ERNEST RE NAN. 835 



She died, while he, prostrated by the malady, was too ill to realize 

 his loss. In the little biographical sketch, which is his most ex- 

 quisite work, and one of the purest masterpieces of French prose, 

 he has given her portrait to posterity and made us share his loss. 



He brought back from Syria not only the inscriptions and 

 archaeological observations published in his Phoenician Mission, 

 which appeared in numbers from 1863 to 1874, but also the first 

 sketch of his Vie de Je"sus, which forms the first volume of the 

 great work of his life, L'Histoire des Origines du Chris tianisme, 

 in seven octavo volumes. The religious questions had always 

 seemed to him the vital questions of history, and the ones which 

 most needed the application of the two essential qualities of the 

 historian — critical acumen, and that divination of the imagination 

 which resuscitates the men and civilizations of the past. It was 

 upon Christianity, the greatest religious phenomenon of the world, 

 that Renan turned the whole resources of his erudition, of his 

 poetic insight, and artistic skill. He was afterward to complete 

 the work by adding to it, by way of introduction, a History of 

 Israel, of which three volumes have been already published, and 

 the remaining two are finished and ready for the press. 



The appearance of the Vie de Je'sus was not only a literary 

 event but a social and religious fact of vast import. It was the 

 first time that the Life of Christ had been written from a purely 

 laical point of view and apart from any supernatural conceptions, 

 in a book destined not for doctors and theologians but for the 

 general public. In spite of the infinite delicacy with which Renan 

 presented his idea, the softened and reverent tone in which he 

 speaks of Christ — or, possibly, even on account of that delicacy 

 and reverence — the scandal of it was colossal. The Catholic 

 clergy felt at once that this form of incredulity, expressing itself 

 with all the gravity of science and all the unction of piety, was 

 far more formidable than the flippancy of Voltairianism ; and 

 coming, as it did, from a pupil of the ecclesiastical schools, the 

 sacrilege and the heresy were complicated with treason and apos- 

 tacy. The Imperial Government, which in 1862 had nominated 

 him Professor of Semitic Philology in the College de France, had 

 the cowardice to revoke the nomination in 1863 in deference to 

 the clamor set up in the clerical camp, but innocently offered him, 

 by way of compensation, a curator's post at the Bibliotheque Na- 

 tionale. " Pecunia tua tecum sit " (thy money be with thee) was 

 Renan's reply to the minister who offered it; and freed hence- 

 forth, by the extraordinary success of his book, from material 

 cares, the " European blasphemer," as Pius IX called him, went 

 quietly on with his work. It was not till after the fall of the 

 empire, in 1870, that his chair was given back to him. Not only 

 did he occupy it thenceforward till his death, but he became in 



