The Life of Christ [pp. 842-853]

i88i.~ TK~ LIFE OF CHRIST. 843
Christianity, very different from what they are to us ~hey represented and preserved an adequate picture of the Christ in his
person, words and works, of his actual environment, of all the
scenes of his earthly life, because the background, the whole
canvas, the entire complement of these brief records, existed di~
tinctly in their knowledge, their memory and their imagination.
It is this which we are obliged to restore and make our own. It
is necessary to paint the picture of the places where Our Saviour
lived, to learn from contemporary traditions what thoughts and
sentiments occupied the minds of the people of that time and
those countries, to inquire from history respecting the men
whose figures appear in the narrative of the gospels. A whole
vanished world must be reanimated, with its customs and manners, its arts and geography, its p~lity and religion, its personages and events, its chronology and its languages, so that we can
in imagination place ourselves in the position of those who wrote
and who heard or read the accounts preserved to us in the gos
pels, in the beginning of our Christian era. This is rendered possible by the perfection which the sciences of arch~ology, of ancient languages, of chronology, of historical criticism and other
cognate matters have attained. It is aided, also, by the thorough and intelligent explorations of travellers among the places
and the remaining memorials or vestiges of~thesc past scenes and
events in the drama of humanity. The present time affords,
therefore,greater facilities for the task of historical reproduction
and the arrangement of known facts of past times in due historical perspective, than any previous age has done since these
epochs of antiquity vanished from actual existence. Other reasons conspire also to make the fulfilment of this task useful and
opportune.
After the apocryphal gospels and the reveries of extravagant
heretics had disfigured the true idea of Christ, the simple presen
tation of the harmonized narrative of the gospels by such writers
as Tatian in the second century, Ammonius in the third and Eusebius in the fourth, sufficed to dissipate this thin and bodiless
mist of absurdity. The fathers who followed generally applied
themselves to doctrinal and moral expositions of the teachings of
the Lord and his apostles. During the medi~val period the
great writers, such as St. Thomas, St. Buonaventura and Ludolph
the Carthusian, who made expositions of the history of Our
Lord, indulged chiefly in the contemplative attraction which they
felt so strongly, and rather chanted the praises than investigated
the human traits and actions of Christ. Their successors em