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are, and how the heavens are reflected in | The difference between their interpretations them. The pervading tone is that of rever- is wide enough, but are we wrong in ascriential thoughtfulness and repose. We think bing the failure of the latter to his prepossesthat Dr. Hanna's descriptions of place excel sion against the supernatural, so that "his those of any other writer, with the excep- eye saw only what it brought with it the tion of Dean Stanley, in a quiet picturesque- power of seeing"? ness, in the subdued light of local colouring with which he has invested the localities he describes. By a few vivid touches he carries us into the very heart of the scene. We have the advantage of the writer's personal visit to the localities,- -a fact never obtruded, but which gives a steady background of reality and of vividness to all his descriptions. We have no highly-coloured figure-painting, but an exquisite felicity, a directness and pictorial precision which leave little to be desired.

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As a specimen of picturesque beauty in Dr. Hanna's narrative, we may select the description of the source of the Jordan at Cæsarea-Philippi (Galilean Ministry, p. 317); and for instances in which the visit of the author to the places he has described has enabled him almost to photograph the scene, we may refer to his account of Jacob's Well, of the road from Bethany to Jerusalem past the hamlet of Bethphage, of the shores of the Lake of Tiberias, and his identification of Wady Fik as the ancient Gadara.

But the description of Nature is subordi

Life, and these incidents are again subservient to the development of character. The outward invariably yields to the inward, the physical to the moral and spiritual. Every other interest revolves around the Sacred Biography itself. The figures of the disciples move around their Master, and serve as a background of contrast to him; while all the minor characters, Jewish, Greek, Roman, Syro phoenician, are sketched by a delicate pencil and with singular tact. So that from a perusal of these volumes we believe that the sympathetic reader will carry away a more distinct image of the character and life of Christ, and his relation to his contemporaries, than he can gain from the more brilliant page of Pressensé, or the more elaborate discussions of Neander.

In their descriptions of Nature, and its possible influence on our Lord, the difference between Renan and Dr. Hanna is note-nated to a recital of the main incidents of the worthy. According to the former, "the aspect of Nature was "the whole education of Jesus." The soft beauty of Galilean lakes and meads, woods and hills, created a correspondingly soft beauty in the soul of the tender prophet of Nazareth; and thus the whole history of his earlier years is" one delightful pastoral." To the deeper insight of our author, Nature's influence over Christ was only inspiring and suggestive. It supplied illustrations of the laws of his kingdom for the disciples, and the framework of parables for the people. Dr. Hanna does not presume to indicate the thoughts which the thirty years' residence in Nazareth may have quickened, but the place, "so tired, so rich in natural beauty, with glimpses of the wide world around for the morning or evening hours," where he had "watched how the lilies grew, and saw how their Creator clothed them, had noticed how the smallest of seeds grew into the tallest of herbs; where outside the house he had seen two women grinding at one mill, inside, a woman hiding the leaven in the dough; where in the marketplace he had seen the five sparrows sold for two farthings; where the sheepwalks of the hills and the vineyards of the valleys had taught him what were the offices of the good shepherd and of the careful vinedresser all those, observations of thirty years were treasured up, to be drawn upon in due time, and turned into the lessons by which the world was to be taught wisdom."

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It is instructive to note the difference between these two travellers, who have both gone over the same ground, and traced the footsteps of Jesus so far as they can be now identified, the one with a faith in the supernatural, and the other without it,-both accurate observers and exquisite narrators.

In the evangelical narratives there are frequent breaks in the continuity of the story, to fill up which by wise inference and not by rash conjecture is one end of historical study. These gaps are due not merely to the silence of the narrators, and the consequent want of connecting links, but to our ignorance of the motives which led to this or that course of action, and of the feelings with which our Lord's acts were accompanied. Much of what we may call the outward drapery of the scenes of the ministry is altogether omitted by the evangelists; and this, when supplied by a discreet interpreter, sheds peculiar light upon the incidents themselves. Or again, when several possible explanations of an event may be given, it is the part of the interpreter to choose the most likely, and, by a wise selection, it is singular how much light may be cast upon the narrative, while all trace of a hiatus between the events disappears. By thus clothing a scene with its unrecorded

moral drapery, much apparent harshness and receive his teaching. Enigmatic gleams of arbitrariness vanish. For example, in the truth are dropped, which become intelligible case of our Lord's cursing the barren fig-tree, only in the light of the sequel. This charwhen we see that he was enacting a par- acteristic is one in which the life of Jesus able," selecting a type of moral barrenness, differs from all other lives. There was and shadowing forth its doom, the very act of no immaturity of plan or act, and no tardy destruction becomes morally beautiful. We development: nothing came too soon, nothmay instance a few of these suggestions ing too late. The life advanced "without which occur in Dr. Hanna's volumes. The haste, yet without rest." Thus forming explanation of the sigh which escaped from a grand and growing unity, it suggests, in our Lord's lips before he cured the deaf and its very uniqueness, that its subject himself dumb man at Bethsaida (Galilean Ministry," saw the end from the beginning." We can pp. 307-8); the explanation of the vernacular even see that to change its order would Aramaic word "Ephphatha" then used in be to mutilate its parts, to reverse its the district of Decapolis, or the use of the sequences would he to mar its perfection. Hebrew phrase "Talitha-cumi" to the dead maiden in Jairus's Hebrew-speaking household; the reasons suggested for our Lord's visiting at a particular time the northern district of Cæsarea-Philippi, where he was "surrounded by the emblems of various faiths and worships; " or the analysis of the motives which led the Greeks in Jerusalem to wish to see Jesus, the act of cleansing the Temple having impressed them (Passion Week, p. 144); or the reasons why Galilee was selected as "the chosen trysting-place' for the appearances of the risen Lord with his disciples (Forty Days, pp. 109-11). In reference to all the manifold breaks in the narrative we may say what Dr. Hanna says of one set of them,

"We cannot doubt that if all the minor and connecting links were in our hands. we should be able to explain what now seems to be obscure, to harmonize what now seems to be conflicting. But in the absence of such knowled-e we must be content to take what each writer tells us, and regard it as the broken fragment of a whole, all the parts of which are not in our hands, so that we can put them connectedly together."-(Forty Days, PP.

25-6.)

In connexion with that inexhaustible ful ness which Dr. Hanna most happily and sometimes unconsciously signalizes in our Lord, his lectures are eminently suggestive of new phases and unexhausted processes of thought. They raise a multitude of open questions at which they merely hint, and the curtain falls upon them, leaving them unsolved. Hence their catholicity. They proclaim one great Faith throughout, but they refuse to dogmatize upon details. It is difficult for a man with strong convictions which he holds firmly to be catholic towards those who differ from him; while it is easy for one who sits apart holding no form of creed to be blandly tolerant of all. But when we find catholicity in alliance with a strong faith, the union is as admirable as it is rare.

The most distinctive feature of these volumes remains to be noticed. It is the frequency with which the soundings of moral evidence are taken in the simplest manner. The author is not writing a formal apologia, but he has indirectly written one.

Thus in one of the earliest chapters, on

some natural

the Nativity, our attention is turned to that strange timing of events that then took Another advantage of such a study of the place." Dr. Hanna shrinks from the atLife of Jesus as this, is its unfolding of the tempt to penetrate within the veil which exquisite sequences both in the acts and teach- hides from us the secret things of God; but ing of our Lord, and in the progressive he finds it possible to detect testimony of others to his claim, those and obvious benefits which have attended singular" ties of thought" and of incident, the coming of the Saviour at the particular to which Dr. Hanna so often refers, the period when it happened." It has enhanced orderliness of the development of his plan, the number and force of the evidences for and the harmonious evolution of his whole his mission. For had Christ appeared at an work towards the world. The very key to earlier age, there would have been no room the interpretation of one scene is often to or scope for prophecy; and the record of be found in its sequence or connexion with his miracles coming down to us from a time another. The continuity of the story is when contemporary history was in the main marvellous, and when a blank occurs which legendary, would have been more open to cannot be filled up, a reason for the hiatus question than it can possibly be when it can usually be found. Incident leads on to proceeds from a literary age, and reaches us incident, disclosure to disclosure. Testimony" through the same channel, and with the is added to testimony. Christ himself same vouchers for its authenticity, as a teaches only as the disciples are able to large portion of ancient history." Further,

the world seems to have been left for a long time to itself, "to make full proof of its capabilities and possibilities." Some of the highest forms of civilisation had already appeared; and the culture of Greek philosophy and art had failed to elevate human nature morally. History anterior to the advent seems to prove that, while human nature may variously elevate itself by efforts proceeding from within, and on its own plane, it cannot thus rectify its disorder and reach its ideal. Between the political condition of Palestine at the exact period of our Saviour's birth and the work which our Lord had to accomplish in the world, Dr. Hanna finds another pre-established harmony:

"Had Jesus Christ appeared one half-century earlier, or one half-century later than he did; had he appeared when the Jewish authorities had unchecked power, how quickly, how secretly had their malice discharged itself upon his head! No cross had been raised on Calvary. Had he come a few years later, when the Jews were stripped even of that measure of power they for a short season enjoyed,

would the Roman authorities, then the only ones in the land, of their own motion have condemned and crucified him?" - (Earlier Years, p. 33.)

Again, in comparing the four Gospels with the apocryphal narratives, we are arrested by the immense chasm between the "Men who wished to honour Christ in all they said about him; men "better taught, many of them, than the apostles,"

two.

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แ had the full delineation of the manhood of Jesus before them, could not atteinpt a fancy sketch of his childhood without not only violating our sense of propriety, by attributing to him the most puerile and unmea ing displays of divine power, but shocking our moral sense, and falsifying the very picture they had before their eyes, by attributing to him acts of vengeance."-Earlier Years, p. 120.)

The harmony between the life of child. hood and youth at Nazareth and the period of public labour, is found to yield another testimony to the miraculous in Christ's

life:

"His self-recognition as the Son of God in Jerusalem, when twelve years of age, his declaration of it to his mother, his acting on it throughout life, his words in the Temple, followed by eighteen years of self-denial, and gentle, prompt obedience, his growing consciousness of divine lineage, and of the selfishness, worldliness, and hypocrisy he detected around him, his divine reticence, his sublime and patient self-restraint, his refraining from all interference in public matters and all exposure to public notice," are the natural signs of the

development of a life sprung not of this world, (Earlier Years, pp. 134-5.)

In the call of the first disciples a sign of the supernatural is seen at the very opening of the ministry:—

"Silently, gently, unostentationsly, Christ enters on the task assigned to him. Would any one sitting down to devise a career for the Son of God descending upon our earth, to work out the salvation of our race, have assigned such an opening to his ministry; and yet could anything have been more appropriate to him minister, than this turning away from being who came not to be ministered unto, but to ministered to by the angels in the desert, to the rendering of kindly services to John, and Andrew, and Peter, and Philip, and Nathanael?"-(Earlier Years, p. 241.)

Similarly, the self-denial implied in Christ's turning from the Samaritan villages, where a ready reception was accorded to him, and sending his disciples exclusively "to the house of Israel" (Earlier Years, p. 346), is inexplicable on the naturalistic theory of his life.

Dr. Hanna points to the unbroken unity of plan running through the course of the public ministry as a further evidence of the supernatural, for it indicates "a previous foresight." He whose life was never deflected from its course by any of the crosscurrents of human affairs must have seen the end from the beginning.

who have played the greatest part on the stage of human history. Their own confessions, the tory of their lives, their earlier compared with their later acts, tell us how little they knew or thought beforehand of what they finally were to be and do. There have been shiftings and changes of place to suit the shiftigs and changes of circumstances; surp is ls here, disappointments there; old instruments of action worn out and thrown away, new ones invented and employed; the life made up of a motley array of many-coloured incidents out of which have come issues never dreamt of at the beginning. Had Jesus seen only so far into the future as the unaided human eye could carry, how much was there in the earlier period of his ministry to have excited false hopes, how much in the latter to have produced despondency! But the people came in multitudes around him, and you can trace no sign of extravagant expectation. The tide of popular favour ebbs away from him, and you see no token of his giving up his enterprise in despair; no wavering of purpose, no change of plan, no altering of his course to suit new and obviously unforeseen emergencies."-(Earlier Years, pp. 252-3.)

"It has not been so with any of those men

The thread of a consistent harmony thus runs through the life from beginning to end; and here we meet the counter-assertion of

M. Renan with a direct and peremptory | the unique sense in which Jesus claimed it, negative. Neander had already admirably and in which his accusers knew that he replied to the attempt of De Wette and claimed it, it must have been the very Paulus, to prove a change of purpose in our height of blasphemy in him. No passing Lord's life; and the remarks of Dr. Hanna, delusion could lessen the sin of such a with the criticism of Pressensé, are a suffi- reiterated assertion by one of sane mind, cient reply to Renan. were it false.

The mysterious moral power which our Lord at times exercised over men offers fresh evidence of his superhuman origin. In the scene at the cleansing of the Temple, whence came that singular spell "over those rough cattle-drivers, and those cold calculators of the money-tables," that at the bidding of the youthful stranger all power of resistance vanished? And on the brow of the cliff at Nazareth, as well as in the garden of Gethsemane, whence came that sudden irresistible power over bands of men, that yielded they knew not why? No psychological analysis will explain these three events without the element of the supernatural.

"If only a man," says Dr. Hanna, "Jesus frontery of pretension, which the blindest, was guilty of an extent, an audacity, an ef wildest, and most arrogant enthusiast has never exceeded. The only way in which to free his character as a man from the stain of egregious vanity and presumption, is to recog nise him as the Son of the Highest. If the divinity that was in him be denied, the human ity no longer stands stainless.”—(Last Day, p. 73.)

To apprehend the full bearing of this re mark, we must consider it in relation to the successive incidents of the life, and the continuity of the claim Christ made. He speaks of his oneness with the Father, of an hour Again, the evident ease and sense of coming in which all men, and even the dead, power (never paraded) with which our Lord should hear his voice and live. "If this wrought his works of healing points in the were but a man speaking of the Creator, same direction. He gives no explanations, and to his fellows, we know not which would and offers no argument to prove that he is be worst, the arrogance in the one direction, the Christ, but simply and naturally, as one or the presumption and uncharitableness in who held the key of Nature's storehouse, he the other" (Earlier Years, p. 375). Again, proceeds to work a miracle as we would set in pronouncing a doom over the cities of about the commonest acts of our lives. Chorazin and Bethsaida, for rejecting himWhen the miracle-workers of antiquity (as self, be "anticipates the verdict of eternity" Elijah) are represented as raising the dead, (Galilean Ministry, p. 123). At Cæsareathey claim no personal power to do so; and Philippi he minutely and circumstantially it is only "with trouble and with pain," predicts the details of his own death; and after long delay, and as the delegates of Je- on his last entrance into Jerusalem foretells hovah, that they succeed, showing that they the destruction of the city, which Josephus had to rise above themselves in the act.informs us was to the letter fulfilled. Strauss Our Lord, on the contrary, acts without any sign of rising above his accustomed level. He speaks to the dead, "in the style of him who said, Let there be light, and there was light."

A still more remarkable characteristic of our Lord's life remains to be unfolded, one which leads us to the very root of the moral evidence for his divinity. It is the infinite assumptions that he makes, which, if unsupported by an inward consciousness of their reality, would sink him, morally, beneath the majority of men. So that we must choose between the horns of a dilemma: either he was much more than human, or much worse than his calumniators. This is admirably indicated by Dr. Hanna. Take the words on the ground of which alone our Lord was condemned to die. "Art thou the Son of God?" was the question of the judges, and it was from his reassertion of the fact that he was condemned as a blasphemer. But if the fact was not true, in

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seems to perceive the force of this, as he admits (New Life, vol. i. p. 45) that "this previous certainty (if real) must have been as supernatural as the event itself." And in accordance with his theory, the predic tion must be construed as an apostolic afterthought, to enhance the mythical glory of the Master. But it is not to the fact of Christ's prevision that we now point, but to the claim associated with it; the assumption of the right to judge mankind, his certainty of a future empire over the world and the realm of the dead; and the conviction is forced upon us, that if no supernatural consciousness supported our Lord in making these assertions, he sinks at once to the level of an inhuman impostor. He denounces terrible woes over the Pharisees. Could the greatest of the prophets have ventured to speak to them as from the throne of heaven, as one who would shortly be seated there? And if this was a delusion on his part, his words not only lose all meaning, but are

from first to last profane, and might be turned against himself. In the house of Simon the Pharisee he quietly makes the assumption that to him all debts are owing, and that by himself alone they could be forgiven. He arranges the future destinies of his disciples, pre-announcing and fixing the time and manner of their death. Deity incarnate alone was entitled to use the language, "If I will that he tarry till I come, what is that to thee?" He washes his disciples' feet, and thereafter says, " Ye call me Master and Lord, and ye say well, for so I am."

"No one ever made pretensions so high, no one ever executed offices more humble, no one ever claimed to stand so far above the level of our humanity, speaking of himself as the light of the world, having rest and peace and life for all at his disposal. No one has made himself more thoroughly one with every human being

whom he met, or was so ready with the services which one man may claim from his brother." (Passion Week, p. 290.)

Again, in the very institution of the Lord's Supper, Dr. Hanna sees a unique testimony to the supernatural in Christ. He says it must have been instituted at the time asserted in the narrative; for "how could any body of men, without a falsehood in their hands which every one could detect, at any posterior period commence the celebra

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"But who would ever have risked his reputation, his prospect of being remembered by the ages that were to com, by exhibiting such an eager and premature desire to preserve and perpetuate the remembrance of his name, his character, his deeds? They have left it to others after them to devise the means of doing so; neither vain enough, nor bold enough,. nor foolish enough, to be themselves the framers of these means. But who is this who, ere he dies, by his own act and deed, sets up the memorial institution by which his death is to be shown forth? Surely he must be one who knows and feels that he has claims to be remembered such as none other ever had? Does not Jesus Christ, in the very act of instituting in his own lifetime this memorial rite, step at once above the level of ordinary humanity, and assert for himself a position towards mankind utterly and absolutely unique?" (Passion Week, pp. 330-1.)

Again, as to the Resurrection. "It is by this event," says Dr. Hanna, in common with many others, "that we desire the entire question of the supernaturalism of our religion to be decided." The most remark able attestation of this fact is to be found where we would least expect it, viz., in the state of the disciples' minds before and after the event occurred. No writer of fiction, N-13

VOL. L.

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no elaborator of floating myths, would have conjoined with the predictions of Christ as to his resurrection, before he died, such an entire forgetfulness of these facts on the part of the disciples a few days afterwards; "such an utter prostration of all faith and hope as that which the evangelists describe, lasting till the most extraordinary means were taken to remove them, and yielding slowly even then." We can easily account for the state of the disciples' minds when their hopes seemed shattered by their Master's death, and the very power of remembering his words had vanished: but we cannot understand how the inventor of a cunningly devised fable, or the credulous idolatry of a number of disciples, full of faith and idealism, could have conjoined these two almost repugnant facts-facts which no man could have foreseen, on calculation of probabilities, because they run utterly counter to the ordinary course of human action. We need not insist on the fact that Christ had "perilled his own reputation on its occurrence; we rest so much on the positive testimony borne by multitudes to the fact itself. But the puzzle which anti-supernaturalism cannot explain is the moral hiatus between the utter gloom and dismay, nay, even despair, of the apostles at the time of their Master's death, and the sudden kindling of their faith (the faith of martyrs), which, within a few days, leapt into flame. What link connected these two states of mind in the apostles? Could it have been wholly subjective? There is a gap to be filled, a moral chasm to be spanned, and no bridge but that of the supernatural reality will span it. This becomes even more evident when we consider the origin and education of the apostles. They were rude unlettered men, slow of heart to believe; men without the faculty of poetic idealization; some of them with a large infusion of the spirit of honest doubt. It is a mistake to suppose that the rustic mind of a peasant is usually the soul of the imaginative thinker; and more amenable to spectral delusions than these Jewish peasants, the fishermen of Galilee, required the strong, clear evidence of fact before they would believe that which at first seemed to them too good news to be true. Then it might have been possible for one disciple to have elaborated the myth of the resurrection, for one excited woman to report that she had seen a ghost, and that it resembled the dead Master whose loss they all mourned: but a mixed multitude of diverse minds, in every variety of circumstances, united their testimony to the fact; a cloud of witnesses declared it with

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