clearly that he should rise again in the flesh.”  He says this with the texts before him, for he quotes them and classifies them in a note.  But this is his point of departure, laid down without qualification.  Yet if there is anything which the existing records do say distinctly, it is that Jesus Christ said over and over again that He should rise again, and that He fixed the time within which He should rise.  M. Renan is not bound to believe them.  But he must take them as he finds them; and on this capital point either we know nothing at all, and have no evidence to go upon, or the evidence is simply inverted by M. Renan’s assertion.  There may, of course, be reasons for believing one part of a man’s evidence and disbelieving another; but there is nothing in this case but incompatibility with a theory to make this part of the evidence either more or less worthy of credit than any other part.  What is certain is that it is in the last degree weak and uncritical to lay down, as the foundation and first pre-requisite of an historical view, a position which the records on which the view professes to be based emphatically and unambiguously contradict.  Whatever we may think of it, the evidence undoubtedly is, if evidence there is at all, that Jesus Christ did say, though He could not get His disciples at the time to understand and believe Him, that He should rise again on the third day.  What M. Renan had to do, if he thought the contrary, was not to assume, but to prove, that in these repeated instances in which they report His announcements, the Evangelists mistook or misquoted the words of their Master.

He accepts, however, their statement that no one at first hoped that the words would be made good; and he proceeds to account for the extraordinary belief which, in spite of this original incredulity, grew up, and changed the course of things and the face of the world.  We admire and respect many things in M. Renan; but it seems to us that his treatment of this matter is simply the ne plus ultra of the degradation of the greatest of issues by the application to it of sentiment unworthy of a silly novel.  In the first place, he lays down on general grounds that, though the disciples had confessedly given up all hope, it yet was natural that they should expect to see their master alive again.  “Mais I’enthousiasme et l’amour ne connaissent pas les situations sans issue.”  Do they not?  Are death and separation such light things to triumph over that imagination finds it easy to cheat them?  “Ils se jouent de l’impossible et, plutot que d’abdiquer l’esperance, ils font violence a toute realite.”  Is this an account of the world of fact or the world of romance?  The disciples did not hope; but, says M. Renan, vague words about the future had dropped from their master, and these were enough to build upon, and to suggest that they would soon see him back.  In vain it is said that in fact they did not expect it.  “Une telle croyance etait d’ailleurs si naturelle, que la foi des disciples aurait suffi pour la creer de toutes pieces.”  Was it indeed—­in spite of Enoch and Elias, cases of an entirely different kind—­so natural to think that the ruined leader of a crushed cause, whose hopeless followers had seen the last of him amid the lowest miseries of torment and scorn, should burst the grave?