For an entire generation the examination of the literary details of the Gospels had occupied theologians so exclusively that the interest in the supreme problems of the evangelical history seemed to have been almost lost sight of. But this interest was newly awakened, and made itself felt far beyond learned theological circles, by the nearly simultaneous publication of Renan’s Vie de Jésus and Strauss’s second Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk (1864). These two works, with all their dissimilarity, resemble each other in this, that they were both written by scholars of the highest eminence, not for the learned world, but for educated people generally, both throwing overboard, therefore, the ballast of learned detailed criticism, and presenting the results of their inquiries in a language intelligible to everybody, and attractive from its literary excellence. They are alike also in this, that both subordinate the criticism of the gospel traditions to a positive description of the personality of Jesus, of his essential religious tendency and genius, of his relation to the Messianic idea of his nation, to the law and the temple, to the hierarchy and religious and political parties of his time, both seeking an explanation of the reformatory success of the commencement, and also of the tragical issue of his labours in these factors. But inasmuch as Strauss confines himself to what he can deem the ascertained or probable facts, after a strict critique of the sources, the portrait delineated by him turns out naturally somewhat indistinct and defective in its outlines; the meagreness of the result answers to the caution of his historical conscience. Renan, on the other hand, feels no such scruples; in his criticism of the sources he goes to work with a much lighter heart, and claims for the biographer the right to help himself over the lacunæ and obscurities or contradictions of his authorities by calling in the aid of the creative imagination, with its powers of combination and inference. By this means he has succeeded in presenting a life of Jesus distinguished for its epic vividness and dramatic development, but its æsthetic charm has been purchased at the price of its historical solidity. This novelistic feature becomes most questionable when it wanders into the vagaries of the naturalistic explanation of the miracles (e.g. the raising of Lazarus), and in such cases casts reflections on the moral character of Jesus. On the other hand, for Renan must be claimed the merit of having emphasised the social aspects of the Messianic mission of Jesus, and of having attempted to sketch the development of his inner life, a change in the phases of his reformatory labours. As to Strauss’s second Life of Jesus, its strength lies, as in the first, not so much in the first part, which deals with the positive side of the history, as in the second part, where it comes to treat of the mythical side of the history. But in the second work,