ples understood him; can furnish a wiser interpretation of his language, can supply a nobler theory of his deeds. We speak of them as eyewitnesses; but eyewitnesses are not always, nor are they ordinarily, mind-witnesses; still more rarely are they soul-witnesses. And the disciples, from the testimony of their own records, seem to have been witnesses neither of mind nor soul.

Perception is an interior thing. It is the mind that sees. The best eyes will be of little use where there is no "speculation" in them. These men had not much of that same speculation. Their minds were not illuminated, and consequently their eyes were not open. The image of Jesus which they give us, however accurate as an object painted on the retina, may be very inaccurate, therefore, as an object mirrored in thought. Our thought is, we know, clearer, healthier, more discerning than theirs was; our sensibility is less jarred by private passion, our reverence is less colored by personal hope and fear. In a word, our idea of Jesus is at once more rational than theirs was, and more spiritual. Our picture of Jesus must therefore be more correctly drawn. Nay, we are at liberty to reject their delineation as wholly inexact, without altering a single one of their data.

On general principles, we dissent entirely from those who, beginning their study of human nature with a study of animal nature, and thinking to qualify themselves for a final judgment on man by gaining an exhaustive knowledge first of all fish, flesh, and fowl, come cautiously crawling up out of the slime of the pre-Adamite earth, and make a leap for Adam from the crown of an ape. Man throws more light on the reptile than the reptile throws on him. So the grandeur of a man shows itself in and through his organization; the spirit explains the body, the soul answers questions about the senses; but you cannot leap from nerve to thought, from the organ of knowledge to the faculty of knowledge; nor can you come by surprise on the soul, by feeling your winding way up along the convolutions of the brain. On the same principle, a great person manifests himself in and through his external history, but it is not by mastering the facts of his external history that you will apprehend him. In that way you will be pretty sure to

misapprehend him. We must interpret the history by the man, rather than the man by the history, as the genius of history itself allows. Yes, M. Renan, as we have seen, admits it.

In the Greek Church there were some who held that the historical Jesus of the Four Gospels was not the true Jesus, but was a deceptive and illusive mockery of the true Jesus, the Antichrist rather than the Christ; indeed, one of them, if we recollect aright, said that the literal, external, historical Christ of the Gospels was the Devil. We must go to the Epistles for the real Jesus, said some one of old. It was Paul, not Luke, who was the correct painter. Paul never saw Jesus, yet how we should welcome a Life of Jesus from the hand of Paul! It would not be much like M. Renan's, we may be sure. It would not be composed from the same data precisely. Paul, looking into his heart, turning over the pages of his altered, renovated, transformed experience, pondering thoughtfully the mysterious passages in his unexpected and unaccountable career, would have exhibited the personality of his Master in a very different light from that which gleamed in the brilliant intelligence of the modern Frenchman. With the writings of the Evangelists before him, he would have discovered hidden senses behind the letter which Matthew penned; he would have brought forth traits which were hidden from Mark, and would have detected links of association which escaped the notice of Luke. What interlineations he would have made ! What notes he would have supplied! What motives he would have revealed! What supplementary passages here and there he would have inserted! Whole chapters, perhaps, would have rolled out from his teeming imagination, full of those little touches of feeling which are better than facts, because they impart to facts their vitality, and give to incidents their power to move and charm. And after those chapters, again, there would be appendix on appendix, containing the conjectures, the hints, the deductions, the criticisms, whose reflected light upon the Evangelical pages would have been better than twice the number of authentic pages from the hand of an ordinary biographer. He would put the Christ he saw with the eyes of the spirit in place of the Jesus he never saw at all, and the fragmentary narrative would have risen from the rank of Mé moires pour Servir, to the dignity of history.

If we could add to Paul's witness the testimony of the great cloud who might speak of what Jesus had been and had done for them; if we could gather in the results of his working in their hearts, and could see the portrait he has painted of himself in the new consciousness of Christendom, we should have materials for an autobiography which is as yet unwritten, and which never will be written except by angels' fingers.

Of course nothing is to be added to the small mass of incident which the Evangelists have preserved, and nothing can be done to prevent the wearing away of that small mass by the constant hammering and filing of laborious and "destructive" criticism. It is not for any of us to arrest the work of scholarship. However profound our veneration, however earnest our faith, however dear and sacred the person whose face is mirrored in that shallow lake of Galilee, we cannot save the lake from the ruffling winds that will make the lineaments undistinguishable, or from any serious convulsions that may alter its margin, or even destroy its bed. However precious the facts may be, it is not for us violently to retain a single one after the student of the text has decided that it must go into the waste-basket of fiction. They who can accept them all as they stand, have the more solid body for their Christ; they who can accept but a portion, must adjust to that portion the spiritual personality of the Master; and they who find themselves to suspect the whole, must embody their own imagination, and let the Spirit give Jesus a body as it pleaseth it.

Dr. Bushnell, in his "Nature and the Supernatural," devotes a long, eloquent, surpassingly able and admirable chapter to the life of Jesus. In this chapter he carries out the idea we have suggested, by simply putting the Christ of the Church into the text of the Evangelist, thus reading the chronicles of the first century by the light of the nineteenth. But Dr. Bushnell is utterly unconscious of the existence of Biblical criticism; for him the New Testament records are authentic as they stand. He seems not so much as to suspect that such men as Bretschneider and Semler, Paulus and Strauss, Gfrörer, Schwegler, or Baur, have lived and written. By the help of his arbitrary, fanciful, and indefensible definition of the supernatural, he takes in as literally and exactly true every marVOL. LXXV. - 5TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. III.

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vellous incident and every miraculous fact, as easily as if they were things of every-day occurrence, and he overlays all incidents alike with the gold of his fine imagination. The chapter reads well; it is compact, harmonious, beautiful; in parts it is singularly happy and strikingly true. But it is impossible for a learned reader to peruse it and not feel that it is not, in its way, as fairly entitled to be called a romance as M. Renan's, if the passing off of the unauthentic for the authentic is an element of romance.

Of the two pictures, however, we hold Dr. Bushnell's to be the more correct, by far. For the question is one of interpretation. It is important to know the facts as far as they are to be known, but it is at least as important that the right construction should be put on the facts. Taking M. Renan's own estimate of what may be considered authentic in the Gospel narrative, there can be no doubt that a spiritually-minded man would connect them with a much higher set of motives than that associated with them by this brilliant rationalist, and would see in them the indications of a character of very different, and even of an opposite type. We object, on critical grounds, to M. Renan's array of facts and incidents; but on grounds higher than critical, we object to his interpretation of the facts and incidents that he assumes. In a word, his delineation fails, in our judgment, not in that it is partial, but in that it is false. It is not merely less than the truth, it is an inversion of the truth. It is not so much defective, incomplete, onesided, as it is wrong from beginning to end. In a word, it is a caricature, in portions a burlesque; and that is equivalent to saying that it is a total reversal of the just relations of the subject, a turning of it upside down and inside out.

We would not conceal from ourselves or from others the fact that the construction of a clear, consistent, and authentic biography of Jesus is a work, in these times, of immense and growing difficulty. If one begins to doubt, there is no telling where doubt will stop; if one admits the element of fable in the smallest degree, there is no assurance that he will not be compelled to admit it in the largest; if one loosens a single stone of literal fact, no guaranty can be given that the whole edifice will not topple over. It is one thing, however, to say,

that no image of Jesus is to be recovered, and quite another thing to put forward a false image. If the true image is lost, there is nothing more to be said. If a false image is substituted for the true, a great deal is to be said and felt. In this latter case, we cannot tell whether the Jesus we know ever had being. In the former case, we can still believe that he had. We can be sure that he was something far greater than the Evangelists perceived. He shall be the more wonderful for the failure of his companions to apprehend him; the more colossal for the ill success of his contemporaries in their attempts to measure him; the more impressive for the vast, mysterious silence, as of an Egyptian plain, in which he stands.

ART. II. - ULRIC VON HUTTEN.

1. Ulric von Hutten. Von DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUSS. 2 Bände. 2. Ulric von Hutten der Streiter für Deutsche Freiheit. Von ERNST VON BRUNNOW. 3 Bände.

THE history of the Reformation has been written almost exclusively by those who saw in it a religious movement originated by Luther and his compeers. Influences not strictly religious, and the men who represented them, have usually been kept out of sight.

Among the persons of whom this is true stands pre-eminent Ulric von Hutten; "the Reformation's man of wit and of the sword, who slew monkery with the wild laughter of his Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum." Want of appreciation on the part of Church historians has not, however, prevented him from being a popular idol in Germany, and especially among those belonging to the party of "Young Germany." To these, he is the model knight about whom all the ideal virtues of the age of chivalry cluster; the accomplished scholar and poet; the man of rank and fortune, who left his lordly castle to take the people's side, to fight against oppression and for German lib

* Spare Hours by John Brown, M. D.