plan crystallized into a gem worthy to be worn in the crown of our rejoicing: "I was but common clay till roses were planted in me." Into this sentence is compressed the profoundest philosophy of all the ages. We may use it as a

Rosetta Stone to decipher the many mysterious hieroglyphs written on the world's walls by the finger of God. I still watch with wonderment and awe the unfolding phenomena of the vegetable world. These tiny architectural artists of nature are enveloped in such unfathomable mystery. Their mantles of invisibility are never unclasped. Their deft fingers move as noiselessly as sunbeams. Their lips are as mute as the lips of the dead. Yet without confusion, without hesitancy, without mistake, they transform amorphic matter into symmetries and tints and flavors and perfumes that become to us speaking symbols of God's love. Out from the foul stagnancy of the marsh a lily lifts its pure white lips to receive the kisses of the sun. What delicacy of fragrance, grace of form, charm of color, fineness of texture, marvellous etherealization of gross substances, evidencing the well-nigh limitless uplifting power of this divinely commissioned germ-fairy that has been sent into this most unpromising part of God's kingdom! Similar miracle workings fill the earth; indeed, as the modern microscope discloses, the capacities of matter for refinement are practically infinite.

Animal germs take these same gross elements after they have been thus uplifted by the vegetable, and carry them still higher, even to the very border-land of spirits, weaving them at the last into a veil of so ethereal a texture that sometimes, in privileged moments, we catch glimpses through it, we are well-nigh persuaded, of the spirits themselves of our loved ones, for the human face at times seems not only to reflect, in its mobile features, changing colors, flitting lights and shadows, the thought-life within, but to be suffused with some strange preternatural radiance,

that suggests the outshining of the glory tints of the soul, of the halo of its very essence.

So universally prevalent throughout nature are these displays of matter's capacity for being uplifted, only those peculiarly gifted with poetic perennial freshness of thought and reverent interpretive insight are properly impressed with the deep significance of promise and of prophecy they possess for every one of us.

We are taught, not only thus by the marvellous movements of life below us, but by the whole course of life about us, forming the incidents of the world's individual and national histories, that if we come into vital union with spirits superior, live in their personal presence, thrill to their talismanic touch, bask in the sunshine of their sympathy, we shall grow into spiritual exaltations of purpose that will eventually ripen into permanent traits of character of whose possibility of development we before had never dreamed. Let the seed of Christ's divine love be planted within us, and the common clay of our natures, that would have forever remained but common clay were it not for this union, will under its magical power be uplifted and transformed into roses whose graces of form, of tint, and of perfume will win for us by-and-by glad welcome into the Paradise of God.

Thus we see that the advent of just such a personage as the Christ of the Gospels was absolutely essential to consummate the plan of organization divinely purposed from the beginning; that just such a spiritually vitalizing influence was needed to be infused into individual experiences to prevent the whole fabric so elaborately built through the long centuries from falling into wreck. This unmistakable necessity of the coming of a God-man, living such a life of loving self-sacrifice, making such a revelation of the yearning sympathy of the divine heart, coming into such vital union with waiting souls, contain in itself the sure promise of his

coming, and testifies that the historic Christ is the veritable Christ of prophecy.

The necessity which scientific inquiry has disclosed of this quickening touch to thus complete God's vast plan of world-organism, reveals to us Christ's place in nature. It was not that his sacrifice was essential to satisfy the demands of a broken law, to pay its penalty so as to render possible and safe God's forgiveness and man's reinstatement-such a thought finding no warrant, so far as I can see, either in science or sound philosophy-but to work such change in human hearts, exert over them such ennobling influences, reach out with such tender, life-giving sympathies, as to win men back to loving obedience, and thus fit them for the forgiveness God is ever anxiously waiting to bestow upon the repentant and believing.

Science in thus discovering the indispensable need of such a work witnesses to the reasonableness of the Christian faith in the divinity of his Lord.

[To be continued.]

ARTICLE VI.

RENAN'S LIFE OF CHRIST.

BY THE REV. M. N. OLIVER, TAPPAN, N. Y.

JOSEPH ERNEST RENAN is dead. While Summer was passing on her legacies to Autumn in 1892, and while Autumn was flinging a kiss to departing Summer, the gifted scholar laid aside his prolific pen, never more to be resumed by the living hand that drove it with so much vigor and elegance across the historic page. The writer of this article had hoped, while visiting Paris the past season, to see the gifted author. Unfortunately the lecture-room was closed for the summer vacation, and the learned lecturer had retired to his native Britanny for rest. It proved to be the rest of death.

He lived sufficiently long, however, to reap many of his early literary aspirations. He laid out a vast field before. him, namely, "A History of the Origins of Christianity." He outlined his contemplated work into four divisions, the first of which was to embrace the "Life of Jesus." This work was completed with a polish and an erudition that won for him the foremost rank in authorship, and the privilege to subscribe himself Membre De L'institute, the highest literary distinction that can be obtained among the French people. This volume has found multitudes of readers and admirers, both in its original language and in its different versions. Its subtlety of thought, without being abstruse; its beauty of diction, preserved even in any fair translation; its warmth of feeling, breathing forth in every line; the peculiar tendency of an age in sympathy with the rationalistic sentiment

which is everywhere apparent upon its pages,-all combine to make it the most popular of those works which purport to exhibit, in historical sketch, the Founder of the grandest and the most blessed of religions.

As already intimated, the peculiar feature of Renan's work is his placing it entirely in the plane of nature, and exclusively in the human sphere. The supernatural is entirely ignored. Said a writer, years ago, in one of the numbers of The Contemporary Review: "He has done as much perhaps as any living man to destroy men's faith in the supernatural." His history proceeds in the regular flow of everyday occurrences. In following the footsteps of his German predecessor, David Friedrich Strauss, in this peculiar aspect of the question, he regards Jesus only as a noble specimen of the purely and exclusively human; and whatever pre-eminence he possessed was simply in a higher intellectual and moral grade of humanity, and in no endowment of the divine, except what all may participate in. However improbable it may be, yet the possibility of Christ's attainments is within human reach. Jesus is only our brother, Adam's son, nothing less, nothing more, beginning and ending an earthly life. The degree of moral and religious excellency to which he attained, is what all may aspire to; and if they reach it not, it is not so much from a want of a supernatural element, as from some defect in the accident of birth, or the advantage of culture. In fact it is the pronounced intention of Renan wholly to ignore what the Christian church regards,—the supernatural in Jesus. Wherever it appears in the Gospel narrative, he explains it away. He attempts to show that the divine which the piety of the church attributes to Jesus, was not inherent, rather imposed upon him by the enthusiasm of his followers, and by the credulity of the age; its only existence was in the imagination of man, not in the person of Christ; it was a parasitic growth, which deformed with its unnatural excrescence, instead of adding to the beauty of an