. 
 
 '* Judaism and Christianity represent in antiquity what Socialism 
 is in modern times. Socialism will not definitely carry all before it. 
 Freedom, with what follows from it, will remain the law of the world. 
 But the freedom of each will be purchased at the expense of con- 
 siderable concessions made to all. Social questions will no longer 
 be suppressed ; they will more and more take precedence of political 
 and national questions." 
 
 Surely this last is a prophecy in course of fulfil- 
 ment. 
 
 15 
 
CHAPTER XI. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 'X'HE final chapter of the History of Israel had for 
 '*' heading the statement and pious exclamation, 
 Finito LibrOj sit Laus et Gloria Chris to, and at the end, 
 " Finished the 24th October 189 1." The fifth and last 
 volume, of which, it is too evident, Renan had not seen 
 the proofs, was not published until 1894, when its 
 author was no more. He was suffering acutely, and 
 more or less continuously throughout the years during 
 which he was working at the History of Israel. At the 
 beginning of 1892 he knew that his condition was hope- 
 less. During a midsummer visit to Brittany he rallied a 
 little, but feeling much worse he decided to return to 
 Paris and die, since he must die, at his post in the 
 College de France. During his last months he suffered 
 agony so terrible as sometimes to deprive him oif the 
 power of speech, but to the end he was gentle and 
 kind to all around him, and assured them that he was 
 happy. He often said to them that death is nothing, 
 that he did not fear it, and congratulated himself on 
 having reached threescore years and ten, the Psalmist's 
 normal limit of life. He had wished to meet death with 
 
LIFE OF RENAN, 227 
 
 his faculties unimpaired, and his wish was granted. On 
 the very day of his death he dictated a page of an essay 
 on Arabian architecture. One of his last wishes was 
 that the poor of Rosmapanon should be remembered, 
 and among his last words to his devoted wife were these: 
 "Let us submit to the laws of that nature of which we 
 are one of the manifestations. The heavens and the 
 earth abide.'' He died at the College de France on the 
 2nd October 1892, a few days before our own Tenny- 
 son, whom he knew and duly admired. 
 
 The Government and the Chamber rightly decided 
 that a state-funeral should be given to him who at the 
 time of his death was at the head of the serious literature 
 of France. Within the court of the College de France, 
 which was draped in black, were grouped official dig- 
 nitaries, representing the President of the Republic; 
 judges were there with members of the French Academy, 
 representatives of the university, of the chief learned and 
 scientific bodies of France, of the diplomatic body. 
 Without, to accompany the catafalque to the cemetery of 
 Montmartre, where Renan's remains were deposited in 
 the Scheffer family vault, was an escort of troops of all 
 arms, as befitted one among whose distinctions was that 
 of having been a Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour. 
 Afterwards the French Chamber decreed that the 
 remains of Renan, with those of Michelet and Quinet, 
 should be transferred to the Pantheon, which, as a rest- 
 ing-place for the remains of famous men, is at once 
 the Westminster Abbey and the St. Paul's of France. 
 Mirabeau was its first tenant. 
 
 The life of no eminent Frenchman presents a more 
 
228 LIFE OF 
 
 stainless record than that of Renan. He began his 
 active career by nobly sacrificing his prospects of 
 worldly advancement to his convictions, and from entire 
 devotion to them he never swerved. He lived the 
 frugal, indefatigable, laborious life of scholars of the 
 olden time, while, unlike most of them, he was conspicu- 
 ous in the gravest controversies, religious, intellectual, 
 and political, of an age of intense conflict in every sphere 
 of thought and action. Ever speaking his mind freely on 
 the chief topics, sacred and profane, passionately debated 
 in his day and generation, he aroused the fiercest and most 
 merciless of all antagonisms, that inspired by the odhwi 
 theologicum. But to none of his orthodox assailants did 
 he ever reply; from his own vivid remembrance of his 
 youthful devotion to the orthodox creed he could under- 
 stand and pardon the enmity which his frankness drew 
 upon him. Only once, and then playfully and almost 
 indirectly, did he deign to refer to absurd calumnies 
 reflecting on his personal honour, with which he had 
 been assailed by some infuriated scribes of the clerical 
 press. There is one characteristic of Renan, as a writer 
 on an absorbing theme of his time, which it seems to 
 me has been overlooked even by his French panegyrists, 
 although indeed it is of a kind which naturally perhaps 
 induced them to ignore it. Unlike several of his most 
 famous contemporaries among French men of letters, 
 although deeply attached to his country, deeply alive to 
 what was glorious in its history, and keenly appreciating 
 the graceful and brilliant qualities of his countrymen, he 
 never flattered them, he never indulged in that exagger- 
 ated glorification of France and the French to which 
 
RENAN. 229 
 
 Victor Hugo was so prone, and which, by stimulating 
 the national vanity and turning the national head, 
 has been most pernicious to the people which greedily 
 swallowed the adulation offered it. No Frenchman ever 
 lamented more than Renan all that was involved in, 
 and that followed on, the cataclysm of Sedan. But he 
 did what was better and more useful than shed tears, he 
 pointed out to his countrymen the faults of character 
 and conduct that had brought on them their terrible 
 disasters, and he preached to them the austere and pain- 
 ful discipline of self-reform, in which alone their recovery 
 lay. 
 
 Renan was often inconsistent, but his inconsistency 
 w^as never the offspring of opportunism, or exhibited with 
 an eye to his own interest. Under the Second Empire 
 he freely criticised Imperialism, under the Third Republic, 
 Republicanism. Though he sometimes hankered after it, 
 an active and personal part in political life was denied 
 him, perhaps fortunately, since his insight and independ- 
 ence would not have allowed him to attach himself 
 ardently to any party in France which had a chance of 
 exercising authority or influencing legislation. But there 
 was one sphere of usefulness in which, from his character, 
 position, and reputation, he was fitted and able to do 
 good. He pleaded persistently for a reform of the 
 higher and highest education of France, for more 
 freedom in its organisation, more elasticity in* its 
 methods, for the expansion of the substantial and the 
 serious in its programme, and the displacement of the 
 merely rhetorical and showy. It seems that much that 
 he advocated in this way has been adopted by the Third 
 
230 LIFE OF 
 
 Republic, which he looked on with no great favour and 
 some suspicion. Before he died he was able to con- 
 gratulate France on the development of an historical 
 school, earnest, studious, and accurate, which owed 
 much to his efforts and example. 
 
 In spite of the seemingly rather reckless levity which 
 is exhibited in some of his later writings, Renan's morality 
 was stainless. "Every one," says his personal friend, 
 Sir M. E. Grant Duff, " who knows anything about him 
 at all, knows that his conduct from birth to death was 
 simply that of a saint — a saint whose opinions may have 
 been as detestable as possible, but who, even if judged 
 by the teachings of the Galilean lake, was still a saint." 
 He modestly charged himself with not sufficiently en- 
 deavouring to promote the interests of others; but those 
 who knew him declare him to have been one of the most 
 friendly and helpful of men. All who have been in his 
 company speak enthusiastically of the fascination of his 
 manner and his conversation. M. G. Monod describes his 
 manner as " having something of the paternal affability 
 of the priest; the benedictory gesture of his plump and 
 dimpled hands, and the approving motion of the head, 
 were indications of an urbanity which never deceived, 
 and in which one felt the nobility of his nature and his 
 race." One peculiarity of his conversation was very 
 characteristic of the man. He hated controversy in 
 private as in public, and has recorded in his Souvenirs 
 his habit of agreeing with his interlocutor rather than 
 engage in discussion. In this he was very different from 
 Dr. Johnson, who, Sir Frederick Pollock says, " would 
 have execrated Renan's books if he could have read 
 
RE NAN. 231 
 
 them, and opened his arms to Renan himself after five 
 minutes' conversation, if tliey could have met. It was 
 the utmost refinement of performance on a fine instru- 
 ment, and without any stiffness or artificial display. 
 Renan's speech might be said to revive the Homeric 
 simile of words falling even as snow-flakes. It was 
 uniform, continuous, soft, and yet brilliant; every part 
 was crystalline, and seemed to have its place in the 
 whole by a sort of inevitable felicity." Renan's personal 
 appearance could scarcely be called prepossessing. An 
 American visitor to him at the College de France, in the 
 year preceding his decease, describes him seated at his 
 desk : — " rotund and episcopal, his hands crossed over 
 his shapeless body, from which the large head emerges, 
 rosy and silvery, the face broad, with big features, a great 
 nose, enormous cheeks heavily modelled in abundant 
 flesh, a delicate and mobile mouth, and grey Celtic eyes.''^ 
 Renan's opinions on the purely human origin of 
 Christianity and Judaism, and on the legendary character 
 of much of the Bible, bear so near an afifinity to those 
 with which the world has been familiar for more than a 
 century, that his heterodoxy may offend some but can 
 scarcely startle any. Doubtless it is otherwise in the case 
 of his daring expeditions into the infinite of the unknown 
 and the unknowable. His "thoughts that wander 
 through eternity " contrast with the general sobriety of 
 English philosophical speculation, even that of our most 
 advanced thinkers. The nearest approach to Renan's 
 high-soaring conjectures on ontology and the ultimate 
 destiny of man, is to be found in John Stuart Mill's 
 
 ^ Theodore Child in Harper's Magazine, vol. xxiv., 1892. 
 
232 LIFE OF 
 
 posthumous essays on religion, though his mild sur- 
 mises are far, very far, transcended in aim and scope by 
 Renan's audacious hypotheses. These are dreams, but 
 the dreams of a man of genius, whose mind from youth 
 onwards had been constantly exercised by problems 
 which agnosticism pronounces to be insoluble on this 
 side the grave, and very naturally declines to handle. 
 But surely, though to be regarded of course merely 
 as conjectures, Renan's are interesting, as showing 
 how the greatest of possibilities appeared to the intellect 
 and imagination of such a mind as his. He was not, 
 and did not pretend to be, a systematic thinker. Indeed 
 his philosophy seems to have partaken of the fieri 
 which he loved to discover in the universe. Here again, 
 therefore, the reader will find Renan sometimes incon- 
 sistent, affirming what he has contradicted and con- 
 tradicting what he has affirmed. But in the end, as 
 at the outset, whatever his temporary aberrations, Renan 
 is seen holding fast to the faith of his youth, that good 
 is for ever good, and evil for ever evil, that truth must be 
 sought and goodness followed at all hazards, so that we 
 may not fail to co-operate in carrying out the ultimate 
 aim of existence, the triumph of good over evil. In 
 a fine essay on Renan's friend, the late M. James 
 Darmesteter, whom France and its highest literature have 
 recently lost, M. Gaston Paris admirably describes 
 Renan's as a "complex and even deceptive nature," 
 which, while "infinitely mobile on the surface, beneath 
 the varying play of light and shade" is nevertheless 
 "unchanging in its depths."^ 
 
 ' Contemporary Review for January 1895. 
 
RENAN, 233 
 
 In the survey, necessarily incomplete, of Kenan's 
 multifarious writings, I have ventured, so far as I 
 could without presumption, to express occasional 
 opinions on his manner and on his matter. In point of 
 style and treatment Renan is, by all those who are com- 
 petent to judge, acknowledged to be one of the most 
 consummate of modern literary artists. Moreover, for 
 the work which he had to perform, the interpretation to 
 modern Europe of the great religions which have moulded 
 the world, from his combination of vast learning with the 
 widest sympathies, his fitness was unique. He brought 
 to bear on the subjects of the two greatest of his works, 
 the histories of early Christianity and Judaism, not only 
 genius, erudition, patient labour, lynx-eyed vigilance of 
 research, a penetrating intellect which rejected the 
 supernatural in the history of man — Gibbon had all 
 these — but also what Gibbon had not — a deep religious 
 sentiment, which survived the dogmatic faith of 
 Renan's childhood and youth, and enabled him to 
 reverence, almost to worship, as the highest ideal of 
 humanity, the Founder of Christianity, to sympathise 
 with and therefore to understand the prophets and 
 psalmists of Israel, the Christian apostles, martyrs, and 
 mediaeval saints, the Protestant and Puritan reformers, — 
 while declaring that the creed of all of them had 
 ceased to be valid for the man of the second half of 
 the nineteenth century. If inevitable limitations of 
 space had not forbidden, I should have liked to linger 
 over those works of which so rigorous a critic as 
 Edmond Scherer declared that, as the poet Gray 
 considered it to be the height of felicity to lie on a 
 
234 LIFE OF 
 
 sofa and read new volumes of Crebillon and Marivaux, 
 so it was his, with or without the sofa, to have new 
 volumes of Renan given him to read. I have been able 
 to bestow only an occasional glance at the contents of 
 Renan's miscellanies, but those of my readers hitherto 
 ignorant of them who may resolve to make their acquaint- 
 ance, will find themselves in a new world replete with 
 all that is attractive, interesting, instructive, from the life- 
 like description of Mahomet, mending his own garments 
 in intervals of prophecy, to charming gossip about the 
 Journal des Debats and its contributors under the Second 
 Empire, or touching anecdotes of heroism in humble 
 French life, told by Renan when awarding, in the name 
 of the French Academy, the Monthyon prizes of virtue. 
 Renan, of course, has his defects. One of them is a cer- 
 tain softness of mental fibre which leads him to exalt the 
 contemplative over the active life, to prefer this and the 
 other meek and meditative ascetic to such a command- 
 ing personality as that of the fiery and energetic apostle 
 of the Gentiles. In his intense desire to realise the per- 
 sons who figure in his great histories he sometimes trans- 
 forms conjecture into positive and emphatic affirmation; 
 and M. de Mezieres, in his address of welcome to 
 Renan on his admission to the French Academy, gently 
 reminded him that out of a single adjective he had 
 evolved quite an elaborate character of the evangelist 
 Luke. But Carlyle's favourite virtue, veracity, is 
 eminently Renan's. Everywhere in his writings you 
 see a man straining to give a faithful picture of 
 what he has to describe, an impartial estimate of the 
 character which he is portraying. He affirmed of himself, 
 
RENAN. 235 
 
 not only that he never said anything that he did not believe 
 to be true, but that he always said everything that he 
 did believe to be true. Fontenelle declared that if he 
 had his hand full of truth he would only open his little 
 finger. This was not Renan's mode of proceeding, and 
 his frankness sometimes gave offence to his friends. 
 But veracity, like charity, covers a multitude of sins, and, 
 compared with the amount and range of his writings, 
 his sins in speech were few in number. Do we not 
 crave above all things from a gifted man, working in 
 Renan's intellectual sphere, that he shall tell us what he 
 really and truly thinks and feels, whether the world likes 
 it or not? This Renan did throughout life, and the 
 themes on which he spoke were often the most delicate 
 and difficult, the most controversial, as well as the loftiest 
 that can occupy the human mind. Never was there a 
 man of letters and of genius, writing much on the deepest 
 problems of religion and philosophy, on human destiny 
 and its relation to the infinite, who could more justly 
 than Renan claim to have for his epitaph the all- 
 including words, Veritatem dilexi—\ have loved truth. 
 
INDEX. 
 
 *' Abbesse de Jouarre," 176, 178 
 
 Academy, Renan elected to, 192 
 
 Antichrist^ /', 1 56- 161 
 
 "Apostles, The," 124-134; 
 quoted, 125, 129 
 
 Avenir de la Science^ 57 ; de- 
 scribed, 57, 58 ; reasons for 
 delay in publishing, dd 
 
 Averro'es et VAverroume^ 63, 
 71 
 
 B. 
 
 Bernard, Claude, Renan suc- 
 ceeds at the Academy, 192 ; 
 his speech on, 193 
 
 Berthelot, Tklarcellin, friendship 
 for Renan, 53, 54 ; letter to, 
 120; 145, 174, 200 
 
 Bopp, Comparative Grammar, 
 . 54, 68 
 
 Buloz, founder of the Revue des 
 Deux MondeSj 70 
 
 Burnouf, friendship for Renan, 
 55,70 
 
 *' Caliban," 176, 177 
 
 Calvin, Essay on, quoted, 73- 
 74 
 
 Chateaubriand, ii, 15 
 
 *' Christianity and Rome," 183 
 
 Cognat, Abbe, describes Renan 
 as a lad, 22 ; goes w^ith him 
 to St. Sulpice, 27 ; describes 
 him there, 29; accompanies 
 him to Paris, 31, 32 ; import- 
 ant letter of Renan's to, 33 ; 
 enters sub-diaconate, 36 ; 
 Renan's confessions to, 41, 
 52 
 
 College de France, 92; Renan 
 appointed to the chair of 
 Hebrew, 93 ; his first lecture 
 at, 94-96 ; Renan's course 
 suspended, 97 ; his appoint- 
 ment revoked, 115; Renan 
 pleads for higher education in, 
 122, 143; elected Director, 
 184, 199, 226 ; Renan's death 
 at, 227 
 
238 
 
 INDEX, 
 
 ** Constitutional Monarchy in 
 France," 143 
 
 Cornu, Madame, Kenan's friend- 
 ship for, 88 ; quotes the Em- 
 press's criticism of the Vie de 
 [hus, 113 
 
 Correspondant, /?, recollections 
 of Renan in, 22 
 
 "Critical Historians of Jesus, 
 the," article of Renan on, 59 
 
 ^' 
 
 De philosophic peripatetic A apud 
 Syros con line ntatio historica^ 
 62 
 
 Dialogues et Fragments Philoso- 
 phiques, 120, I2l ; quoted, 
 121, 147, 175 
 
 Duff, Sir M. E. Grant, 97, iii, 
 113; account of interview with 
 Renan, 143; letter of Renan 
 to, quoted, 144 ; quoted on 
 visit to London, 183, 184; 
 description of Renan, 230 
 
 Dupanloup, Abbe, afterwards 
 Bishop of Orleans, superior of 
 the Seminary of St. Nicolas 
 du Chardonnet, 19, 20; con- 
 nection with Renan's school- 
 life, 22-27; views of, quoted 
 in Souvenirs, 26 
 
 E. 
 
 **Eau de Jouvence," 176, 177 
 Ecclhiaste, /', 193-195 
 Eglise Chritienne, l\ 178-183 
 *• Ethical and Critical Essays," 
 
 71 
 Eugenie, Empress, opinion of 
 
 Vie dejhus, 113, 143 
 Ewald, 72; treatment of Book 
 
 of Job, 83 
 
 Feuilles Ditachees, 202 - 207 ; 
 quoted, 203, 204, 205, 206 
 
 "General History and Com- 
 parative System of the Semitic 
 Languages," 68, 69 
 
 Gibbon compared with Renan, 
 
 Goncourt, Edmond de, descrip- 
 tion of dinner after fall of 
 Sedan, 144-146 
 
 " Gospels and the Second Chris- 
 tian Generation, the," 163- 
 170 
 
 Guest, Lady Charlotte, her 
 Mahinogion, a collection of 
 Celtic lore, much liked by 
 Renan, 75 
 
 H. 
 
 Hague, the, Renan visits, 162, 
 
 163 
 Hegel, philosophy discussed by 
 
 Renan, 59 
 Hir, Le, Hebrew teacher at 
 
 St. Sulpice, 36, 37; advises 
 
 Renan on his studies, 46 
 Histoii-e du Peuple d'Israel, 
 
 207-225; quoted, 212, 213, 
 
 225, 226 
 Histoire Litteraire de la France 
 
 an xive. sihle^ 61, 62 
 
 L 
 
 "Instruction Superieure en 
 France, son Histoire et son 
 Avenir," 122 
 
 " Intellectual Activity of France 
 in 1849," 57 
 
INDEX, 
 
 239 
 
 " Intellectual and Moral Re- 
 form of France, the," 151-155 
 
 Irving, Henry, interview with 
 Renan, 185 
 
 Issy, branch of Seminary of St. 
 Sulpice, Renan's life there, 
 27, 28-31 
 
 J. 
 
 Job, Book of, translated by 
 Renan, 78; quoted, 79-82, 
 
 Journal Astatique^ Renan con- 
 tributes to, 65 
 
 Journal de V Instruction Ptib- 
 liquBf 60 
 
 Journal des Dibats^ contribu- 
 tions by Renan, 66, 70, 71, 
 
 234 
 Journal des Savans^ contri- 
 buted to by Renan, 65 
 
 Lamennais, 11, 71, 86 
 
 Le Clerc, Victor, Renan's friend- 
 ship for, 61 ; article on, 172 
 
 Lesseps, Ferdinand de, Renan's 
 speech of welcome to, at 
 Academy, 193 
 
 L^vy, Michel, publisher, 64, 
 65, 170 
 
 Liberie de Penser^ la^ Renan 
 contributes to, 56, 57, 59 
 
 London, Renan visits, 183- 
 186 
 
 Lubbock, Sir John, 143 
 
 M. 
 
 Marc Atirele et la Fin du 
 Monde Antiquey 1 86- 1 92 ; 
 quoted, 192 
 
 Merimee, Prosper, criticises the 
 Life of Jesus, 118, 119 
 
 *' Metaphysics of the Future, 
 the," 173 
 
 Mezieres, M. de, speech of wel- 
 come to Renan at Academy, 
 
 234 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, 232 
 
 " Miscellanies of Travel and 
 History," 170-172 
 
 Mission de Phenicie^ 89 
 
 Moniteur, report against Renan 
 by Minister of Public Instruc- 
 tion published in, 113, 114 
 
 N. 
 
 Napoleon, Prince, Renan's 
 intimacy with, 140; Renan 
 accompanies on tour to the 
 North, 144 
 
 Napoleon III., 50, ^y, 88 ; policy, 
 139, 140, 142, 148, 152 
 
 Noemi, Renan's playfellow, 16 
 
 Nouvelles Etudes d'Histoire Re- 
 Hgieuse, 59, 70, 71, 197- 199 
 
 O. 
 
 "On the Study of Celtic 
 
 Literature," 75 
 '* Origin of Languages," 56 
 
 P. 
 
 Pall Mall Budget quoted on 
 Renan's stay in London, 184, 
 
 185 
 
 Pantheon, Renan buried at, 
 
 227 
 Paris, Renan enters Seminary, 
 
 31 ; sets up house with his 
 
 sister, 63 ; life at, 202 
 Pasteur, Renan's speech of 
 
 welcome to, at Academy, 193 
 " Poetry of the Celtic Races," 
 
 74,75 
 
240 
 
 INDEX, 
 
 '* Poetry of the Exhibition," 
 74, 75; quoted, 76,77 
 
 Pollock, Sir Frederick, on 
 Kenan's style, 231 
 
 PrHre de Nef7iii le, 176, 177 
 
 Q. 
 
 "Questions of the Time," 139 
 R. 
 
 Renan, the father, profession, 
 12; death, 13, 18 
 
 Renan, Henriette, Renan's 
 sister, takes a school to pay 
 off the family debts, 13 ; en- 
 courages Renan in his doubts, 
 41; sends him money, 46, 
 53 ; keeps house for him, 63 ; 
 encourages her brother to 
 marry, 67; accompanies him 
 to Syria and dies of fever, 
 90; dedication to her of the 
 Vie de Jesus ^ 90 
 
 Renan, Madame, nee Scheffer, 
 67 ; accompanies her husband 
 to Syria, 90 ; receptions at the 
 College de France, 199 
 
 Renan, Joseph Ernest, parent- 
 age, 11-13, 14; school-life, 
 15-17 ; at Seminary of St. 
 Nicolas, 20, 21 ; life there, 
 22-27 ; enters branch of St. 
 Sulpice at Issy, 27-31 ; 
 goes to St. Sulpice in Paris, 
 31 ; doubts, 32-35 ; learns 
 Hebrew, 36 ; studies German 
 exegesis with Le Hir, 37 ; 
 leaves St. Sulpice, 46 ; 
 character, 47 ; comparison 
 with Voltaire, 48-51 ; starts 
 as tutor in Quartier Latin, 
 52 ; studies languages and 
 wins Volney prize, 54, 55 ; 
 
 friendship for Burnouf, 55 ; 
 wins prize at Academie des 
 Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 
 56 ; writes for periodicals, 
 56-60; teaches at Versailles, 
 61 ; appointed on commission 
 of literary inquiry in Italy 
 and England, 61 ; appoint- 
 ment in Bibliotheque Nation- 
 ale, 62 ; becomes Doctor of 
 Letters, 62 ; writes De Philo- 
 sophid peripateticA apud 
 Syr 05 comnientatio historica 
 and Averro'es et V Averro'istne^ 
 63; takes house with his 
 sister, 63 ; writes for Journal 
 Asiatique and Journal des 
 SavanSy 65 ; writes for 
 Journal des Debats and Revue 
 des Deux Mondes, 66; pre- 
 pares for marriage, 6j ; 
 publishes "General History 
 and Comparative Systems of 
 the Semitic Languages," 
 68 ; elected member of the 
 Academy, 70; "Studies of 
 Religious History " and " Eth- 
 ical and Critical Essays," 
 71-77; translates Book of 
 Job and Song of Solomon, 
 'j2f2>6 ; commissioned to ex- 
 plore ancient Phoenicia^ 2>7, 
 89, 90 ; writes Mission de 
 Phinicie^ 89 ; begins Vie de 
 Jesus ^ 90; appointed Professor 
 of Hebrew at the College de 
 France, 93 ; his first lecture, 
 94-96 ; his course suspended, 
 97 ; gives private lectures, 97 ; 
 finishes Life of Jesus, 98; hisap- 
 pointment revoked, 115; Dia- 
 logues et Fragments Philoso- 
 phiquesy 120, 12 1 ; V If is true- 
 tion Supirieure en France^ son 
 Histoire et son Avenir, 122; 
 
INDEX, 
 
 241 
 
 visits the East, 123; writes 
 "TheApostles,"i24-i34; "St. 
 Paul," 134-138; "Questions 
 of the Time," 139; offers him- 
 self for election to the French 
 Chamber, 140-142; "Con- 
 stitutional Monarchy in 
 France," 143; goes to Scot- 
 land with Prince Napoleon, 
 144; enters into a contro- 
 versy with Strauss, 147-151; 
 " The Intellectual and Moral 
 Reform of France," 151- 155; 
 visits Rome, 156; "The 
 Antichrist," 156-161 ; invited 
 to Palermo, 161; "Twenty 
 Days in Sicily," 161, 162; 
 invited to the Hague, 162; 
 " The Gospels and the 
 Second Christian Genera- 
 tion," 163-170; "Miscel- 
 lanies of Travel and Plis- 
 tory," 170-172; "The Meta- 
 physics of the Future," 173; 
 "The Theology of Beranger," 
 175; "Caliban," "Eaudejou- 
 vence," "Le Pretre de Nemi," 
 "L'Abbesse de Jouarre," 176- 
 178; L! Eglise Chretienne, 
 178-183; comes to London, 
 183 ; Marc AurUe et la Fiti 
 du Monde Antique^ 186-192; 
 elected member of the 
 Academy, 192 ; VEcclhi- 
 flj/^, 193-195; Souvenirs d En- 
 fance et de Jeunesse^ 195- 
 197; Nouvelles Etudes d' His- 
 toire Religieuse^ I97-I99; re- 
 visits Treguier, 200; Feuilles 
 Ditachees^ 202-207; Histoire 
 du Peuple d'' Israel, 207-225; 
 death, 226 ; state burial, 227; 
 characteristics, 228-235 
 Renan, the mother, character, 
 13, 14, 18, 39; reconciled to 
 
 his abandoning the priest- 
 hood, 53 ; death, 201 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, con- 
 tributed to by Renan, 70, 71, 
 120, 121, 142, 161, 197 
 Rome, Renan visits, 156 
 Rosmapanon, Renan's country- 
 house, 202, 227 
 
 S. 
 
 Sacy, Silvestre de, advice to 
 Renan, d^y 67, 70 
 
 Sainte-Beuve, acquaintance with 
 Renan, 67 ; criticises the Life 
 of Jesus, 115, 116, 140 
 
 Sand, George, criticisms on 
 Renan, 119, 120 
 
 Scherer, Edmond, criticises the 
 Life of Jesus, 11 6- 118, 234 
 
 Seminary of St. Nicolas du 
 Chardonnet, 19, 22-26 
 
 Sicily, Renan visits, 161, 162 
 
 Song of Solomon, translation 
 by Renan, 78, 84, 85 
 
 Souvenirs d^Enfa^tce et de 
 Jeunesse^ mentions Noemi, 
 16, 18; describes Renan's 
 seven years' study for the 
 priesthood, 22, 24, 25, 26, 
 31; quoted, 37-39; end of, 
 55 ; describes Renan's intro- 
 duction to Levy, 64, 65, 75, 
 196, 230 
 
 Spinoza,Renan's address on, 163 
 
 Stanley, Dean, Renan's friend- 
 ship with, 185, 186 
 
 St. Paul, 134-138, 156 
 
 Strauss, his Leben Jesu, 37, 59 ; 
 controversy with Renan, 147- 
 151 
 
 T. 
 
 Tennyson, anecdote told by 
 Renan of his stay in Brittany, 
 75, 185 
 
 16 
 
242 
 
 INDEX. 
 
 "Theology of Beranger," 175 
 
 Thierry, Augustin, advises Re- 
 nan, 66, 70, 71 
 
 Tourgenieff, Kenan's funeral 
 speech, 200 
 
 Treguier, Kenan's birthplace, 
 II, 17, 41; Kenan's later 
 visits, 200 
 
 " Twenty Days in Sicily," 161, 
 162 
 
 V. 
 
 Versailles, 61, 147 
 
 Vie de Jesus, 59, 60 ; begun, 
 90; dedication quoted, 90; 
 described, 98-112; quoted, 
 loi, 106, 109, no, III; 
 criticisms of, 1 12- 1 20 
 
 Villemarque, collections of Cel- 
 tic literature, 75 
 
 Volney prize won by Kenan, 
 54, 55, 68 , . , ^ 
 
 Voltaire, compared with Kenan, 
 47-51, 112; Strauss's lectures 
 on, 147 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 By JOHN P. ANDERSON (British Museum). 
 
 I. Works. 
 II. Appendix— 
 
 Biography, Criticism, etc. 
 Magazine Articles, etc. 
 III. Chronological List of Works. 
 
 I. WORKS. 
 
 iclaircissements tires des langues 
 semitiques sur quelques points 
 de la prononciatiou grecque. 
 Paris, 1849, 8vo. 
 
 Extract from the "Journal G6n6- 
 ral de I'lnstruction Publique." 
 
 Aveiroes et TAverroisme, essai 
 histcrique. Paris, 1852, 8vo. 
 
 The second and third editions, 
 revised and enlarged, appeared in 
 1861 and 1866. 
 
 De philosophia peripatetica apud 
 Syros commentationem histori- 
 cam scripsit E. Renan. Parisiis, 
 1852, 8vo. 
 
 Histoire generale et systeme com- 
 pare des Langues Semitiques. 
 Paris, 1855, 8vo. 
 The second edition appeared in 
 
 ^ 1858 ; third and fourth in 1863. 
 
 Etudes d'Histoire Religieuse. 
 Paris, 1857, Svo. 
 Numerous editions. 
 
 Studies of Religious History 
 
 and Criticism. Authorised trans- 
 lation from the original French 
 by 0. B. Frothingham. New 
 York, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Studies in Religious History. 
 
 Authorised English edition. 
 London, 1886, 8vo. 
 
 Studies in Religious History. 
 
 London, 1893, 8vo. 
 
 De I'origine du laugage. Paris, 
 1858, Svo. 
 
 Memoirs sur Torigine et le car- 
 actere veritable de I'histoire 
 phenicienne qui porte le nom 
 de Sanchoniathon. Paris, 1858, 
 4to. 
 
 Extract from tom. xxiii. of the 
 **Mdm, de I'Acad. des inscrip. et 
 belles-lettres." 
 
 Essais de Morale et de Critique. 
 Paris, 1859, Svo. 
 
 A collection of articles which 
 appeared originally in the ** Revue 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 des Deux Mondes" and the "Journal 
 des Ddbats." 
 
 Nouvelles considerations sur le 
 caract^re general des peoples 
 semitiques, et en particulier 
 sur leur tendance au mono- 
 theisme. Paris, 1859, 8vo. 
 
 Le Livre de Job traduit de 
 THebreu, etc. Paris, 1859, 
 8vo. 
 
 The Book of Job translated 
 
 from the Hebrew, by Ernest 
 Renan. Rendered into English 
 by A. F. G. and W. M. T. 
 London [1889], 8vo. 
 
 Le Cantique des Cantiques traduit 
 de I'Hebreu, avec une etude sur 
 le plan, I'age et le caract^re du 
 poeme. Paris, 1860, 8vo. 
 
 Another edition. Avec 25 
 
 eaux-fortes d'apres les dessins 
 de Bida. Paris, 1885, fol. 
 
 M^moire sur I'dge du livre in- 
 titule : Agriculture Nabateenne. 
 Paris, 1861, 8vo. 
 
 Extract from torn. xxiv. of the 
 ** Mem. de I'Acad. des inscrip. et 
 belles-lettres." 
 
 An Essay on the Age and Anti- 
 quity of the Book of Nabathoean 
 Agriculture, etc. [Translated 
 from the French byS. Symouds.] 
 London, 1862, 12mo. 
 
 Henriette Renan, souvenir pour 
 ceux qui Pont connue. Paris, 
 1862, 8vo. 
 Only 100 copies printed. 
 
 De la part des peuples Semitiques 
 dans I'histoire de la civilisation. 
 Discours d'ouverture au College 
 de France. Paris, 1862, 8vo. 
 
 La chaire d'Hebreu au College 
 de France. Explications kmes 
 collogues. Paris, 1862, 8vo. 
 
 Histoire des origines du Christian- 
 isme. 8 vols. Paris, 1863-83, 
 8vo. 
 
 Vol. i., Vie de Jdsus; vol. ii., 
 Les Apdtres; vol. iii., Saint Paul; 
 vol. iv., L' Antichrist ; vol. v., Les 
 
 6vangiles ; vol. vi., L'Eglise Chr^ti- 
 enne; vol. vii., Marc-Aurfele; vol. 
 viii., Index G^n^rale. 
 
 Vie de Jesus. Paris, 1863, 8vo. 
 Numerous editions. It also forms 
 torn. i. of the *' Histoire des Origines 
 du Christianisme." 
 
 The Life of Jesus. London, 
 
 1864, Svo. 
 
 The Life of Jesus. Trans- 
 lated by C. E. Wilbour. New 
 York, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Another edition. New York, 
 
 1870, 8vo. 
 
 People's edition. London, 
 
 1887, 8vo. 
 
 J^sus. Paris, 1864, 12mo. 
 
 This is the same work as the 
 " Vie de Jdsus " without the intro- 
 duction and notes, 
 
 Trois inscriptions pheniciennes 
 trouv^es k Oumm-El-Awamid. 
 Paris, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Extract from the ** Journal Asia- 
 tique." 
 
 Mission de Ph^nicie dirig^e par 
 M. Ernest Renan. Paris, 1864, 
 4to. 
 
 Plates. Paris, 1864, fol. 
 
 Sur les Inscriptions Hebraiques 
 des synagogues de Cafr-Bereim, 
 en Galilee. Paris, 1865, 8vo. 
 
 An extract from No. 8, 1864, of 
 the ** Journal Asiatique." 
 
 Histoire litteraire de la France au 
 quatorzi^me si^cle. Discours 
 sur I'etat des lettres par V. 
 Le Clerc. Discours sur I'etat 
 des beaux-arts par E. Renan. 
 2 tom. Paris, 1865, 8vo. 
 
 Les Apotres. Paris, 1866, 8vo. 
 Forms also tom. ii. of the " His- 
 toire des Origines du Christianisme." 
 
 The Apostles. Translated 
 
 from the ori^jinal French, Lon- 
 don, 1869, 8vo. 
 
 Another edition, London 
 
 [1889], 8vo. 
 
 Histoire critique des livres de 
 I'Ancien Testament. Traduite 
 par M. A. Pierson. Avec une 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 iii 
 
 preface de M. Ernest Renan. 
 
 Paris, 1866, 8vo. 
 Etude sur Lamennais. Paris, 
 
 1865, 8vo. 
 
 This study on Lamennais ap- 
 peared in that writer's work, "Le 
 
 Livre du peuple, nouvelle edition." 
 
 Paris, 1865. 
 Nouvelles observations d'epi- 
 
 graphie hebraique. Paris, 1867, 
 
 8vo. 
 Questions Contemporaines. Paris, 
 
 1868, 8vo. 
 Saint Paul. Avec une carte des 
 
 voyages de Saint Paul, par 
 
 M. Viepert. Paris, 1869, 8vo. 
 Forms also torn. iii. of the "His- 
 
 toire des Origines du Christian- 
 
 isme." 
 La Part de la Farnille et de I'Etat 
 
 dans TEducation. Paris, 1869, 
 
 12mo. 
 La Monarchie Constitution nelle en 
 
 France. Paris, 1870, 12mo. 
 La Reforme intellectuelle et 
 
 morale. Paris, 1871, 8vo. 
 Essais d'histoire religieuse et 
 
 Melanges litteraires de D. F. 
 
 Strauss. Traduit de Talle- 
 
 mand par C. Ritter. Avec 
 
 une introduction par Ernest 
 
 Renan. Paris, 1872, 8vo. 
 Rapport fait a la Soci^te Asiatique 
 
 dans la seance du21 Juin, 1872. 
 
 Paris, 1872, 8vo. 
 Extract from No. 5, 1872, of the 
 
 ** Journal Asiatique." 
 Pierre du Bois, legiste. Paris, 
 
 1873, 4to. 
 Only 20 copies were printed for 
 
 L'Antechrist. Paris, 1873, 8vo. 
 Forms also torn. iv. of the "His- 
 toire des Origines du Christianisme." 
 Rapport annuel fait k la Soci^te 
 Asiatique, dans la seance du 
 30 Juin 1875. Paris, 1875, 
 8vo. 
 
 Extract from No. 9 of the " Jour- 
 nal Asiatique," July 1876. 
 
 Rapport annuel fait k la Society 
 Asiatique, dans la seance du 
 28 Juin 1876. Paris, 1876, 8vo. 
 Extract from the "Journal Asia- 
 tique." 
 
 Dialogues et fragments philoso- 
 phiques. Paris, 1876, 8vo. 
 
 Philosophical Dialogues and 
 
 Fragments. From the French 
 by Rds Bihari Mukharji. Lon- 
 don, 1883, 8vo. 
 
 Spinoza. Conference tenue a la 
 Haye, le 12 Fevrier 1877, deux- 
 centi^me anniversaire de la mort 
 de Spinoza. Paris, 1877, 8vo. 
 
 Spinoza: 1677 and 1877. Ad- 
 dress, etc. [Translated by Mrs. 
 William Smith.] Pp. 147-170 
 of '* Spinoza; four Essays," etc. 
 Edited by Professor Knight. 
 London, 1882, 8vo. 
 
 Les Evangiles et la seconde gener- 
 ation chr^tienue. Paris, 1877, 
 8vo. 
 
 Forms also torn. v. of the "His- 
 toire des Origines du Christianisme." 
 
 Melanges d'histoire et de voyages. 
 Paris, 1878, 8vo. 
 
 Caliban suite de la Tempete, drame 
 philosophique. Paris, 1878, 8vo. 
 
 Preface to Jules Mohl's Vingt-sept 
 ans d'histoire des Etudes Orien- 
 tales. Paris, 1879, 8vo. 
 
 Lettre k un Ami d'Allemagne. 
 Paris, 1879, 8vo. 
 
 Relates to a passage in his recep- 
 tion speech at the Acad^mie Fran- 
 gaise. 
 
 L'Eglise Chr^tienne. Paris, 1879, 
 8vo. 
 
 Forms also torn. vi. of the "His- 
 toire des Origines du Christianisme." 
 
 Discours de M. E. Renan, pro- 
 nonc^ le jour de sa reception k 
 1' Academic Fran9aise le 3 Avril, 
 1879. Paris, 1879, 8vo. 
 
 Conferences d'Angleterre, Rome et 
 le Christianisme, Marc-Aur^le. 
 Paris, 1880, 12mo. 
 '* Hibbert Lectures." 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Lectures on the influence of 
 
 the institutions, thought, and 
 culture of Rome on Christianity, 
 and the development of the 
 Catholic Church. Translated 
 by C. Beard. London, 1880, 
 Svo. 
 The "Hibbert Lectures." 
 
 L'Eau de Jouvence, suite de 
 Caliban. Paris, 1881 [1880], 
 870. 
 
 Annaik, poesies Bretonnes par M. 
 N. Quellien. Avec une Lettre- 
 Preface de M. Ernest Renan. 
 Paris, 1880, 8vo. 
 
 Inscriptions phenicicnnes tracees 
 a I'encre, trouvees \ Larnaca. 
 Paris, 1881, Svo. 
 
 An extract from the "Revue 
 Archeologique," Jan 1881. 
 
 Rapport annuel fait a la Societe 
 Asiatique dans la seance du 
 29 Juin 1881. Paris, 1881, 
 8vo. 
 
 Extract from the "Revue Asia- 
 tique." 
 
 L'Ecclesiaste traduit de I'Hebreu, 
 avec une etude sur I'age et le 
 caractfere du Livre. Paris, 1882, 
 Svo. 
 
 Qu'est-ce qu'une Nation ? Con- 
 ference faite en Sorbonne, le 
 11 Mars 1882. Paris, 1882, 
 Svo. 
 
 Marc-AurMe et la fin du monde 
 antique. Paris, 1882, Svo. 
 
 Forms also torn. vii. of the " His- 
 toire des Origines du Christianisme." 
 
 Seance de 1' Academic Fran§aise du 
 27 Avril 1SS2. Discours de re- 
 ception de M. Louis Pasteur, 
 Reponse de M. Ernest Renan. 
 Paris, 1882, Svo. 
 
 Stance de I'Academie Franjaise du 
 25 Mai 1882. Discours de re- 
 ception de M. V. Cherbuliez. 
 Reponse de M. Ernest Renan. 
 Paris, 1882, Svo. 
 
 Le Judaisme comme race et 
 comme religion. Conference 
 faite au cercle Saint-Simon le 
 27 Janvier 1883. Paris, 1883, 
 Svo. 
 
 L'Lslamisme et la Science. Con- 
 ference faite a la Sorbonne le 
 ^9 Mars 1883. Paris, 1883, 
 Svo. 
 
 Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse. 
 Paris, 1883, Svo. 
 
 An attested copy of the "acte de 
 naissance" of Renan is inserted in 
 the British Museum copy. 
 
 Recollections of my youth. 
 
 Translated from the French by 
 C. T. Pitman and revised by 
 Madame Renan. London, 1883, 
 Svo. 
 
 Second edition. London, 
 
 1892, Svo. 
 
 Nouvelles etudes d'histoire re- 
 ligieuse. Paris, 1884, Svo. 
 
 De I'idcntite originelle et de la 
 separation graduelle du judaisme 
 et du christianisme, conference 
 faite k la Societe des etudes 
 juives, le 26 Mai, 1883. Ver- 
 sailles, 1884, Svo. 
 
 An extract from ^he "Annuaire 
 de la Soci^t^ des Etudes Juives," 
 3e Ann^e. 
 
 Discours prononce sur la tombe de 
 L Tourgu^neff le ler Qctobre 
 1883, par M. Renan. (Pp. 297- 
 302 of Tourgeneffs **(Euvres 
 Dernieres." Paris [1885], 12mo. 
 
 Seance de I'Academie Franyaise du 
 23 Avril 1885. Discours de re- 
 ception de M. F. de Lesseps. 
 Reponse de M. Ernest Renan. 
 Paris, 1885, Svo. 
 
 Philippine de Porcellet, auteur 
 presume de la Vie de Sainte 
 Donceline. Paris, 1885, 4to. 
 
 Extract from the "Histoire Lit- 
 tdraire," tom. xxix. 
 
 1802. Dialogue des Morts. (Re- 
 pres^nte k la Comedie-Fran9aise, 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 le 26 Fevrier 1886, jour anniver- 
 
 saire de la naissance de V. 
 
 Hugo.) Paris, 1886, 8vo. 
 Le Pietre de Nemi, drame philoso- 
 
 phique. Paris, 1886, 8vo. 
 L'Abbesse de Jouarre. Drame [in 
 
 five acts and in prose]. Paris, 
 
 1886, 8vo. 
 
 Discours et Conferences. Paris, 
 
 1887, 8vo. 
 
 Histoire du Peuple d'Israel. 5 
 torn. Paris, 1887-1894, 8vo. 
 
 History of the People of 
 
 Israel. From the French. 3 
 vols. London, 1888-91, 8vo. 
 
 Drames Philosophiques. Paris, 
 
 1888, 8vo. 
 
 Caliban, L'Eau de Jouvence, Le 
 Pretre de Nemi, L'Abbesse de Jou- 
 arre, Le Jour de I'An, 1886. 
 
 Le Livre des Secrets aux Phil- 
 osophes, on Dialogue de Placide 
 et Timeo, Extrait de I'Histoire 
 litteraire de la France, torn. 
 XXX. Paris, 1888, 8vo. 
 
 Congres des Societes savantes. 
 Discours prononces a la seance 
 generale du Congres le 15 Juin 
 
 1889, par M. Renan et M. Fal- 
 lieres. Paris, 1889, 8vo. 
 
 Re[^onse de M. E. Renan au dis- 
 cours de M. J. Claretie. Paris, 
 1889, 8vo. 
 
 Pages choisies, a I'usage des lycees 
 et des ecoles. Paris, 1890, 
 Svo. 
 
 L'Avenir de la Science. Pensees de 
 1848. Paris, 1890, Svo. 
 
 The Future of Science. Ideas 
 
 of 1848. Translated from the 
 French (by A. D. Vandam to 
 p. 284, C. B. Pitman from p. 
 284). Loudon, 1891, Svo. 
 
 Journal d'un Voyage en Arabic 
 (1883-84). Par Charles Huber. 
 [Edited by J. E. Renan.] Paris, 
 1891, Svo. 
 
 Feuilles Detachees. Faisant suite 
 aux Souvenirs d'Enfance et de 
 Jeunesse. Paris, 1892, Svo. 
 
 II. APPENDIX. 
 
 Biography, Criticism, etc. 
 
 A., P. A. D. — Les Erreurs du xixe 
 siecle, etc. Paris, 1865, Svo. 
 
 A reply to Kenan's "Vie de 
 J^sus." 
 
 Andrie, J, F. D. — Quelques mots 
 sur les mythes du Docteur 
 Strauss et sur la vie de Jesus 
 d'apr^s E. Renan. Berlin, 1865, 
 Svo. 
 
 Anglade, M. L'Abbe. — Impossible 
 de nier la Divinite de Jesus 
 Christ. Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Contains strictures on Kenan's 
 ** Vie de J^sus." 
 
 Arnaldi, D.— Vita di Gesu del 
 professore Ernesto Renan. Con- 
 futazione. Genova, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Autessanty, G. d'.— M. Renan 
 devant le bon sens. Paris, 
 1867, Svo. 
 
 Asseline, V. — Preuves de I'exist- 
 ence de Dieu, suivies de quel- 
 ques reflexions sur la Vie de 
 Jesus de Renan. Paris, 1864, 
 Svo. 
 
 Auger, Lazare. — Neuf pages de- 
 cisives sur la *'Vie de Jesus" 
 de M. Ernest Renan. Paris, 
 1863, Svo. 
 
 Auzies, C. — Les Origines de la 
 Bible et M. E. Renan. Paris, 
 1889, Svo. 
 
 g * * * * *^ H.— LaVieetlaMort 
 de Jesus selon Renan, Havet et 
 Ramee. Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Balche, Alexandre de.— M. Renan 
 et Arthur Schopenhauer. 
 Odessa, 1870, Svo. 
 
 Barnouin, Dr.— Jesus-Christ et 
 M. Renan, etc. Avignon, 1866, 
 Svo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Barr^s, Maurice. — Dialogues par- 
 isiens. Huit jours chez M. 
 Renan. Paris, 1888, 12mo. 
 
 Baubil, F. H.— Vive Jesus ! Appel 
 au peuple du manifeste Deicide 
 de M. Renan. Paris, 1864, 
 8vo. 
 
 Baudon, P. L. — M. Ernest Renan 
 le prophete et le vrai fils de 
 Dieu. Etude critique. Paris, 
 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Bauer, Bruno. — Philo, Strauss 
 und Renan und das Urcbrist- 
 hentlium. Berlin, 1874, 8vo. 
 
 Beard, John R. — A Manual of 
 Christian Evidence, containing 
 as an antidote to current 
 materialistic tendencies, par- 
 ticularly as found in the 
 writings of Ernest Renan, an 
 outline of the manifestation 
 of God in the Bible, etc. 
 London, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Beyschlag, W. — Ueber das *'Leben 
 Jesu" von Renan. Berlin 
 [1864], 8vo. 
 
 Bloch, M. — Renaniana. [On the 
 *»Vie de Jesus."] Pest, 1864, 
 8vo. 
 
 Block, Simon. — Monsieur Renan 
 et le judaisme. Vie de Jesus. 
 Paris, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Boiteau, Paul. — Lettre k M. 
 Renan sur son article du Jour- 
 nal des D^bats du Decern bre, 
 1859. Paris, 1859, 8vo. 
 
 Bonald, L. J, M. de, Cardinal. — 
 Mandement portant condamna- 
 tion du livre intituM *' La Vie 
 de J^sus." Lyon, 1863, 4to. 
 Bonnetain, J. — Le Christ-Dieu 
 devant les si^cles. M. Renan 
 et son roman du jour. MUcon, 
 1863, 8vo. 
 Bourgade, F.— Lettre k M. E. 
 Renan k I'occasion de son 
 ouvrage intituM Vie de J6sus. 
 Paris, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Bourget, Paul. — Ernest Renan. 
 
 Paris, 1883, 8vo. 
 Part 16 of "C^ldbrit^s Contem- 
 
 poraines." 
 Essais de psychologic con- 
 
 temporaine. Paris, 1885, 12mo, 
 Ernest Renan, pp. 35-110. 
 Brandes, Georg. — Eminent 
 
 Authors of the Nineteenth 
 
 Century, etc. New York 
 
 [1887], 8vo. 
 Ernest Renan, pp. 147-167. 
 Brunner, Sebastian. — Der Atheist 
 
 Renan und sein Evangelium. 
 
 Regensburg, 1864, 12mo. 
 Bussy, Charles de. — Les Apotres 
 
 selon^ Renan. Paris, 1866, 8vo. 
 L'Ame de Mademoiselle Hen- 
 
 riette Renan, a son fr^re Ernest, 
 
 auteur de la Vie de Jesus. 
 
 Paris, 1863, 32mo. 
 Cahuac, J. C. — La Verite. centre 
 
 I'erreur ou contre Renan. 
 
 [Agen, 1865], 12mo. 
 Cairns, Rev. John. — False Christs 
 
 and the true, or the Gospel 
 
 History maintained in answer 
 
 to Strauss and Renan. Edin- 
 burgh, 1864, 8vo. 
 Carfort, Adolphe, and Bazouge, F. 
 
 — Biographic de Ernest Renan. 
 
 Paris, 1864, 8vo. 
 Carle, Henri. — Crise des Croy- 
 
 ances. M. Renan et I'esprit do 
 
 systeme, etc. Paris, 1863, 12mo. 
 Carvalho, T. de. — Vida de Judas. 
 
 Renan. Refuta9ao das novas 
 
 irapiedades. Lisboa, 1864, 
 
 16mo. 
 Cassel, Paulus, — Ueber Renan's 
 
 Leben Jesu. Berlin, 1864, 
 
 8vo. 
 Castaing, A. — Jesus, M. E. Renan 
 
 et la Science. Paris, 1863, 
 
 12mo. 
 Catholic. — Le Rationalisnie ^tudie 
 dans la Vie de J^sus de M. 
 
 Ernest Renan par un Catho- 
 lique. Besan5on, 1869, 8vo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Chantrel, J. — Un bon Apotre. 
 
 Paris, 1866, 8vo. 
 A criticism on "Les Apdtres" 
 
 by Renan. 
 Ciiarmes, Francis. — Etudes his- 
 
 toriques et diplomatiques. 
 
 Paris, 1893, 8vo. 
 Reception de M. Renan d I'Acad- 
 
 ^mie Frangaise, pp. 375-381. 
 Chauvelot, Barnabe, — A. M. 
 
 Ernest Renan. Paris, 1863, 
 
 8vo. 
 A reply to his " Vie de Jdsus." 
 Cheret, L'Abbe. — Lettres d'un 
 
 Cure de Campagne a M. Renan 
 
 sur sa Vie de Jesus. Paris, 
 
 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Chery, M. — Les Apotres de Ernest 
 Renan. Paris, 1866, Svo. 
 
 Chose, M. — DelaPhilosophie pour 
 Deux Sous a propos du livre de 
 M. Chose \i.e.y the ** Vie de 
 Jesus" of J. E. Renan]. 
 Paris, 1863, 12mo. 
 
 Clabaut, L'Abbe. — E. Renan et 
 rivangile. Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Cochin, Augustin. — Quelques 
 mots sur la Vie de Jesus. 
 Paris, 1863, 12mo. 
 
 Coco Zanghi, G. — Saggio di Ser- 
 moni con note critiche contro 
 la nuova opera di E. Renan, 
 Les Apdtres. Catania, 1867, 
 Svo. 
 
 Cognat, Joseph. — Monsieur Renan 
 hier et anjourd'hui. Paris, 
 1SS3, Svo. 
 
 Cohen, J. — Les Deicides, examen 
 de la Vie de Jesus, etc. Paris, 
 
 1864, Svo. 
 
 Colani, T. — Examen de la Vie de 
 Jesus, by M. Renan. Paris, 
 1864, Svo. 
 
 Colins, C. de. — A Monsieur 
 Ernest Renan. Paris, 1862, 
 12mo. 
 
 A letter occasioned by his speech 
 at the opening of his course of 
 lectures at the College of France. 
 
 Constant, B. — Les Contradictions 
 de M. Renan, etc. Paris, 1863, 
 Svo: 
 
 Crelier, L'Abbe H. J. — Le Livre 
 de Job venge des interpretations 
 fausses et impies de M. Ernest 
 Renan. Paris, 1860, Svo. 
 
 Le Cantique des Cantiques 
 
 venge des interpretations im- 
 pies de M. Ernest Renan. 
 Paris, 1861, Svo. 
 
 M. E. Renan guerroyantcontre 
 
 le surnaturel. Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Cros, L'Abbe. — M. Renan demas- 
 que, ou lettre de M. I'Abbe 
 Cros k un de ses paroissiens sur 
 la philosophic de M. Renan. 
 Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Croyant. — M. Renan en face du 
 miracle ; par un Croyant. 
 Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Cruice, M. P., Bishop of Mar- 
 seilles. — De quelques discus- 
 sions recentes sur les Origines 
 du Christianisme, etc. Paris, 
 1858, Svo. 
 
 D., A. M. — Lettre d'un Homme 
 du Monde h. M. Renan. Paris, 
 1864, Svo. 
 On the " Vie de J^sus." 
 
 J) * * * * *^ H. F. — Le Cin- 
 quieme Evangile de M. Renan. 
 Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Darmesteter, James, — Notice sur 
 la vie et I'oeuvre de M. Renan. 
 Paris, 1893, Svo. 
 
 Daspres, L. — Le Christ de I'his- 
 toire en face du Christ de M. 
 Renan. Paris, 1864, Svo. 
 
 Daumer, G. F. — Das Christen- 
 thum und sein Urheber. Mit 
 Beziehung auf Renan. Mainz, 
 1864, Svo. 
 
 Delaporte, P^re. — La Critique et 
 la Tactique, etude sur les pro- 
 c^d^s de I'anti- christianisme 
 moderne h. propos de M. Renan. 
 Paris, 1863, Svo. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Delitzsch, F. — Jesus und Hillel. 
 Mit Riicksicht auf Ren an verg- 
 lichen. Erlangen, 1867, 8vo. 
 
 Delorme, J. — Les Contradictions 
 de M. Ernest Renan. Lyon, 
 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Deschamps, A. — Le Semitisme 
 et les idees d'un professeur 
 d'Hebreu. Paris, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Des Granges, F. — Une Echappee 
 sur la Vie de Jesus d' Ernest 
 Renan. Paris, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Desliaires, G. — La Vie de Jesus, les 
 Evangiles et M. Renan. Mar- 
 seille, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Deutinorer, M. von. — Renan und 
 das Wunder. Miinchen, 1864, 
 8vo. 
 
 D'Hulst, M. — ij'Examen de con- 
 science de M, Renan. Paris, 
 1889, 8vo. 
 
 M. Renan. Paris, 1892, 
 
 8vo. 
 Extracted ixovuLe Correspondant. 
 
 Disdier, Henri.— Lettres detachees. 
 No. 12. Lettre k Ernest Renan, 
 etc. Geneve, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Du Boulay, John. — English Com- 
 mon Sense versus Foreign Fal- 
 lacies in questions of religion. 
 London, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Contains remarks on the "Vie 
 de Jdsus," etc. 
 
 Duff, Sir M. E. Grant.— Ernest 
 Renan. In Memoriam. Lon- 
 don, 1893, 8vo. 
 
 Dumoulin, J. — Le bon sens d'un 
 homme de rien contre les non 
 sens d'un homme de Science 
 Refutation des livres de M. 
 Renan. Paris, 1870, 8vo. 
 
 Eichhoff, F. A. — Reponse aux 
 ]&vangiles de G. d'Eichthal et 
 h, la Vio de Jesus d'Ernest 
 Renan. Paris, 1864, Svo. 
 
 Elmslie, W. G.— Ernest Renan 
 and his Criticism of Christ. 
 London [1884], Svo. 
 
 Engelhardt, C. F.— Wider Renan 
 und Conforten. Berlin, 1871, 
 8vo. 
 
 Felix, C. J. — Jesus-Christ et 
 la critique nouvelle [of J. E. 
 Renan]. Paris, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Ferrer del Rio, Antonio. — Apuntes 
 contra la titulada Vida de Jesus 
 de Ernesto Renan. Madrid, 
 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Filaehon, J. E. --Etudes de Philo- 
 sophie Naturelle. No. 2. Re- 
 ponse directe a M. Renan, etc. 
 Paris, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Fisher, G. P. — Essays on the 
 supernatural origin of Christi- 
 anity, with special reference to 
 the theories of Renan, etc. 
 New York, 1866, 8vo. 
 
 Foisset, M. — Ernest Renan, Vie 
 de Jesus. Besan9on, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Fouquier, Marcel. — Prolils et Por- 
 traits. Paris, 1891, 8vo. 
 M. Ernest Renan, pp. 93-98. 
 
 France, Anatole. — La Vie Litter- 
 aire. Paris, 1889, 8vo. 
 
 M. Ernest Renan, historien des 
 Origines, pp. 322-328. 
 
 La Vie Litteraire. Paris, 
 
 1890, 8vo. 
 
 " Histoire du Pen pie d'Israel," pp. 
 317-324. 
 
 Fiegier, E. — Jesus devant le droit, 
 ou critique judiciaire de la Vie 
 de J^sus de M. E. Renan. 
 Paris, 1863, 8vo. 
 
 Freppel,p. E., Bishop of Angers. — 
 Une Edition Populaire de la 
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 ZwoUe, 1863, Svo. 
 Stephens, E.— Modern Infidelity 
 
 disarmed, in a reply . to M. 
 
 Renan's Life of Jesus. London, 
 
 1876, Svo. 
 Strauss, D. F.— Krieg und Friede. 
 
 Zwei Briefe an Ernst Renan 
 
 nebst dessen Antwort, etc. 
 
 Leipzig, 1870, Svo. 
 Sulzbach, A. — Renan und der 
 
 Judaismus. Frankfurt-an-Main, 
 
 1867, Svo. 
 Taylor, Isaac. — The Restoration 
 
 of Belief, etc. London, 1864, 
 
 Svo. 
 The present j^osition of the 
 
 argument concerning Christianity: 
 
 Ernest Renan, pp. 360-383. 
 Tiraonide, pseud. — Renegat? Ou 
 
 question indiscrete a M. Renan. 
 
 Paris, 1864, Svo. 
 Tripard, M. — Philosophic de M. 
 
 Renan dans la Vie de J^sus. 
 
 Besan9on, 1864, Svo. 
 Trogoff de Kerbiquet, L. de. — La 
 
 Defense de I'fivangile. £pitre 
 
 en vers h. M. Renan. Paris, 
 
 1863, Svo. 
 
 I7 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Tulloch, John.— The Christ of 
 the Gospels and the Christ of 
 Modern Criticism : lectures on 
 M. Kenan's *'Vie de Jesus." 
 London, 1864, 8vo. 
 
 Urdaneta, A. — Jesucristo y la In- 
 credulidad. Obra escrita respon- 
 der a la "Vida de Jesus" de 
 Mr. E. Renan. Carcacas^ 1866, 
 Svo. 
 
 Valeri, J. B. — La Divinidad de 
 Jesucristo. Refutacion auslitico 
 de la vida de Jesus de Ernesto 
 Renan. Lima, 1864, Svo. 
 
 Verneilh, Felix de. — L'Art du 
 moyen age, et les causes de 
 sa decadence d'apres M. Renan. 
 Paris, 1862, 4to. 
 
 Vidart, L. — El Panteismo Ger- 
 mano-Frances. Apuntes criticos 
 sobre las doctrinas filosoficas de 
 Mr. E. Renan. Madrid, 1884, 
 Svo. 
 
 Vigoureux, F. — La Bible et la 
 critique. Reponse aux "Souv- 
 enirs d'enfance et de jeunesse " 
 de M. Renan. Paris, 1883, 
 Svo. 
 
 Villeneuve, H. de. — L'Amusez- 
 vous de M. Renan et le Credo 
 du P. Didon. Paris, 1892, Svo. 
 
 Vloten, Dr. J. van. — Jezus van 
 Nazareth en zijne beginselen, 
 etc. Amsterdam, 1863, Svo. 
 
 Wallon, H. A. — La Vie de Jesus 
 et son nouvel Historien, Paris, 
 1864, Svo. 
 
 Weidemann, K. A. — Die neuesten 
 Darstellung des Lebens Jesu von 
 Renan, Schenkel und Strauss. 
 Gotha, 1864, Svo. 
 
 Weill, A. — Le faux Jesus-Christ 
 du P6re Didon et les faux pro- 
 ph^tes d'Ernest Renan. Paris, 
 1891, Svo. 
 
 Weisinger, A. — Aphorismen gegen 
 Renan's Leben Jesu. Wien, 
 1864, Svo. 
 
 X. — La Divinite de Jesus Christ 
 a propos du livre de M. Renan. 
 Paris, 1863, 12mo. 
 
 Young, John. — The Christ of His- 
 tory. With an appendix, con- 
 taining a brief criticism of M. 
 Renan's "Vie de Jesus." Lon- 
 don, 1868, 8vo. 
 
 Zeller, E. — Strauss and Renan. 
 An essay, etc. London, 1866, 
 Svo. 
 
 Magazine Articles, etc. 
 
 Renan, Ernest. — Blackwood's 
 Edinburgh Magazine, vol. 90, 
 1861, pp. 626-639. — Eraser's 
 Magazine, vol. ^^^ 1862, pp. 
 579-593. — Harper's New 
 Monthly Magazine (with por- 
 trait), by J. McClintock, vol. 28, 
 1863, pp. 398-405.— American 
 Quarterly Church Review, by 
 J. S. Kidney, vol. 19, 1867, 
 pp. 204-224. — North British 
 Review, vol. 48, 1868, pp. 
 63-85. — Appleton's Journal 
 (with portrait), vol. 3, 1870, pp. 
 190-192.— Methodist Quarterly, 
 by G. Prentice, vol. 52, 1870, 
 pp. 6-28. — London Quarterly 
 Review, vol. 50, 1878, pp. 45-77. 
 — Fortnightly Review, by G. 
 Saintsbury, vol. 33, 1880, pp. 
 625-643.— Nineteenth Century, 
 by F. W. H. Myers, vol. 9, 
 1881, pp. 949-968. — West- 
 minster Review, vol. 120, 1883, 
 pp. 437-470. — Dublin Review, 
 vol. 92, 1882, pp. 221-225.— 
 Academy, by Paul Bourget, 
 June 16, 1883, pp. 420, 421.— 
 Atlantic Monthly, vol. 52, 
 1883, pp. 274-281. —Saturday 
 Review, May 5, 1883, pp. 563, 
 564. — Church Quarterly Review, 
 vol. 16, 1883, pp. 444-463.— 
 Quarterly Review, vol. 171, 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Kenan, Ernest. 
 
 1890, pp. 336-385. — West- 
 minster Review, by W. H. 
 Gleadell, vol. 136, 1891, pp. 
 387-403 ; same article, Eclectic 
 Magazine, Nov. 1891, pp. 691- 
 701.— Academy, by J. Owen, 
 May 9, 1891, pp. 443-445.— 
 Harper's Magazine, by Theodore 
 Child, vol. 24, 1892, pp. 330- 
 334.— Pall Mall Budget, Jan. 
 28, 1892. — North American 
 Review, by Col. R. G. Inger- 
 soll, vol. 155, 1892, pp. 608- 
 622.— Saturday Review, Oct. 8, 
 1892, pp. 408-409.— Spectator, 
 Oct. 8, 1892, pp. 491, 492.— 
 The Monist, by Moncure D. 
 Conway, vol. 3, 1893, pp. 201- 
 210.— Dial (Chicago), Oct. 16, 
 1892, pp. 234, 235.— Academy, 
 by J. Jacobs, Oct. 8, 1892, pp. 
 311, 312.— Athenaeum, Oct. 8, 
 1892, pp. 484, 485.— Contem- 
 porary, by G. Monod, vol. 62, 
 1892, pp. 632-646.— Revue des 
 Deux Mondes, by E. M. de 
 Vogue, Nov. 15, 1892, pp. 445- 
 462. — Revue Encyclopedique, 
 by F. Pillon, tom. 2, 1892, pp. 
 1559-1586.— New World, by J. 
 Darmesteter, vol. 2, 1893, pp. 
 401-433. 
 
 Abbess of Jouarre, Nation, 
 
 by A. Laugel, vol. 43, 1886, 
 pp. 370, 371. 
 
 and D'Eichthal. New 
 
 Monthly Magazine, vol. 129, 
 1863, pp. 231-252. 
 
 and FranjCe. Fortnightly 
 
 Review, by J. Mazzini, vol. 21, 
 1874, pp. 153-174. 
 
 and Sainte-Beuve. London 
 
 Quarterly Review, vol. 33, 
 1870, pp. 457-480. 
 
 and St. Paul, Quarterly 
 
 Review, vol. 150, 1880, pp. 
 243-269. — Revue des Deux 
 
 Renan, Ernest. 
 
 Mondes, by B. Aube, Aug. 15, 
 1869, pp. 877-904. 
 
 Another View of. Atlantic 
 
 Monthly, March 1893, pp. 
 431-432. 
 Antechrist. Edinburgh Re- 
 view, vol. 140, 1874, pp. 485- 
 515. — Theological Review, by 
 C. K. Paul, vol. 10, 1873, pp. 
 557-575. — London Quarterly 
 Review, vol. 41, 1873, pp. 135- 
 164 ; Christian Observer, by 
 E. B. Elliott, vol. 75, 1875, pp. 
 275-287, 373-382, 463-475.— 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, by 
 A. Reville, Dec. 15, 1873, pp. 
 750-782. 
 
 The Apostles, Fortnightly 
 
 Review, by H. Rogers, vol. 5, 
 1866, pp. 513-536; same article, 
 Littell's Living Age, vol. 90, 
 1866, pp. 479-493. 
 Autobiography. Modern Re- 
 view, by R. R. Suffield, vol. 4, 
 1883, pp. 495-519.— Athenaeum, 
 May 19, 1883, pp. 627, 628.— 
 Literary World (Bost), July 28, 
 1883, pp. 236, 237. —Mac- 
 millan's Magazine, vol. 48, 
 1883, pp. 213-223.— Spectator, 
 vol. 56, 1883, pp. 10, 11, 79, 
 81. — Scottish Review, vol. 3, 
 1883-84, pp. 61-75.— Nation, by 
 A. Laugel, vol. 36, 1883, pp. 
 421, 422, 441, 442.— Contem- 
 porary Review, by J. L. Davies, 
 vol. 44, 1883, pp. 279-289. 
 
 A Chat about. Fortnightly 
 
 Review, by A. D. Vandam, 
 vol. 52 N.S., 1892, pp. 678- 
 684, 
 Confession of Faith. Spec- 
 tator, vol. 58, 1886, pp. 1694- 
 1696. 
 
 Critical Essays. Christian 
 
 Examiner, vol. 77, 1864, pp. 
 83-98. 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Renan, Ernest. 
 
 Dialogues and Fragments. 
 
 Mind, by G. C. Robertson, vol. 
 4, 1879, pp. 132-135.— West- 
 minster Review, vol. 106, 1876, 
 pp. 109-136.— Spectator, vol. 
 57, 1884, pp. 319, 320. 
 
 Did Love of Truth make Mm 
 
 an Infidel? Catholic World, 
 vol. 36, 1883, pp. 829-848. 
 
 Dramas, Atlantic Monthly, 
 
 vol. 63, 1889, pp. 558-562. 
 
 English Conferences, Dial 
 
 (Chicago), by B. Herford, vol. 
 1, 1880, pp. 65 67. 
 
 Feuilles D^tacMes, Nation, 
 
 March 10, 1892, pp. 187, 188. 
 — National Review, by S. J. 
 Low, vol. 19, 1892, pp. 338- 
 348. 
 
 Funeral of. Nation, Oct. 27, 
 
 1892, pp. 316, 317. 
 
 Gaiety of. Spectator, Feb, 
 
 27, 1892, pp. 297, 298. 
 
 The Gospels. Fortnightly 
 
 Review, vol. 28, 1877, pp. 485- 
 509. 
 
 Inconsistencies of, Dublin 
 
 University Magazine, vol. 75, 
 1870, pp. 325-336. 
 
 Later Works of. Fortnightly 
 
 Review, by A. Lang, vol. 47, 
 1887, pp. 50-60 ; same article, 
 Eclectic Magazine, vol. 108, 
 pp. 329-336. 
 
 Lectures on Rome and Chris- 
 tianity, Dublin Review, by W. 
 E. Addis, vol. 4, 3rd series, 
 1880, pp. 333-359. 
 
 Life of Jesus. North Ameri- 
 can Review, by C. T. Brooks, 
 vol. 98, 1864, pp. 195-233.— 
 Christian Examiner, by 0. B. 
 Frothingham, vol. 75, 1863, pp. 
 313-339.— Victoria Magazine, 
 by R. H. Hutton, vol. 1, 1863, 
 pp. 385 - 396. — Blackwood's 
 Magazine, vol. 96, 1864, pp. 
 
 Renan, Ernest. 
 
 417-431.— British Quarterly Re- 
 view, vol. 38, 1863, pp. 271- 
 304. — Dublin Review, vol. 54, 
 1864, pp. 386-419.— Christian 
 Observer, vol. 63, 1863, pp. 
 780-786 ; vol. 64, pp. 143-148.— 
 Eclectic Review, vol. 118, 1863, 
 pp. 268-278.— Edinburgh Re- 
 view, vol. 119, 1864, pp. 574- 
 604. — Journal of Sacred Litera- 
 ture, vol. 32, 1863, pp. 150-164, 
 344-362.— Knickerbocker, vol. 
 63, pp. 247, etc.— Littell's Liv- 
 ing Age (from the Reader) y vol. 
 79, 1863, pp. 32-38.— National 
 Review, vol. 17, 1863, pp. 524- 
 563. — North British Review, 
 vol. 40, 1864, pp. 184-209.— 
 Temple Bar, vol. 10, 1864, pp. 
 44-62. — Westminster Review, 
 vol. 80, 1863, pp. 537-543.— 
 Continental Monthly, by P. 
 Schaff, vol. 6, 1864, pp. 651- 
 663. — Princeton Review, by J, 
 P.Westervelt, vol. 38, 1866, pp. 
 133-140.— London Quarterly, 
 vol. 21, pp. 457, etc., and vol. 
 22, pp. 235, etc.— La Petite Re- 
 vue, Nos. 2, 4, 7, 10, 13, 1863- 
 64. — Revue de Musique Sacree, 
 by E. G. Rey, Sept. 1863.— Le 
 Monde, by A. Mazure, Nov. 11, 
 1863. — Journal des D^bats, by 
 E. Bersot, Aug. 23, 1863.— 
 Revue Contemporaine, by A. 
 Claveau, July 15, 1863.— Revue 
 Ind^pendante, by C. Deloncle, 
 Aug. 1, 1863.— La Verity, July 
 19, 1863,— Le Monde, Oct. 12, 
 1863.— Revue Chretienne, by E. 
 de Pressens^, Aug. 15, 1863. — 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, by E. 
 Havet, Aug. 1, 1863. — Archives 
 du Christianisme, by S. Des- 
 combaz,Sept. 1863. — Le Monde, 
 Aug. 2, 16, Oct. 9, and Nor. 1, 
 1863. — Courrier du Dimanche, 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY. 
 
 Renan, Ernest, 
 by A. Dumoulin, Aug. 9, 1863. 
 — La Correspondance Litteraire, 
 by L. Lalanne, July 25, 1863.— 
 Bulletin du Bibliophile, by S. 
 de Sacy, Aug. 1863.— Le Temps, 
 by E. Scherer, July 7, 14, 28, 
 Aug. 12, and Sept. 29, 1863.— 
 Revue du Progrfes, by C. Selles, 
 July 1863. — Le Correspondant, 
 by the Abbe Meignan, Oct. 25, 
 1863. — Revue Germanique, by 
 A. Nefftzer, Sept. 1, 1863. 
 
 Christmas Thoughts on, 
 
 Macmillan's Magazine, by F. D. 
 Maurice, vol. 9, 1864, pp. 190- 
 197. 
 
 Marcus Aurelius. Nation, 
 
 by A. Laugel, vol. 33, 1881, pp. 
 489, 490, 510, 511. 
 
 New Studies in Religious 
 
 History, Nation, by A. Laugel, 
 July 17,1884, pp. 50, 51.— Mac- 
 millan*s Magazine, vol. 60,1884, 
 pp. 161-170. 
 
 On HiTnself. Spectator, Aug. 
 
 29, 1885, pp. 1131, 1132; same 
 article. Eclectic Magazine, vol. 
 105, pp. 706-708. 
 
 Origin of Christianity. Na- 
 tion, by A. Laugel, vol. 30, 
 1880, pp. 8, 9, 41, 42.— 
 London Quarterly Review, 
 vol. 58, 1862, pp. 76-114.— 
 Revue des Deux Mondes, by 
 G. Boissier, March 1, 1882, 
 pp. 40-76. 
 
 The People of Israel. Revue 
 
 des Deux Mondes, by F. Brune- 
 tiere, Feb. 1, 1889, pp. 672-694 ; 
 
 Renan, Ernest. 
 
 by J. Darmesteter, April 1, 
 
 1891, pp. 513-552. 
 La Fhilosophie de M. Renan. 
 
 Revue Nationale, by E. Poitou, 
 
 Oct. 10, 1864. 
 Le PrHre de Nemi. Nation, 
 
 by A. Laugel, Dec. 10, 1885, 
 
 pp. 483, 484, 506, 507. 
 Recollections of. Congrega- 
 
 tionalist, by R. W. Dale, vol. 
 
 12, 1883, pp. 539-550, 638-645. 
 
 — Nineteenth Century, by 
 
 Frederick Pollock, vol. 32,1892, 
 
 pp. 711-719. 
 — — Sketch of his Life and Work. 
 
 Popular Science Monthly, by G. 
 
 Monod, vol. 42, 1893, pp. 831- 
 
 840. 
 Souvenir sd^Enfance. Monthly 
 
 Magazine, vol. 158, 1876, pp. 
 
 571-582. 
 Strauss and Ecce Homo. 
 
 Edinburgh Review, vol. 124, 
 
 1866, pp. 450-475 ; same article. 
 Eclectic Magazine, vol. 68, 
 
 1867, pp. 265-280. 
 
 Strauss and Schleiermacher. 
 
 Princeton Review, by J. P. 
 
 Westervelt, vol. 38, 1866, pp. 
 
 133-140. 
 A Talk on Religion with. 
 
 Nation, by L. de Lautreppe, 
 
 Feb. 23, 1888, pp. 152, 153. 
 Table- Talk of. Fortnightly 
 
 Review, by H. Le Roux, vol. 
 
 52 N.S., 1892, pp. 685-688. 
 Theory of. Continental 
 
 Monthly, by H. M. Thompson, 
 
 vol. 5, 1864, pp. 609-619. 
 
 IIL— CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS. 
 
 Averroes et PAverroisme - 1852 
 Histoire des Langues Semi- 
 
 tiques - - - 1855 
 
 Etudes d' Histoire Religieuse 1857 
 
 De I'origine du langage - 1858 
 
 Essais de morale et de 
 critique 
 
 Nouvelles considerations 
 sur le caractere general 
 des peuples semitiques - 
 
 1859 
 
 1859 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
 
 Le Livre de Job - - 1859 
 Le Cantique des Cantiques- 1860 
 Histoire des Origines du 
 Christianisme - 1863-83 
 Vol. i.— Vie de J^sus. 
 ,, ii.— Les Ap6tres. 
 „ iii.— Saint Paul. 
 „ iv.— L'An^^christ. 
 „ v.— Les Evangiles. 
 ,, vi.— L'Eglise Chr^tienne. 
 ,, vii. — Marc Aur^le. 
 „ viii.— Index G^n6rale. 
 Vie de Jesus 
 Mission de Ph^nicie - 
 Discours sur I'^tat des 
 beaux-arts en France au 
 quatorzi^me si^cle 
 
 (In torn. ii. of the "His- 
 toire Littdraire de la France 
 au quatorzi^me si^cle.) 
 Les ApOtres 
 
 Questions Contemporaines- 
 Saint Paul 
 
 La Part de la Famille et de 
 
 I'Etat dans I'Education - 
 
 La Monarchie Constitu- 
 
 tionnelle en France 
 La Reforme Intellectuelle et 
 
 Morale 
 L'Ant^christ - - 
 Dialogues et fragments 
 philosophiques 
 
 1863 
 1864 
 
 1865 
 
 1866 
 1868 
 1869 
 
 1869 
 
 1870 
 
 1871 
 1873 
 
 - 1876 
 
 Leslfevangiles - 
 
 1877 
 
 Melanges d'histoire et de 
 
 
 voyages 
 
 1878 
 
 Caliban suite de la Tempete 
 
 1878 
 
 Lettre k un Ami d'Alle- 
 
 
 magne 
 
 1879 
 
 L'Eglise Chr^tienne 
 
 1879 
 
 Conferences d'Angleterre - 
 
 1880 
 
 L'Eau de Jouvence 
 
 1881 
 
 L'Ecclesiaste - 
 
 1882 
 
 Marc AurMe et la fin du 
 
 
 monde antique 
 
 1882 
 
 Souvenirs d'Enfance et de 
 
 
 Jeunesse 
 
 1883 
 
 Nouvelles etudes d'histoire 
 
 
 religieuse 
 
 1884 
 
 Le Pretre de Nemi - 
 
 1886 
 
 L'Abbesse de Jouarre 
 
 1886 
 
 Discours et Conferences 
 
 1887 
 
 Histoire du Peuple d'ls- 
 
 
 rael .... 1887-94 
 
 Drames Philosophiques 
 
 1888 
 
 Pages Choisies k I'usage des 
 
 
 Lycees et des Ecoles 
 
 1890 
 
 L'Avenir de la Science. 
 
 
 Pens^es de 1848 - 
 
 1890 
 
 Feuilles Detachees - 
 
 1892 
 
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