We may select the name of a writer who stands pre-eminent in critical investigations connected with religion, as the best representative of the tone assumed in reference to the Christian faith by the most highly educated younger spirits of the French nation, of whose literature he is one of the brightest living ornaments,—Ernest Renan.(891) Exhibiting a mind of the rarest delicacy, and bearing traces of the collective cultivation which arises from detailed acquaintance with most varied branches of human culture, he has brought his vast acquaintance with the Semitic tongues to bear on the historical criticism of portions of the Hebrew literature; and has sketched with the hand of a master the great passages in the history of religion,—the symbolism of mythology; the monotheistic systems, Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan; the four chief phases of Christianity, the Catholic, the Protestant, the Socinian, the rationalist;(892) and has speculated on the future religious tendencies of the age, in essays, which those who feel most deeply pained with the views presented must acknowledge to be marked by rare power and freshness. Possessing a delicate appreciation of the past, and a cheerful confidence in the future; loving the advance of the knowledge of physical nature, yet protesting against the tendency to materialism; dreading the democracy of opinion, which threatens to suppress independence of inquiry by a power analogous to centralization in the state; the artist no less than the critic, imaginative as well as reflective, he may be studied as in all respects the contrast to the French philosopher of the last century, and as the type of the cultivated minds on whom Christianity has made its impression. His view of philosophy is the one recently explained: his view of religion and of Christianity, so far as we can gather it indirectly from his criticisms, seems to mark a belief in the religious sentiment as a subjective feeling, rather than in the reality of its external object of worship. Its objective side seems to him to be a symbolism, and Christian dogma to be an obsolete form of religious philosophy; inspiration a form of natural consciousness; and even its highest expression to be but the poetry, the art, of the imaginative faculties. There is audible at times an undertone of despondency, as the sigh of one who has searched for truth and not found it;(893) and who, in despair of discovering it on the intellectual side, has taken refuge in the moral. Religion, vain speculatively, is resolved by him into ethics. Faith expires in conscience; dogma in morality. And this interesting writer closes his speculations with the regret, that he feels himself isolated from those Christian saints whose characters he regards as the purest in the world.(894) Such may probably be regarded as the type of thought of the most educated thinkers of France; a feeling of partial belief, partial doubt; a keen appreciation of the beauty of the character of the great