M. Renan's 'Life of Jesus' offers me that as a most reasonable theory! Believing in a true God and a good God, being utterly incapable of believing in the lying devil it proposes to me, this pleasant theory, that, beneath the face and eyes of that true God, a poor imposture, a cheap delusion becomes, not only the holiest thing, the purest thing, the most sanctifying thing, but also the strongest thing, the most victorious thing in all the world! If ever theory so played sleight of hand with cause and effect, if it ever so mingled and mixed right and wrong, and so taught that lies and truth were about the same, we have failed to meet with it. And if ever any theory required power of gullibility like this last and newest, we have failed to hear of that.
The fact is there is no escaping the honest conclusion that, unless Jesus Christ is what He claimed to be, divine, 'God manifest in the flesh,' 'the Son of the Father,' then He was simply an impostor. (He could not have been a self-deceived fanatic.) Now any man is free to accept the last horn of this dilemma, if he chooses. It is a free country. But if he takes that, we insist that he is logically bound to call Christianity a cheat, a delusion, a snare and a curse to humanity! He shall not ask us to swallow the monstrous and immoral proposition, that this outrageous lie and imposture is the glory, the blessing and hope of humanity!
And this is what M. Ernest Renan, in most melodious sentences, proposes. This is his theory of Christianity, its origin and its success.
This is the best thing philosophic and philologic unbelief has to offer, the most rational account it has to give in the year 1864. Surely unbelief must have large faith in human nature's capacity of spiritual swallow, if men are expected to take this down, as more reasonable than what they will hear in the next pulpit!
Nay, after all, the Christian theory of Christianity is the most rational yet. It has mysteries, but it calls them mysteries, things above reason. It accepts them, and so escapes absurdity—ends with no means, effects from no causes, wonders that spring out of the ground, divine teachers produced by a 'charming' climate, and impostures that are holy truths! Above all, it escapes moral idiocy, and holds there is a line between right and wrong! On the whole, it is, as yet, the only theory which explains all the facts, the only one of which the consequences may be logically accepted, which makes Christ or His religion reasonable or possible.
M. Renan's 'beautiful' young Galilean carpenter, with such power over 'hallucinated' Magdalens, conducting grand picnics in that 'charming' climate, and making life a May day, is not the world's mighty Deliverer; and his miracle-mongering demagogue, claiming to be the Son of David in lying genealogies, and the Son of God in blasphemous audacity, is not the world's Teacher of all Truth and Righteousness. The new Jesus is a poor substitute for the Divine Man whom we adore.
We cannot, therefore, accept the new theory. It is not logically competent to the facts. Established on garbled evidence with painful struggles, it will not, when completed, fulfil the conditions. It is not reasonable. It is not moral. We have desired to present this view of it. The details of criticism we leave to others, who can easily deal with M. Renan. We have aimed to show, what any plain reader can see, the unreasonableness and immorality of this theory of Christianity's origin.
As long as we have faith in a righteous God, so long can we never believe that the best, purest, and holiest religion is born in fraud and trickery. M. Renan's theory declares the purity and the holiness of Christianity, and yet insists on the trickery and the fraud: therefore we must reject his theory.
So long as we believe that a true God is omnipotent, we cannot believe that fraud and deception are masters of the world. But M. Renan insists that Christianity has mastered the world, and yet declares it founded upon fraud and deception. We must therefore reject M. Renan.
The fine writing, the sentiment, the abundant 'sweetness' of the book cannot make beautiful this monstrous perversion of reason, this insidious attack on the very distinction between God and Satan.