M. Renan professes to give an historical account of the way in which the deepest, purest, most enduring religious principles known among men were, not merely found out and announced, but propagated and impressed upon the foremost and most improved portions of mankind, by the power of a single character. It is impossible, without speaking of Jesus of Nazareth as Christians are used to do, to speak of His character and of the results of His appearance in loftier terms than this professed unbeliever in His Divine claims. But when the account is drawn out in detail, of a cause alleged to be sufficient to produce such effects, the apparent inadequacy of it is most startling. When we think of what Christianity is and has done, and that, in M. Renan's view, Christ, the Christ whom he imagines and describes, is all in all to Christianity, and then look to what he conceives to have been the original spring and creative impulse of its achievements, the first feeling is that no shifts that belief has sometimes been driven to, to keep within the range of the probable, are greater than those accepted by unbelief, in its most enlightened and reflecting representations. To suppose such an one as M. Renan paints, changing the whole course of history, overturning and converting the world, and founding the religion which M. Renan thinks the lasting religion of mankind, involves a force upon our imagination and reason to which it is not easy to find a parallel. His view is that a Galilean peasant, in advance of his neighbours and countrymen only in the purity, force, and singleness of purpose with which he realised the highest moral truths of Jewish religious wisdom, first charming a few simple provincials by the freshness and native beauty of his lessons, was then led on, partly by holy zeal against falsehood and wickedness, partly by enthusiastic delusions as to his own mission and office, to attack the institutions of Judaism, and perished in the conflict--and that this was the cause why Christianity and Christendom came to be and exist. This is the explanation which a great critical historian, fully acquainted with the history of other religions, presents, as a satisfactory one, of a phenomenon so astonishing and unique as that of a religion which has suited itself with undiminished vitality to the changes, moral, social, and political, which have marked the eighteen centuries of European history. There have been other enthusiasts for goodness and truth, more or less like the character which M. Renan draws in his book, but they have never yet founded a universal religion, or one which had the privilege of perpetual youth and unceasing self-renovation. There have been other great and imposing religions, commanding the allegiance for century after century of millions of men; but who will dare assert that any of these religions, that of Sakya-Mouni, of Mahomet, or that of the Vedas, could possibly be the religion, or satisfy the religious ideas