foundation of all criticism consists in setting aside in the life of Christ the supernatural," and again, "Nothing enters into human affairs but what is human; and every science, particularly history, must bid farewell definitely to the supernatural and the divine."

This perversive philosophy once launched needed only a leader to present it in a concrete and popular form. For such a purpose the German Life of Christ by Strauss could serve as a model. A hand was ready in France to take up the enterprise, Ernest Renan, the modern Voltaire, put forth his notorious "Life of Jesus," which might be called the great crime of the nineteenth century. Renan wished to show that Jesus is not God, and at every page his demonstration is shattered like glass against the evidence of the texts. These texts he knows, but he is content to falsify them. He does so because in his Hegelian school no one assertion is truer than its opposite. Sometimes he adopts the respectful, unctuous tone of those who cried out: "Hail, King of the Jews." In this frame of mind he speaks of Christ as "the man who even yet directs the destinies of humanity," "the man who has given the most beautiful code of perfect life that any moralist has ever traced." But almost in the same breath he insults, minimizes and reproaches our Lord as a pedantic peasant, an eccentric, an anarchist, and the like.

This intermingling of adulation and insult to the divine character of Christ had its effect. It seduced the simple-minded, and brought the book into the hands of the imprudent and deluded multitude. It blinded the masses, it brought tears to the eyes of the faithful, it crushed the great heart of Mother Church, it gave a tone to lying criticism, it gave to blasphemy the character of elegance; it lent assistance to a policy oppressive of truth and liberty; it performed its part in the war of spoliation and sacrilegious confiscation; it renewed the hours of darkness around the Cross of the dying Redeemer; it essayed to make humanity, regenerated through the Blood of the Son of God, return back to Arius and to paganism. The work of Renan and his followers has been the great crime of the century.

During the last half of the century anti-Christianism underwent a change. The position held by Positivism was taken by evolutionist transformation. Its authors were Charles Darwin, the naturalist, and Herbert Spencer, the philosopher. Their doctrines were received with enthusiasm by thousands who had been seeking some new fad in the intellectual line. The anti-Christian looked to it to replace Christianity. In France it became the religion of the Third Republic. Jules Ferry, in the Lodge Clemente Amitie, 1877, declared openly: "We can now throw aside our theological toys. Let us free humanity from the fear of death, and let us believe in a humanity eternally progressing." It was the religion of atheism, and it has been forcing its creed upon humanity ever since.

Scepticism, born of Kant and Hegel, had come to its throne. With Hegel all things were only relative; with Kant objects are only phenomena, and the truth of things is merely subjective; religion itself was to him only subjective, and was, moreover, relegated to the things unknowable. In this he resembled Spencer with whom Religion held the first place in the category of the Unknowable, and that vast, dark, and bottomless pit into which he consigned everything which could not be known by experimentation. This glorification of ignorance, elevated into a system, became known as agnosticism.

The vagaries of sophism in the English-speaking world were hardly less prolific than in Continental Europe. The great intellectual forces of the nineteenth century allied themselves to two movements, the transcendental and the empiric. The former sprang from the writings of Rousseau; created the French Revolution, developed into German rationalism, passed into England to the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, generated in France a whole tribe of soliloquists and dreamers, and was finally crystallized in the half-prophetic, half-delirious preachings of Carlyle. Crossing the Atlantic it inspired and originated New England Transcendentalism through the Concord School of Philosophy, of which Emerson, a pupil of Carlyle, was the chief exponent.

It was a vague and abstract school. It took its very name from the fancy that this new knowledge transcended all experience and was quite independent of reason, authority, the testimony of the senses, or the testimony of mankind. It spoke freely of the Infinite, the Infinite Nothing, the Infinite Essence of Things. Carlyle spoke of Eternal Verities, the Immensities, the Eternal Silences. Emerson wrote of it as the Over-soul, the Spirit of the Universe. It permeated all literature, it directed the study of history, it inspired poetry, it became a religious creed; it hypnotized a large portion of the studious world.

About the middle of the century men began to question it, especially when it was perceived that its conclusions did not correspond with its premises. Human thought suddenly veered to the opposite extreme. The world was tired of abstractions; it called for facts. Thenceforth reason was to be omnipotent, and Nature began to be studied. The philosophy of the new order made her a god. "She will give up her secrets to us, and we will build our systems upon them. We will tear open the bowels of the mountains, and read their signs. We will pull down the stars from the skies, weigh them, and test their constituents. We will seek the elemental forces of Nature, and there we shall find the elemental truths. We will dredge the seas, sweep the rivers, drag fossils out of forgotten caves, construct the forms of dead leviathans from one bone, examine the dust of stars in shattered aerolites, and the structure of the animal creation in the spawn of frogs by the wayside, or the tadpoles in the month of May. And we shall find that all things are made for man; and that man alone is the Omnipotent and Divine." The world took up the cry and called it Progress. Mankind was shaken by new emotions. Through steamship, telegraph, telephone, and wave currents, distance was annihilated. The world was moved from its solid basis. Vast buildings were flung into the sky; the populations flocked to fill them in the dense cities; and in the exultation of the moment men looked back upon the past with a kind of pitying ridicule, and cried: "This is our earth, our world; we want no other. Humanity is our God, and the earth its throne!"

Then in the very height of all this pride, men suddenly discovered that under all this huge mechanism and masonry they had actually driven out the soul of man. The building of sky-scrapers, the slaughter of so many millions of hogs, the stretching of wiry networks over cities and states, the underground railways and sea-tunnels—all these were but a poor substitute or compensation for the ideals that were lost. Beneath all this material splendor every noble quality that distinguishes man was utterly extinguished, and one saw only the horrors of the midnight streets, the masses festering in city slums, the great gulf broadening between the rich and the poor, selfishness, greed, Mammon-worship, the extinction of the weak, the sovereignty of the strong, the cruelty, the brutality, the latent meanness of the human heart developing day by day like a monstrous disease upon the face of humanity.

Then came the mutterings of a new terror, the very offspring of the materialism that was worshiped, the spectre of socialism and anarchy, the new belief in the terrible destructiveness of a Godless science. The intellectual world drew back in horror at the sight of the child it had begotten. It began