eighteen centuries has been the aliment of humanity, seems irretrievably dissipated; the most sublime levelled with the dust, God divested of his grace, man of his dignity, and the tie between heaven and earth broken' (concluding Dissertation, § 144).

This broken tie, however, he proceeded to reunite on speculative grounds, or, in his own words, 'to reestablish dogmatically that which has been destroyed critically.' Into that process we need not follow him; it was the justification of the announcement of his preface, 'The author is perfectly aware that the essence of the Christian faith is perfectly independent of his criticism; the supernatural birth of Christ, his miracles, his resurrection and ascension, remain eternal truths, whatever doubts may be cast on their reality as historic facts.' This was, in fact, the object of his whole book, to apply to the Gospels the speculative forms of the Hegelian doctrine of the Incarnation, in which humanity took the place of the individual. For this end, the actual personality of Jesus, his character, his teachings, seemed of such small account that they could be almost wholly ignored.1 When the miraculous was dissolved, nothing was left which appealed to him as significant, for he justly observed that the rationalist Christology, while creating no difficulty to the understanding, did not account for the Christ in whom the Church believes, and this was the Christ

1 Thus, after analysing the Sermon on the Mount, he says (p. 342): 'The discourses of Jesus, like fragments of granite, could not be dissolved by the flood of oral tradition; but they were not seldom torn from their natural connexion, floated away from their original situation, and deposited in places to which they did not properly belong.'

whom he set out to save. His failure to recognise the value of the historical residuum, and to present it as of any worth to his readers, left upon those who could not accept his speculative reconstruction a sense of blank desolation. The Jesus whom they knew and loved, seemed to have disappeared entirely.

Strauss himself could not realise this. He no doubt sincerely believed that he had rendered a service to religion by showing the Church a way out of its conflict with science and philosophy; he was deeply wounded by the storm of opposition which his book excited, and with almost youthful fury-he was but seven-and-twenty when he plunged into the strife-he fell upon his critics in his replies. The controversy died away, but not without leaving deep and abiding traces. The main defect of the book, beneath its theory of the manufacture of a Messianic biography out of Old Testament elements, lay in the insufficiency of its treatment of the Gospel records. It attempted to construct an elaborate system of historical criticism without any prior investigation into the literary origins, contents, and relations, of the documents on which the whole was founded. Strauss had been so preoccupied with his philosophical aim, that he had not thought it worth while to trouble himself with the positive facts.2 Just as Mrs. Browning complained that Dr. Johnson

1 Dr. Fairbairn, Place of Christ in Modern Theology, p. 244, quotes sufficient illustrations.

2 Contrast, for example, such a modern work as Wendt's Teaching of Jesus.

wrote the Lives of the Poets' and left out the poets, so it might be said of Strauss that he wrote the Life of Christ' and omitted Jesus. His book made an epoch; but before it could be properly appreciated the study of the origins of Christianity must pass through long and winding paths.'

Especially was it needful, in order to escape from the purely destructive method of Strauss, that the criticism of the Gospel history should be based on

1A few words may be added here by way of illustration concerning one of the books evoked by Strauss's attack, the Life of Jesus by Neander, published in 1837 (English translation from the fourth German edition, 1852), Associated in Berlin (1812) with De Wette and Schleiermacher, he had long been occupied with his great work on Church History, when Strauss entered the field. The Prussian Government proposed to place the obnoxious book under ban, but Neander protested; 'Let it be answered by argument, not by authority' (quoted by Fairbairn, p. 242). After a year's labour he was ready with his reply. He naturally proceeded from the critical basis of his earlier treatises on the Planting of Christianity, etc., and in this respect did little to correct the one-sidedness of Strauss. He minimised some of the miracles; the star which brought the Magi in search of the infant Christ was an astrological sign; the water at Cana was not changed into real wine but only received powers capable of producing the same effects; Paulus's view of the feeding of the five thousand was a possible one,-examples of the like are not wanting in the Middle Ages-yet the details of the narrative were irreconcilable with such a hypothesis; the Transfiguration was a vision in sleep, with the candid admission, 'Still the difficulty remains, that the phenomena, if simply psychological, should have appeared to all the three Apostles in the same form.' Well might Strauss propose for the motto of such a treatise, 'Lord, I believe, help thou my unbelief.' On the other hand, the miracles occupied quite a subordinate place in the general presentment of Christ's ministry. Neander's idea of a Life of Christ involved an attempt to delineate his teaching both in its essential aims and in its relation to contemporary parties and ideas; and the fulness and care of his exposition are in marked contrast with the meagre treatment of Strauss (Part II. chap. vi.). But on this side Baur not unjustly criticised it afterwards for its weakness in the treatment of the Fourth Gospel (Kritische Untersuchungen über die Kanonischen Evangelien, 1847, p. 52).

the criticism of the documents which are its sources.1 This was, in fact, undertaken by Weisse in 1838, with the result already recorded. He came to the conclusion, like Wilke in the same year, that the oldest and most original of the Gospels was to be found in Mark. To some extent he shared the mythical view of Strauss, but he saw in such narratives more of the creative spirit of Christianity, and less of the half-mechanical transference of Old Testament elements, than Strauss had been willing to allow. So he pointed the way of advance by his careful investigation of his authorities, as well as by his sympathetic recognition of the ideal values of the products of the consciousness of the Church. But a more definite criticism still was needed, which should attempt to ascertain the special characteristics of each book, to determine its chief literary features, to account for its peculiarities, to discover any traces of its special object, and fix the circumstances of time and place, the conditions of thought and life, in which it was composed. Every religious author bears some relation to the beliefs and hopes of his age, to its struggles and parties and interests. What evidence exists that such influences were at work in the communities out of which the Gospels issued, what was their nature, and how did they operate upon the records? The first person

1 Baur's clear-sightedness saw this at once, Die Kanonischen Evangelien, p. 41. Cp. Pfleiderer, Development of Theology, p. 225.

2 See ante, p. 235.

seriously to raise such questions and supply an answer, was Ferdinand Christian Baur.1

III.

Like many another great German scholar, Baur was able to cover an amazing range of study. While still a master at Blaubeuren he had produced as early as 1824 a treatise on the natural religion of antiquity. His appointment to a chair at Tübingen led him to choose the early history of Christianity as his especial field of research, and in the year in which Strauss began the issue of his Leben Jesu, Baur published two treatises which might seem at first sight unrelated to each other, yet were really in the closest connexion. The first was an investigation into the strange forms of speculation in the second century of our era commonly known as Gnosticism;' the second dealt with the origin and significance of the Pastoral Epistles.' The Gnostic (the term is believed to have come into use at the beginning of the second century) regarded himself as possessed of a special gnosis or knowledge of divine things, imparted originally by Jesus to his apostles, and

3

1 A fine description of Baur's theological development will be found in Fairbairn's Place of Christ in Modern Theol., Book I. div. II. chap. iii. In the sketch here offered for the general reader, attention is directed only to his treatment of the Gospels.

2 Symbolik und Mythologie, oder die Natur-Religion des Alterthums, Stuttgart, 1824-25, in three volumes.

3 Die Christliche Gnosis, 1835.

4 Die sogenannten Pastoral-Briefe, 1835.