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saved Turner from? What is the difference to rising artists between a state of things where systematic study is enforced under the eyes of the great painters of the day, and a state of things where it is almost impossible? In Paris you first catch your young painter; you make him understand that his game is man, and that he is to be a student, and not painter, until he can draw man thoroughly. He has to work five hours a day at his master's atelier, from the cast or the life, having the great man's personal instruction three times a week: he also goes to the Académie for two hours in the evening; he works thus in chalk and charcoal for one, two, three, or more years, from the cast and from the life; the skeleton and the casts being always ready in the life school. And till he is fit for it, he is not allowed to use brush or oil-colours in the atelier. If he has any real power he will be able to obtain an art-scholarship, which will secure him from the necessity of painting little pictures for life. Consequently, when he has your leave to paint, he is a master of the technical part of his craft; and also he is inclined to attempt historical subject properly so called, and to paint something in the history of the ways of man; finally, whatever he draws will be in drawing. The English student of promise may at best take to exact Pre-Raphaelism, keeping carefully to domestic, or sensational, or sham religious subject; or, if he be one in a thousand, he may paint landscape as good as Brett's, and have his pictures rejected by your Royal Academy; or he may go to watercolour, and multiply Swiss views and Scotch views; or he may share the fate of Haydon. The public is the general patron, and commands art; and the public likes little studies of little girls, and ferns, and praying Puritans, and expiring prostitutes. Landscape art is made the refuge of bad draughtsmen, and because men cannot or will not wait to go through their necessary training in form, they sink the poet's ambition, which ought to nerve them to high attempt at least, in affected humility and priggish scorn of honourable quest. Because men talked and painted nonsense about the grand style in the last century, it is held that an educated man does rightly in ignoring the difference between great things and small.

We were bidden consider the ravens and the lilies, for lessons necessary to man: we were never told to stop there, or pass life in considering them. If art is a thing to give a man's life to, it must be a thing to which to give the best powers of his life, and they will not be developed by mere landscape or mere colour, though it be of natural glory brighter than Solomon's. Our painters must dwell on the whole of the text, until they know that men are much better than lilies or than ravens, and that Art is mainly and really concerned with man. R. ST. JOHN TYRWHITT.

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Jesus Christ: His Times, Life, and Work. By E. DE PRESSENSE. London:
Jackson, Walford, and Hodder. 1866.

The Life of Our Lord upon the

and Geographical Relations.
London: Alexander Strahan.

Earth, in its Historical, Chronological,
By the Rev. SAMUEL J. ANDREWS

Synopsis Evangelica. Denuo Recensuit CONSTANTINUS TISCHENDORF

Editio Secunda. Lipsia: Mendelssohn.

WE have been little used to look to France for contributions to the

theological treasure of the Church. The great Gallican divines of the seventeenth century had few successors in the early, and none in the latter part of the eighteenth; and even the first half of the nineteenth century was almost over before any work appeared in the French language which could take rank with the great masterpieces of former days. The great thinkers and writers of the France which made the Revolution were not Christians; and if the intelligence and creative genius of the France which the Revolution has made have laid aside the bitter hatred of Christianity which disgraced a former generation, they have sometimes exchanged the old hatred for a condescending patronage of Christianity almost more offensive than open enmity. At any rate they have poured their wealth into other channels than those of theological learning. Roman Catholic France has been literary, political, controversial, devotional. It has had little inclination to expend the strength wanted for more tangible objects upon patient investigation in a field where the reward of independent inquiry would be suspicion at least, if not condemnation. The Protestant Church in France has been still fighting almost for existence, or striving to make good the claim of Christianity to be the light and life of the world. Sometimes, too, its ablest men have had too little

sympathy with the Church of the Middle Ages, or of the fourth century, to care to study Christian antiquity profoundly. The great work of the Abbé Migne has been invaluable as furnishing implements for their task to the theological students of all Europe; but we could imagine that it has been more valued in other countries than in his own. And it is, in fact, little more than a republication of the results of the labours of the great scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is almost ludicrously behind the age in its few attempts to put the biblical learning of other churches within the reach of Roman Catholic students.

We welcome, therefore, with great pleasure any book which shows that the vigorous thinkers and writers of Christian France are entering into the field of theological learning and inquiry, and are finding readers who can value the result of their labours there. The last few years have seen many proofs that in France, as elsewhere, there is a growing wish for full and searching inquiry into all matters connected with the origin and history of the Church, and that those who cannot or will not follow up the inquiry for themselves are still capable of watching its course and appreciating its results. It is remarkable, but scarcely surprising, that the last great impulse has been given to the spirit of free yet believing inquiry by the very book of which the appearance was hailed by unbelievers as a triumph, and regarded by too many Christians with serious alarm.

Renan's "Vie de Jésus" was exactly the book, we may well believe, to dazzle superficial readers on the Continent. The fascinating style, the vivid picturesqueness of delineation, the profound Oriental learning, wielded with the poet's grace and the orator's practised skill, concealed for a little while from the view of many the revolting absurdity as well as irreverence of the theory which the book was written to maintain. The impression made for a season was great, but it can scarcely be lasting. Meantime it has drawn attention to the subject of our Lord's earthly life. It has disposed the literary public of France to receive, with an interest which could not have been excited a few years since, any really candid and intelligent discussion of the great questions on which the controversy of our day between faith and unbelief must turn.

It has shown, too, that there are certain points in the controversy which are no longer fairly open to debate-matters which may henceforth be assumed by Christian investigators, because they are conceded as indisputable by an acute and subtle adversary, who would gladly dispute them if he could, but who has too much of the true historic instinct not to feel the force of overwhelming evidence. M. Renan's admissions, for instance, on the subject of the early date and authorship of our Gospels are most important. They are remark

able proofs either of his ingenuousness or of his perfect confidence in the solvent power of his own theories as applied to any set of facts.

The work, of which the title is placed first at the head of this article, appears to have been produced in part by the excitement which the "Vie de Jésus" created on its first appearance. It is from the pen of a writer already very favourably known, at home and abroad, by his history of the First Three Centuries of the Christian Church. He is, we believe, the son of a father whose name was for years connected with the work of the British and Foreign Bible Society in France. The present work is published simultaneously in Paris and in London, translated from the proof-sheets of the French original, with the author's sanction.

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We have not yet met with it in French, and cannot, therefore, speak with confidence of the way in which the translation is executed, though we have noticed a few instances in which we can scarcely think that the author meant to say what the translator gives us as his meaning; and we could wish that a more careful or more learned correction of the press had saved the book from being disfigured by such mistakes as "Plutarch, Serum. vind." (p. 517), for "De serâ numinum vindictâ;" "Tertullian, the translator of Irenæus and Cyprian, always quotes" (p. 136), for "Tertullian, the translator of Irenæus, and Cyprian, always quote;" "Denys of Alexandria" (p. 180, note), for “Dionysius;" the "Tubingue school" (Preface, p. x), for "Tübingen school;" and "All work was forbidden. except the preparation of the elements," which, from the reference to Exod. xii. 16, must apparently be an erratum for aliment, i. e., in the simpler phrase of the Authorized Version, "that which every man must eat." Of less consequence are inaccuracies like "Gfrærer (p. 99, n. and passim), for “Gfrörer;" "Lyde" (p. 147, n.), for " Leiden," or "Leyden" (?). A large number of errata too, especially in references, are uncorrected in the short list given. There is a strange mistake apparently, in p. 255, as to the meaning of the French word "courtisan." But the English version reads very pleasantly, is unaffected, unconstrained, generally perspicuous in style, often really eloquent, and does not often seem to fail, except where it would have been very difficult to succeed, namely, in giving the exact force of passages dealing with metaphysical speculation. Such passages abound in the early chapters of the book, and all who care to understand them must, we think, have recourse to the original. The translator has, in fact, been compelled (as the translation was intended to appear simultaneously with the original) to do the more difficult part of her task without having the advantage of preparing for it by previously accomplishing the easier. It is evident that her mastery of both languages has advanced with her progress in the book. To

most readers the translation will answer every purpose equally with the original.

The deeply interesting, but rather unwieldy volume before us is made up of two unequal portions, adapted it might seem, if not almost intended, for different sets of readers. The first two hundred pages contain a mass of learned and able disquisition upon various philosophical, critical, and historical subjects, preliminary to the story of our Lord's life. The last three hundred contain a masterly survey, taken in a thoroughly believing and therefore fearless spirit, of the gospel history. Multitudes of those who could understand and value the latter part of the book, are happily quite unconscious of the difficulties which its former part is intended to solve. They have not felt them for themselves; they are not likely to encounter them in others. Such readers may naturally enough be repelled by the quantity of polemical matter across which they have to pass to the true subject of the book. Even those who can understand and profit by the critical and philosophical inquiries of which the results are given in the first part, might be glad to have them kept separate from the exposition of the sacred theme itself of our Saviour's life and ministry. It is the hard lot of many men in our day that they must rise through a lower region, agitated by contending storms, into the serener atmosphere in which spiritual things are spiritually contemplated. But the labour and conflict of the ascent are not in themselves the best preparation for the work which must begin when the summit is reached. Few men can gaze steadily upon the great realities of the unseen world while they are employed in analysing their own conceptions of them, or in vindicating them against those who deny the importance, nay, even the existence, of the objective counterpart of the conceptions.

We could have wished, then, that M. de Pressensé had kept separate the controversial and the narrative or expository portion of the valuable volume before us. The former part is meant for the few, who must or ought to know the reason of their faith; the latter may be read with great advantage by every Christian. No writer who is generally known in England seems to us to have conceived the subject so worthily, or to have approached it with the same spirit, at once of religious reverence and of fearless inquiry. Of older books in our own language we scarcely need speak. Some of them -far at the head of all, of course, Jeremy Taylor's exquisitely beautiful "Life of Christ "-must always remain a part of our classical literature, and will, for many minds, have their devotional and practical use. But they do not attempt to conceive the subject as it must be conceived by those who wish really to study it in our own day. They lack much which we want, and are full of matter which we do not want, and which we feel to lead us away from the true

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