We are familiar with the attempts to resolve the Christianity of the New Testament into philanthropy; and, on the other hand, writers like Mr. Carlyle will not let us forget that the world is as dark and evil as the Bible draws it.  This writer feels both in one.  No one can show more sympathy with enlarged and varied ideas of human happiness, no one has connected them more fearlessly with Christian principles, or claimed from those principles more unlimited developments, even for the physical well-being of men.  No one has extended wider the limits of Christian generosity, forbearance, and tolerance.  But, on the other hand, what is striking is, that all this is compatible, and is made to appear so, with the most profound and terrible sense of evil, with indignation and scorn which is scathing where it kindles and strikes, with a capacity and energy of deliberate religious hatred against what is impure and false and ungodly, which mark one who has dared to realise and to sympathise with the wrath of Jesus Christ.

The world has been called in these later days, and from opposite directions, to revise its judgments about Jesus Christ.  Christians, on the one hand, have been called to do it by writers of whom M. Ernest Renan is the most remarkable and the most unflinching.  But the sceptical and the unbelieving have likewise been obliged to change their ground and their tone, and no one with any self-respect or care for his credit even as a thinker and a man would like to repeat the superficial and shallow flippancy and irreligion of the last century.  Two things have been specially insisted on.  We have been told that if we are to see the truth of things as it is, we must disengage our minds from the deeply rooted associations and conceptions of a later theology, and try to form our impressions first-hand and unprompted from the earliest documents which we can reach.  It has been further urged on us, in a more believing spirit, that we should follow the order by which in fact truth was unfolded, and rise from the full appreciation of our Lord’s human nature to the acknowledgment of His Divine nature.  It seems to us that the writer of this book has felt the force of both these appeals, and that his book is his answer to them.  Here is the way in which he responds to both—­to the latter indirectly, but with a significance which no one can mistake; to the former directly and avowedly.  He undertakes, isolating himself from current beliefs, and restricting himself to the documents from which, if from any source at all, the original facts about Christ are to be learned, to examine what the genuine impression is which an attempt to realise the statements about him leaves on the mind.  This has been done by others, with results supposed to be unfavourable to Christianity.  He has been plainly moved by these results, though not a hint is given of the existence of Renan or Strauss.  But the effect on his own mind has been to drive him back on a closer survey of the history in its first