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Updated: June 19, 2025
To criticism, therefore, which seeks to have the best that is known and thought on this problem, it is, however well meant, of no importance whatever. M. Renan's book attempts a new synthesis of the elements furnished to us by the Four Gospels. It attempts, in my opinion, a synthesis, perhaps premature, perhaps impossible, certainly not successful.
M. Renan's historical sketch of the first steps of the Christian movement is, whatever we may think of its completeness and soundness, a survey of characters and facts, based on our ordinary experience of the ways in which men act and are influenced.
Mr Arnold is distressed later at Renan's taking Victor Hugo's poetry so prodigiously au serieux, just as some of us have been, if not distressed, yet mildly astonished, at Mr Arnold for not taking it, with all its faults, half seriously enough.
M. Renan's theory does not, however, represent Paul as the "victim of hallucinations" to a greater degree than Mohammed. The latter, as every one knows, laboured during much of his life under almost constant "hallucination"; yet "masculine sense, strong logic," etc., were qualities quite as conspicuous in him as in St. Paul. Here, as throughout his essay, Mr.
Exquisite even as M. Renan's mere style is, it is exquisite by reason of sweetness, with a certain not quite white and slightly phosphorescent light, not by strength or by practical and masculine force. Now it was the latter qualities that Mr Arnold wanted; sweetness and light he could not want. First he tried for a Charity Commissionership; then for the librarianship of the House of Commons.
In Renan's exquisitely phrased preface to his Drames Philosophiques occurs the following sentence which I render into English tant bien que mal: "Side by side are the history of fact and the history of the ideal, the latter materially speaking of what has never taken place, but which, in the ideal sense, has happened a thousand times."
For what is the adverse case? The question, as Dr. Wace puts it, is "It may be asked how far can we rely on the accounts we possess of our Lord's teaching on these subjects." It will be obvious that M. Renan's statements amount to an adverse answer to a "practical" denial that any great reliance can be placed on these accounts.
It has been, for a long time, their great desire to publish in these pages a "Life of Christ" which shall be, to quote Mr. Hall Caine's words in the December MCCLURE'S, "as vivid and as personal from the standpoint of belief as Renan's was from the standpoint of unbelief."
In like manner we cannot doubt that Renan's theory of Adonis was itself deeply tinged by passionate memories, memories of the slumber akin to death which sealed his own eyes on the slopes of the Lebanon, memories of the sister who sleeps in the land of Adonis never again to wake with the anemones and the roses. XXXIII. The Gardens of Adonis
They refuse to settle such a question by the short and easy method on which M. Renan relies; they will not consent to put it on questions about the two Isaiahs, or about alleged discrepancies between the Evangelists; they will not think the claims of religion disposed of by M. Renan's canon, over and over again contradicted, that whether there can be or not, there is no evidence of the supernatural in the world.
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