In general, however, the rising French school of critical theology was disappointed in Renan. Their spokesman was Colani. “This is not the Christ of history, the Christ of the Synoptics,” he writes in 1864 in the _Revue de théologie_, “but the Christ of the Fourth Gospel, though without His metaphysical halo, and painted over with a brush which has been dipped in the melancholy blue of modern poetry, in the rose of the eighteenth‐ century idyll, and in the grey of a moral philosophy which seems to be derived from La Rochefoucauld.” “In expressing this opinion,” he adds, “I believe I am speaking in the name of those who belong to what is known as the new Protestant theology, or the Strassburg school. We opened M. Renan’s book with sympathetic interest; we closed it with deep disappointment.”(119) The Strassburg school had good cause to complain of Renan, for he had trampled their growing crops. They had just begun to arouse some interest, and slowly and surely to exercise an influence upon the whole spiritual life of France. Sainte‐Beuve had called attention to the work of Reuss, Colani, Réville, and Scherer. Others of the school were Michel Nicolas of Montauban and Gustave d’Eichthal. Nefftzer, the editor of the _Temps_, who was at the same time a prophet of coming political events, defended their cause in the Parisian literary world. The _Revue germanique_ of that period, the influence of which upon French literature can hardly be over‐ estimated, was their sworn ally. Then came Renan and threw public opinion into a ferment of excitement. Everything in the nature of criticism, and of progress in religious thought, was associated with his name, and was thereby discredited. By his untimely and over‐easy popularisation of the ideas of the critical school he ruined their quiet work. The excitement roused by his book swept away all that had been done by those noble and lofty spirits, who now found themselves involved in a struggle with the outraged orthodoxy of Paris, and were hard put to it to defend themselves. Even down to the present day Renan’s work forms the greatest hindrance to any serious advance in French religious thought.