I had been at a German university, and the historical study of Christianity was to me as familiar as the study of Roman history. Professors whom I had looked up to as great authorities, implicitly to be trusted, such as Lotze and Weisse at Leipzig, Schelling and Michelet at Berlin, had, after causing in me a certain surprise at first, left me with the firm conviction that the Old and New Testament were historical books, and to be treated according to the same critical principles as any other ancient book, particularly the sacred books of the East of which so little was then known, and of which I too knew very little as yet; enough, however, to see that they contained nothing but what under the circumstances they could contain, traditions of extreme antiquity collected by men who gathered all they thought would be useful for the education of the people. Anything like revelation in the old sense of the word, a belief that these books had been verbally communicated by the Deity, or that what seemed miraculous in them was to be accepted as historically real, simply because it was recorded in these sacred books, was to me a standpoint long left behind. To me the questions that occupied my thoughts were to what date these books, such as we have them, could be assigned, what portions of them were of importance to us, what were the simple truths they contained, and what had been added to them by later collectors. Well do I remember when, before going to Oxford, I spoke to Bunsen of the preface to my Rig-veda, and used the expression, “the great revelations of the world,” he, perfectly understanding what I meant, warned me in his loud and warm voice, “Don’t say that at Oxford.” I could see no harm, nor Bunsen either, nor his son who was an Oxford man and a clergyman of the Church of England; but I was told that I should be misunderstood. I knew far too little to imagine that I had a right to speak of what was fermenting and growing within me. During my stay at Leipzig and Berlin, and afterwards in my intercourse with Renan and Burnouf, the principles of the historical school had become quite familiar to me, but the application of these principles to the early history of religion was a different matter. How far the Old and the New Testament would stand the critical tests enunciated by Niebuhr was a frequent subject of controversy, during the time I spent at Paris, between young Renan and myself. Though I did not go with him in his reconstruction of the history of the Jews and the Jewish religion, and of the early Christians and the Christian religion, I agreed with him in principle, objecting only to his too free and too idyllic reconstruction of these great religious movements. Besides, before all things, I was at that time given to philosophical studies, chiefly to an inquiry into the limits of our knowledge in the Kantian sense of the word, the origin of thought and language, the first faltering and half-mythological