the main question of a Life of Jesus—Strauss gave his readers no answer. Undoubtedly it can be urged in his defence that the criticism of the sources was at that time still in a condition of too great confusion and uncertainty to permit any successful answer to that problem of the historical kernel of the life of Jesus. Nevertheless the difficulty of the matter could not relieve the historian of the duty of at least making an attempt to trace from the materials left to him, as the residue of his critical analysis of the deeds and words of Jesus, the main outlines of his character, to bring out the peculiarity and originality of his religious genius, and in this way to discover in the original personality and reforming activity of Jesus the originating cause of the rise of the community of his disciples and their faith in him as the Messiah and his divine mission. If in his closing essay Strauss had presented a religious and moral description of Jesus of this nature, instead of a metaphysical allegory as a substitute for the shattered mythological conception of tradition, though the objection of the church to his work would not have been wanting, it would then undoubtedly have taken a less passionately denunciatory form than was the case, in consequence of the purely negative character of the result, unrelieved by any modifying conclusion. In proportion to the strength of the feeling of these defects, shared by readers of all parties, was the urgency of the duty laid upon scientific theologians of preparing, by a renewed and more thorough examination of the Gospels, the stones of a new edifice to be reared upon the site laid bare by Strauss’s critical labours. “In the darkness which criticism produces, by putting out all the lights hitherto thought to be historical, the eye has first to learn by gradual habit to again distinguish a few single objects,” as Strauss himself remarked in his third edition. But this difficult task was not accomplished by those apologists who endeavoured to make good the damage by the antiquated arts of the harmonists, with their petty concessions, mystifications, and evasions, but by those courageous inquirers who, undeterred by dogmatic considerations, sought by a strictly historical method to set in the true light the exact composition and the mutual relations of the evangelical documents. We have already remarked that Baur and his disciples, the so-called Tübingen school, took a leading part in this work, while other independent students co-operated with them, supplementing and correcting their labours. This, however, is not the place to follow these inquiries in detail; but we must glance at their result as regards the historical treatment of the life of Jesus.