Now we trust that Dr. Farrar will bear with us when we say that his power of vivid narrative is considerably in excess of his critical acumen. We do not mean to imply that his judgment is untrustworthy when he has to deal with various readings of the Greek text, or when he has to decide between several explanations of the same historical difficulty. On the contrary, he exhibits a remarkable capacity for arranging and weighing evidence: witness his admirable note upon John viii. 1-11 (vol. ii. 61, 62), and exhaustive excursus, Was the Last Supper a Passover?' But with all his sagacity in discriminating between the opinions of others, we constantly find him making suggestions himself which stir more difficulties than they solve, and at times so handling the sacred narrative as to invite rather than disarm the attacks of a sceptical foe.

Take, for instance, his treatment of the Fourth Gospel. 'Writing as a believer to believers, as a Christian to Christians, surely,' pleads Dr. Farrar, after nearly nineteen centuries of Christianity any one may be allowed to rest a fact of the life of Jesus on the testimony of St. John without stopping to write a volume on the authenticity of the Fourth Gospel : and if he had confined himself to the somewhat narrow audience whom he claims to be addressing, we should have had nothing to urge against his plea. But it is easy to perceive that while he invites the attention of those only whom he somewhat vaguely terms 'believers,' he has in his mind's eye a much wider circle. Every page of his book, and especially the valuable notes with which he has enriched it, teems with anticipations and refutations of supposed objectors. He is, in fact, too good a theologian to divest himself wholly of the critic; on the other hand, he is too zealous an artist to allow the seductive flow of his narrative to be seriously interrupted by critical considerations. His work in consequence exhibits the defects inseparable from a double intention. As history it cannot altogether be trusted; as criticism it is manifestly inadequate. Now the Gospel of St. John is, to say the least, dangerous ground for the writer of a popular Life of Christ. Granted that the author was St. John-and we cordially agree with Dr. Farrar in thinking that the weight of internal evidence is all but decisive in favour of the orthodox view-granted that much of the Gospel is pure narrative, still the results of criticism are not so wholly void as to allow of its indiscriminate use as a document of precisely similar character to the records of the Synoptists. Our author's chapter on Nicodemus furnishes one among many instances of the critical unsoundness into which he is too often unconsciously betrayed through what seems to us an imperfect apprehension

apprehension of the conditions of his task. The third chapter of St. John's Gospel, after narrating the nightly visit of the timid Rabbi to our Lord, passes in the 16th verse into one of those didactic discourses in the style of St. John's First Epistle, which form so peculiar a feature of the Gospel. Few critics but such as maintain a more or less mechanical theory of inspiration—and of these Dr. Farrar is not one-refuse to admit here that the Evangelist is in part commenting upon and explaining the testimony which he records, and more obviously still is this the case in the expansion of the Baptist's words at the close of the chapter. But although, if the subjective element be thus admitted, the admission is a most important one as affecting the purely historical character of the Gospel, Dr. Farrar treats the discourse as resting upon exactly the same footing as any other recorded words of Jesus, and founds upon it the following reflection, just, no doubt, in itself, and full of spiritual insight, but unsuited to the connection in which it is found.

'Doubtless in the further discussion of [these mysteries] the night deepened around them, and, in the memorable words about the light and the darkness with which the interview was closed, Jesus gently rebuked the fear of man which led this Great Rabbi to seek the shelter of midnight for a deed which was not a deed of darkness, needing to be concealed, but which was indeed a coming to the true and only light.'-vol. i. p. 200.

It is of course open to Dr. Farrar to hold that St. John's Gospel was written for the purpose of supplementing or occasionally rectifying the accounts of the Synoptists, rather than of arranging certain features of the great picture according to a special point of view: but as the latter is in the main the opinion even of those critics who hold the Johannean authorship, and at least accounts for many of the most difficult phenomena of the Gospel, he is hardly free to express impatience of the scepticism which doubts its genuineness, while he almost entirely ignores that peculiar element which distinguishes this record so widely from the earlier narratives.

We find ourselves compelled to enter a still stronger protest against the use which Dr. Farrar makes of Christian legend. To a mind like his, intensely susceptible of the picturesque, the temptation to interweave with the sacred history extraneous fables which sober criticism has either set aside or not thought it worth while to refute, tends at times seriously to compromise the faithfulness of his narrative. Conspicuously is this the case in regard to the Visit of the Magi, and the Interview with the Greeks, recorded by St. John (xii. 20 ff.). True, he characterises the legends connected with the former incident as 'innocent fancies;' but

when

6

The

when we are told in the same sentence that they are worthy of mention because of their historic interest, and their bearing on the conceptions of Christian poetry and Christian art,'* it would seem as though some importance were attributed to them over and above the influence they have exercised upon the latter, and in this case their 'innocence' becomes more than questionable in the context where they are found. A similar objection must be urged against the introduction of the legend of Abgarus in connection with the Visit of the Greeks. We are not aware that even tradition links them together, and we suspect the author has been misled here by the fanciful ingenuity of Sepp; but to speak of an absurd fable as an interesting tradition, but one upon which we can unfortunately lay no stress,' is to suggest a possibility of its truth which is simply mischievous. effect of such playing with legend is unconsciously illustrated by Dr. Farrar himself, when he introduces the Greek inquirers at the head of his page by the uncritical designation, 'Emissaries from the West.' There is another instance of the same want of historic perception in vol. i. p. 60, which we notice, because the writer is evidently unaware of the impression which his too unguarded use of legend is calculated to make upon the mind of the thoughtful reader. After pointing out the contrast between the style of the Apocryphal Gospels and that of the Evangelists, and condemning the former in language that needs no palinode, he quotes a story from the 'Arabic Gospel of the Infancy,' as 'at any rate harmless, and possibly resting upon some slight basis of historical fact.' The scene is so manifestly a childish reflection of the Triumphal Entry that, whether harmless or not, its quotation as possible fact must detract something from the weight of Dr. Farrar's judgment in regard to a far more important matter-the difficulties, namely, which are involved in the duplicate narratives of the Gospels. His vindication of a second cleansing of the Temple as belonging to the last days of our Lord's life, in immediate connection with His entry into Jerusalem, forms the introduction to the most original and suggestive chapter in the whole work.

Another fault to which Dr. Farrar is prone is the uncritical use of scientific or pictorial description in cases where the inadequacy of the one or the uncertainty of the other is simultaneously admitted. We can see no possible reason why he should have encumbered his text with Kepler's calculations in reference to the Star in the East,' the applicability of which to the Gospel narratives is now generally abandoned.' A note

* Vol. i. 36.

† Vol. ii. 207.

would

would have sufficed, and would have obviated besides the disturbance of the religious ideas which the chapter is intended to convey. Among other instances of the same want of selfrestraint are the lurid description of Herod's malady, of which we are presently told in a note that 'it is very doubtful whether there is such a disease'* at all; and the translation of the solemn words, ἐγένετο ὁ ἱδρὼς αὐτοῦ ὥσει θρόμβοι αἵματος into This passion . . . which forced from Him the rare and intense phenomenon of a blood-stained sweat,'t when the pathological explanation seems to be discountenanced in a note, and a subjective interpretation has been applied to the passage only a few lines before.

One other point we notice because of its importance with respect to many of the most difficult problems with which the writer of a Life of Christ is called upon to deal. When we are told by St. Luke that Jesus increased in wisdom '—an expression which, notwithstanding the very full and interesting account which Dr. Farrar gives us of Jewish education, he allows to pass without comment-it seems to us that a door is opened for humble speculation as to the meaning of this intellectual growth. If our author had ventured upon the subject, we think his treatment of some portions of the sacred history-notably of the Temptation-would have been different. But the cognate question as to whether Jesus shared the beliefs of His time, as is boldly assumed by one school of critics, or, as others hold, accommodated His teaching not unfrequently to those beliefs, is one that can hardly fail to suggest itself from time to time to the student of the Gospels. It is prominently forced upon us, for instance, in relation to the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus, and the promise of our Lord to the Dying Thief. Dr. Farrar, however, dismisses the 'doctrine of accommodation' in a brief note upon demoniacal possession (vol. i. 237), with the slight remark that although it has received the sanction of some very eminent Fathers'-he might have added of many very eminent divines'-'it must be applied with the most extreme caution.' We readily accept the admonition, but when we find the author drawing a hasty inference like the following from the use of éτaîpe (comrade) instead of pine (friend) in our Lord's question to Judas, Matt. xxvi. 50, 'Never, even in the ordinary conventionalities of life, would Christ use a term that was not strictly true,' we are constrained to ask whether the statement is intended to preclude the idea that the language of our Lord's utterances was ever qualified by the defects in knowledge characteristic of His time.

* Vol. i. 47.

† Vol. ii. 311.

Dr.

Dr. Farrar's method, which seldom allows him to forsake the literal interpretation of the Gospel accounts, is necessarily least satisfactory whenever the history is couched in mysterious form. It was probably the author's own consciousness of this which determined the commencement of his narrative with the scenes of the Nativity. Although, from a theological point of view, the omission of all direct mention of the Miraculous Conception is hardly what we should have expected in the present work; its truth being unmistakeably assumed, we think that Dr. Farrar has shown his wisdom in making no attempt to impart a more definite outline to the angelic apparitions recorded in the initial chapters of St. Matthew and St. Luke than is given to them by the Evangelists themselves. Perhaps it may be doubted whether he has not gone too far in asserting the absolute credibility of the Gospels as simple histories'* in reference to the story of the Shepherds. The belief that the narrative of the Holy Infancy has been conveyed to us in more or less imaginative form-a belief which has been entertained by many devout critics, and which several of Dr. Farrar's own expressions tend to encourage -is a wholly different thing from its rejection as myth or legend; and we fail to see what reason can be assigned for the subjective explanation which our author unhesitatingly applies to the angelic ministrations of the Temptation and the Agony which will not equally serve to consign the angelic accessories of the Nativity to the highly-wrought imagination of its earliest witnesses. The incidents of the Holy Infancy seem to us to offer no scope for the harmonist of the Gospels. The conviction of their essential truth must result from a spiritual apprehension of those central and more tangible facts of the sacred life which presuppose an origin transcending human experience. Dr. Farrar professes to be appealing, not, like Correggio in his La Notte,' to our imagination, but to our historical sense: he intends that we shall be able to realise these incidents more clearly than before; and he has failed, in our judgment, not because his attempt is a feeble one, but because he has made it at all.

To judge from the tendency of thought at the present time, we should imagine that no portion of the work before us will have been scanned with greater interest than that which treats of the Miracles of Christ. In regard to these Dr. Farrar had already uttered no uncertain sound; and in the present volumes he follows in the main the line of thought adopted in his Hulsean Lectures. We could wish that he had been content with one calm statement of his views in opposition to those of

* Vol. i. p. 13.