of Tübingen has been exaggerated, in so far as regards the Life of Jesus. The book appeared on the 23rd of June 1863; before November sixty thousand copies of it were in circulation. Renan still used his literary gifts to pursue a scientific ideal. In the days when he had composed his huge, immature treatise on the Future of Science, he had written: "I envy the man who shall evoke from the past the origins of Christianity. Such a writer would compose the most important book of the century." He set to work to realize this project, and produced the Apostles in 1866, and St Paul in 1869, after having visited Asia Minor with his wife, where he studied the scenes of the labours of St Paul as minutely as in 1861 he had observed the material surroundings of the life of Jesus.
Renan was not only a scholar. In St Paul, as in the Apostles, he shows his concern with the larger social life, his sense of fraternity, and a revival of the democratic sentiment which had inspired L'Avenir de la science. In 1869 he presented himself as the candidate of the liberal opposition at the parliamentary election for Meaux. While his temper had become less aristocratic, his Liberalism had grown more tolerant. On the eve of its dissolution Renan was half prepared to accept the Empire, and, had he been elected to the Chamber of Deputies, he would have joined the group of l'Empire liberal. But he was not elected. A year later war was declared with Germany, the Empire fell, and Napoleon III. went into exile. The Franco-German War was a turning-point in Renan's history. Germany had always been to him the asylum of thought and disinterested science. Now he saw the land of his ideal destroy and ruin the land of his birth; he beheld the German no longer as a priest, but as an invader. His heart turned to France. In La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (1871) he endeavoured at least to bind her wounds, to safeguard her future. Yet he was still under the influence of Germany. The ideal and the discipline which he proposed to his defeated country were those of her conqueror—a feudal society, a monarchical government, an élite, which the rest of the nation exists merely to support and nourish; an ideal of honour and duty imposed by a chosen few on the recalcitrant and subject multitude. The errors of the Commune confirmed Renan in this reaction. At the same time the irony always perceptible in his work grows more bitter. His Dialogues philosophiques, written in 1871, his Ecclesiastes (1882) and his Antichrist (1876) (the fourth volume of the Origins of Christianity, dealing with the reign of Nero) are incomparable in their literary genius, but they are examples of a disenchanted and sceptical temper. He had vainly tried to make his country follow his precepts. He resigned himself to watch her drift towards perdition. The progress of events showed him, on the contrary, a France which every day left a little stronger, and he aroused himself from his disbelieving, disillusioned mood and observed with genuine interest the struggle for justice and liberty of a democratic society. For his mind was the broadest of the age. The fifth and sixth volumes of the Origins of Christianity (the Christian Church and Marcus Aurelius) show him reconciled with democracy, confident in the gradual ascent of man, aware that the greatest catastrophes do not really interrupt the sure if imperceptible progress of the world—reconciled also in some measure, if not with the truths, at least with the moral beauties of Catholicism, and with the remembrance of his pious youth.
On the threshold of old age the philosopher cast a glance at the days of his childhood. He was nearly sixty when, in 1883, he published those Souvenirs d'enfance et de jeunesse which, after the Life of Jesus, are the work by which he is chiefly known. They possess that lyric note of personal utterance which the public prizes in a man already famous. They showed the blasé modern reader that a world no less poetic, no less primitive than that of the Origins of Christianity exists, or still existed within living memory, on the north-western coast of France. They have the Celtic magic of ancient romance and the simplicity, the naturalness, the veracity which the 19th century prized so highly. But his Ecclesiastes, published a few months earlier, his Drames philosophiques, collected in 1888, give a more adequate image of his fastidious critical, disenchanted, yet not unhopeful spirit. These books are often bitter and melancholy, yet not destitute of optimism. They show the attitude towards uncultured Socialism of a philosopher liberal by conviction, by temperament an aristocrat. We learn in them how Caliban (democracy), the mindless brute, educated to his own responsibility, makes after all an adequate ruler; how Prospero (the aristocratic principle, or, if we will, the mind) accepts his dethronement for the sake of greater liberty in the intellectual world, since Caliban proves an effective policeman, and leaves his superiors a free hand in the laboratory; how Ariel (the religious principle) acquires a firmer hold on life, and no longer gives up the ghost at the faintest hint of change. Indeed, Ariel flourishes in the service of Prospero under the external government of the many-headed brute. For the one thing needful is not destined to succumb. Religion and knowledge are as imperishable as the world they dignify. Thus out of the depths rises unvanquished the essential idealism of Ernest Renan.
Renan was a great worker. At sixty years of age, having finished the Origins of Christianity, he began his History of Israel, based on a lifelong study of the Old Testament and on the Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum, published by the Académie des Inscriptions under Renan's direction from the year 1881 till the end of his life. The first volume of the History of Israel appeared in 1887, the third and finest volume in 1891, the last two only after the historian's decease. As a history of facts and theories the book has many faults; as an essay on the evolution of the religious idea it is (despite some passages of frivolity, irony, or incoherence) of extraordinary importance; as a reflection of the mind or Ernest Renan it is the most lifelike of images. In a volume of collected essays, Feuilles détachees, published also in 1891, we find the same mental attitude, an affirmation of the necessity of piety independent of dogma. On the 12th of October 1892 he died after a few days' illness. In his last years he received many marks of honour, being made an administrator of the Collège de France and grand officer of the Legion of Honour. Two volumes of the History of Israel, his correspondence with his sister Henriette, his Letters to M. Berthelot, and the History of the Religious Policy of Philippe-le-Bel, which he wrote in the years immediately before his marriage, all appeared during the last eight years of the 19th century.
See Desportes and Bournand, E. Renan, sa me et son œuvre (1892); E. Grant Duff, Ernest Renan, in memoriam (1893); Séailles, E. Renan, essai de biographies psychologique (1894); G. Monod, Les maitres de l'histoire (1894); Allier, La Philosophie d'E. Renan (1895); M. J. Darmesteter, La 'vie de E. R. (1898); Platzhoff, E. Renan, ein Lebensbild (1900); Brauer Philosophy of Ernest Renan (1904); W. Barry, Renan (1905); Sorel, Le Systéme historique de R. (1905-1906).
(A. M. F. D.; X.)
RENARD, ALPHONSE FRANÇOIS (1842–1903), Belgian geologist and petrographer, was born at Renaix, in Eastern Flanders, on the 27th of September 1842. He was educated for the church of Rome, and from 1866 to 1869 he was superintendent at the Collège de la Paix, Namur. In 1870 he entered the Jesuit Training College at the old abbey of Maria Laach in the Eifel, and there, while engaged in studying philosophy and science, he became interested in the geology of the district, and especially in the volcanic rocks. Thenceforth he worked at chemistry and mineralogy, and qualified himself for those petrographical researches for which he was distinguished. In 1874 he became professor of chemistry and geology in the college of the Belgian Jesuits at Louvain, a few years later he was appointed one of the curators of the Royal Natural History Museum at Brussels, and in 1882 he relinquished his post at Louvain. In 1888 he was chosen professor of geology at the university of Ghent, and retained the post until the close of his life. Meanwhile he had been ordained priest in 1877, and had intended to enter the Society of Jesus. He was known as the Abbé Renard; but, as remarked by Sir A. Geikie, "As years passed, the longing for mental freedom grew ever stronger, until at last it overmastered all the traditions and associations of a lifetime, and he finally separated himself from the church of Rome." His first work,
