"The Run."

For sweeter they be,

Than any chime of bells,
The melodies that linger

All year in yon dells,

Till the hounds come by and awake them.
And the pedlar answered,
From beneath his load,

At noon they went streaming
Right o'er my road.

From the farmsteads the lassies

Rushed out to see,

How they skimmed like swallows,
Over plough and lea.
As they went to the hills

What a head they bare!
Like snow-drift scudding

On the stormy air,

And few were the steeds could o'ertake them.

Forward waved the shepherd,

They are west away,

On the moorlands startling

The plover grey. ·
Ever on as they sped,

More mute they grew,
And the riders waxed fewer,

And yet more few,

Till one only hunter attended.

And the widow, as she sat
On her lone cottage-floor,

Heard their cry thro' the dark

On the midnight moor;

And at morn came the worn hounds

Home, one by one,

And the huntsman knew

That the chase was done,

Never knew how nor where it ended."

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In conclusion, we do not hesitate to say that no volume of such true national poetry has appeared in Scotland for a long time. Mr. Shairp's poetry is something very different from a mere echo of Burns, or Scott, or our old ballads. He has found for himself, in his wanderings over Highlands and Lowlands, fresh fountains of inspiration. That which chiefly distinguishes this volume from the hundreds of meritorious verses which are written, and sometimes printed, in the present day, is that the author has really got a worthy and unhackneyed subject, which he cares for and understands better than any one else, which affords him great enjoyment, and which stirs his feeling to its depths.

ART. VII. Vie de Jésus. Par ERNEST RENAN, Membre de l'Institut. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863.

TIME enough has elapsed since the publication of this remarkable volume to allow us now to estimate its force and its weakness. We fear it must be ranked as one of the greatest outrages that has ever been offered to that Name which stands upon the title-page; and surely not less an outrage that the buffet on the cheek is only a fillip from the glove of a learned professor; that the "Away with him!" is a sentimental rhapsody of 460 pages, endurable, but for the insolence of its praise, in which the supposed decadence of a noble moral nature is described; that instead of the preference of Barabbas, we have a patronizing comparison with Çakya-Mouni. The style is graceful and perspicuous; the descriptions of scenery are touched with the true hand of an artist. Yet we are able to see why M. Renan's picture can never be accepted by any considerable number of persons in this country as the true one. Sparks of doubt will be scattered into the stubble of many minds, and here and there they will kindle into fresh flame; but this particular torch that scatters them has blazed, and will die out. For us the writer, eloquent and ingenious if you will, aims at too little or too much. If we have here nothing divine, nothing but genius and originality; if he who scattered miracles round him as a sower the seed; who put forth claims such as man never dreamt of before, to be God and the Son of God, be only man, a precursor of Renan, who needs Renan to set him up on the right historical basis; and if so much of the Gospel history as conflicts with this theory is to be deducted as pure falsehood, nay, so much of the words of Jesus himself, then for a people like us, self-willed indeed and strong, self-indulgent yet still at heart veracious, the Bible is closed for ever. Who could spend his heart's best affections upon the fabulous history of a false Messiah? Who could follow out with any real credence the ambidextrous process by which the Christ whom Paul and John preached is here pared down into an ignorant enthusiast of Nazareth, whose strong religious insight does not prevent him from degenerating into an impostor, deceiving and being deceived?

In order to arrive at this position, M. Renan is obliged, in the first place, to deal with the Gospels as no other historical materials have ever yet been dealt with. He demands from them a firm historical foundation, and at the same time the utmost plasticity. Strange to say, with M. Renan the Gospels are not regarded as compilations of the second century; they

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are restored to their place in the first. A certain measure of authority must be re-vindicated to them; otherwise a life of Jesus must be all doubts and negations. The work of Strauss is after all an elaborate attempt to show the life that he did not lead. M. Renan regards St. Luke as one regular whole, written, or rather compiled, by a companion of St. Paul; of which the date "can be ascertained with much precision by considerations drawn from the work itself." He knows from the 21st chapter that it "was certainly written after the siege of Jerusalem, and only a short time after." The Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark have not the same distinct impress of the author's personality, but quoting the well-known passage of Papias, M. Renan infers that in our present gospel of Mark we have the narrative of facts and sayings mentioned by Papias, and in our present St. Matthew the collection of sayings (Aóya) assigned to him by the same writer. These are important concessions. We have narratives that come from the time and circle in which apostles lived. Even the Gospel of St. John is admitted, though with doubt; all of it, says M. Renan, may not have been written by John, but

"As a whole this Gospel may have originated towards the close of the first century, from the great school of Asia Minor, which was connected with John. That it represents to us a version of the life of the Master worthy of high esteem, and often to be preferred, is demonstrated, in a manner which leaves us nothing to be desired, both by external evidence and by the examination of the document itself." But these admissions are made to be recalled. With an arbitrary dogmatism he rejects all miracles; that is, he scarcely leaves one chapter standing of the very documents on which all his history is to rest. He dismisses at once, in terms which we will spare our readers, all the discourses recorded by John. In order to give a colourable fairness to this treatment of his materials, M. Renan betakes himself to the old theory of a succession of editions of gospels, and that with a heartiness for which, to do him justice, we seldom find a parallel amongst modern writers. The Gospels, he thinks, were at first little cared for, in comparison with oral traditions:

"There was no scruple about inserting additional matter, about combining them in divers ways, and completing the one by the other. The poor man that has but one book wishes it to contain all that touches his heart. These little books were lent from one to another, each transcribed in the margin of his copy the words and parables which he found elsewhere, and which touched him. And so the most beautiful thing in the world has issued from an obscure and entirely popular process of elaboration" (p. 22).

Has M. Renan ever considered what it is which he here asks us

to believe? A community that cared little about books, because the world was coming to an end, occupies itself in an incessant labour of borrowing, copying, collating, altering, and mending its books. A community which, even from the first, erred in excess of personal attachment to a leader, and pushed it on to party spirit, took the "things said and done" which bore St. Mark's name, and the Logia which bore St. Matthew's, and without scruple, assimilated, altered, added to them, and forgetful of any claim of Matthew or Mark, made each his little gospel of what touched his own heart most. Was this state of things possible? There is no kind of record of it; we confess ourselves unable to conceive it clearly, even as one supposition. It is quite opposite to what Papias describes. The Hebrew Matthew, interpreted into Greek by different readers and instructors, has nothing to do with this incessant tampering with and obliteration of an apostle's undoubted work. But give M. Renan all he asks; attribute, and without a smile, all this strange literary activity, this free handling of apostolic writings, to the simple, unlettered, reverent Christians of the first age, and two questions will still need an answer,-How comes it that all the earliest records of the formation of the canon give us our four Gospels and no more, after a process that must have tended either to form a multitude of gospels, or to assimilate all to each other, and so merge them into one? and secondly, Why, in this supposed age of free gospellers, did not many a variation of the text disappear, which has since perplexed the minds of harmonists from the days of Ammonius of Alexandria? When the Gospels emerge into the period of written Church history, they are the Gospels that we have at present; and such difficulties as the two genealogies, which even the dullest editor could have removed by a few strokes of the pen, are at least a testimony to a certain reverence which withheld the hands of editors, if that race existed. But these considerations trouble M. Renan but little. His purpose requires two things, and he secures them both. There must be some historical basis for his romance; and as the history that is available abounds with miracles, is intractably interwoven with miracles, he submerges it a little in a sea of popular editing and copying, in the hope of being able decently to avoid reading what he does not desire to read, in their stained and altered pages.

This is not the only instance of unfair dealing with the reader. The argument by which the Gospel of Luke is proved to have been written at a particular date is compressed into the following sentence :

"The date of this Gospel can be determined with much exactness by considerations drawn from the book itself. The 21st chapter of

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Luke, inseparable from the rest of the work, was certainly written after the siege of Jerusalem, and only a little after. Here then we are upon solid ground, for we are dealing with a work written wholly by the same hand, and of a most perfect unity."

A few references to verses in the 21st chapter are given in the notes, and one to the 22d chapter, and from these we dimly discern an objection to admit that any prophecy of our Lord had really been uttered before the event. We wronged the subtlety of the argument. Thanks to a writer whom M. Renan quotes elsewhere with approbation, M. Nicolas,' we discover that the words of our Lord, yes, of our Lord, in St. Matthew, which describe in one grand cluster of images the national judgment of the Jews and the general judgment of the world, show an erroneous belief that these two judgments would be contemporaneous, and therefore must have been written before the destruction of Jerusalem, before events had proved that the two judgments were to be distinct; and yet not much before, for we are not to attribute them to prophecy. In Luke, M. Nicolas finds that the two events are distinguished, which shows that one of them must have occurred already; but on the other hand, the fresh expectation that the second would follow directly upon it, belongs, as M. Nicolas thinks, to a time just after the fall of the holy city. Observe the assumptions to which M. Renan does not even deign to call attention, in his dogmatic self-confidence; there can be no prophecy, the evangelist shaped even the words of the Lord to suit current facts, and the omitting to distinguish as clearly as an almanac the day and hour which no man was to know, could only proceed from ignorance! Grant these postulates, and we will give you in return the exact date of St. Luke's Gospel " from internal evidence."

Meanwhile we have been always taught that the internal evidences led to a conclusion quite different from this. The author of the Acts and of the Gospel are the same; M. Renan admits it. The Gospel, which he admits to be a complete whole, was written before the Acts; the inspired author says so.2 If then, the Acts ends abruptly with St. Paul's imprisonment at Rome, because St. Luke was writing at that very time, and so the facts of the history were all told out, then the Gospel must have been written before the end of Paul's imprisonment; and no writer places this so late as the destruction of Jerusalem, or indeed later than A.D. 65. Not a word does M. Renan say of all this; these tame facts are overruled by the necessity that there should be no prophecy; the verse, Luke xxi. 24, must have been written after the event. On M. Renan's own prin1 Etudes Critiques sur la Bible, p. 10.

2 Acts i. 1.