M. Renan has to account for the prominence given to the Resurrection in the earliest Christian teaching, without having recourse to the supposition of conscious imposture and a deliberate conspiracy to deceive; for such a supposition would not harmonise either with the portrait he has drawn of the Master, or with his judgment of the seriousness and moral elevation of the men who, immeasurably inferior as they were to Him, imbibed His spirit, and represented and transmitted to us His principles.  And this is something much more than can be accounted for by the general disposition of the age to assume the supernatural and the miraculous.  The way in which the Resurrection is circumstantially and unceasingly asserted, and made on every occasion and from the first the foundation of everything, is something very different from the vague legends which float about of kings or saints whom death has spared, or from a readiness to see the direct agency of heaven in health or disease.  It is too precise, too matter-of-fact, too prosaic in the way in which it is told, to be resolved into ill-understood dreams and imaginations.  The various recitals show little care to satisfy our curiosity, or to avoid the appearance of inconsistency in detail; but nothing can be more removed from vagueness and hesitation than their definite positive statements.  It is with them that the writer on Christianity has to deal.

M. Renan’s method is—­whilst of course not believing them, yet not supposing conscious fraud—­to treat these records as the description of natural, unsought visions on the part of people who meant no harm, but who believed what they wished to believe.  They are the story of a great mistake, but a mistake proceeding simply, in the most natural way in the world, from excess of “idealism” and attachment.  Unaffected by the circumstance that there never were narratives less ideal, and more straightforwardly real—­that they seem purposely framed to be a contrast to professed accounts of visions, and to exclude the possibility of their being confounded with such accounts; and that the alleged numbers who saw, the alleged frequency and repetition and variation of the instances, and the alleged time over which the appearances extended, and after which they absolutely ceased, make the hypothesis of involuntary and undesigned allusions of regret and passion infinitely different from what it might be in the case of one or two persons, or for a transitory period of excitement and crisis—­unaffected by such considerations, M. Renan proceeds to tell, in his own way, the story of what he supposes to have occurred, without, of course, admitting the smallest real foundation for what was so positively asserted, but with very little reproach or discredit to the ardent and undoubting assertors.  He begins with a statement which is meant to save the character of the Teacher.  “Jesus, though he spoke unceasingly of resurrection, of new life, had never said quite