It was as a volume of this _Histoire des Origines du Christianisme_ that his _Vie de Jésus_ appeared in 1863. This life of the Founder of Christianity produced a profound stir in the camps of religious orthodoxy, and drew upon its author severe criticisms. Apart from the particular views set forth in that volume, we must remember that the very fact of his writing upon “a sacred subject,” which was looked upon as a close preserve, reserved for the theologians or churchmen alone, was deemed at that time an original and daring feat in France. His particular views, which created at the time such scandal, were akin to those of Baur and the Tubingen School, which Strauss (Renan’s contemporary) had already set forth in his _Leben Jesu_.[12] Briefly, they may be expressed as the rejection of the supernatural. Herein is seen the scientific or “positive” influence at work upon the dogmas of the Christian religion, a tendency which culminated in “Modernism” within the Church, only to be condemned violently by the Pope in 1907. It was this temper, produced by the study of documents, by criticism and historical research which put Renan out of the Catholic Church. His rational mind could not accept the dogmas laid down. Lamennais (who was conservative and orthodox in his theology, and possessed no taint of “modernism” in the technical sense) had declared that the starting-point should be faith and not reason. Renan aptly asks in reply to this, “and what is to be the test, in the last resort, of the claims of faith is not reason?” [12] Written in 1835. Littré issued a French translation in 1839, a year previous to the appearance of the English version by George Eliot. Strauss’s life covers 1808-1874. In Renan we find a good illustration of the working of the spirit of modern thought upon a religious mind. Being a sincere and penetrating intellect he could not, like so many people, learned folk among them, keep his religious ideas and his reason in separate watertight compartments. This kind of people Renan likens in his _Souvenirs d’Enfance et de Jeunesse_ to mother-o’-pearl shells of Francois de Sales “which are able to live in the sea without tasting a drop of salt water.” Yet he realises the comfort of such an attitude. “I see around me,” he continues, “men of pure and simple lives whom Christianity has had the power to make virtuous and happy. . . . But I have noticed that none of them have the critical faculty, for which let them bless God!” He well realises the contentment which, springing sometimes from a dullness of mind or lack of sensitiveness, excludes all doubt and all problems.