Social Characteristics.

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numerous fortifications in repair, and to keep watch and guard around the island by day and by night. That the islanders are too wedded to old customs, when proved to be bad, cannot be doubted; and the obstinate resistance which the Guernseymen offered to political reforms that were sorely needed, is one of the least creditable facts in their history. In both islands there is a good deal of class feeling. The old families are too apt to look down upon those who are not owners of territory, but have made money in trade and commerce, although in so doing the latter have greatly contributed to the prosperity of the whole community. In Guernsey, not long since, society was divided into two sets- the families who prided themselves on ancient descent and landed estates, and who called themselves the "Sixties," from the number of families admitted within the upper ranks at the time of building the present Assembly Rooms; and the families who had gained fortunes in business, and during the great war with France, and who were called the "Forties." In Jersey the rival factions were known respectively as the "Laurel" and the "Rose." The same degree of insularity does not prevail The increase in the number of tourists has, to a considerable degree, corrected it. This change has not been wholly advantageous. Jersey especially has suffered in manners and morals by the influx of a class of residents best described as mauvais sujets. These are chiefly Irish, Scotch, and French. Many political refugees, especially from France, have taken up their abode here, among them is M. Victor Hugo, whom the Jerseymen refused to shelter, and who thereupon betook himself to the more hospitable Guernsey. By way of acknowledgement for its hospitality, he has made the island the scene of his latest, and one of his ablest tales, Les Travailleurs de la Mer. In the Channel Islands, drunkenness is somewhat prevalent, but not so much as might be expected, when it is remembered that an additional temptation to this vice exists in the low price at which, from lightness of taxation, alcoholic drinks can be obtained. On the other hand, fortunately, there are no drink-shops in the country parishes. In three respects Guernsey is superior to Jersey; in the first island the population are longer lived than in the second, they are more religious, and they are better educated. These three advantages are probably closely connected. Good morals and religion are the result of good education, and tend to longevity. The schools being better attended, and vice being less prevalent, many diseases are avoided, and so the words of the wise man of old are verified,

that wisdom hath length of days in her right hand, and in her left hand riches and honour. The religiousness of the Guernsey men is worthy of special remark. Methodism early took root among them, and at the present time has a strong hold of the population. In the town there are to be found the usual variety of religious communities; but in the country parishes the inhabitants-whoalmost universally attend Divine worship-are with few exceptions either Churchmen or Wesleyans. In the town churches it is customary to hold the services in two languages, generally in French in the morning, and in English in the evening. In the country churches French is for the most part exclusively used. The Wesleyans have two distinct organizations. They have chapels and circuits in which English alone is used, and others in which French is exclusively resorted to. The latter are more numerous, and in all but about two country parishes in each of the principal islands, the French chapels stand alone. Crimes of violence are exceedingly rare in all the islands, although unhappily two closely consecutive murders have just been perpetrated in Jersey. Property is respected in a community where beggars are unknown, and every one possesses something that he can call his own. Altogether the English tourist, and indeed the Englishman in search of a comfortable home, may go farther and fare worse, than he will fare in the Anglo-Norman Archipelago.

Rénan's Les Apôtres.

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ART. VIII.-Les Apôtres. Par M. ERNEST RENAN. Paris: M. Lévy. 1866.

M. RENAN has made haste to issue a second instalment of his learned and brilliant, but shallow and sceptical, version of the origin of Christianity. Having in his first volume conducted the beautiful Enthusiast who founded it to the Cross, where He expiated, not the sins of mankind, but His own revolutionary fanaticism, he here proceeds to show how, in the hands of His disciples, the work of Jesus, which seemed to have collapsed through His defeat, rose again, and became a living force in the history of the world. His subject is now "The Apostles ;" and the fragment before us reaches to the first Apostolic Mission, when the servants of Jesus, more sanguine and more bold than their Master, conceived the sublime idea of traversing the world with their new doctrine. It embraces, therefore, that portion of his work which taxes most severely both his philosophy and his criticism; and it is evident that he has felt the necessity of putting forth all his strength, both as a critic of the original text and as a philosophical interpreter of its meaning.

As it regards the sacred documents of our religion, M. Rénan is, or seems to be, more conservative than many of his fellow-labourers in the cause of infidelity: at least, his views of their genuineness are much more in accordance with the sound conclusions of orthodox criticism. His theory knows nothing of forgery in a later age; and generally his treatment of the writers is always very respectful to their character as men of honesty and goodness. But, after all, this tribute, however satisfactory as coming from such a quarter, is not of much weight; for it is more than neutralised by an arbitrary theory of interpretations which involve a loose estimate of their historical value. For instance, after elaborately arguing for the sole authorship and unity of the Acts, as written by the third evangelist, he awakens our suspicion and destroys our confidence by the following most baseless observations on St. Luke:

"We see that a man who on system placed himself in such a disposition of mind is least of all capable of representing things as they actually passed. Historical fidelity is matter of indifference; edification is all that concerns him. Luke hardly disguises: he writes that

Theophilus may know the truth of what his catechists taught him. There was then already a conventional system of ecclesiastical history, which was officially taught, and the frame of which, as well as that of the evangelical history itself, was probably already fixed. The predominant character of the Acts, like that of the third gospel, is a tender piety; a lively sympathy with the Gentiles; a conciliatory spirit; an extreme prejudice in favour of the supernatural; love for the low and the humble; a strong democratic sentiment, or rather a persuasion that the people were naturally Christians, that the great ones only hindered them from following their good instincts; an exalted idea of the power of the church and its heads; a distinctive taste for life in community. The process of composition is the same in the two works, so that we are in respect to the history of the apostles just what we should be in respect to the evangelical history if, in sketching this latter, we had only one text, the gospel of Luke. We feel the disadvantages of such a situation. The life of Jesus presented according to the third gospel would be extremely defective and incomplete. A fundamental distinction, however, must here be made. In point of historical value, the book of Acts is divided into two parts: one, containing the first twelve chapters and narrating the principal facts in the history of the primitive church; the other, containing the sixteen remaining chapters, dedicated to the missions of St. Paul. This second part itself contains two kinds of narration: that in which the narrator is an eyewitness, and that in which he reports what he had heard. It is clear that, even in the latter case, his authority is great. Often the conversation of Paul gave him his information. Towards the end especially his record has a surprising air of precision. The last pages of the Acts are the only thoroughly historical pages which we have on the origin of Christianity. The first, on the contrary, are the most assailable in the entire New Testament. It is in relation to these first years especially that the author is subject to that view which governed him in the composition of his gospel; and now in a still more deceptive form. His system of the forty days, his account of the ascension, closing by a kind of final rapture of theatrical solemnity the fantastic life of Jesus, his manner of describing the descent of the Holy Ghost and the miraculous preaching, his mode of understanding the gift of tongues, is different from that of St. Paul, betray the prepossessions of an apostle relatively low, when the legend is very dry and rounded as it were in all its parts. All passes before him with a strange mise en scène, and a great display of the marvellous. We must remember that the author writes half a century after the events, far from the land in which they took place, on facts which he did not see, which his master had not seen any more than himself, according to traditions partly fabulous or transfigured. Not only is Luke of a different generation from the first founders of Christianity; he is of another world; he is a Hellenist, with very little of the Jew, almost a stranger to Jerusalem and the secrets of the Jewish life; he was never in contact with the primitive Christian society; he was scarcely acquainted with

Principles of Criticism.

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its first representatives. The Acts, in a word, are a dogmatic history, arranged as a basis for the orthodox doctrines of the time, or to inculcate ideas which more pleased the piety of the author. We may add that it could not have been otherwise. We know the origin of every religion only by the narratives of its believers. It is only the sceptic who writes history ad narrandum.”—P. xxvii.

We have translated this extract for its value as foreshadowing the spirit and style of the book; and as exhibiting most clearly the arbitrary style of criticism on which it is based. The author betrays the weakness of his cause in the elaborate endeavours he makes to show that when we can collate the Acts with the Epistles of St. Paul, St. Luke is often in error. Much stress is laid, for instance, on the difference between St. Luke's account of the events in the Apostle's life that followed his conversion, and the Apostle's own account in the Epistle to the Galatians, an epistle which M. Rénan holds to be "absolutely authentic, older than the Acts, perfectly sincere, and without any legends." But, apart from the easy reconciliation with which every devout reader of the New Testament is familiar, is it at all conceivable that these two writers could have written, one of them legend and the other history, on a point which must have constantly been the subject of conversation; that St. Luke could have deliberately falsified a narrative that lay before him in his master's own handwriting, and in a point that had no essential bearing upon any Christian doctrine? The last clause of our quotation points epigrammatically its own condemnation. If any document extant in literature is history written ad narrandum, it is the Acts of the Apostles. But we must not pause longer on this subject. M. Rénan forces once more on our attention, and in the most cold and ruthless manner, that positivist philosophy which underlies his critical scepticism; and we cannot do the cause of truth better service, or more effectually expose the vanity of modern unbelief, than by letting him speak the secrets of the prison-house in which his better nature lies bound:

"How, moreover, can we pretend to follow literally documents in which impossibilities are found? The first twelve chapters of the Acts are a tissue of miracles. Now it is an absolute canon of criticism to allow no place in historical narration for miraculous circumstances. And this is not the consequence of a metaphysical system. It is simply a fact of observation. Facts of this kind have never been established. All pretended miracles when studied near resolve themselves into illusion or imposture. If one single miracle were proved, we could not reject in mass all those of the ancient histories; for, after all, while admitting that a great number of these might be false,