This early view of Strauss, which has become identified with his name, was exchanged in late years for a more advanced view which extended the meaning of the word “myths” so as to include all narratives that spring out of a theological idea, and it admitted the existence of “pious frauds” in the gospels. Baur, he says, first convinced him that the author of the fourth gospel had “not unfrequently composed mere fables, knowing them to be mere fictions.” The animating spirit of both the old view and the new is the same. Strauss says: “We know with certainty what Jesus was _not_, and what he has _not_ done, namely, nothing superhuman and supernatural.” “No gospel can claim that degree of historic credibility that would be required in order to make us debase our reason to the point of believing miracles.” He calls the resurrection of Christ “ein weltgeschichtlicher Humbug.” “If the gospels are really historical documents, we cannot exclude miracle from the life-story of Jesus;” see Strauss, Life of Jesus, 17; New Life of Jesus, 1: preface, xii. Vatke, Einleitung in A. T., 210, 211, distinguishes the myth from the _saga_ or legend: The criterion of the pure myth is that the experience is impossible, while the _saga_ is a tradition of remote antiquity; the myth has in it the element only of belief, the _saga_ has in it an element of history. Sabatier, Philos. Religion, 37—“A myth is false in appearance only. The divine Spirit can avail himself of the fictions of poetry as well as of logical reasonings. When the heart was pure, the veils of fable always allowed the face of truth to shine through. And does not childhood run on into maturity and old age?” It is very certain that childlike love of truth was not the animating spirit of Strauss. On the contrary, his spirit was that of remorseless criticism and of uncompromising hostility to the supernatural. It has been well said that he gathered up all the previous objections of sceptics to the gospel narrative and hurled them in one mass, just as if some Sadducee at the time of Jesus’ trial had put all the taunts and gibes, all the buffetings and insults, all the shame and spitting, into one blow delivered straight into the face of the Redeemer. An octogenarian and saintly German lady said unsuspectingly that “somehow she never could get interested” in Strauss’s Leben Jesu, which her sceptical son had given her for religious reading. The work was almost altogether destructive, only the last chapter suggesting Strauss’s own view of what Jesus was.