North"--it is not quite thus that Josephus describes the Galileans--was set up an "_aimable communisme_." Is it possible to imagine a more extravagant distortion than the following, both in its general effect and in the audacious generalisation of a very special incident, itself inaccurately conceived of?-- Il parcourait ainsi la Galilée au milieu _d'une fête perpétuelle_. Il se servait d'une mule, monture en Orient si bonne et si sûre, et dont le grand oeil noir, ombragé de longs cils, a beaucoup de douceur. Ses disciples déployarent quelquefois autour de lui une pompe rustique, dont leurs vêtements, tenant lieu de tapis, faisaient les frais. Ils les mettaient sur la mule qui le portait, ou les étendaient à terre sur son passage. History has seen strange hypotheses; but of all extravagant notions, that one that the world has been conquered by what was originally an idyllic gipsying party is the most grotesque. That these "_petits comités de bonnes gens_" though influenced by a great example and wakened out of their "delicious pastoral" by a heroic death, should have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect, and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome alternative. M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except what is miraculous. If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle. To some extent, indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records. The feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:--"Il se retira au désert. Beaucoup de monde l'y suivit. _Grâce à une extrème frugalité_ la troupe sainte y vécut; _on crut naturellement_ voir en cela un miracle." This is all he has to say. But miracles are too closely interwoven with the whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed of. He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them. But be bids us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth where men's souls and affections were deeply interested. But, even supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing