obsolete belief.” When His confidence in the development of His Kingdom came into collision with barriers which He could not pass, when His belief in the presence of the Kingdom of God grew dim, the purely eschatological ideas won the upper hand, “and if we may suppose that it was precisely this thought of the imminent decisive action of God, taking possession of His mind with renewed force at this point, which steeled His human courage, and roused Him to a passion of self‐sacrifice with the hope of saving from the judgment whatever might still be saved, we may welcome His adoption of these narrower ideas as in accordance with the goodwill of God, which could only by this means maintain the failing strength of its human instrument and secure the spoils of the Divine warfare—the souls of men subdued and conquered by Him.” The thought which had hovered before the mind of Renan, but which in his hands had become only the motive of a romance—_une ficelle dé roman_ as the French express it—was realised by Keim. Nothing deeper or more beautiful has since been written about the development of Jesus. Less critical in character is Hase’s “History of Jesus,”(144) which superseded in 1876 the various editions of the Handbook on the Life of Jesus which had first appeared in 1829. The question of the use of John’s Gospel side by side with the Synoptics he leaves in suspense, and speaks his last word on the subject in the form of a parable. “If I may be allowed to use an avowedly parabolic form of speech, the relation of Jesus to the two streams of Gospel tradition may be illustrated as follows. Once there appeared upon earth a heavenly Being. According to His first three biographers He goes about more or less incognito, in the long garment of a Rabbi, a forceful popular figure, somewhat Judaic in speech, only occasionally, almost unmarked by His biographers, pointing with a smile beyond this brief interlude to His home. In the description left by His favourite disciple, He has thrown off the _talar_ of the Rabbi, and stands before us in His native character, but in bitter and angry strife with those who took offence at His magnificent simplicity, and then later—it must be confessed, more attractively—in deep emotion at parting with those whom, during His pilgrimage on earth, He had made His friends, though they did not rightly understand His strange, unearthly speech.”