LIFE OF JESUS BY RENAN.

Question (to Erastus.) — What effect will Renan's “Life of Jesus” produce?

Answer. — An enormous effect. Great will be the repercussion among the clergy, because this book overturns the very foundations of the edifice in which it has sheltered itself for eighteen centuries. It is not an irreproachable book, far from it, because it reflects an exclusive opinion, which confines itself within the cramped circle of material life. Nevertheless, Renan is not a materialist, but belongs to that school which, if it does not deny the spiritual principle, also attributes to it no effective and direct role in the guidance of the things of the world. He is one of those intelligent blind men who explain in their own way what they cannot see; who, not understanding the mechanism of vision at a distance, imagine that only by touching it can one know a thing. That is why he reduced the Christ to the proportions of the most ordinary of men, denying him all the faculties that constitute attributes of the Spirit free and independent of matter. Nevertheless, alongside capital errors, especially in what concerns spirituality, the book contains very just observations, which up to here had escaped the commentators and which, from a certain point of view, give it great reach. Its author is included in that legion of incarnate Spirits who can be classified as demolishers of the old world, having as their mission to level the terrain upon which a new, more rational world will be built. God willed that a writer, justly esteemed among men, from the point of view of talent, should come to project light upon some obscure questions tainted with secular prejudices, in order to predispose Spirits to the new beliefs. Without suspecting it, Renan smoothed the way for Spiritism. [1]

[Vie de Jésus, par Ernest Renan - Google Books.]