Nevertheless, this work will always retain a certain interest, both for Frenchmen and for Germans. The German is often so completely fascinated by it as to lose his power of criticism, because he finds in it German thought in a novel and piquant form. Conversely the Frenchman discovers in it, behind the familiar form, which is here handled in such a masterly fashion, ideas belonging to a world which is foreign to him, ideas which he can never completely assimilate, but which yet continually attract him. In this double character of the work lies its imperishable charm.
And its weakness? That it is written by one to whom the New Testament was to the last something foreign, who had not read it from his youth up in the mother-tongue, who was not accustomed to breathe freely in its simple and pure world, but must perfume it with sentimentality in order to feel himself at home in it.
XIV. The “Liberal” Lives Of Jesus
David Friedrich Strauss. Das Leben Jesu für das deutsche Volk bearbeitet. (A Life of Jesus for the German People.) Leipzig, 1864. 631 pp.
Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte. Eine Kritik des Schleiermacher'schen Lebens Jesu. (The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History, a Criticism of Schleiermacher's Life of Jesus.) Berlin, 1865. 223 pp. Appendix, pp. 224-240.
Der Schenkel'sche Handel in Baden. (The Schenkel Affair in Baden.) A corrected reprint from No. 441 of the National-Zeitung, of the 21st September 1864.
Die Halben und die Ganzen. (The Half-way-ers and the Whole-way-ers.) 1865.
Daniel Schenkel. Das Charakterbild Jesu. (The Portrait of Jesus.) Wiesbaden, 1864 (ed. 1 and 2). 405 pp. Fourth edition, with a preface opposing Strauss's “Der alte und der neue Glaube” (The Old Faith and the New), 1873.