is an appearance of an honest and philosophically avowable faith, there is doubt at bottom. It seems clear from all this, that skepticism has become the natural atmosphere of the good minds of our time-of all who are imbued with the spirit of modern science! There should be no complaint of the seeming arrogance of pretending that only a defective education, want of maturity, or lack of some special bent of mind, could retain men like Guizot, Gladstone, Faraday, Pressensé, Tholuck, and Montalembert in bondage to faith in the supernatural. The positive, scientific faith is now quite as much exposed to such systematic impertinence as ever dogmatic faith was. But if we have passed through a revolution of this kind, so that doubt is now the prevailing atmosphere of intellectual life and faith the exceptional condition, a new duty is imposed on those who abandon Christian creeds. They owe those they leave, not less than those they join, the most minute and comprehensive accounts of these inevitable changes. That these are the fatal results of expanding thought, of increasing wisdom, should be most carefully shown. The earliest doubts, and how they were for a time quieted—what renewed and multiplied these doubts, and how they affected the dogmas of religion-the extension of skepticism from one object to another-the gradual and resistless surging in of new convictions to exclude the former ones-in what particulars the earlier views were untenable and in what the new ones are more free from contradiction-these are all points on which we need light. Especially should the delusive notion be dismissed that these ideas are only fitted to impress and convince the elect few. Renan's scheme of thought, if he would only define it simply, is not beyond the reach of sophomoric brains. If these high priests of the new system would but analyze the process of their relapse from faith to positive science, as vividly as Luther, Augustine, and John Henry Newman have analyzed their conversion, they would confer a priceless boon on the world. But while they conceal the reasons of a change of opinion which they proclaim unavoidable-while they respond to our inquiries with a suggestion of our unfitness to judge such high matters-we may be pardoned for surmising that they may be as faulty in their reasoning as they show themselves defective in good-breeding. Take the case of Renan [January, in illustration. It appears that at nineteen he had stumbled on certain doubts arising from what could only have been a very superficial acquaintance with natural science. Their nature is not disclosed, but we are left to infer that they involved a conflict between science and the Bible. We ought to be informed here what his difficulties were, what his views on the relations of science and revelation, what his notions on the inspiration, of the Scriptures, whether faith in him was a simple traditional assent to Catholic dogmas or a vital relation to Christ, God revealed to the heart, to use Pascal's definition. Thus we might learn what he had rejected. When he resolved not to become a priest what were his exact objections? With what feelings did he look forward to the priesthood? Was he pleased with the prospect of exchanging his facilities for study in Paris, its stimulating intellectual life and brilliant society, for some remote and monotonous parish with a ceaseless round of petty and harassing duties? Was he dreaming of a literary career? Did he turn to the University and the Institute because conscience forbade him to enter the priesthood, or did he forsake the Church because fairer prospects smiled upon him from other quarters? The account of this transition which Sainte-Beuve has drawn from Renan is even more full of contradiction than the story of Saint Paul's conversion. One Gospel never contradicted another so squarely as some of the assertions of Sainte-Beuve contradict the statements of Renan. Two pages before his declaration of the fatal nature of the change we are discussing, this amiable critic shows us another phase of the business. Renan "felt that, had he been born in Germany, he might have found stations propitious to respectful and independent study, without being obliged to break absolutely with venerable names and things, by the aid of a happy confusion of poetry with the religion of the past." But a few weeks later the objections which had previously hovered over his mind assumed a fixed and precise form. We confess that doubts which can be so plastic one month and so inflexible the next, according to the outward circumstances of the doubter, hardly seem to result from the fatal development of his mind. There is room to think that the change of attitude witnessed in those few weeks was due quite as much to additional will as to additional light. On what grounds did this youth of two-and-twenty, less than two years after his first serious doubts, settle the great question of supernatural religion? Those two years had been spent in the study of theology, of Hebrew under Lehir and at the lectures of Quatremère. What knowledge of natural science could he have gained in that time? Could he have mastered the methods and results of German theology at that early date? Had he been tenfold the prodigy he is, this would have been impossible. We dwell on this matter because of the importance which has been assigned to it as a sign of the times. Renan himself says, that few become unbelievers for good reasons, and he claims a scientific cause for his own unbelief. It is, then, our right and duty to be strict. On all the points named absolute sincerity would require ample details. We have seen how calm and peaceful this evolution was, silent as the rising of the heavenly constellations, grand and inevitable as the swelling tides of the ocean, in the account Renan gave of it, in 1862, to Sainte-Beuve. But he appears to have forgotten a little what he had said on the same topic thirteen years earlier, and only four years after the events described: "I wish all my friends who remain in Orthodoxy a peace comparable with that in which I have lived since my struggle came to its close, and the appeased tempest has left me in the midst of this great pacific ocean, a shoreless and waveless sea, where the only star is reason, and the only compass my own heart." "Fatal distinction "-of sacred and profane... "What struggles did it not cost me!"* Here the conflict was not from the necessity of sundering friendly relations or ties of gratitude; it lay where Sainte-Beuve says there was none in his intellectual difficulties and processes. Of course, the earlier account is the more trustworthy. This discrepancy comes from no purpose of concealment or disguise. When years have passed away since the occurrence of such events, that great magician, the imagination, clothes them with hues that often contrast with the reality. Then, too, Renan was not the literary artist in 1849 that he had become in 1862. Indeed, what statement of that nature could pass through the transfiguring hands of two writers like Renan and Sainte * "Questions Contemporaines," p. 313. Beuve, without some suppressions of unpleasing features, some beautifying additions or arrangements? But this change had made Renan a tutor, and compelled him to cast about himself for a career. His studies in the Semitic literatures went on, though not without some hesitation. The University attracted him, and, in 1848, he tried his hand at instruction in philosophy. This was given up, it appears, through lack of confidence in the methods and results of philosophical study. He turned to the Academies, and competed in learned dissertations for the prizes offered by The Institute. One of these carried off the Volney Prize in 1847; it was afterward expanded into a "General History of the Semitic Languages." Another successful, but still unpublished, essay, treated "The Study of Greek in the Occident during the Middle Ages." In 1848 he published a remarkable study on "The Origin of Language;" in 1850 he was designated by the Academy of Inscriptions for a learned mission in Italy, the fruit of which commission appeared, two years later, in his "Averroes and Averroïsm." He gained admission to the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1851, and to the Journal des Débats in 1852. History, literature, and art furnished him themes for a series of learned, suggestive, and brilliant essays. He thus made himself felt as a thinker of original power and a writer of high ability. He has since published translations of the "Book of Job" and "The Song of Songs," "Studies in Religious History," "Essays in Morals and Criticism," "Contemporary Questions," and "The Share of the Semitic Nations in the History of Civilization;" the last, his inaugural lecture as Hebrew Professor in the College of France. Three volumes of his "History of the Origin of Christianity" have already appeared under the titles, "Life of Jesus," "The Apostles," and "Saint Paul." In two additional volumes, "The Antichrist" and "The Last Apostolic Men," the author hopes to complete, ere five years are gone, this great work, to which he has deliberately reserved the ripest years of his life. These works all reveal an intellect of marked power, competent learning, great literary skill, and delicate poetic sensibility. In his critiques' on "Ary Scheffer's Temptation of Christ," "Lamennais," "The Author of the Imitation of Christ," "The Acta Sanctorum," "The Poetry of the Expo sition," and "The Poetry of the Celtic Nations," Renan shows an exquisite sensibility to artistic and poetic merits. Yet he has his reserves, even here. In Béranger he scourges remorselessly the wantonness of French verse. That peaceful old bard, so chaste, temperate, and respectable in reality, who puts on lechery, drunkenness, and disreputable airs with his singingrobes, moves him to anger. Tennyson, Milton, Racine, Longfellow, these and such as they, would be his poetic favorites. But Rabelais, Pulci, Byron, and even Moliére, with his peals of inextinguishable and immortal laughter, would find little favor with him. It was well, he thinks, that Moliére was not admitted to the Academy. It would have pained Renan to have seen the old comedian and playwright ruffling the dignity of Racine or Bossuet. In his pieces on Ewald's History of the Israelites, the Critical Historians of Jesus, and Comparative Mythology, Renan seems too absolutely at the mercy of the authors he reviews for his information and conclusions. He more than once excuses himself for not discussing important questions with a greater display of critical apparatus. Others have destroyed, he will build; the writer gets the start of the critic. But we must now ask what conclusions Renan has reached on the vital questions of Christianity. It is to be regretted that the date of its composition is not appended to each of his productions. We might then study his development as a thinker at our leisure. Yet this aid is not indispensable. More than most men, like Lamennais, like Châteaubriand, his kinsmen in race, Renan is capable of passing at a bound from one pole of thought to its opposite. How it was in 1845 we cannot tell, but two years later he held the same ideas in the main that he holds to-day. Could we know what books he read in this interval, we should have no little light on the secret formation of his opinions. It does not seem very probable that he ever accepted the Hegelian philosophy. Indeed, he condemns Strauss for having made, in his Life of Jesus, an application of Hegelianism to the story of the Gospels. It seems probable that Renan read this book in Littré's French translation. He usually refers to the work in that guise; and what he draws attention to, and most freely lauds, are not the contents proper of the volume, but the fine analyses that Littré has, prefixed to it. References are frequent to Littré's articles |