SECTION V

the ideality of the gospel history

Christianity is in perfect harmony with the conviction that God is the perfect, the all-comprehending, the all-pervading spirit, that He is the power ruling over all life, and that He shows Himself to be this power. God is light, and not darkness, not dull matter, not a being of an unspiritual and impenetrably obscure nature; neither is there in Him a shadow of uncertainty. This conviction is a fundamental one in the conception of spirit; and by it, pure Monotheism is superior to Heathenism, Moses to Plato, Genesis to all the sacred books of Paganism. It is in the life of Christ that its verification is celebrated; for this life is the manifestation of the identity of all reality and all ideality, the marriage festival of their union. It is the manifestation of God in the flesh.

Those great contrasts in human life, spirit, and appearance, the ideal and the actual, were originally one. Hence the life of the first man rightly appears in the light of its ideality. Man, at his first appearance, was good, the pure product of God’s creative energy. He lived in the visible glory of the divine goodness which surrounded him, that is, in Paradise. In this point of view, he was not yet subject to temporality, he was not as yet of a perishable nature. He felt within himself that formative process which originated the world, and divined his antecedents with childlike intuitiveness. He felt the presence of God in the gentle whispers of the airs of Paradise, the decisions of God in the impressions made upon himself by the creatures. It was thus that he received a primitive revelation from the co-operation of the objects of surrounding nature with his own sensuous and spiritual powers of anticipation, in the all-enlightening element of the omnipresent divine Spirit. This primitive revelation was, therefore, essentially identical with his primitive condition. If it be represented as special, extraordinary, and supernatural, there is an unconscious assumption of the schism which did not as yet exist.¹ This is also the case when primitive man, in the bright dawn of his birth, comprising the beauty of the whole race, surrounded by creation celebrating his advent with joyful animation, when this man is exchanged for the savage in whom the universal curse appears in its full development, and who represents only a stunted branch of humanity.² This blessed condition, however, of primitive man was in its very nature only for a happy and pretemporal (vorzeitlicher) season.

Both moral and religious consciousness testify that the fall must have taken place. Man finds in his life a contradiction between his ideal duty and will, and between his sensuous, or rather his carnal, will and deed; a contradiction between his destiny and reality. Whence did this contradiction arise? By his deeming the restraint under which he was placed an evil, and fancying that he could remedy it.³ For it was by this very means that, when once the contradiction existed, he fell ever farther and farther into the depths of opposition. The nature of the first sin may thus be inferred by the nature of the sin and sinfulness ever before our eyes. By this schism, man’s stand-point with respect to the enlightenment of the Eternal Spirit has been entirely displaced. In his error, he first looks upon his sin as only a natural evil; and, erring still further, he sees wrong even in natural evil. Nature now seems to him a defection from the ideal, an obscurity in God. Reality appears to him as a curse, as a judgment of God, ever plunging him into still lower depths. Thus he charges the contradiction between life and the ideal upon nature,—partly with justice, because even in nature his disturbing influence is apparent; partly with injustice, because God rules in nature, and opposes his sin in all reality. This rupture between ideality and reality, which pervades his whole soul, threatens to become an ever-increasing abyss.

But the atonement to come, had its foundation in the original relation existing between divinity and humanity, as described above. In the work of atonement is manifested the reciprocal effect of the compassion of God and the yearning of man. Hence the course of divine pity must ever be in harmony with human desire, and thus also in harmony with divine justice. It was under this condition that the great preparation for the atonement arose.

It was necessary that the atonement should take place in and through humanity, for in and through it was the union between the ideal and the actual to reappear. But it was equally necessary that it should take place in separation from and above humanity, for it could only be effected as an act of God. All ideality is on His side, and has power over all reality; but reality which appears in opposition to ideality is impotent, and without resource.

Hence the atoner, the reconciler, is on one hand the Son of man, the expression of the deepest and truest life of the human race. He belongs to it. On the other hand, He is the second man, given by God, filled with God. Hence He stands in separation from the first man, and, with him, from the whole race, as the Merciful One, the Redeemer.

This contrast appears in process of formation even in the preparation for the atonement. On one side is seen the religious man in his passivity; in his development religion appears as the religion of nature, and under its prevalence human ruin comes to maturity, to that universal despair in which the need of redemption attains its full growth. On the other side, the religious man appears in his activity; spiritual religion is the path taken by his activity, and its climax and fruit is the God-man, the actual and true atonement.

This is the contrast between Judaism and Heathenism. God suffered the heathen to walk in their own ways, the ways of vanity, in opposition to the eternal ways of the Spirit. He withdrew from them, as they withdrew from Him. But He called Abraham and his descendants; and His call met their faith and prayer. They who misconceive this contrast, or find it inconsistent with the justice of God, who require an abstract equality in God’s dealings with all nations, might as well take offence at the fact that God did not give the Iliad to the Hottentots, nor the fair hair of the ancient Germans and the Niebelungenlied to the Esquimaux.⁴

This contrast, however, is only a contrast, and not a contradiction; that is to say, that the salvation which came through the Jews had an inward and hidden reference to the craving for salvation which was ripening among the heathen. It was, moreover, only a limited contrast: notwithstanding the general tendencies of the heathen nations, the need of salvation was urgently felt by the majority,⁵ and this feeling was itself a near approximation to salvation; while in the majority of the Jews, in spite of the fact that salvation had ripened in their midst, an immense estrangement from salvation had been developed, just because they wanted to convert the contrast into a contradiction—their nation absolutely saved, other nations absolutely lost.⁶ Consequently, if national developments in general are taken into account, the contrast is entirely a relative one. There is a reflection of spiritual religion in the development of natural religion, as well as a reflection of natural in spiritual religion.

Heathenism, absolutely considered, is the contrast between the ideal and the actual. But heathenism, elevated by the feature of aspiration, and of the divine Spirit, displays a mutual interweaving of the ideal into life and of life into the ideal. An element of aspiration existed, which invested the non-historical ideal with an historical body, and the mere dull fact with an ideal splendour and a divine significance. It was thus that mythology, viewed on its bright side, was developed. For it has its dark side also, and lies under the influence of general heathen corruption. We are now, however, considering it only in its more exalted aspect. The myth-forming element, then, is in general identical with the element of aspiration after the reconciliation of the ideal and the actual, after the God-man. It is the play, the anticipation, the poetry, the dream of the christological propensity in its passivity. When, then, this aspiring poetical spirit seizes on the ideal, or the theorem to which in heathenism the power of reality is wanting, it bestows upon them, by a gradual process of contemplation and illustration, more and more of an historic body, and forms them into facts. And thus philosophic myths arise from the element of unconscious longings for the incarnation of God, for heavenly reality. But the same spirit applies itself still more readily to such actual facts or natural phenomena as have a higher significance, explaining them according to its presentiment that all reality must be penetrated by spiritual light. Thus arise historical myths, completed by physical ones, and proceeding from a desire for the glorification of the flesh.⁷ And finally, when suffering man seeks repose from his weary lot in the charms of poetry, and indulges in anticipations of a brighter and better future, he unites historical and philosophical myths into new forms, in which the whole actual world shines with divine splendour, and heaven is communicated to earth in a circle of facts. Thus do poetic myths arise.

The myth-forming era of a nation terminates as well as its infancy. But when does this take place? It may be answered, When its infancy ceases, when it begins to write, or something similar. But such answers are unsatisfactory.

When the mind of a nation begins to reflect, and to perceive the fearful depth of the abyss existing between the ideal and life, its myth-forming activity must needs be extinguished. But together with this perception, and in the same proportion, will that hitherto hidden ideal, the government of God, dawn upon it in its strict historical reality. And thus also will it learn to appreciate the spiritual actuality present in the ideals and axioms of the theory of life. Its poetry now becomes the poetry of reality, contemplating and illustrating the actual by the light of philosophical attainments, in its relation to the eternal. The transition, however, from the mythic to the historic stage is by no means a sudden one. It is but gradually that the national mind begins to find even in human caprice, in the accidental, in the bright and the dark sides of life and of nature, and especially in the demoniacal, a more general significance, viz., its relation to the eternal; and thus legends arise. In tradition, the ideal of general reality begins to disclose itself to man. Legends must therefore be of three kinds. Historical legends may perhaps convert the first natural philosophers into powerful magicians; philosophic legends may transform the sportive and evanescent beauties of nature into charming elves, and represent the temptations and deliverances of man as the victories of his guardian spirit over the evil spirits; while poetic legends will blend together reminiscences, for instance, of some demoniacally powerful Dr Faust, with legends of the demoniacal and Faustlike spirit in the breast of man, into a most powerful and effective poem. It is by means of the legend that man is led from that state of childhood and childlike presentiment, whose propensity it is to form myths from the historic germ of the ideal, and from the ideal germ of significant facts, to conscious life, which clearly perceives and carries out the difference between the ideal and life, between poetry and reality, and begins to seek for the divine in things as they are.

The philosophic myth now becomes philosophy. The heathen national mind, having come to maturity, now seeks the divine in philosophy as the theory of life, and in order to find it in this abstraction, distinguishes between the school and the life, speculative spirits and ordinary individuals, and proceeds from system to system. The result is despair, for the ideal is never fully realized in life. The elect of speculative blessedness abandon the uninitiated to gloomy ignorance; one system supersedes another, and scepticism threatens to swallow up all. But despair itself brings forth the seed of the felt necessity of salvation. The logos of Plato might animate, civilize, and embellish the world, but could neither make, save, nor sanctify it. The stoicism of Zeno could sacrifice everything, but only in proud self-will, not in the love of God. The recognition of nature’s subjection to law could point Epicurus to a peace to be attained by a conduct in entire conformity with the state of life, but could not lead to rest and delight in God. These ideals formed no unity: they had no power over the life, they were not themselves manifested in the flesh; but they prepared the best of the heathen, by the deep despondency they evoked, the anticipations they inspired, and the prefigurements they taught, for the recognition of the manifestation in the flesh. Parallel also with philosophy appeared the cultivation of actual history, removing with ever-increasing strictness the embellishments of fiction, and seeking the ideal, the overruling providence of God, in historic reality; in the curse of civil war, as well as in the triumph of courageous patriotism; in the pestilence which raged among the people, as well as in the songs of victory which gladdened their festivals; in the silent intelligent connection and concatenation of events, as well as in the terrible judgments in which retribution is seen to march with avenging steps. But here also the result was despair,—a despair, however, which, with unconscious hope, tremblingly discerned the sublime proceedings of the Judge, and produced the fruit of a submission which cast itself upon that Judge’s mercy.

The poetic myth now appeared in its metamorphosed and matured form, as classic poetry and formative art. In plastic art, the beautiful forms of gods in human shape are the most significant productions, the faint images of an incarnation of God. The Greek possessed images of special aspects or incidents of the incarnation, but not of the mere incarnation. For the image of Zeus differed from the image of Apollo, and this again from the image of Minerva, and so forth. There is no more a unity of forms in art, than there is a unity of ideals in philosophy. Nothing but a monstrous prejudice could elevate these abstractions or fragmentary ruins of the ideal, of the God-man, exhibited by the pale, cold marble images, which could but point to the divine humanity, above the more hidden, but more spiritual, the glowing, living, and real process of formation of the God-man, of Immanuel, in the prophetic life of Israel.⁸ It is in heathen poetry, however, that we find the greatest abundance of christological aspirations. In epic poetry, gods, heroes, and men are mingled in the greatest variety. This is the heathen counterpart of the monotheistic ladder reaching to heaven, upon which the angels of God ascend and descend. In lyric poetry are found strains in sympathy with that repose of the human heart in the ideal which became real, permanent, and true in Christ. But it is dramatic poetry which is most significant. It exhibits subjective human personality and action in their struggle with, and opposition to, the power of the reality which God directs and permits. In the comic drama appears that meaner kind of folly which history cannot depict; it is forthwith exposed to ridicule by the power of reality, and the mirth of comedy denotes the constant sinking of the bubbles and froth of vanity in the general stream of rational and moral life. In tragic poetry we witness crime obtaining historical importance by its dark power, and continuing to entail results, until, either as the guilt of the individual, or as the hereditary guilt of the family involved in its curse, it brings about the catastrophe which requires a sacrifice, and which, viewed as a judgment of Supreme Justice, breathes of atonement. It is in Greek tragedy, then, that we meet with the deepest christological notions ever attained by the heathen world. An Iphigenia ‘who must die that an Helen may be recovered;’ an Antigone who sacrifices her happiness and life to redeem her brother’s soul;-what significant references are these to the great centre, the real, the universal, the sufficient atonement! There is a hundred times more unconscious feeling for the truth of the Christian doctrine of the atonement, both in pure ancient tragedy, and in the nobler products of modern tragedy, than in many hypocritical rationalistic moral sermons, based as they are upon a conceited and narrow-minded dislike to the doctrine that Christ atoned on the cross for the sins of Adam’s race. But tragedy being, as classic poetry, distinct from actual life, could at best but mature the aspiration after the true atonement and the sense of its need, and increase the susceptibility for its reception.

The national development of the fall of man among the heathen nations, stood from the first in contrast with the national development of salvation among the Jews. Salvation in its formative process exhibits from the beginning an actual realization of the divine ideal of humanity, or, in other words, the idealization of humanity in its inmost actual tendencies. In discussing the call of Abraham, it is a wholly false and no longer tenable alternative, so to view the matter as to consider it a question between the actings of his own mind alone, or the supernatural acts of God alone. That harmonious contrast which exhibits the human in the divine, and the divine in the human, is more in keeping here. The either and or which would for ever separate divinity and humanity, are quite out of date in this case. Divine as well as human is the solution throughout. It would betray a great want of appreciation of the divine-human life to be still disputing concerning Christian faith, whether it were the work of God or of man. Even in the very first germination of the christological life in the patriarchs, this ardent and inward interaction takes place. Because God seeks man, man seeks God, and vice versa. God calling man, and man calling on God, meet and lay hold upon each other. The God who calls, enters unto covenant with the man who calls upon Him. By this covenant with Jehovah, with the ever-personal God of ever-personal beings, the life of the patriarchs begins to shine with the glory of the ideal. The dawn of the manifestation of God in the flesh appears. The religion of Israel, as the religion of the patriarchs, or of the promise, is the counterpart of the heathen mythology. The promise is divine ideality realized, or in process of realization, in its interaction with the active aspirations of men freely yielding themselves to God. If historic myths are here sought, the seekers are corrected by the appearance of Abraham, who, in strict historical reality, is declared to be, in spite of all deficiencies, through faith, the father of the faithful. Are philosophic myths inquired after?-the inquiry is met by the history of Jacob, appearing as Israel, and showing how the Ideal becomes Life: he so wrestled with the angel of the Theophany, during the darkness of the night, that he was lamed by the shock, and went halting in the daylight. Finally, are poetic myths sought?-these, as well as the two former kinds, are superseded and forbidden by more real relations; in the blessing of Jacob, e.g., appears a poem prophetically disclosing the very spirit and significance of his sons, and the theocratic future of his descendants.

The counterpart of heathen legends is seen among the people of Israel in the rich significance acquired by everything emerging from this people, or even coming in contact with them. The Dead Sea, Saul among the prophets, the Edomite, and Philistine, all become symbolical when viewed in the light of the Israelitish mind.

But here also the masculine pre-Christian consciousness is characterized by its discrimination of the various references between the real and the ideal. Heathen philosophy finds its counterpart in the law of the Hebrews. If the ideal is mere theory in the former, it becomes statute and practice in the latter. If it forms an esoteric school in the former, it forms an exoteric national society in the latter. If in the former it wanders from system to system, it exhibits itself in the latter in the firmest historical consistency. From the fact, indeed, that the ideal becomes law for a whole nation, with all its rough, weak, and wild members, it seems to lose in logical pliability and pure spirituality. But the law in Israel, which was binding upon all spirits, was completed by the typical worship, which stirred, awakened, instructed, and liberated those that were receptive. All the types of this worship were, to the receptive, symbols of the eternal thoughts of God, and awoke within them ever increasing anticipations, as well as isolated perceptions and glimpses, of the nature of the atonement.

With the actual history, too, of the heathen nations, and its exhibition of tragic objective reality, is contrasted the sacred history of Israel, with its reference of all the events and leadings experienced by the people of God to His direct appointment. The history of Israel is illumined by the glory of the ideal. The stars are in alliance with the host of the Lord. The phenomena of natural life are seen in co-operation and harmony with the antecedents and circumstances of the kingdom of God. All the great incidents even of profane history are, by their reference to the higher life in Israel, placed in relationship with the supreme and universal aim and purpose, with the manifestation of God, with the atonement. From this explanation of the ways of Israel arises that rich historical typicism, by which God’s dealings with Israel—e.g., their passage through the Red Sea, and their wanderings in the wilderness—typify the lot of His true people.

Finally, the noblest manifestation of spiritual life among the heathen, viz., art and poetry, finds its counterpart in Hebrew prophecy. In the former, the poet is an idealistic prophet; in the latter, the prophet is a realistic poet. In the one, we have a passive homage done to that holy thing which was in process of formation; in the other, the active formation of the object of sacred homage. In the inspired frames and utterances of the prophets are represented the incidents of the maturing and approaching incarnation of the Son of God. Poetry itself is filled with the power of reality, and reality is laid hold of, corrected, cheered, and penetrated by this consecrating spirit. This struggle of humanity with divinity, and of divinity with humanity, which, with its overflowing joys and abundant sorrows, forms the distinctive characteristic of Israelitish life, terminates at last in their perfect union in the God-Man.⁹ The holy Virgin, the highly favoured instrument of mature, perfect, human aspiration, conceives the God-man, the incarnation of complete salvation, and now reality becomes ideality, and ideality reality,—the true union of divinity and humanity appears.

But till this consummation, the eternal light, during the process of its breaking forth from behind the dark background of the natural national life of Israel, was surrounded by coloured rims, representing in mythological reflections the myths of the heathen world. The patriarchs had their imperfections, the law its transitory forms, the history of Israel its strange admixtures, the prophets their troubled frames of mind, and the opposition of false prophets. Hence a mythological excrescence forms as it were the setting to the development of pure theocracy in Israel, but is always separate and distinct, as a mere accompaniment, from the brightness of this development. At length, with the consummation of the ideal reality, a positive heathen product of this mythological matter is formed in Israel. Abstract myths of the New Testament era are represented by the deeds of hardened and antichristian Judaism; philosophical myths, by the Talmud; historical myths, by the homeless journeying of the wandering Jew through the world; poetic myths, by the lamentations of Israel over the mere shadow of Zion’s glory, when its reality was ever more and more giving light to the world. Before endeavouring to form an estimate of the genuine ideal history of the incarnation of God in Christ in its full significance, we will try to depict the relation of the more prominent features of the world’s history in the ages subsequent to the Christian era, during which the effects of Christ’s life were developed, to the mythology of ancient times.

In the Christian world, history was essentially modified. It was now subjected to the ever-increasing preponderance of the ideal over the actual. The divine life now flowed, like a silent but mighty stream, through the world of men. The most wonderful, the most exalted ideals became realities; e.g., the emancipation of slaves, the moral and intellectual equality of woman with man, the recognition of the brotherhood of nations, and their incipient alliance. But the history of the world in Christian times did not become immediately an entirely ideal history. The power of old corruptions, though it had received its death-blow, continued to manifest a fearful activity; and this still active corruption appeared in its universal prevalence even within the circle of the Church, so soon as the Church ventured to receive into its bosom, by wholesale baptisms, nations which had yet to be educated into Christian nations. But the spirit of Christianity, assured beforehand of victory, nay, animated by present victory, as the spirit of Christ, was ever contending with these masses of rude and corrupt reality. It is from these fundamental relations of the Eternal Spirit to reality, that isolated analogies have arisen between Christian history and the Jewish and heathen histories, with reference to the mythological notion.

The life of the Church of Christ is in its essence divine and human, glorious, spiritually active, in other words, at once both real and ideal. Such a life flows with ever increasing power through the hidden depths of Church history; and in these depths the Christian spirit and Christian reality, as well as Christian poetry, or the celebration of life’s ideal, are one. In its development, however, the life of Christ in the Church is a life in process of formation, and more or less resembles the Israelitish life. The characteristic of this formative process was seen in the fact, that Christian truths, like laws, tended to life, but had not yet become free and developed life; that Christian persons, ways, and facts, though everywhere illumined by the heavenly glory of the ideal, were frequently plunged again into darkness; that Christian worship was still in strong contrast with work, Sundays with working days, poetry with actual life. This circle of formative Christian life, however, was itself surrounded by an extensive circle of heathen life, which the nations had in large proportions transplanted into the Christian Church. In this dark surrounding, even the light of Christianity was of necessity variously refracted, and the deepest dyes and loudest tones of the ancient mythology in consequence reappeared. The time of Christ and of His apostles may be compared with the time of the patriarchs. Our remarks will eventually treat of this period, but are at present more immediately concerned with periods of greater historical breadth, more comprehensible, and gradually leading to the due understanding of that ideal height.

The age of the apostolic fathers and of apostolic traditions till the time of Constantine, may be compared with that age of legends which forms the transition from the mythologic to the historic period. An addition of the mythic element plays round the centre of purely Christian and spiritualized reality. In the systems of the Gnostics, the plastic impulse of Christianity appears in its strangest form. Every notion here appears as an acting person. As a semi-heathen tendency, Gnosticism recoils from acknowledging the Incarnate Word, the God-man; while as a semi-Christian tendency, it is constrained to satisfy its impulse towards the one true God-man by the formation of a thousand idealistic phantoms of Him. And thus philosophic legends make their appearance. The historic are exhibited in the manner in which the important personages of the time are symbolically magnified: Nero, e.g., into the Antichrist; Simon Magus, the spurious miracle-worker, into the counterpart of Simon Peter. Antichristian life also is drawn in darker, and Christian life in fairer colours, than the facts justify, as in the history of the martyrs. It is in the apocryphal gospels and histories of apostles, however, that the poetic legends of the period, the pious romances of this very peculiar popular life, appear. For there were but few whose primary intention, as heretical works, was actual deception.

The period from Constantine the Great to Gregory the Great, forcibly recalls that of the giving of the law to Israel. The sacred ideal now becomes symbol, as it then became law. Religious history now becomes a history of dogmas, as then a typical history. Then, popular poetry was the celebration of symbolical promises; here, it is the commemoration of the perfected fact of redemption. The mythic element here appears in large proportions as an accessory. The Son of God of the Arians, for instance, is a philosophical myth in process of formation, gradually introducing by its development a new Polytheism. The history of the first monks, e.g., of Anthony and Paul of Thebes, forms historic myths of the most beautiful and fullest significance. The tradition of this period becomes poetry, its poetry tradition, and the poetic myth is seen in the very dawn of legendary fiction.

The middle ages exhibit the New Testament people of God in their greatest extension, in their first stage of Christian development, at their nearest approach to heathenism. All forms of spiritual life, Christian, Jewish, heathen, are here present, and the most various, the most copious intermixture of the real with the ideal takes place: there is a continual advance of heathenism by the law and the promise towards Christ, a continual descent of the Christian spirit upon all the steps of this wide-spread and various national temperament. If we inquire after the ideal in its Christian vitality, after doctrine, Scholasticism exhibits a remarkable embodiment of all ideal Christian knowledge. Scholasticism is Christian in its essence—freedom of thought in the power of faith; Old Testament-like in its form—its defined and statutory decisions, and in the relation of service in which it stands to ecclesiastical dogmas; and finally, mythologic in the manner in which it converts separate notions into definite forms, and is reflected in the abhorrent astonishment of Christian people. Yet how marvellously did the enthusiasm of the Christian ideal seize the Christian nations of the middle ages! The whole life of mediæval times becomes romantic, that is, illumined by the lightning-like glances of the Eternal, pervaded by touches of significant symbolism, through the attraction of Christian enthusiasm, in its popular, sympathetic power, and in the impulsive ardour of its youth. As the lightning at night continually illuminates the dark sky, so do the day-streaks of the Eternal fall, with ever increasing brightness, upon the dark reality. Life itself becomes poetry in this idealistic tendency. The Grecian people, in the ideal expedition of its heroic and youthful period, the expedition to Troy, obtained possession of the beautiful woman; the Jewish people, in an expedition of a similar kind, according to their temperament and tendency, conquered the promised land; the Christian nations, in their romantic expeditions, delivered the holy sepulchre. These all expressed the peculiarity of their several tendencies, temperaments, and enthusiasms, in relation to an historical phenomenon, which they recognized as their most special property, and which became to them the symbol of their whole spiritual prosperity. But when we contemplate the distinctive incidents of this idealized Christian national history, we see that in the deep cloistral seclusion of monastic life, in the middle ages, the Christian spirit, as such, was diving with mystic ardour into the mysteries of the Gospel, and converting them into experience and knowledge; that, besides an external sacerdotal consecration, it was acquainted with the free consecration of the Spirit in the various stages of the inner life, and was thus preparing for that happy New Testament life of faith which broke forth at the Reformation. We see, however, the same spirit in its Old Testament form, as a theocratic spirit, agitating and exciting, educating and consecrating, national life; we see it as a legal spirit, wielding the rod, or even hurling the threatening and annihilating lightning; we see it as a presentient spirit, converting all persons, customs, usages, and events into symbols of the future and eternal world. The heathen mind also everywhere takes its part in transforming Christian history into mythic phantasmagoriæ, Christian apophthegms into heathen incantations, Christian relics into heathen fetishes, Christian saints into heathen divinities. As then this Christian national life is itself romantic, the poetry and art of the period are especially so. It is not enough that these should produce their proper effect as art, they must be also symbolic and prophetic. Thus related to Christian idealism, and illuminated by it, do we behold mediæval art seizing upon history, and consecrating it by the worship with which she is identified. This symbolic kind of poetry and art of the middle ages unites the enigmatic typicism of the Old Testament with that Christian transparency of form which allows the light of the ideal to be seen; while, under the form of legends, it expresses, in a manner more or less mythological, the great gulf between the Christian ideal and reality. With the Reformation, however, Christian national life, as such, began to rise to the spiritual level of the New Testament, the specific distinction between the priesthood and the laity being, in conformity with the spirit of Christianity, abolished. The dogmas of Christianity, which had hitherto been regarded as a kind of esoteric mysteries, unfitted for and unattainable by the ordinary understanding of the Christian people, being now inculcated in a manner suited to the intellectual capacities of the flock, were transformed into powerful convictions and vital influences. On the other hand, all life, all reality, was brought to light and to judgment by the purifying glow of the Christian spirit: morals, trade, policy, war, all were thrown into the refining fire, and only that which was pure could abide the flames, and exhibit an ideal reality. Hence, too, past history was viewed more and more in its relation to the destiny of man, and explained in its ideality as the effect of the all-prevailing government of God. And finally, poetry also became more abundant in vitality, a consecration of man’s deepest sorrows, questions, hopes, and blessings; and true Christian life acquired more and more the transfiguration glory resulting from a solemn contemplation of all worldly events in the light of Christ’s victory. Thus a prospect was opened of a future, in which all Christian ideals will have the power of all availing vital forces, of custom and reality; and in which Christian national life will appear in the consecration of the Spirit, in the priestly dignity of continual submission to God, and in the royal honour of free agency, in His strength. The result of this union of the divine and human life in the great extension of elect Christian national life, will be the perfected poetry of life, the longed-for rest of the people of God, called by the Mystics the seventh era, the Sabbath of the world’s history.

In proportion, however, as this ideal Christian history comes to maturity, and even more speedily, is its antichristian contrast also matured, the last universal form of that false mythological manner of existence which, in the presence of apostolic Christianity, was formed in the Talmud, and in the allied features of Judaism. On one hand, it announced itself by the philosophical tendency which denied to the ideal the power of being realized in the personality of the God-man, in the Christian Church, in its priesthood, in immortal individuals, and their salvation. On the other hand, it profaned history: moral precepts were to supplant religious revelations, mechanical inventions to eclipse moral precepts, materialistic calculations to subjugate mechanical inventions, and, finally, animal inclinations were, as a fixed principle, to govern the whole human race. One result of this depreciation of the religious and ethical view of the world, was the appearance of an absolute scepticism in all that is historically noble or holy, since the certainty of the noble and the holy can only be recognized in the element of religion and morality. Finally, the poetry of this dismemberment of the world became, in conformity with this tendency, more and more a poetry of sin and crime, the poetry which glorifies man as the demoniac animal, but blasphemes the God-man. This development points to its termination, these appearances point to that final form wherein the ruin of mankind will be manifested in the maturity of its antichristian position. The dark side of mythology in its full development is seen here. Its hatred of the manifestation of ideal perfection in the light of Christianity, possessing as it does the illumination of that word which embraces and explains both heaven and earth, is shown in those strange caricatures and imitations of the ideal, in those monstrous representations of the spiritual, in which the apophthegm and its contradiction, prayer and blasphemy, the features of an angel of light and the grimaces of Satan, mingling with each other, exhibit the unspeakable confusion of the ideal. Aversion to Christian sanctity of life, as exhibited in the spiritual purity of marriage, in the spiritual consecration of property, in the spiritual elevation of the State, in the spiritual authority of the Church, which represents the bride,-this aversion has, in its delusions, so mingled the utmost profligacy with the most hypocritical monkery, the plunder of property with its dissipation, rebellion with despotic terror, and scepticism with the most abject submission to the hierarchy, that the historical presence of this sanctity can nowhere be perceived or secured in this wild confusion, but passes through the bright day like a dark myth. The poetry of so confused a state of existence can, in its very nature, be no nightingale-song, but rather resembles the croak of the three demoniacal frogs of the Apocalypse (Rev 16:13), who are to appear in the last stage of the world’s history, to complete the last seduction. But everywhere, even in his deepest ruin, man testifies to the indestructible tendency of his life, to realize the ideal, to idealize the real, and to celebrate this union in poetry. Even mature Antichristianity desires this union and its celebration, but not so that things should be absorbed in persons, but persons in things—not by investing substance with the light of the subject, but by plunging the subject into the obscurity of substance—not in the personal Christ, in whom all Christians are one, but in impersonal Christians, in whom the one Christ, ever divided and never complete, appears and disappears everywhere, and nowhere. Antichristianity is a caricature, a hostile imitation of Christianity, only because it wants personality, and especially the all-unifying person of Christ. All its distortions cry out for a total correction, all its perplexities for a thorough solution, all its mad phrases for a healing inspiration by one word, which would make all clear, the reigning person, the God-man.

But when we behold the full, ever-spreading, ever-increasing flow of Christian divine-human life through the world, and trace this stream to its origin, shall we find it to have its rise from a source in which the ideal has not become life, nor the life ideal—in which religious passivity, as in heathen mythology, must supply its deficiencies by fictions of an atonement? The stream, on the contrary, points to a source of its own kind, to an abundant and ever-flowing fount of its own peculiar nature,—an origin, therefore, which is at once both spirit and fact, life and consecration. Christianity points back to Christ in all His historical glory.

Finally, if we follow the track of the christological formative process in the Old Covenant, and ask, To what end does it tend, what flower must this wondrous plant bear, into what fruit will it ripen?—this formative process also leads us to the appearing of Messiah, of the God-man in all His historical power and glory.

There must then necessarily exist between these pre-Christian preparations and that historical flowing forth of the divine-human life in the Christian era, such an upland as the Gospel history exhibits. The chief feature of this region is that fundamental principle of Christian life—atonement. Here, then, we see in highest religious activity that foreordained and perfected reality of divine life, to which heathen mythology testified in religious passivity by significant dreams. The beautiful dream has here grown into reality; hence that faint dream of a dream, the view that the evangelical history has a mythic character, is an anachronism.

We have now reached that point of our subject which makes it our next concern to endeavour to estimate the nature of Christ Himself, with reference to the epochs of mythology. His advent as the God-man was necessary, as the result of Judaism, and as the principle of Christianity. If He had not so appeared, Judaism would be justified in its permanence; and if He were not the personal God-man, the Christian life would be but a delusion, founded as it is on the relations of believing persons to the supreme personality. He is the Son of God: as the living unity of all the revelations of God, He appears with the power of eternity in the midst of time, and is thus also the complete realization of every divine ideal. But He is therefore also the Son of man, the living unity of all pure and elevated human life, the most intensely human being in the light of a holy life; in other words, the perfect spiritualization of human reality. As the Son of God, He feels Himself, in virtue of His divine consciousness, to be resting in the bosom of the Father (Joh 1:18); and as the Son of man, he bears on His heart the whole human race, and strives to raise them with Himself into His glory (Joh 12:32). Atonement is the central point of His being: in Him divinity and humanity, the spirit and nature, ideality and reality, Jews and Gentiles, heaven and earth, are reunited. We may now view His life in its various relations. When we see how the Godhead is therein manifested in the flesh, in other words, the Eternal in the highest historical reality, Christ is Himself presented to us as the supreme miracle, the vital principle of each separate miracle. He enters the already existing spheres of life, as the last, the decisive, the transforming vital principle; hence He is both the miracle and the source of miracles, the principle of transformation and renewal to the whole Adamic race. But when we view His humanity, and see how it is one with its ideal, illuminated by the thought of God, and thus a reflection of the whole world, He appears also as the great symbol. He is in this relation the pure image of God, and therefore the light of the world; the key which unlocks the spiritual riches of heaven, of mankind, and of nature; the centre of all symbols. And because it is in Him that the Godhead first triumphs in complete victory in a human heart, and in Him that a human being first reposes on the bosom of God, on His Father’s heart, and there joyfully rests and solemnly works, His life is the highest poetry. His dealings are the perfect rhythm; His word is lyric, a perpetual hymn of praise; His work the true worship of the highest festival, Himself the fairest of the children of men. And as Christ, as the miracle, renews the world, and as the symbol enlightens it; so does He, as the fairest image of God therein, also glorify it, till His Church shall appear as the bride, till both heaven and earth shall crown her with splendour as the inheritance of God.

The glory of Christ’s deeds is the result of this glory of His nature.¹⁰ As being in Himself wonderful, He must needs show Himself to be such, by wonder-working. Some would view Him as the God-man, without acknowledging His miracles; others will concede the miracle of the resurrection, but none other. What is this but a sun without rays—a heaven-reaching alpine peak without its surrounding wreath of Alps, and without highlands! The concession is as obscure as the negation The incarnation of the Son of God is not His mere incorporation. In His incarnation is involved His dwelling and walking among men (Joh 1:14). For a man is converted into a mere apparition, if we do not grant that we must act in conformity with his intrinsic nature. This monstrous assumption is contrary also to historical truth and teleology. For never yet was a solitary power placed in the world, as a mere specimen, and then withdrawn. If it be said, that surely it is enough to allow that Christ effected very much by the power of His word, and founded an enduring Church, we would reply: Must not the auspices under which His powerful word formed the Church have been miracles? Must not that effect of His word which, breaking through the outward forms of Judaism, in a few years transformed the Jewish world into the Christian world, have been accompanied by miraculous phenomena? But if it is asserted that these miracles of the Lord Jesus were, at least when compared with His teaching, but subordinate manifestations of His life, such a view is certainly not that of St John, nor in accordance with the sublimity of the Christian principle. The Christian principle presupposes that in the life of Jesus every utterance has the power of a fact, every fact or miraculous operation the distinctness of a vocal declaration. Hence, according to St John’s Gospel, our Lord often describes His word as His work; His spiritual revelations consist of the most decided effects, they are the deeds of His word, or the words of His deed; if at one time an act is the motive of His words, at another His word is the motive of His acts. Thus the words and works of Christ are, on the one hand, the separate miracles flowing from the deep fountain of His wondrous life; on the other, the separate symbols, by which the varied and abundant affluence of the eternal Spirit is announced.¹¹

What solemn beauty do all His deeds exhibit! A Sabbath glory rests on Canaan, where they were performed; a stream of eternal peace wells forth from His most arduous conflict in Gethsemane; the accursed tree itself becomes a mark of honour when once His holy head has touched it. This remark leads us to a fresh subject, that of the circumstances by which our Lord was surrounded. We are here reminded that it is legend which first strives to look upon coarse or common reality in the light of the ideal; that it is legend which grasps, by anticipation and invention, the spiritual significance of the actual world. But in this case fictions would be out of date. For it is a universal law that, as is the man, so is the opportunity presented to him. Supreme importance of personality demands supreme importance of surrounding circumstances. Hence the circumstances by which Christ was surrounded acquire a peculiar and universal distinction, as being adapted to call forth the full development of His power, to occasion the whole working out of His life. They form, in their character and concatenations, a concentrated expression of the history of the world. For it was in His own age that Christ overcame the world and the powers of hell; it was in His own days that He found appropriate instruments for the founding of His kingdom. Thus His history was perfected by the interaction of His peculiar life with a peculiar constellation of the world’s history. And it is in this way that the ideality of His life becomes an illuminating agency to the whole world; on this account, that His fate is as wonderful as His life. The fact that the theocratically-trained Jewish world and the classically-trained heathen world united with equal perversion to crucify Him, exhibits a peculiar and tragical coincidence, involving the whole ancient world in condemnation. The world’s sentence, which He underwent in His death, was to be followed by His resurrection. But if the history of His life also is rich in single and significant features, in which the course of nature corresponds with its course, this will be found in strict accordance with the parallelism in which nature is wont to develop itself with the spirit of man. In a case wherein the whole human race is, so to speak, concentrated in one life, on the conflict and victory of which its fate depends, and wherein the conflicts of this life have so culminated that the decisive moment has arrived by which the earth as well as humanity is to be glorified, we need not be surprised at convulsions of the earth. Why must sentient nature maintain at such a moment a stoical indifference, when in less important crises she has announced, so to speak, her co-operation with that divine Spirit which was directing the world’s history? But the miraculous in the history of Jesus develops also a rich symbolism, which makes the whole world transparent to its very depths. The characters by whom our Lord is surrounded, as heroes of recipiency for His spirit—a Peter, a James, a John; the dwellings which receive Him, such as the house at Bethany; the dark or darkened beings who oppose Him-a Judas, a Caiaphas, a Pilate,—how significant do they become by their relation to Christ, and by the effect of His light, in manifesting the depths of human nature, of the world, and of hell! Yes, every man whom the Lord touched, every creature, every fleeting occurrence, becomes a living mirror, an enlightening agency to the world. His Spirit is the miraculous finger which elicits from everything its peculiar tone, everything must respond to His word. This Spirit glorifies even His cross, by revealing His victory in the resurrection. In His sufferings on the cross is seen the reconciliation of the world, and by the light of this reconciliation a glory is shed upon all sorrow, upon all that is dark and terrible on earth, as being a dispensation of God’s hidden kindness. Judgment is seen in its deep inward union with sin-annulling grace, and the world is illuminated to its very depths by the light of the divine government, glorifying itself in its victory over all evil. But it is also the same Spirit which transforms His fate into the most sublime poetical event. His life is, in its simple Gospel features, a sublime Messiad, which no poetry can surpass. It is a drama, assembling its lifelike characters in the centre of the world, and introducing, in the sharpest traits, in the most significant deeds, in the most sudden results, that catastrophe of whose all-affecting reality and result all tragic occurrences and fictions had prophesied—a catastrophe in which the curse of the Adamic race falls upon the holy child of this race, as the most terrible judgment of God upon the world, and yet a judgment which, through the infinite satisfaction of this holy sacrifice, becomes the reconciliation of the world and the means of its glorification. From the mortal agonies and heavenly victories of this history, are breathed upon every recipient soul the reviving and quickening influences of the peace of God. So real is the ideal world opened to us in the Gospel history. It is a wonderfully copious, a heavenly, a far-reaching reality, which the Philistine (Philister) beholds with alarm, and strives to represent as an obscure mythical image, in order to free himself from the powerful effect it has in disturbing his comfort. But where reality thus exhibits miracle, symbol, and poetry, in their highest unity, power, and depth, mythical representations are superseded,¹² and must vanish before the simple narratives of this reality; or, if they remain, can only be regarded as the timid apocryphal productions of popular Christianity in its immature state. Every abstract fiction must here be below the truth; and the assumption that this reality itself is such a fiction, is a pale phantom venturing to appear at midday.

───♦───

Notes

1. Much discussion has of late taken place concerning the notion of myths, since the word has been so vaguely employed by many, and lately by Strauss, in matters theological. Invention, fiction, error, fable, and anecdote have all had to play their parts in the notion of the myth. Tholuck (die Glaubenwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte, p. 51, &c.), among others, animadverts upon this confusion. Strauss subsequently expressed himself more clearly. ‘We distinguish by the name of an evangelical myth, a narrative directly or indirectly referring to Jesus, which may be considered not as the expression of a fact, but as the deposit of an idea of His earliest followers. The myth, in this sense, will be met with, here as elsewhere, sometimes pure, as the substance of the narrative, sometimes as an accessory to actual history.’ This whole definition rests upon a misconception of the fundamental relations existing between ideas and facts. It assumes, in the Gospel history itself, a mutilated realization of eternal ideas; and in the narrative of the Gospel history an idealistic representation of these ideas, overgrowing the reality. The idea here works in a Neptunian, not a Plutonian manner; it can form ‘deposits’ of facts, and ‘wash away’ the firmer form of tradition in its floods, but is incapable of forming primitive rocks by igneous forces, and raising a new world from the deeps. The distinction between the historical and philosophical myth is not here allowed its due importance. The philosophical appears as the pure myth, drawing from two sources—from Old Testament Messianic expectations, and from the impression which Christ left behind Him; the historical, as a myth appended to history, and having for its foundation some isolated fact, of which enthusiasm takes possession, ‘in order to entwine it with mythic conceptions drawn from the idea of the Christ.’ Thus the pure or philosophic myth is doubly deprived of its real elements; first of the Messianic expectation in its real tendency, then of the impression made by Christ according to its real contents; and the historical myth doubly mutilated; for, first, there is an occurrence of which enthusiasm takes possession, instead of the occurrence awakening the enthusiasm; then the myth is formed out of this occurrence, not by being further fashioned in the fire of the idea, but by being ‘entwined,’ as with a garland, with mythic conceptions. So antagonistic to each other are the ideal and the actual in this province of criticism. They meet like Ahrimanes and Ormuzd. The Doceticism of a dualistic view of the universe, unable fully to grasp the mystery that the Son of God came in the flesh, here co-operates with the Ebionitism which insists upon seeing in the Christian Church an idealist far surpassing the prophet and his impression, and cannot comprehend that the flesh of Christ’s life was pervaded by the Spirit, His deeds (the supposed anecdotes) illuminated by the ideal; to which, therefore, the doctrine that Jesus is the Christ is still a foreign one. Doceticism never attains to a recognition of the fulness of the Godhead in the midst of the manhood, the fulness of ideality crowned with reality. The ideal, in its flight over the earth, is only allowed to skim it like a swallow. Ebionitism, on the other hand, is incapable of recognising in the God-man, the Son of God who goes to the Father, and is raised up to the glory of the Father. According to its view, human nature only attains to the theories of the idealist—to a sort of bear’s dance to the measure of the eternal, which it is unable to keep up, and soon falls heavily again upon its broad forefeet. This swallow’s flight of the ideal, this bear’s dance of the actual, point to that constant schism in the world, or rather in the view of the world, entertained by the criticism in question, which may be regarded as the peculiar mark of Manichean error within the province of Christianity. The theological dictum on the notion of the myth is taken up con amore by Otfried Muller. Myths, says he (Prolegomena zu einer wissenschaftlichen Mythologie, p. 59),¹³ are, according to their external notion, ‘narratives of the doings and destinies of individual personages, which, according to their connection and blending with each other, relate to a period antecedent to the historical era of Greece, and separated from it by a tolerably distinct boundary.’ With respect to the internal notion of the myth, it is ‘a mode of fusing together fact and idea’ (p. 78). ‘This union’ (of the thing done and the thought entertained), says the author, ‘takes place in most myths; and there are not many in which something real and something ideal may not be pointed out. The older the myth, the more entirely is the fact blended with the thought. Hence, even the difference between the historic and philosophic myth, on which great stress was formerly laid, is relatively of less importance’ (p. 70). It is entirely in accordance with Christian theology, that the older the myth is, the more entirely does the fact seem blended with the idea. The primitive is the type of the consummation. As, then, the highest myth in the centre of history consists in the union of the incidents of the actual, the marvellous, the symbolic or ideal, and the poetic, so must the first myth, at the beginning of pre-historic times, exhibit this union also. It is in the nature of things that here every idea should find its type in reality, and that, vice versa, every fact should be illuminated by its relation to the ideal. Gradually, however, a ramification takes place. The myth of Pandora, for instance, is at all events a philosophical myth; it represents the idea of the origin of evil by an occurrence. In the recovery of the Grecian Helen from Troy, on the contrary, we have a fact embellished into a highly significant myth, in which the nation that dedicated itself to the service of beauty, began its heroic deeds in conformity with this impulse. Finally, the harmonious union of all the incidents relating to the idealized fact, forms the poetic myth. Muller does not bring this forward as a peculiar kind of myth, but discusses the notions that appertain to it under the title, ‘How the myth is to be distinguished from its treatment by poets and authors.’ Here the psychological motive of the occurrences, and the arrangement of various legends into one harmonious whole, is defined as the poet’s share in the embellishment of a fact. Compare Ullmann’s treatise, Historisch oder Mythisch, p. 56.

On the distinction between the myth and the legend, compare George, Ueber Mythus und Sage, and Strauss, Leben Jesu, vol. i. p. 113. Strauss defines as legendary, on one hand, the inaccuracies, on the other, the colourings, modifying such history as passes through a long course of oral tradition. These formulæ do not, however, in the least degree touch upon the real inner nature of the legend. The distinction of George would convert the historic myth into legend—myth and legend are almost one. The former is the legend of the Greeks, the latter the myth of the Germans. If, however, the essential distinction of these notions be required, it must be acknowledged that the myth poetically matures the scattered seed which has a religious signification, while the legend anticipatively expresses the recognition of the ideal in common, variegated, fantastic, or even terrible reality. When a misfortune consciously self-incurred is attributed to Nemesis, this is of the nature of the myth. When the shipwreck on the Lurley rocks, a mishap incurred by an unconscious fault, or by no fault at all, is ascribed to Loreley, this is of the nature of the legend.

2. In estimating the relation of the Gospel history to mythology, it must be considered, (1) as the original history of the new human race, or the real people of God, which, as such, can by no means be history in the usual sense, but only poetic, symbolic, and religious history; (2) as the commencement of a development of life, which, in conformity with its nature, is a manifestation of truth; and especially of the truth of the ideal, verified in its facts, and of the facts verified in their ideal nature. According to the notion of Christianity, it is impossible that it should be surpassed, enriched, or carried further, by any embellishments.

3. Prophecy exhibits a series of real interactions between the real and the ideal. The idea of prophecy, which many theologians had thrown away as a weed, has been brought back to them by botanists and poets, who have begun to recognize, even in the life of plants, the nature of prophecy. Göthe’s poem Die Metamorphosen der Pflanzen is, in this respect, very significant. All those phenomena of natural life, which not only externally announce, but also internally prepare a higher development, as, e.g., the leaf does the flower, present an image of prophecy.

The myth, on the contrary, has its type in the various allusions, or lights and shadows, in which nature is so abundant. Thus the moon, for example, upon whose dark but real body is impressed, so to speak, the image of the sun’s brightness, the ideal of its nature seems to be an image of the historical myth. The dawn, on the other hand, denotes the philosophical myth: we have here the young day which, before its appearance in the world, forms in the clouds of heaven a beautiful but unsubstantial corporeity. The rainbow represents figuratively the original unity of the two kinds of myths; the primitive myth, for the clouds representing obscure reality is illumined by the light, but the light, denoting the colourless ideal, develops all its variegated splendour in its union with this reality. Finally, the reflection of the heavens in a clear stream seems a natural emblem of the poetic myth. As the bright images of the sun and moon appear in the watery mirror, fulfilling the saying, ‘Kehrt wellenathmend ihr Gesicht nicht doppelt schöner her?’ so do the pure reflections of ideal history, or of the mythically incorporated ideal, appear with enhanced splendour in the element of poetry.

1) In this manner does the Apostle Paul, Gal. iii. 19, 20, treat the difference between the Mosaic and the Christian religion, In the former, angels and mediators are employed; but a mediator presupposes a schism (ἑνὸς οὐκ ἔστι). In the latter, God gives Himself to man, becomes one with him in Christ; the schism, and with it the (mere) mediator, being done away (ὀ θεὸς εἷς ἐστι).

2) Hegel, Religionsphilosophie, Pt. iti. p. 212: ‘The state which has been foolishly supposed to have been the primitive one, the state of innocence, is the state of nature of the animal.’ This is a merely naturalistic assertion, unable to conceive of man as a pure product of the Spirit of God, in the ideal pristine vigour of his primitive condition, because some degenerate corrupt branch of the human family is regarded as the type of primitive man. Could then the Greek, the Jew, the German, have been comprised in the savage as in the first Adam? If this original or natural existence is designated as an evil one, an Ahriman is introduced, against whom no Ormuzd could defend himself. [In conformity with Hegel’s view of primitive man is the opinion of Strauss, that nothing more is required for the transition from Polytheism to Monotheism than an improved intellectual culture, and an increasing observation. of the natural world. The theory of civilised man gradually developing from the savage has been thoroughly refuted by the late Archbishop Whately in a lecture entitled ‘ Civilisation.’ —ED.]

3) They who consider the first sin necessary to the spiritual development of man, must consequently prolong the continuance of sin to eternity. This particular error is, however, connected with the more general one of viewing the determinative merely as the negative, and failing to recognise the positive in the negative.

4) Eichhorn agrees with the Fragmentists^* in refusing to recognise an immediate divine agency, at least in the Old Testament history of the world. ‘he mythological researches of a Heyne had already so far enlarged his circle of vision as to lead him to perceive how such an influence must be either admitted or denied in the primitive histories of all people—Strauss, Leb. Jesu, Pt. i. p. 20.

*) ['The Fragmentists,’ i.e, those who adopt the opinions broached in the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, published by Lessing in the year 1777, in the fourth number of the ‘Contributions to History and Literature from the Treasures of the Ducal Library at Wolfenbüttel,’ in which an anonymous writer attacked the Christian religion, and especially the history of the resurrection, Lessing disclaimed some of the sentiments there uttered—especially stating that no difference in the accounts of the resurrection could disprove the fact.—ED,]

5) [Very interesting corroborations in detail of this whole chapter, and especially of this point, are to be found in the works of Gale, Bryant, Döllinger, Pressensé, and Ackerman, or in a still more accessible form in Trench’s Hulscan Lectures, and summarily in Bushnell’s Nature and the Supernatural, chap, viii--Ed.]

6) The Jewish point of view, opposed by St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, is the same which is expressed in the question, Why should the Jews alone have been favoured with the blessing of revelation? ‘The Jews inquired, Why should salvation come to the Gentiles, and not to the Jews alone? But we have to deal here, not With merely dogmatical assertions, but with facts which only the deluded deny. The lightning darts through the clouds in a zigzag direction, and in like manner does the spirit of revelation dart through the world. The one phenomenon arises from the extreme rarity of the lightning, shown by its floating between the attracting forces, and the other from the infinite discrimination of the Spirit, who in His righteousness passes through the world with constant reference to the attraction of a felt need of salvation.

7) When Eve, in her aspirations after the ideal, exclaimed at the birth of her first son, I have gotten the man, the Lord (Gen. iv. 1), the myth-forming instinct, the instinct of glorifying the actual in the ideal of the divine-human life, was strikingly displayed. The words קָנִיתִי אִישׁ אֶת־יְהוָֹה have indeed been otherwise translated ; but, in any case, they represent man in intimate inward relation to Jehovah, the Lord, and therefore man in his ideality. And this is the matter in question. Comp. Baumgarten, theol. Kommentar zum Pentateuch, Pt. i. p. 74.

8) See Hegel’s Vorlesungen iiber die Philosophie der Religion, Pt, ii. pp. 79, 80, &c.

9) Gen. xxxii. 24, &c.

10) So-called ‘Criticism’ has committed itself to the absurdity of asserting that the leading events of the Gospel history were invented by the Evangelists. At onetime, it is denied that Christ formed the Evangelists, and it is said that the genera] cannot be expressed in the particular; at another, the Evangelist is said to have formed his Christ, and it is asserted that the general can only be expressed by the particular. According to Jean Paul’s humorous narrative, a poor schoolmaster once composed a Klopstock’s Messiah and other works, according to his own idea. It was thus, perhaps, that the Evangelist composed his Messiah, or if it were not the Evangelist who embellished his Master, it must have been the Church that did so, A new doctrine indeed, according to which the needy bride clothes the rich King with the robe of Righteousness.

11) According to modern criticism, traces of fiction may be recognized in the significant, the ideal. The reality of a fact is said to vanish before the illumination of the religious idea. What a reality is it which these critics require! The more trivial and unspiritual, so much the more probable. In such a case, a witch would be more probable than a well-educated woman, And yet these histories of miracles, which at one time they consider improbable, as being symbolical, they call at another anecdotes. An anecdote, however, is nothing but a striking and amusing occurrence—the direct opposite of a myth, or of any symbolic act. Hence, first bodies without souls, i.e, anecdotes, and then souls without bodies, i.e., myths, but never living myths, ideal events, form the objects of their intellectual vision. The use of the word anecdote, in this connection, is specially damaging to De Wette’s system.

12) See my work, Ueber der geschichtlichen Charakter der kanon. Evang., p. 31.

13) [Or p. 1 of Leitch’s translation, entitled ‘Introduction to a Scientific System of Mythology, by C. O. Muller,’ Lond. 1844. By this work a ‘great deal of light is thrown on the subject of this chapter, and generally on the idea, sources, determination of the age, and cessation of myths. It may be well to consult also Milman’s History of Christianity, vol. i. pp. 115 and 129; though all that he says in these chapters will not be agreed with, and must indeed be considered to some extent dangerous.—ED.]