man gives up for the sake of the Kingdom of God is repaid a hundredfold in persecutions, in order that in the Coming Age he may receive eternal life as his reward. He interpreted it as meaning that the sufferer shall be compensated by love; his fellow-Christians will endeavour to make it up to him, and will offer him their own possessions so freely that, in consequence of this brotherly love, he will soon have, for the house which he has lost, a hundred houses, for the lost sisters, brothers, and so forth, a hundred sisters, a hundred brothers, a hundred fathers, a hundred mothers, a hundred farms. Schenkel forgets to add that, if this is to be the interpretation of the saying, the persecuted man must also receive through this compensating love, a hundred wives.[1]
This want of insight into the largeness, the startling originality, the self-contradictoriness, and the terrible irony in the thought of Jesus, is not a peculiarity of Schenkel's; it is characteristic of all the liberal Lives of Jesus from Strauss's down to Oskar Holtzmann's.[2] How could it be otherwise? They had to transpose a way of envisaging the world which belonged to a hero and a dreamer to the plane of thought of a rational bourgeois religion. But in Schenkel's representation, with its popular appeal, this banality is particularly obtrusive.
In the end, however, what made the success of the book was not its popular characteristics, whether good or bad, but the enmity which it drew down upon the author. The Basle Privat-Docent who, in his work of 1839, had congratulated the Zurichers on having rejected Strauss, now, as Professor and Director of the Seminary at Heidelberg, came very near being adjudged worthy of the Martyr's crown himself. He had been at Heidelberg since 1851, after holding for a short time De Wette's chair at Basle. At his first coming a mildly reactionary theology might have claimed him as its own. He gave it a right to do so by the way in which he worked against the philosopher, Kuno Fischer, in the Higher Consistory. But in the struggles over the constitution of the Church he changed his position. As a defender of the rights of the laity he ranged himself on the more liberal side. After his great victory in the General Synod of 1861, in which the new constitution of the Church was established, he called a German Protestant assembly at Franktort, in order to set on foot a general movement for Church reform. This assembly met in 1863, and led to the formation of the Protestant Association.
When the Charakterbild Jesu appeared, friend and foe were alike surprised at the thoroughness with which Schenkel advocated the more liberal views. "Schenkel's book," complained Luthardt,
