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Updated: May 14, 2025
Ernest Renan, the most widely read writer of religious history in his day, was forty years old when the "Vie de Jésus," his most popular book, appeared as the first volume of a "History of the Origins of Christianity." He was born at Tréguier in Brittany, France, Feb. 27, 1823, a Breton through his father and a Gascon through his mother.
The dates of their writing are far apart, their origins are various. None of them are connected directly with personal experiences. In all of them the facts are inherently true, by which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually happened. I don't mean to say it is only that.
He chose them on account of their proximity to the British Museum; at that time he believed himself destined to produce some monumental work of erudition: the subject had not defined itself, but his thoughts were then busy with the origins of Christianity, and it seemed to him that a study of certain Oriental literatures would be fruitful of results.
Here sprang up in later times a great and populous city named, strangely enough, neither for Henderson, the founder, nor for Robertson and Donelson, the leaders of the two colonizing parties, but for one having no association with its history or origins, the gallant North Carolinian, General Francis Nash, who was killed at the Battle of Germantown.
Before science arose, man guessed at things and appealed to the gods at every step. The gods, as superhuman powers capable of doing anything, were naturally introduced to account for origins and mysterious events. Such an agent seemed a sufficient answer to any problem. How did man arise? God created him. How did the earth come to be? God created it.
It is hardly possible to say what its original distribution was, and whether or not there was a single center of distribution. As to its origin many theories have been advanced. Its character as initiatory is not an explanation all customs of initiation need to have their origins explained.
Such are the composite and mixed persons, the extraordinary mixed figures, creations comparable with the fantastic animal compositions of Orientals; a moment's thought and these are reduced to unity, whilst the fancies of the dream are ever formed anew in an inexhaustible profusion. Every one knows such images in his own dreams; manifold are their origins.
On the whole it may not be the wiser plan to write about the Origins of Religion in the style which might suit a study of the life of ballet dancers; the two MM. Halevy, the learned and the popular, would make a blunder if they exchanged styles. Yet Gibbon never denies himself a jest, and Montesquieu's Esprit des Lois was called L'Esprit sur les Lois.
The origins of Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Nihilism for all four, however diverging or antagonistic in the ends they immediately pursue, spring from a common root have been variously ascribed in France to the work of Louis Blanc, Fourier, Proudhon, or in Germany to Engels, Stirner, and Rodbertus, or to the countless secret societies which arose in Spain, Italy, Austria, and Russia, as a protest against the broken pledges of kings and governments after the Congress of Vienna.
Let us look, then, at these two contrasted origins of the same blessed gift, the Christian hope. I. We have, first of all, the hope that is the child of the night, and born in the dark.
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