invented it"; and further, we may say that if they did invent it, the inventors would be as great as the hero. Strauss himself tore to shreds the old attempts of Dr. Paulus to represent the miracles as mere natural events; but how impossible it was to support anything like a religion on views such as his, he himself showed in his subsequent Glaubenslehre (1840), in which he expressed his belief that no reconciliation was possible between science and Christianity. Strauss's whole method is vitiated by his two preassumptions (1) that all miracles are impossible; and (2) that the Gospels have no pretence to historical authority. The readers of the Gospels have felt that "It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth"; and ordinary reasoners realise at once that the trivial and fantastic hypotheses of a rationalising scepticism are shattered on the two vast facts of Christianity and Christendom. And, like all who have attacked the Divinity of our Lord, even Strauss seems almost compelled to fall down on his knees before Him. He says that "Jesus stands foremost among those who have given a higher ideal to Humanity;" that "It is impossible to refrain from admiring and loving Him; and that never at any time will it be possible to rise above Him, nor to imagine any one who shall be even equal with Him.” Renan's Vie de Jésus appeared in 1865. In many respects, if its scepticism be subtracted from it, it was a beautiful book. The author was a learned and brilliant man of genius, and was the master of an eminently fascinating style, through which breathes a charming personality. Yet how utterly inefficient were the deplorable methods by which he tried to set at naught the faith of Christians! Let two instances suffice. For nearly nineteen centuries the religion, the history, and the moral progress of mankind have been profoundly affected by the Resurrection. And yet Renan thinks it sufficient to account for the Resurrection by saying, 'Divine power of love! sacred moments in which the passion of an hallucinée gives to the world a resuscitated God!" Such a mode of treating the convictions of centuries of Christians, who have numbered in their ranks some of the keenest and most brilliant thinkers in the race of man, can only be regarded as utterly frivolous. For the sake of a subjective prejudice it sets aside all the records of the New Testament, and the nineteen centuries of splendid progress which have had their origin in the faith which those records founded. So far was "la passion d'une hallucinée," from having founded the belief in the Resurrection that the Apostles, who had found it impossible to realise the prophecies of Resurrection which they had heard from the lips of their Lord, were most reluctant, and most slow of heart to believe the most positive evidence. So far from being prepared beforehand to accept or to invent a Resurrection, "they were terrified and affrighted, and supposed that they had seen a Spirit," when Christ Himself stood before them. When Mary of Magdala and the other women told them that they had seen Jesus, so far from being credulous enough to be carried away by hallucinations, they regarded their words as " idle talk" (λîpos “babble,” a word of entire contempt)—and they disbelieved them: nay, they even rejected the witness of the two disciples to whom He had appeared on the way to Emmaus, and Thomas was dissatisfied with the affirmation of the whole Apostolic band. So far from "regarding it as the height of absurdity to suppose that Jesus could be held by death," their despairing conviction that the bridegroom had indeed been taken from them, was so all but insuperable that it required the most decisive personal eye-witness to overcome it. Again, consider the way in which Renan treats the Resurrection of Lazarus ! Although Eleazar was one of the commonest of Jewish names, he assumes that the story of the resuscitation of Lazarus rose from some confusion about the Lazarus of the Parable who was carried into Abraham's bosom; and in some very confused sentences he more than hints that the story of his death and resurrection was the result of a noiion between Jesus, Mary, and Martha, and that Jesus in some way or other gave way to the suggestion of the sisters, because, in the impure city of Jerusalem he had lost "something of his original transparent clearness," "Peut-être l'ardent désir de fermer la bouche à ceux qui niaient outrageusement la mission divine le leur ami, entraîna-t-elle ces personnes passionnées 1 Vie de Jésus, 372. au delà de toutes les bornes. Il faut se rappeler que, dans cette ville impure et pesante de Jérusalem, Jésus n'était pas lui-même. Sa conscience, par la faute des hommes, et non par la sienne, avait perdu quelque chose de la limpidité primordiale." Strange that a man of even ordinary intelligence could expect any one to get rid of a miracle by the hypothesis that the Lord of truth,-He whose life and teaching have created in the world the conviction that "it is better to die than lie,"-lent Himself to a coarse and vulgar makebelieve! Christianity surely has nothing to fear from such reconstructions of the Gospel History as these! Most of the books written to disprove the Divinity of the Saviour suggest some brand-new hypothesis; one after another they have their brief vogue, are trumpeted by unbelievers as a refutation of Christianity, and then pass into oblivion, if not into contempt. They have not shaken the belief reigning in millions of hearts in every region of the habitable globe; and the Christian world, without the smallest misgiving, will still exclaim, in the words of the inscription on the obelisk reared by the Pope Sixtus in front of St. Peter's at Rome, on soil once wet with the blood of martyrs:"CHRISTUS VINCIT, CHRISTUS REGNAT, CHRISTUS IMPERAT, CHRISTUS AB OMNI MALO PLEBEM SUAM DEFENDAT." The Christian world continues, and will for long ages hence continue, to offer up the prayer Strong Son of God, immortal Love, Whom we, that have not seen Thy face, By faith, and faith alone, embrace, Believing where we cannot prove; Thine are these orbs of light and shade; Сабрана THE VENGEANCE OF DIONYSUS. BY EURIPIDES. (From the "Baccha": translated by Arthur S. Way.) [EURIPIDES: The last of the three Greek tragic poets; born on the island of Salamis in B. c. 480, according to popular tradition, on the day of the famous naval battle. He received instruction in physics from Anaxagoras, in rhetoric from Prodicus, and was on terms of intimate friendship with Socrates. He early devoted his attention to dramatic composition, and at the age of twenty-five obtained a prize for his first tragedy. After a successful career at Athens, he retired for unknown reasons to Magnesia in Thessaly, and thence proceeded to the court of Archelaus, king of Macedonia, where he died in B.C. 405. Of over seventy-five tragedies there have come down to us only eighteen, the best known being "Alcestis," "Medea," "Hippolytus," "Hecuba," "Andromache," "Iphigenia at Aulis," "Iphigenia among the Tauri," "Electra," "Orestes," "Baccha."] [ARGUMENT.-Semelê the daughter of Kadmus, a mortal bride of Zeus, was persuaded by Hera to pray the God to promise her with an oath to grant her whatsoever she would. And when he had consented, she asked that he would appear to her in all the splendor of his godhead, even as he visited Hera. Then Zeus, not of his will, but constrained by his oath, appeared to her amidst intolerable light and flashings of heaven's lightning, whereby her mortal body was consumed. But the God snatched her unborn babe from the flames, and hid him in a cleft of his thigh, till the days were accomplished wherein he should be born. And so the child Dionysus sprang from the thigh of Zeus, and was hidden from the jealous malice of Hera till he was grown. Then did he set forth in victorious march through all the earth, bestowing upon men the gift of the vine, and planting his worship everywhere. But the sisters of Semelê scoffed at the story of the heavenly bridegroom, and mocked at the worship of Dionysus. And when Kadmus was now old, Pentheus his grandson reigned in his stead, and he too defied the Wine giver, saying that he was no god, and that none in Thebes should ever worship him. And herein is told how Dionysus came in human guise to Thebes, and filled her women with the Bacchanal possession, and how Pentheus, essaying to withstand him, was punished by strange and awful doom. - WAY.] Pentheus We must not overcome by force The women. I will hide me midst the pines. Dionysus Such hiding shall be thine as fate ordains, Who com❜st with guile, a spy on Bacchanals. |