836 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



1883 the honored head of the great scientific establishment from 

 which he had once been driven with indignity. 



Forced, by the publication of the Vie de Je'sus, into the arena 

 of religious conflict, Renan never stooped to polemics. He kept 

 the quiet of his thoughts, untouched by all this wrangling; and 

 he continued to speak of Christianity and the Catholic Church 

 with the same even fairness — I may say more, with the same re- 

 spectful though independent sympathy. The English public had 

 an opportunity of appreciating these high qualities of intellectual 

 liberty and calm when, in 1880, he gave his Hibbert lectures on 

 Rome and Christianity, and another admirable lecture on Mar- 

 cus Aurelius, at the Royal Institution — a lecture in which he 

 anticipated the generalization of the last and finest volume of his 

 Origines du Christianisme. 



The year 1870 marks an important epoch in the life of Renan. 

 It was, indeed, the year of a new crisis. From the moment when 

 he emancipated himself from his first foster-mother, the Church, 

 and from his ecclesiastical education, Germany had been the sec- 

 ond foster-mother of his mind. As he had broken with the Church 

 without ceasing to recognize her greatness and the services she 

 had rendered, and still renders, to the world, so now he suffered, 

 not without pain, the relaxation — almost the rupture — of the moral 

 ties which bound him to Germany ; but he never repudiated the 

 debt of gratitude he owed her, nor ever sought to depreciate her 

 virtues and her merits. He gives eloquent expression to his feel- 

 ings in his letters to Dr. Strauss in 1871, in his speech on his re- 

 ception into the French Academy, and in his letter to a German 

 friend in 1878. At the same time a new development took place 

 in his political conceptions. An aristocrat by temperament, and 

 a constitutional monarchist in opinion, he found himself called to 

 live in a democratic society and under a republic. Convinced as 

 he was that the great movements of history have their real origin 

 in the very nature of things, and that one can influence one's con- 

 temporaries and one's compatriots only by accepting the tenden- 

 cies and conditions of the time, he was able to reconcile himself 

 to the democracy and the republic, and to appreciate their advan- 

 tages without ignoring their difficulties and their dangers. 



Henceforth, therefore, Renan was in full possession of his 

 powers and in full harmony with his time. Emancipated from 

 the Church, he was the interpreter of free thought in its loftiest 

 and most learned form, in a country which regarded clericalism 

 as the most formidable enemy of its new institutions. Emanci- 

 pated from Germany, and finding in the very misfortunes of his 

 country a stimulus and a spur to his patriotism, he sought to make 

 his writings the most perfect expression of the genius of France. 

 Emancipated from all the fetters of extinct political systems, he 



