"There is a third fact: the appearances of Jesus after his death, related in the Gospels, had substantially no other character than that which marked the appearance of Christ to the Apostle Paul upon his journey to Damascus. Paul mentions the appearance of Christ to himself among the other appearances related in the Gospels, as in every respect of a like description. Thence we may conclude, that the accounts in the Gospels which represent the risen Master as having a material body cannot be well grounded. From the account in the Book of Acts, it does not appear that Jesus wrought any effect upon the apostle through the organs of a material body. It was an appearance of light attended by a voice, which, according to this representation, was perceived by Paul. He himself describes his vision of Christ as emphatically an inward revelation of Christ: 'It pleased God to reveal his Son in him" (vol. ii. p. 314).

In this portrait of Jesus, which Dr. Schenkel has sketched with such a loving hand and reverent spirit, there is less, far less, in the features than in the expression to make us feel that we are really looking at that blessed face. It is in what is incidental, rather than in what is essential, to his treatment, that the finest touches will be found, and the impression of severest truthfulness received. One thing he has proved conclusively, that a true Life of Jesus does not necessarily arise from a right estimate of the Gospels, however indispensable such an estimate may be to such a Life. It is also necessary to be without bias, without preconceptions. He that would write the Life of Jesus, though he need not be without hypotheses, must be content to drop them just as fast as he discovers that they are not justified by the reports which he accepts as genuine. And he must not be too anxious to make the record square with his hypotheses. It may well be doubted whether the application of these tests to Dr. Schenkel's method would not reveal a leaning on his part to certain modes of thought, so strong as to unfit him for the task which he has undertaken. Never was a book written more earnestly, in a more truth-loving and God-serving spirit. It shines at every page with a most perfect conscientiousness and purity of aim. But these qualities often consist with violent dogmatic leanings, that, in spite of them, are sure to tell upon the task in hand.

Such leanings Dr. Schenkel nowhere manifests. But he is haunted with the idea of the Church. He does not mean that it shall influence his studies of the life and character of Jesus; but it is very certain that it does. At times he seems half to suspect it; and, in his chapter on the Last Supper, it is painfully interesting to see him wavering between his preconception and the stubborn facts that do not willingly conform to it.

Dr. Schenkel's conception of Jesus appears to us much more formal, much more self-conscious, much more ecclesiastical, than it would have been could he have freed himself, upon the threshold of his work, from this idea of the Church. But it was so much a part of him, that he was not conscious of it any more than we are conscious of the muscles that we use most frequently. The result has been, that he has found in the New Testament what was not there until he had imported it. His portrait of Jesus is the portrait of a man who does every thing self-consciously, every thing for effect. He does nothing spontaneously. There is a wilfulness about him for which the Gospels furnish us no warrant. He acts for reasons from without, not by necessity from within. Dr. Schenkel complains that Matthew's Jesus is a fore-ordained and pre-determined character. But his own conception is but little better, - that of a post-determined character, that of a man who does every thing to-day with reference to something else that he will do to-morrow. He is always drilling his disciples, always initiating them into the formalities of his kingdom. He does not go right on, willing to die if death is incidental to his work. He keeps his eye for ever on the cross. His death is always in his thought. There is something very morbid about this. It takes very much from the idea that Jesus was as courageous as he was sensitive. It is not the part of greatness to think so much upon one's death. It does not seem like Jesus to think so much more of something that is to befall him than of the living word of truth which he can preach.

Instead of removing the dust that has concealed the portrait of Jesus from the world for eighteen centuries, that we may see the great original, Dr. Schenkel has hung up in front of it what he declares to be a copy; but it is a copy of his own idea, rather than a copy of the face that we would fain behold. Let the reader, when he has been swept along through these six hundred pages on the flood-tide of Dr. Schenkel's beautiful enthusiasm, retrace his course, and see how meagre are the facts on which the doctor builds his the ory. And, of the facts that he is pleased to use, it is even more astonishing to see how many of them he distorts and whips, unconsciously enough, into his service. The candid reader will appeal from him to his translator very frequently; for Dr. Furness steadily opposes Dr. Schenkel's tendency to formulate the life of Jesus, and pleads very eloquently for a less intentional and more spontaneous conception of his character. According to Dr. Furness, he did not institute a communion; he lived a divine life; he lived it into others, and they, finding themselves possessed of it, were drawn together, and there was a communion whether they would or no; he did not go to Jerusalem to sacrifice himself, but to declare the truth of God, and to abide the consequences. Nor did the woman who anointed him do this in token of his death, as if she were embalming him before his time, but out of purest reverence and love; nor was the Last Supper with his disciples "only the last of a series of previously arranged acts, a solemn ending, in view of his death and of the formal institution of his Communion," as Dr. Schenkel says. He well says "only." It was a great deal more than that. It was an hour of tenderest emotion. The words he spoke were not the language of a ritual. They were a plea for human love; a cry for human sympathy; a prayer, that when his followers came, from year to year, to celebrate the Paschal feast, he might not be forgotten. That he meant to abolish this feast and institute another in its stead, or that he meant to symbolize the death of the old order, the record gives us no sign. All this, if not a great deal more with reference to the war that Jesus made upon the hierarchy, is to be credited, not to the Gospels, but to the prepossessions with which Dr. Schenkel entered upon his work.

Marked as the difference is between Dr. Schenkel and his translator, as to the amount of definiteness in the aims of Jesus, there is another question, not less interesting, on which they divide even more sharply. It is the question of the socalled miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels. Of course Dr. Furness would insist, as earnestly as Dr. Schenkel, that the theological miracle is impossible; that there can be no such thing as a violation of natural law. Of course they are united in believing that the miracles of Jesus are not credentials, and do not make the truth of his teaching any truer or any more authoritative than it would otherwise be. They are also agreed that the miraculous accounts pertaining to the birth and infancy of Jesus have no historical validity. But there is still much room for difference. Schenkel allows that Jesus was possessed of healing power. With his estimate of the Gospels, he can do no less. But he does this only because he is compelled. He does not rejoice in doing it. He would certainly be better pleased if he could eliminate every atom of this wonder-working from the text. This he cannot do; but he does not go an inch further than he is compelled to go. And, when he comes to any thing of this sort that he feels must be historic, he still makes every possible allowance for exaggeration, and ascribes the largest possible proportion of the effect produced to "faith." The words of Jesus to the woman that had touched his garment, "Thy faith hath made thee whole," are the key with which he unlocks the majority of these accounts. He further imagines, that he can trace in Jesus a growing dislike of these wonders, and a limiting of them almost entirely to those afflicted with insanity. Very different is Dr. Furness's treatment of these same accounts. He fondles them most lovingly. He makes the most of them. It is scarcely necessary for him to suppose "faith" on the part of the diseased. The power of Jesus of itself is quite sufficient. What Dr. Schenkel trips over as lightly as he can, Dr. Furness dwells upon with constantly increasing admiration.

But, outside of these reports of sudden cures, Dr. Schenkel accepts nothing. The blasting of the fig-tree is a distorted parable. The miracle of Cana was no miracle: Jesus had provided wine in case the first supply should be exhausted. The Transfiguration points to a private conversation, in which Jesus told a few of his disciples of his relation to Moses and the prophets. Jairus's daughter was not dead; Jesus himself said so. The raising of Lazarus is in the fourth Gospel; and the fourth Gospel is not authentic. The stilling of the sea, it was the stilling of men's fears. The feeding of the multitude was a spiritual feast. The resurrection of Jesus, - it was a purely internal experience, not an external fact: that his fleshly body ever rose again we have no reason to believe.

But Dr. Schenkel does not strengthen his position when he says that these accounts of miracle involve the idea of omnipotence, and gives this as a reason for rejecting them. Even Mr. Mansel has allowed that no bystander can testify to a miracle. He can only testify to certain exceptional appearances. He can know nothing of their essential character. It were well to keep the question on this plane, - to speak of the miracles of the New Testament as so many phenomena, and weigh the evidence accordingly. But the more remarkable the phenomenon reported, the more faithfully should we sift the evidence. We are by no means bound to believe the story of a resurrection on the same amount of evidence as would convince us that a certain man died on a certain day. But let us rest our incredulity upon the isolated character of the event, not on its impossibility. For, until we know all the laws of nature, scarcely can we say of any thing reported that for it to happen is impossible. But its unwontedness may furnish, on the one hand, a presumption against the truth of it; and if, on the other hand, we find that the report can be accounted for without supposing any, or scarcely any, basis in fact, we are certainly at liberty to disbelieve.

Dr. Schenkel's position will be attacked from two directions. It will be denied that miracles are violations of natural law, and hence impossible. And it is to be regretted that he has put the term impossibility where the term improbability, based on unwontedness, would have done as well.