The raising of Lazarus, for instance, which M. Renan would like to turn out of the Gospels, but which he is forced to confess must stay--according to him, was a deliberate, planned, stage performance, a gross piece of juggling imposition. Now we do not object _per se_ to M. Renan's taking that view of it. He has a perfect freedom of choice. We _do_ object to the immorality, the essential blindness to right and wrong, which lead him to apologize for the cheat, and try to prove it a perfectly innocent and justifiable thing. We protest against confounding eternal distinctions, against debauching conscience by proving wrong right, and a cheat an innocent bit of acting, against claiming an impostor and a liar as the high priest of the world's 'absolute religion'! But few of us, in this part of the world, can appreciate the transcendental reasoning that makes an impostor half divine, or a cheat holy. 'Good faith and imposture,' to quote our author, 'are words which, in our rigid conscience, are opposed like two irreconcilable terms,' though, he says, it is not so in 'the East,' from which our religion came, and was certainly far from being so with our Teacher! We cannot admire M. Renan here. The writing is very fine. He exhausts himself in his 'charming' style to make it all right, and show us that we have profound reason to admire this lying teacher, this cheating miracle monger, whom he holds up between us and the pure 'Son of Mary.' But it does not answer. In this cold climate a lie is a lie, a cheat is a cheat, and a mountebank and impostor is not the teacher of 'the absolute religion of humanity!' As M. Renan writes His life, that is the way in which the Founder of Christianity develops Himself. First we have the young man, amiable, sweet, 'charming,' enacting a 'beautiful pastoral' in the 'delicious climate of Galilee,' where it appears that nobody has anything to do save to enact 'pastorals,' although we are told '_brigandage_ was common in Galilee,' which seems a strange accompaniment to 'pastorals.' Where He got His wisdom, how He came by these 'transcendent utterances,' which, we are told, 'some few' only, even now, are lofty enough to appreciate, we are not informed. There they are. But, right in the midst of them, this wonderful young man, uttering these 'charming' lessons, and these 'delicious' sayings, sets to work miracle-mongering, trying His hand at thaumaturgy and legerdemain, becomes an impostor and a mountebank, pretending, among other things, to raise a man who puts on a shroud, gets into a grave, and shams dead! At last He is taken, and then, in view of death, becomes penitent, reforms, and recovers His purity!