the most grotesque.  That these “petits comites de bonnes gens” though influenced by a great example and wakened out of their “delicious pastoral” by a heroic death, should have been able to make an impression on Judaean faith, Greek intellect, and Roman civilisation, and to give an impulse to mankind which has lasted to this day, is surely one of the most incredible hypotheses ever accepted, under the desperate necessity of avoiding an unwelcome alternative.

M. Renan is willing to adopt everything in the Gospel history except what is miraculous.  If he is difficult to satisfy as to the physical possibility or the proof of miracles, at least he is not hard to satisfy on points of moral likelihood; and he draws on his ample power of supposing the combination of moral opposites in order to get rid of the obstinate and refractory supernatural miracle.  To some extent, indeed, he avails himself of that inexhaustible resource of unlimited guessing, by means of which he reverses the whole history, and makes it take a shape which it is hard to recognise in its original records.  The feeding of the five thousand, the miracle described by all the four Evangelists, is thus curtly disposed of:—­“Il se retira au desert.  Beaucoup de monde l’y suivit. Grace a une extreme frugalite la troupe sainte y vecut; on crut naturellement voir en cela un miracle.”  This is all he has to say.  But miracles are too closely interwoven with the whole texture of the Gospel history to be, as a whole, thus disposed of.  He has, of course, to admit that miracles are so mixed up with it that mere exaggeration is not a sufficient account of them.  But be bids us remember that the time was one of great credulity, of slackness and incapacity in dealing with matters of evidence, a time when it might be said that there was an innocent disregard of exact and literal truth where men’s souls and affections were deeply interested.  But, even supposing that this accounted for a belief in certain miracles growing up—­which it does not, for the time was not one of mere childlike and uninquiring belief, but was as perfectly familiar as we are with the notion of false claims to miraculous power which could not stand examination—­still this does not meet the great difficulty of all, to which he is at last brought.  It is undeniable that our Lord professed to work miracles.  They were not merely attributed to Him by those who came after Him.  If we accept in any degree the Gospel account, He not only wrought miracles, but claimed to do so; and M. Renan admits it—­that is, he admits that the highest, purest, most Divine person ever seen on earth (for all this he declares in the most unqualified terms) stooped to the arts of Simon Magus or Apollonius of Tyana.  He was a “thaumaturge”—­“tard et a contre-coeur”—­“avec une sorte de mauvaise humeur”—­“en cachette”—­“malgre lui”—­“sentant le vanite de l’opinion”; but still a “thaumaturge.”  Moreover, He was so almost of necessity; for M. Renan