equipment. You may be quite sure that anything useful or profitable for you which such books may contain will reach you in due course through the proper channel and in the right way, and, that being so, you are under no necessity to jeopardise any part of your peace of mind."
Tholuck's work professedly aims only at presenting a "historical argument for the credibility of the miracle stories of the Gospels." "Even if we admit," he says in one place, "the scientific position that no act can have proceeded from Christ which transcends the laws of nature, there is still room for the mediating view of Christ's miracle- working activity. This leads us to think of mysterious powers of nature as operating in the history of Christ�powers such as we have some partial knowledge of, as, for example, those magnetic powers which have survived down to our own time, like ghosts lingering on after the coming of day." From the standpoint of this spurious rationalism he proceeds to take Strauss to task for rejecting the miracles. "Had this latest critic been able to approach the Gospel miracles without prejudice, in the Spirit of Augustine's declaration, 'dandum est deo, eum aliquid facere posse quod nos investigare non possumus,' he would certainly�since he is a man who in addition to the acumen of the scholar possesses sound common sense�have come to a different conclusion in regard to these difficulties. As it is, however, he has approached the Gospels with the conviction that miracles are impossible; and on that assumption, it was certain before the argument began that the Evangelists were either deceivers or deceived."
Neander, in his Life of Jesus, [1] handles the question with more delicacy of touch, rather in the style of Schleiermacher. "Christ's miracles," he explains, "are to be understood as an influencing of nature, human or material." He does not, however, give so much
- ↑ Das Leben Jesu-Christi. Hamburg, 1837. Aug. Wilhelm Neander was born in 1789 at Gottingen, of Jewish parents, his real name being David Mendel. He was baptized in 1806, studied theology, and in 1813 was appointed to a professorship in Berlin, where he displayed a many-sided activity and exercised a beneficent in- fluence. He died in 1850. The best-known of his writings is the Geschichte der Pflanzung und Leitung der christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel (History of the Propagation and Administration of the Christian Church by the Apostles), Ham- burg, 1832-1833, of which a reprint appeared as late as 1890. Neander was a man not only of deep piety, but also of great solidity of character. Strauss, in his Life of Jesus of 1864, passes the following judgment upon Neander's work: "A book such as in these circumstances Neander's Life of Jesus was bound to be calls forth our sympathy; the author himself acknowledges in his preface that it bears upon it only too clearly the marks of the time of crisis, division, pain, and distress in which it was produced." Of the innumerable "positive" Lives of Jesus which appeared about the end of the 'thirties we may mention that of Julius Hartmann (2 vols., 1837-1839). Among the later Lives of Jesus of the mediating theology may be mentioned that of Theodore Pressel of Tiibingen, which was much read at the time of its appearance (1857, 592 pp.). It aims primarily al edification. We may also mention the Leben des Herrn Jem Christi by Wil. Jak. Lichtenstein (Eriangen, 1856), which reflects the ideas of von Hofmann.
