A time of quiet and rest seemed now to have dawned upon tliis i)olcmical field of Christian theology, when suddenly, in 1803, the learned Frenchman Eenan ap- peared with liis Vie de Jesus, and stirred anew the spir- its, as Strauss had done thirty years before. IMost ar- bitrarily did Jlr. Kenan deal with the data upon which his work professed to be based ; while theologically he ])rocceded throughout " on a really atheistic assumption, disguised beneath the veil of a pantheistic phraseology. ... It is, however, when we look at the Vie de Jesus from a moral point of view that its shortcomings are most apparent in their length and breadth. Irs hero is a fanatical impostor, who pretends to be and to do that wliich lie knows to be beyond him, but who, never- theless, is held up to our admiration as the ideal of hu- manity" (Liddon, p. 50G). It is sufficient to reply to this caricature by Mr. Kenan that, " If this be the found- er of Christianity, and if Christianity be the right be- lief, then all religion must cease from the earth ; for not only is this character unfit to sustain Christianity, but it. is unfit to sustain any religion ; it wants the bond" (Lange, I, xviii). Yet "it may be that to the thou- sands whose thoughts have either rested in the symbols of the infancy and the death which the cultus of the Latin Church brings so prominently before them, or wlio, having rejected these, have accepted nothing in tlieir place, the Vie de Jesus has given a sense of liuman reality to the Gospel history which they never knew before, and led them to study it with a more devout sympathy" (Plumptre, p. 337). Countless editions and translations were made of the worlv, and it was read everywhere with as much interest as if it had been sim- ply a work of fiction ; indeed (German theologians, even the Rationalists, hesitated not to rank it among French novels. Innumerable are the works which were writ- ten against and in defence of this legendary hypothesis. In (iermany, especially, the contest raged fiercely, and for a time it seemed as if the materialistic Frenchman was to uproot all Christian feelings in the hearts of the common people of Germany, when Strauss suddenly reappeared on the stage in Ijehalf of his mythical the- ory with a new edition of his Leben Jesu, this time prepared yb>- Me tennis of the German people, '-and the new work, more popular in form, more caustic and sneer- ing in its hostility, has been read as widely as the old. . . . JIustering all old objections and starting anew, he seeks to prove that the first three gospels contradict each other and the fourth. Without entering into the more elaborate theories as to their origin and their re- lation to the several parties and sects in early Christen- dom, as IJaur <lid afterwards, he has a general theorj' wliich accounts for them. Men's hopes and wishes, their reverence and awe, tend at all times to develop themselves into myths. . . . The myths were not 'cun- ningly devised,' but were the spontaneous, unconscious growth of the time in which they first appeared. If men asked what, then, was lel't them to believe in— what was tlie idea which had thus developed itself through what liad been worked on as the facts of Christianity, the answer was that God manifested himself, not in Christ, but in luimanity at large — humanity is the uniou of the two natures, the finite and the infinite, the child of the visible mother and the invisible father. . . . Tiie outcry against the book was, as might be expected, enormous. It opened tlie eyes of those who ha<l dallied with unbelief to see that they were naked, and it strip- pod (itf the fig-leaf covering of words and phrases with whicli they had sought to hide their nakedness. What was olfered as the compensation for all tliis work of de- struction, if it were offered in any other spirit than that of the mockery even then, and yet more now, so charac- teristic of the author, was hardly enough to give warmth and shelter to any human smil" (Plumptre, p. 334). Tlie ablest among Christian divines and scholars came forward to refute the naked falsehoods, and up to our day
the contest rages, nor can it be said how soon it wiU be ended ; it is certain, however, that orthodox Christianity is daily gaining ground, even in the very core of the heart of Kationalism. In France it drew forth the able work of Pressense, Jesus Christ son Temps, sa Vie son (Euvre (Paris, 1865), which has since appeared in an English dress in this country. In England, Ecce Homo, a survey of the life and work of Jesus Christ (London, 1866), was a response to French and German Rational- ists, in so far as the reaUty of our Saviour's human ca- reer is concerned. (See above, II, 3.)
Great service has also been done for the truth by the productions of Weiss {Seeks Vortrdge iiber die Person Jesu Christi, Ingolst. 1864), Liddon {Bampton Lecture, 1866 ; see Christian Remembrancer, 3 &u. 1868, article vi), and particularly by Row (London, 1868; N.Y. 1871; see Princeton Rev. 1810, art. v), Plumptre (Boyle Led. 1866), K.Payne Smith {Bampton Lecture, 1869), Leathes, Wit- ness of St. John to Christ {Boyle T^ect. 1870), Andrews, and Hanna. Several popular treatises on the subject were also produced in Germany, England, and-America, among which are those of Abbott and Eddy. Henrj' W^ard Beecher has just published vol. i of a similar work.