fountains, and to bring him from it filled more than ever with wonder at its astonishing phenomena, to protest against the poverty and shallowness of the most ambitious and confident of these attempts.  They leave the historical Character which they pourtray still unsounded, its motives, objects, and feelings absolutely incomprehensible.  He accepts the method to reverse the product.  “Look at Christ historically,” people say; “see Him as He really was.”  The answer here is, “Well, I will look at Him with whatever aid a trained historical imagination can look at Him.  I accept your challenge; I admit your difficulties.  I will dare to do what you do.  I will try and look at the very facts themselves, with singleness and ‘innocence of the eye,’ trying to see nothing more than I really see, and trying to see all that my eye falls on.  I will try to realise indeed what is recorded of Him.  And this is what I see.  This is the irresistible impression from the plainest and most elementary part of the history, if we are to accept any history at all.  A miracle could not be more unlike the order of our experience than the Character set before us is unique and unapproachable in all known history.  Further, all that makes the superiority of the modern world to the ancient, and is most permanent and pregnant with improvement in it, may be traced to the appearance of that Character, and to the work which He planned and did.  You ask for a true picture of Him, drawn with freedom, drawn with courage; here, if you dare look at it, is what those who wrote of Him showed Him to be.  Renan has tried to draw this picture.  Take the Gospels as they stand; treat them simply as biographies; look, and see, and think of what they tell, and then ask yourself about Renan’s picture, and what it looks like when placed side by side with the truth.”

This, as we have ventured to express it in our own words, seems to be the writer’s position.  It is at any rate the effect of his book, to our minds.  The inquiry, it must always be remembered, is a preliminary one, dealing, as he says, with the easiest and obvious elements of the problem; and much that seems inadequate and unsatisfactory may be developed hereafter.  He starts from what, to those who already have the full belief, must appear a low level.  He takes, as it will be seen, the documents as they stand.  He takes little more than the first three Gospels, and these as a whole, without asking minute questions about them.  The mythical theory he dismisses as false to nature, in dealing with such a Character and such results.  He talks in his preface of “critically weighing” the facts; but the expression is misleading.  It is true that we may talk of criticism of character; but the words naturally suggest that close cross-questioning of documents and details which has produced such remarkable results in modern investigations; and of this there is none.  It is a work in no sense of criticism; it is a work of what he calls the “trained historical imagination”;