This perversive philosophy once launched needed only a leader to present it in a concrete and popular form. For such a purpose the German Life of Christ by Strauss could serve as a model. A hand was ready in France to take up the enterprise, Ernest Renan, the modern Voltaire, put forth his notorious "Life of Jesus," which might be called the great crime of the nineteenth century. Renan wished to show that Jesus is not God, and at every page his demonstration is shattered like glass against the evidence of the texts. These texts he knows, but he is content to falsify them. He does so because in his Hegelian school no one assertion is truer than its opposite. Sometimes he adopts the respectful, unctuous tone of those who cried out: "Hail, King of the Jews." In this frame of mind he speaks of Christ as "the man who even yet directs the destinies of humanity," "the man who has given the most beautiful code of perfect life that any moralist has ever traced." But almost in the same breath he insults, minimizes and reproaches our Lord as a pedantic peasant, an eccentric, an anarchist, and the like. This intermingling of adulation and insult to the divine character of Christ had its effect. It seduced the simple-minded, and brought the book into the hands of the imprudent and deluded multitude. It blinded the masses, it brought tears to the eyes of the faithful, it crushed the great heart of Mother Church, it gave a tone to lying criticism, it gave to blasphemy the character of elegance; it lent assistance to a policy oppressive of truth and liberty; it performed its part in the war of spoliation and sacrilegious confiscation; it renewed the hours of darkness around the Cross of the dying Redeemer; it essayed to make humanity, regenerated through the Blood of the Son of God, return back to Arius and to paganism. The work of Renan and his followers has been the great crime of the century. During the last half of the century anti-Christianism underwent a change. The position held by Positivism was taken by evolutionist transformation. Its authors were Charles Darwin, the naturalist, and Herbert Spencer, the philosopher. Their doctrines were received with enthusiasm by thousands who had been seeking some new fad in the intellectual line. The anti-Christian looked to it to replace Christianity. In France it became the religion of the Third Republic. Jules Ferry, in the Lodge _Clemente Amitie_, 1877, declared openly: "We can now throw aside our theological toys. Let us free humanity from the fear of death, and let us believe in a humanity eternally progressing." It was the religion of atheism, and it has been forcing its creed upon humanity ever since.