§ 182.8. =Strauss=, who had meanwhile occupied himself with the studies of Von Hutten, Reimarus, and Lessing’s “Nathan,” feeling that the researches of the Tübingen school had antiquated his “Life of Jesus,” and stimulated by Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” written with French elegance and vivacity, in which he described Christ as an amiable hero of a Galilæan village story, undertook in 1864 a semi-jubilee reproduction of his work, addressed to “the German people.” This was followed by a severe controversial pamphlet, “The Half and the Whole,” in which he lashed the halting attempts of Schenkel as well as the uncompromising conservatism of Hengstenberg. He now pointed out cases of intentional romancing in the gospel narratives; the resurrection rests upon subjective visions of Christ’s disciples. His “Lectures on Voltaire” appeared in A.D. 1870, and in A.D. 1872 the most radical of all his books, “The Old and the New Faith,” which makes Christianity only a modified Judaism, the history of the resurrection mere “humbug,” and the whole gospel story the result of the “hallucinations” of the early Christians. The question whether “we” are still Christians he answers openly and honourably in the negative. He has also surmounted the standpoint of pantheism. The religion of the nineteenth century is _pancosmism_, its gospel the results of natural science with Darwin’s discoveries as its bible, its devotional works the national classics, its places of worship the concert rooms, theatres, museums, etc. The most violent attacks on this book came from the _Protestantenverein_. Strauss had said, “If the old faith is absurd, then the modernized edition of the ‘_Protestantenverein_’ and the school of Jena is doubly, trebly so. The old faith only contradicts reason, not itself; the new contradicts itself at every point, and how can it then be reconciled with reason?”[534]