“The best of men That e’er wore earth about him was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, The first true gentleman that ever breathed.” And such remembrance of Jesus, in his life among the people, his friendships, smiles and tears, are found in the sermons of Tillotson, South, Jeremy Taylor. But the descended God gradually consumed the humanity. In the last century it became a heresy to consider Jesus as a man. The man was crucified on a cross of dogmas; he lay dead and buried under a stony theology, until Renan rolled away the stone, raised him to life, clothed him with flesh and blood, invested him with beauty, and said once more to the Pharisee, the sceptic, the scoffer—_Behold the man!_ For writing that book,—just after Strauss had shown the Christ of Christendom a mythological figure,—the churches should have clasped Renan’s knees. But for it they heaped him with abuse, declared that Jewish bankers had bribed him to write it, drove him from his professorship of Hebrew, reduced him to poverty. The Pope denounced him as “The European Blasphemer.” He has been terribly avenged in his own country, where every educated man has abandoned the church. And he lived to see the Christianity of England striving to gain a new hold on the people by following his brave gesture,—rationalising away the supernatural Christ, and exalting the humanity of Jesus as the sign of his divinity. The criticism of that work is not at all so destructive as that of many who have written in the generation that has elapsed since its appearance,—of Dr. Martineau, for instance, on whom Oxford has conferred a doctor’s degree. Indeed, in reading Renan’s “Life of Jesus” now, one is surprised by its concessions. He accepts the four Gospels as coming from the first century, a belief which even the learned theologians have abandoned. Some newspaper has said that Renan borrowed from Strauss; on the contrary, the fault of the book is that it did not borrow from Strauss, and from English authors, who had proved that the Gospels are all of the second century. That would have relieved him of the necessity of apologising for Jesus in some matters of which Jesus never heard, of which Paul in the first century knew nothing, as when he intimates that Jesus may have once lent himself to an amiable deception. No miracle was ever ascribed to Jesus by any writer of his own century. In several other respects Renan’s “Life of Jesus,” on its negative side, is behind the advance of research and criticism. But those are small details compared with the spirit and general purpose of the work. In this moment, when we are celebrating the discovery of a western world, we may well pay homage to the scholar who rediscovered and exhumed an eastern world, long buried under débris of mythology and rubbish of superstitions. This Renan has done in his series of works on the “Origins