never have been reached by the German works which were really Renan’s authorities.  It is idle to say with Pfleiderer that it is a pity that, having possessed so much learning, Renan had not possessed more.  That is not quite the point.  The book has much breadth and solidity of learning.  Yet Renan has scarcely the historian’s quality.  His work is a work of art.  It has the halo of romance.  Imagination and poetical feeling make it in a measure what it is.

Renan was born in 1823 in Treguier in Brittany.  He set out for the priesthood, but turned aside to the study of oriental languages and history.  He made long sojourn in the East.  He spoke of Palestine as having been to him a fifth Gospel.  He became Professor of Hebrew in the College de France.  He was suspended from his office in 1863, and permitted to read again only in 1871.  He had formally separated himself from the Roman Church in 1845.  He was a member of the Academy.  His diction is unsurpassed.  He died in 1894.  In his own phrase, he sought to bring Jesus forth from the darkness of dogma into the midst of the life of his people.  He paints him first as an idyllic national leader, then as a struggling and erring hero, always aiming at the highest, but doomed to tragic failure through the resistance offered by reality to his ideal.  He calls the traditional Christ an abstract being who never was alive.  He would bring the marvellous human figure before our eyes.  He heightens the brilliancy of his delineation by the deep shadows of mistakes and indiscretion upon Jesus’ part.  In some respects an epic or an historical romance, without teaching us history in detail, may yet enable us by means of the artist’s intuition to realise an event or period, or make presentation to ourselves of a personality, better than the scant records acknowledged by the strict historian could ever do.

Our materials for a real biography of Jesus are inadequate.  This was the fact which, by all these biographies of Jesus, was brought home to men’s minds.  Keim’s book, the most learned of those mentioned, is hardly more than a vast collection of material for the history of Jesus’ age, which has now been largely superseded by Schuerer’s Geschichte des Judischen Volkes im Zeitalier Jesu Christi, 2 Bde., 1886-1890.  There have been again, since the decade of the sixties, periods of approach to the great problem.  Weiss and Beyschlag published at the end of the eighties lives of Jesus which, especially the former, are noteworthy in their treatment of the critical material.  They do not for a moment face the question of the person of Christ.  The same remark might be made, almost without exception, as to those lives of Jesus which have appeared in numbers in England and America.  The best books of recent years are Albert Reville’s Jesus de Nazareth, 1897, and Oscar Holtzmann’s Leben Jesu, 1901.  So great are the difficulties and in such disheartening fashion are they urged from all sides,