John: "The conclusion might have been drawn from my discourses that I was not the Messiah. Why should people attribute such lofty pretensions to me?" etc. In order to give the Gospels the true literary flavour, a characterisation is tacked on to each of the persons of the narrative. In the case of the disciples, for instance, this runs: "They had sound common sense, but very limited insight; the capacity to receive teaching, but an incapacity for reflective thought; a knowledge of their own weakness, but a difficulty in getting rid of old prejudices; sensibility to right feeling, but weakness in following out a pre-determined moral plan."
The simplest occurrences give occasion for sentimental portraiture. The saying "Except ye become as little children" is introduced in the following fashion: "Jesus called a boy who was standing near. The boy came. Jesus took his hand and told him to stand beside Him, nearer than any of His disciples, so that he had the foremost place among them. Then Jesus threw His arm round the boy and pressed him tenderly to His breast. The disciples looked on in astonishment, wondering what this meant. Then He explained to them," etc. In these expansions Hess does not always escape the ludicrous. The saying of Jesus in John x. 9, "I am the door," takes on the following form: "No one, whether he be sheep or shepherd, can come into the fold (if, that is to say, he follows the right way) except in so far as he knows me and is admitted by me, and included among the flock."
Remhard's work is on a distinctly higher level. The author was born in 1753. In 1792, after he had worked for fourteen years as Docent in Wittenberg, he was appointed Senior Court Chaplain at Dresden. He died in 1812.
"I am, as you know, a very prosaic person," writes Reinhard to a friend, and in these words he has given an admirable characterisation of himself. The writers who chiefly appeal to him are the ancient moralists; he acknowledges that he has learned more from them than from a "collegium homileticum." In his celebrated "System of Christian Ethics" (5 vols., 1788-1815) he makes copious use of them. His sermons — they fill thirty-five volumes, and in their day were regarded as models — show some power and depth of thought, but are all cast in the same mould. He seems to have been haunted by a fear that it might some time befall him to admit into his mind a thought which was mystical or visionary, not justifiable by the laws of logic and the canons of the critical reason. With all his philosophising and rationalising, however, certain pillars of the supernaturalistic view of history remain for him immovable.
At first sight one might be inclined to suppose that he frankly shared the belief in miracle. He mentions the raising of the
