did not desire to put pressure upon the human mind, but only to guide it. "It would be impossible to show a more conscientious respect and a more delicate consideration for the rights of human reason than is shown by Jesus. He will conquer only by convincing." "He is willing to bear with contradiction, and condescends to meet the most irrational objections and the most ill-natured misrepresentations with the most incredible patience."
It was well for Reinhard that he had no suspicion how full of enthusiasm Jesus was, and how He trod reason under His feet!
But what kind of relation was there between this rational religion taught by Jesus and the Christian theology which Reinhard accepted? How does he harmonise the symbolical view of Baptism and the Lord's Supper which he here expounds with ecclesiastical doctrine? How does he pass from the conception of the divine teacher to that of the Son of God?
This is a question which he does not feel himself obliged to answer. For him the one circle of thought revolves freely within the other, but they never come into contact with each other.
So far as concerns the presentation of the teaching, the Life of Jesus by Opitz follows the same lines as that of Reinhard. It is disfigured, however, by a number of lapses of taste, and by a crass supernaturalism in the description of the miracles and experiences of the Great Teacher.
Jakobi writes "for thoughtful and sympathetic readers." He recognises that much of the miraculous is a later addition to the facts, but he has a rooted distrust of thoroughgoing rationalism, "whose would-be helpful explanations are often stranger than the miracles themselves." A certain amount of miracle must be maintained, but not for the purpose of founding belief upon it: "the miracles were not intended to authenticate the teaching of Jesus, but to surround His life with a guard of honour."[1]
Whether Herder, in his two Lives of Jesus, is to be classed with the older rationalists is a question to which the answer must be "Yes, and No," as in the case of every attempt to classify those men of lonely greatness who stand apart from their contemporaries, but who nevertheless are not in all points in advance of them.
Properly speaking, he has really nothing to do with the rationalists, since he is distinguished from them by the depth of his insight and his power of artistic apprehension, and he is far from sharing their lack of taste. Further, his horizon embraces problems of which rationalism, even in its developed form, never
- ↑ This is perhaps the place to mention the account of the life of Jesus which is given in the first part of Plank's Geschichte des Christentums. Gottingen, 1818.
