had premeditated to give, more or less pleasant to him. No one cares whether the speaker is or is not sincere. It is well known, indeed, that he must often be insincere, since he speaks, not his own opinions, but those of his party, or rather those which it suits his party to profess for the time being. No one cares for their truth. What is wanted is that they be plausible, and afford a good excuse for the vote.

La foule is sincere. It comes to you for information and counsel. The first, almost the only quality which it demands from you is, sincerity. You may reproach it, you may laugh at it, you may run counter to its prejudices, it will bear anything from you while it believes you to be honestly anxious to give it good advice. But beware how you are found out in flattering it. Beware how you are found out in saying anything which it believes to be insincere. That instant your influence is gone. Inferior men may be powerful mob-orators, if they have the same prejudices and feelings as their hearers. They reveal to every man that he is sympathized with by them, and sympathized with by his neighbors. They render every folly contagious. They strengthen wrong opinions, and excite passions already too violent.

The real triumph and the real usefulness is not to stimulate, but to moderate, to control, to alter, and often to reverse. So far as I effected these things, or any of these things, before the Hôtel de Ville, I was useful.

It is remarkable that there is a sort of dualism in a speaker's mind. However eager, however impassioned you may be, you hear from behind you a quiet, impartial voice, judging, censuring, and advising; whispering to you an impartial commentary, generally of blame or of warning. "That argument," it says, "is false; that fact is exaggerated, you do not believe what you are saying, and they will find it out; you have said enough on this subject-keep away from that subject." The voice never comes from before you; the whisperer seems to be perched on your shoulder, with his mouth close to your ear. He never leaves you. In your fiercest emotion, “dans tout l'abandon et toutes les témérités de votre éloquence," whether you are bursting with anger and indignation, or intoxicated by the sympathy and cheers of your audience, the cold, equable voice pursues you, and directs and restrains without interrupting you. There is, as I said before, a dualism in your mind. You are at the same instant the fervid, impetuous orator, and the calm, unexcited critic.

FAULTS OF THE FRENCH CHARACTER.

March 13th (1862).—Prince Napoleon. The great fault of the French is, qu'ils n'ont pas de

caractère. This shows itself in their dread of being in a minority. On every question the instinct of a Frenchman is, to ascertain on which side is the majority, and to join it. It shows itself also in their want of elasticity; they have no backbone. A blow from the Government strikes them down, and they lie flat and torpid. It was the same three hundred years ago. There was at that time a strong Protestant feeling in France; but it could not stand persecution. Next to this, their great fault is their hatred of superiors. The peasant, lying at the bottom of society, hates every one who wears a coat, and still more every one who wears a cassock.

Pietri. And yet he would rise if you were to pull down his clocher.

Prince Napoleon. In some departments, perhaps in twenty out of the eighty-six, he likes his clocher, but in every department he hates his curé.

best.

Pietri. The lower clergy, however, are the

Prince Napoleon. The least bad. The other day a storm was raised in the Senate because I was supposed to have said that Napoleon reentered France in 1815 with the cry, "A bas les prêtres!"* If I had said so it would have been the truth. The only country in Europe in which the priest is popular is England; and he is popular there because he is a gentleman, a man of the world, a père de famille, and above all, because he is rich and is charitable. Our priests are poor; they eke out their incomes by exactions from the people, they are turned out of their seminaries ignorant of everything except a scholastic divinity which, even if it be comprehensible, no one understands; they spring from the same class as the peasants, over whom they claim absolute authority, they interfere with the ménage, they set the wife and the daughter against the husband and the father. Every government and every party that relies on their support is doomed.

Senior. Does the peasant hate the prefect? Prince Napoleon. No. In the first place, he never sees him. To him the prefect is an abstract idea, or, at most, an impersonation of the Government; and the peasant clings to the Government as the enemy of his enemy-the bourgeois.

tron.

What the workman hates most is his paWhen I had to select a couple of hundred workmen to send them to London for the exhibition, I offered them forty thousand francs toward the expense. They accepted it from me, but they all said that they would not take a sou from their masters.

Next to his patron, the workman hates the bourgeois. Louis Philippe and his bourgeois

*What he really said was, "A bas les traitres!"-ED.

Chamber of Deputies were abominations to him. So was the Provisional Government and the Constituent Assembly. All the workmen were behind the barricades against Louis Philippe in February, 1848, and against Cavaignac in the following June. He hates constitutional government, with its checks and counter-checks, and hierarchy of power. His affection is given only to what he supposes to be revolutionary principles, the absence of an aristocracy-that is to say, of any intermediate between the Government and the mass of the people. As for the bourgeois, he hates everybody, because he fears everybody. He hates and fears the people; he hates and fears what aristocracy we have left to us; he hates and fears the Government.

Senior. Why the Government?

Prince Napoleon. Because it taxes him, becauses it imposes free trade on him, because it makes war, subjects him to the conscription, and interferes with trade.

X. Because it emasculates his newspaper, internes him, or sends him to Cayenne if he talks too loud, and because it interferes with the course of justice if he is defrauded by one of its favorites.

Senior. And the aristocracy?

Prince Napoleon. There is no aristocracy except the aristocracy of office, which gives influence but no respect, and the small aristocracy of military and civil talent. Our officials and generals and orators and littérateurs are something while their office or their talent continues, but their influence is transient. . . .

I bitterly deplore it, but I am in a small minority. France is not liberal in government, in commerce-in anything, in short, except religion, and its religious tolerance arises from its disbelief. Even the schoolmaster does not affect to have any faith in the doctrines which he is obliged to pretend to teach.

Pietri. We must trust to the gradual operation of the press.

Prince Napoleon. I, too, trust to the press. Though it has done positively but little, it has done comparatively much during the last ten years. It has enabled the Emperor to give us an installment of free trade, and of free discus

sion.

Illiberal as France still is, she is much less so than she was in 1852; much less so than she would have been if Louis Philippe had continued. But we shall not see fully the useful influence of the press till it is free. I say useful influence, for the positive influence, the influence for evil, is probably greatest under a system of compression. In America, where there is perfect freedom, no one newspaper has much influence. In England, where the enormous expense of founding and

keeping up a newspaper gives a monopoly to a few great capitalists, a few newspapers have considerable power; but not half the power which they have in France. The fiscal burdens, the cautionnement, the liability to suppression, the stamp, keep the number of papers lower even than it is in England, and the notoriety of the fact that they all publish, and indeed exist, only on the sufferance of the Government, gives importance to their censures. Everything that they say in opposition to the Government is taken as an admission. What I wish for is not so much the liberty of the press as its anarchy.

Senior. By its anarchy, do you mean that there shall be no such thing as a délit de la presse?

Prince Napoleon. I mean that there shall be no stamp, no cautionnement, no forced signature, no avertissement. At present, the press is under the régime not of l'arbitraire, which is bad enough, but of le caprice, which is intolerable. I wish a journal with only two hundred abonnés to be able to live. I wish to have a hundred, or five hundred such journals; their errors and their falsehoods would neutralize one another. But, while every opposition journal calls in question the principle of the Government and of the dynasty, we must have some délits de la presse. In England you have practically abandoned political prosecutions, because these questions are never raised. No newspaper in England writes against Christianity, or royalty, or property. Still the system of avertissement, if it were not managed by a fool or a madman, has many advantages.

Petinet. I detest it. To be tried, warned, and suppressed, without being heard, is intolerable.

Prince Napoleon. Still it is better to be suppressed than to be imprisoned.

ENGLISH HABITS.

Saturday, April 5th (1862).-We dined at Madame Anisson's, and afterward went to Thiers. Madame Anisson talked about English habits.

Madame Anisson. There is one institution which governs your whole lives, which I could never tolerate-the luncheon. Luncheon and breakfast destroy the whole morning. Your breakfast is so early that nothing can be done before it. It lasts till about eleven. Then, in winter, you must go out; for there is no going out after luncheon. At two comes luncheon; it is over by three, and by four it is dark. The drawing-room is deserted, you sit in your own room till half-past seven, and then you are expected to dine, though you in fact dined only four hours and a half before. Our plan of breakfast

ing at half-past eleven gives us two or three hours before breakfast, and the whole day from halfpast twelve to half-past six free.

Senior. I am quite ready to surrender luncheon, if you will give up a French institution—a lady's having a day for morning receptions.

Madame Anisson. I abominate it, and never submit to it. I pay a morning visit in order to talk to a friend. What conversation can there be in a room of twenty people, when somebody is coming in and somebody is going out every ten minutes?

Roger Anisson. The institution which I envy you most is that of downs and commons. We have biens communaux, but they are generally in wood, or let by the commune to individuals. The village-green, round which cottages with their little gardens, and sometimes the houses of the smaller aristocrats of the village-the doctor, the clergyman, and the retired tradesman-are scattered, is almost unknown to us. So is the great open down, on which I have ridden in England for ten miles.

CONVERSATIONS WITH RENAN.

May 1st (1863).—I will throw together several long conversations which, during the last ten days, I have had with Renan, on the subject of his unpublished work, "Histoire Critique des Origines du Christianisme."

Renan. It is printed, but I do not intend to publish it until I have delivered my next course of lectures-perhaps not until I have delivered more than one course. It will scandalize the orthodox world. I reject totally the supposed inspiration of the compilers of the Gospels. It was an idea introduced by the schoolmen, in order to supply premises for their disputations. The human mind was then the slave of authority. A text from Aristotle was conclusive in metaphysics; a text from the Bible was conclusive in theology. The skill of the disputer was shown by leading his adversary to an affirmation contradictory to one of the indisputable authorities.

Senior. St. Hilaire, who is a considerable Orientalist, believes that the Gospels were not published in their present form until the second century.

Renan. I disagree with him; I have no doubt that the Gospels assumed their present form in the first century, and I see no reason for disbelieving the uniform tradition that they were compiled by those whose names they bear. When I use the word "compiled," I exclude St. John, for his Gospel is obviously original, and its peculiarities are a strong proof that when it was written the other three Gospels existed. Not one of the miracles related by any of the earlier Evangelists is mentioned by St. John, except the feed

ing of the five thousand, and the walking of Jesus on the lake the following night.

St. John, indeed, scarcely mentions an event which is told by any one else. Such remarkable ones as the Transfiguration, the choosing the Apostles, and the institution of the Eucharist, at each of which he was present, are not even alluded to. There is not a single parable in the whole Gospel, nor any moral precept, except the "new commandment," to love one another. The only condition on which eternal life is made to depend is faith in himself. Strongly contrasted with the absence of moral teaching is the abundance of doctrinal teaching.

The union of Jesus with the Father, the necessity of a firm belief in this union, and the promise of eternal life to those who possess this belief, constitute nearly the whole Gospel.

This absence from the work of St. John of everything contained in the other Gospels could not have taken place by accident; and, if it was intentional, he must have had all the other Gospels before him.

Again, it is impossible that the predictions ascribed to Christ three days before the passion could have been ascribed to him by any one writing after the end of the first century; for that prophecy declares that, "immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun shall be darkened, the stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken; and then shall all the tribes of the earth mourn, and they shall see the Son of Man coming in the clouds of heaven with power and great glory. And he shall send forth his angels, and they shall gather together his elect from one end of the heaven to the other. When you see all these things, know that it is near, even at the door. Verily, I say unto you, that this generation shall not pass away until all these things be fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."

Senior. It seems clear that Matthew confounds two different events predicted by our Saviour in the same conversation. That conversation began by the remarks of the disciples on the vast substructions of the Temple. Jesus answered that the day was coming when one stone would not be left on another. Then Peter, James, John, and Andrew, asked him privately when this was to be, and what would be the previous tokens. He answers, according to Matthew and Mark, that the token would be the desecration of the sanctuary foretold by Daniel; * according to Luke, the surrounding of Jerusalem with hostile armies. "There will then," he adds, "be misery

* "They shall pollute the sanctuary, and shall place there the abomination that maketh desolate.”—DAN. ii. 31.

such as never was endured before, and Jerusalem will be trodden down by the Gentiles." Here the first prophecy, that of the fall of Jerusalem, seems to end. The second prophecy which you have mentioned, and which describes the end of the world, follows. Matthew connects the two by the word "immediately"; but, as the events predicted in the second prophecy have not yet occurred, it is clear that Matthew, impressed with the then prevalent notion that the end of the world was at hand, confounded the two prophecies, and that Mark and Luke copied him. The second event, the destruction of the world, seems to be that of which Jesus says, “Of that hour and day knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father only." But he does foretell the time of the first event, the destruction of Jerusalem, and fixes it within the lives of the existing generation, as he had previously fixed the arrival of the kingdom of heaven before the deaths of some of those who then stood around him.* Luke seems to have perceived the inconsistency of these statements, and omits the affirmation that no one, not the angels, not the Son, but only the Father knew the time when the prediction would be fulfilled. John, as you remark, omits the whole conversation.

Renan. Few things seem more remarkable than the scantiness of the memoranda of the teaching of Jesus. His disciples, indeed, did not belong to a writing class, they were illiterate artisans and fishermen. Nor was it a writing age. Much, too, is to be attributed to the prevailing expectation that the end of the world, or rather of this “aion,” of this phase of the world's existence, was at hand and would be immediately succeeded by the kingdom of heaven. It seemed unnecessary to record lessons which would soon cease to be applicable. I think it probable that the first record was that which Matthew made of the discourses of Jesus-the "logia," as they are called. Then probably Mark added a narrative of some of the events of his ministry. Still later, probably after the destruction of Jerusalem, Luke published his collections, and the possessors of the different Gospels filled up their copies by extracts taken from the others; and thus the first three Gospels became chapter after chapter identical. Much later John wrote, and, without adding anything to the moral lessons recorded by his predecessors, gave them a sanction by declaring the divinity and preexistence of Jesus.

The general impression is, that the teaching of Jesus was melancholy. Toward the latter part of his ministry, after he had warned his disciples that they would be objects of hatred

Matt. xvi. 28.

and contempt, that they would all be persecuted and some destroyed, that he himself would suffer an ignominious and cruel death, that Jerusalem would be trodden under foot, and that the whole Jewish nation would undergo calamities such as had never been endured before, of course the general character of his discourse became melancholy. But it does not seem to have been so at the beginning. The disciples believed that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. What it was to be was not clearly indicated, but there can be little doubt that they expected the fulfillment of the prophecy of Daniel.

"I saw in the night visions, and behold one like the Son of Man came with the clouds of heaven, and came to the Ancient of days. And there was given to him dominion and glory and a kingdom that all people, nations, and languages should serve him; his dominion is an everlasting dominion, which shall not pass away, and his kingdom is that which shall not be destroyed. And the kingdom and dominion, and the greatness of the kingdom under the whole heaven shall be given to the people of the saints of the Most High, whose kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and all dominions shall serve and obey him." (Daniel, chapter vii.)

The pagan golden age was a painful recollection. They believed in the gradual deterioration of mankind :

"Etas parentum pejor aris tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos
Progeniem vitiosiorem."

The Jewish golden age was future, and it was believed to be now at hand.

Galilee even now, after the ravages of centuries of war and of Mussulman waste and tyranny, is one of the most delightful countries in the world, full of verdure, water, and shade. Nazareth itself is a charming little town, by far the most agreeable in Palestine. Its low, square, detached houses have no beauty within or without, but they are embosomed in vines, fig-trees, and oranges, and stand in gardens intersected by streams from the hills around. The fountain, which was the center of the society of the ancient town, is ruined, as everything under Turkish rule gets ruined, but its ruins are still the resort of Nazarene women, whose beauty, a gift from the Virgin Mary, still makes them renowned in the East. The ridge, freshened by the seabreeze, on the slope of which the town stands, commands a glorious prospect, extending from Carmel and the sea to the west to beyond the valley of Jordan to the east. It was in this delicious country that Jesus passed his youth and his adolescence, and he strayed little out of it during the wanderings which occupied his minis

try. The villages of Magdala, Capernaum, Bethsaida, and Chorazin, were all in the small space of a few square leagues between Nazareth and the lake. The trees, excepting the fruit-trees which overshadow the gardens, have disappeared; but the waters of the lake are as clear and as blue as ever; its shores, free from mud, are covered with turf and flowers down to the water's edge, and are broken into little bays and capes, covered with thickets of arbutus, rose, and cactus. He does not appear to have traveled in Samaria more than once or twice, on his way to Jerusalem, and he seldom visited Jerusalem except to attend the annual feasts. The arid, naked plains of Judea probably offended his exquisite taste for the beauties of nature, as much as the narrowness and hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Scribes disgusted his moral sense. He seems always to have returned with new delight to the verdure of Galilee and to the simplicity of the Galileans.

Senior. And yet it was in Galilee that he said that a prophet had no honor in his own country.

Renan. That must have been an ebullition of temporary disappointment. It was said, too, in the very beginning of his ministry, when his own brethren disbelieved in him, and those who had known him as a child, the son of humble parents, were slow to admit his Messianic pretensions. At a later period he was more reverenced in Galilee than in Jerusalem. Though his disciples were of the humblest, or the least respected classes—fishermen, artisans, tax-gatherers, and sinners-they were not unrefined. The coarseness of the European boor or workingman is not to be found in the East. No man is more gentlemanlike than a Bedouin. Human nature requires little in such a country; the idea of comfort belongs to indoor life and cold climates. It was very rarely indeed that Jesus or his disciples were ill received. They had a common purse of which Judas Iscariot was the bearer, but he does not seem to have made much use of it. When the twelve, and afterward the seventy, were sent out, they were desired to take with them no money, but they suffered no inconvenience for the want of it.

The peculiarities of his teaching were cheerful. Every previous religion had been ascetic. Even the disciples of John the Baptist had fasted. Every previous religion interposed between God and man a priesthood. Every previous religion was encumbered with ceremonies, long prayers, and observances.

Senior. Not only every previous religion, but every subsequent one. There are no religions to which these qualities more belong than those of the Roman and of the Greek Church.

Renan. Well, the religion taught by Jesus is utterly free from them. The scene of the first miracle attributed to him is a marriage-feast. No scruples as to the character of the master or of the guests prevented his acceptance of invitations. He came to call not the just but sinners to repentance. In the East a house which receives a stranger becomes for the time public. The inhabitants of the village, and above all the children, flock round it. Jesus would not allow them to be repulsed. The women showed their reverence and their love by offering to him precious oils and perfumes. The disciples sometimes murmured at the waste or the interruption, but his affectionate heart sympathized with all testimonies of affection. He disapproved of all worldly cares. "Sufficient," he said, “for the day is the evil thereof." He reproved Martha for the elaborateness of her hospitality. The intercourse among the disciples was sometimes a little disturbed by questions as to their comparative rank in the future kingdom; but these were quickly ended by the interposition of their Master, and in general they seem to have lived together in perfect harmony. Their love and reverence of their Master were abundant, and so was his affection for them; though John had his peculiar love, and Peter was the one on whose vigor and devotion he most relied. The doctrine itself was called "the good news." The approach of the kingdom was the subject of constant expectation. It was one of the petitions of the only prayer which Jesus taught. I can conceive nothing more joyous than these early pilgrimages in Galilee, in a beautiful country, and a climate such as untraveled northerners can not conceive; of a

Renan. I am not sure that that can be called a complaint. He had then a settled residence at Capernaum. It was probably merely a statement that being on a journey he had for the time no fixed habitation.

There is no allusion in the Gospels to indigence among his disciples. Some of them, such as Zaccheus and Joseph of Arimathea, were rich, though he treated wealth as an obstacle to piety.

man ever spoke before, and of disciples young and enthusiastic, free from all worldly cares, and publishing everywhere the "good news that the kingdom of heaven is at hand." That kingdom, according to the belief of the disciples, was to take place on this earth. It had a far greater influence on their imagination than the promises of happiness in a future world and in a future state of existence could have had.

Many of the expressions of Jesus seem to point to a terrestrial millennium.