thought that the hour of the downfall of the Christian church and religion had struck, while others expected good results from the struggle. "This is the crisis of the disease," they said; "thousands will shrink from the fearful abyss, and return to the good old faith; the church will overcome this enemy as all others, and then stand more firmly than ever." Some even expressed the hope that the author himself, if he sincerely inquired after truth, could not remain in this extreme position, and would, ere long, recall his errors. At first none seemed to venture on the arena to oppose him, but soon a whole host of answers from both orthodox and semiorthodox theologians appeared, and calmed down the fears of the agitated friends of religion.

Strauss was born in 1806 at Ludwigsburg, in the kingdom of Würtemberg. As a student at Tübingen, he was always industrious, retired, seemingly modest, correct, and, at one time, thought even to be pious. In talents and scholarship he stood first in his class. He finished his education at Berlin, from which city he returned, somewhat changed, to Tübingen. He cultivated his mind particularly in the school of Schleiermacher's criticism and Hegel's metaphysical pantheism. His learning is not so extensive as that of Tholuck, Neander, Baur, and others, but very well digested, accurate, nice, and adroitly managed. His acumen is admirable. No discrepancy in the Gospels, how slight soever, escapes his observation. He acts toward the records as a lawyer, who hears their accounts, and seeks to involve them in contradiction, in order to destroy the weight of their testimony. He writes with more elegance, clearness, vivacity, point, and wit, than most of the German theologians. At the same time his work is characterized by an air of calmness and indifference in regard to the result. He pulls down the most venerable structures of antiquity without a sigh or regret. It seems not to cause him the least pain that his conclusions, if they are correct, must deprive millions of their only comfort in life, and their only hope in death. There he stands upon the ruins of the greatest and most sacred life which ever appeared among men, like a marble statue, with the all-sufficient air of a Stoic philosopher. It is true, in the last chapter he affects to build up again what he has destroyed, by referring to an abstract idea what the church finds in the person of Jesus Christ. A miserable substitute indeed! "Humanity as a whole," we are told, "is the God-man, the Saviour of the world, the child of the visible mother, nature, and of the invisible father, spirit. Humanity is the incarnate God; she performs miracles by subduing nature in her wonderful inventions, such as steamboats and railroads.

We are saved by faith in this Christ, that is, by coming to the painful consciousness of our individuality, and finding ourselves, at the same time, embraced in the general race, which constantly rises from the grave"-the only immortality known in pantheistic philosophy. In a speculative church like this all worship would have to be the worship of genius, (or hero-worship, as Carlyle calls it;) all prayers must be addressed to the spirit of humanity, that is, must be self-adoration. Can such a system save an immortal soul? Thus far, at least, it has not.

Strauss is a Rationalist in the general sense of the term, so far forth as he rejects everything which he cannot comprehend with his natural reason; but his philosophy is of a very different kind from that of Rationalism proper: it is not deistic, but pantheistic; it does not separate God from the world in an abstract way, but confounds the two by deifying the idea of humanity; it is not popular, but speculative and transcendental; not Ebionitish, but Gnostic. His infidelity is more refined and profound than that of Bahrdt, Paulus, Röhr, or Wegscheider, but on this very account more dangerous where it once has taken hold. While the older Rationalists retain the tenets of natural religion, particularly the three ideas of Kant, namely, God, liberty, and immortality, Strauss would fain deprive us of a personal God, of a personal Christ, and of individual immortality. While Paulus holds fast to the historical character of Christ's life, only excluding all supernatural and miraculous agency, Strauss dissolves nearly the whole of it into mythological fables, produced, not from any impure motives, to be sure, as the Wolfenbüttel Fragmentist would make us believe, but unconsciously, by the creative power of a pious enthusiasm.

Strauss requires from the biographer of Jesus that his heart and mind be perfectly free from religious and dogmatic suppositions and prejudices; and claims, in the preface to his first edition, (vol. i, p. v,) this freedom (Voraussetzungslosigkeit) as the fruit of his own philosophical studies. This, however, is a conceit. It is absolutely impossible for a theologian to get rid of all suppositions, else he would have to give up himself, and commence with nothing. But of the creature the maxim is perfectly true, ex nihilo nihil fit. it is the privilege of the Creator only to make something out of nothing. We must require, rather, that the biographer of Jesus proceed from right suppositions, from sincere love of truth, and deep reverence for Him whom the most superficial observation shows to be the greatest benefactor of mankind, and the only comfort and hope

* Leben Jesu, vol. ii, p. 710.

of millions. Strauss was full of false prejudices from the beginning, in spite of his assertion to the contrary. He had established in his mind, before writing his work, the principle, that miracles are impossible; that the Hegelian philosophy, as he understood it, was the only true philosophy; that the orthodox and rationalistic view of the evangelical history was obsolete; and also many other suppositions, which guide and determine him more or less in all his arguments and conclusions.

Our critic does not reach such a height of folly and absolute skepticism as to deny altogether the historical existence of Jesus Christ; but he reduces it to a mere skeleton. According to him, Christ was a religious genius, who first awoke to the consciousness of the essential unity (or, rather, identity) of God and men. this is all in no feature was he specifically different from other individual men. The superhuman glory with which the evangelists surround him is nothing but the reflection of their own mistaken ideas. His views may be thus set forth :—

By mythus we are to understand the representation of a religious idea in the form of a fact which the author honestly believes to have really happened. It is intimately related to the creations of poetry; but it differs from them, at the same time, in this, that the poet, in most cases, is conscious of the unhistorical character of his productions, while the mythus rests always on a self-deception in this respect. The mythus, moreover, has not a simply individual character, but proceeds from the general spirit of a religious society or of a nation.* Older writers have made a distinction between historical and philosophical myths. But the first, (historical myths,) which rest on some fact, are better called legends, (Sagen, for which we cannot find a term precisely corresponding in English.) Now the first Christian community was pregnant with the Messianic ideas of the Old Testament, which assumed new vigor and life from the person of Jesus. Moses had announced a prophet like him. Deut. xviii, 15; Acts iii, 22; vii, 37. The Messiah was to proceed from the family of David, and from the town of Bethlehem. Isa. ix, 7; xi, 1; Micah v, 1; Luke i, 32; Matt. ii, 5; xxii, 42; John vii, 42; Acts ii, 30. He was to be, according to prophecy, a prophet, priest, and king, performing all kinds of miracles; opening the eyes of the blind, unstopping the ears of the deaf, making the lame man to leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb to sing. Isa. xxxv, 5, seq.; xxxii, 3, 4; Matt. xi, 5;

* Comp. Baur's Review of Oltfried Müller's “Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie," in Jahn's Jahrbüchern f. Phil. u. Paedag., 1828, vol. i, p. 7; Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i, §§ 14, 15.

Luke vii, 21, seq. He was to suffer and to die for the sins of his people, Isa. liii; at the same time, however, he should not see corruption, but rise triumphantly from the grave. Psa. xvi, 10; Acts ii, 31; x, 35. The enthusiasm for Jesus excited in the disciples made them believe that all these prophecies were fulfilled in him, and their own ideas assumed, unconsciously, the nature of external facts. They were not able to hold fast the idea of a divine human Saviour in its abstract universality; and thus the Christian church generally since that time has always identified it with the individual Jesus of Nazareth, until some philosophers and critics in the nineteenth century discovered the incongruence of the absolute and the individual, and succeeded in saving the idea of a Godman by sundering it from the inadequate historical and individual form with which the imagination of antiquity had clothed it.

This is the general substance of the work in question. The manner in which Strauss carries out his principle is rather monotonous. He takes up the different accounts of the Gospels on each part of Christ's life, involves them in contradiction with each other, to prepare the way for the denial of their historical character, and then goes on to show that the orthodox exposition, as represented in our days mainly by Olshausen, cannot be maintained; and from this he passes over to the rationalistic interpretation of Paulus and others to prove that it is equally untenable from philosophical as well as exegetical reasons. Having thus, as he imagines, destroyed the former interpretations, he thinks himself driven to the mythic view as the only one consistent with the principles of sound criticism.

Without pretending, of course, to bestow a thorough review on the work, which would require us to write a book, we mention some of the arguments which shake the foundation of this dangerous system. The importance of the subject is such that our readers, we hope, will willingly consent to examine it a little further.

The two chief grounds on which Strauss rests his attempt to invalidate the extraordinary events in Christ's life, are the apparent contradictions in the accounts of the Gospels, and the alledged impossibility of miracles. The first is of a critical, the second of a philosophical, nature.

Every careful reader of a Synopsis Evangeliorum must see at once that the four Gospels differ frequently, not only in chronological arrangement, but also in the accounts themselves. The difference is most striking in the relation of the Gospel of St. John to the so-called Synoptics. But it will be found, at the same time, that these differ

ences do not affect any essential point either in history or in doctrine. All the leading portions of Christ's life stand out clear and impregnable; yea, the discrepancies go only to confirm the general truth of the gospel history; affording the strongest possible proof that there was no collusion among the evangelists. Each drew from his own observations and sources with perfect honesty and conscientiousness. Moreover, the differences are not contradictions, but complements of each other. A building or a landscape may be represented from different sides, so as to furnish occasion for many pictures; why not an immortal man also? It was absolutely impossible for one evangelist to give a complete picture of the Saviour, in whom the fullness of the Godhead dwelleth bodily. Even Socrates, who was a mere man, could not be fully represented by one disciple. How different is Plato's description of his character and system from Xenophon's! And yet the one only gives, as it were, the body, the other the soul, of the same person. There is no doubt that if Strauss had applied the same acumen in harmonizing the four Gospels that he has done in dividing them, he would have been much more successful, because the truth would have been on his side.

But even if we grant that the so-called harmonistic efforts cannot remove all the real differences, does it follow that the life of the Saviour is a mythus? No more preposterous conclusion could be drawn than this. If such a conclusion can rest on such a premise, the whole history of the world falls to the ground. That is one of the best portions in Tholuck's book against Strauss, in which he proves, with considerable learning, that the same, nay, much greater, discrepancies exist in the accounts given by the greatest historians of facts in profane history which no sane man has ever dreamed of doubting. We shall only hint at one example. The Life of Alexander the Great was written partly by eye-witnesses of his own actions, by his warriors and friends, such as Ptolemæus, Aristobulus, Nearchus, Marsyas, Eumenes, Baeto, &c., of whose writings Arrian, Plutarch, and Strabo, have preserved faithful extracts. A comparison of these writings affords a whole string of discrepancies. One leaves out what the other relates as the most prominent facts in the life of his hero. They do not even agree in regard to the date of Alexander's death. Eumenes and Diodotus, who wrote down the events daily as they occurred, say that he died the 11th of June; but Aristobulus and Ptolemæus, who were present at his death-bed, mention the 13th.

Dr. A. Tholuck, die Glaubwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, second edition, p. 443, seq.

VOL. VIII.-17