as true of generations as of individuals; and this explains why Jesus enjoys a resurrection at every Easter when the lilies come up, and at the beginning of every generation, when young people appear with new culture and new hearts.
I can remember the appearance, a generation ago, of the sstheticized Christ, who was developed out of Renan's Jesus and out of Pre-Raphaelite art by young men without Renan's immense Semitic scholarship, but with more than his allowance of sentiment and sensuousness and sensibility to Syrian wild flowers. I can recall the exotic passions of the Salome, the Herodias and the John Baptist of Oscar Wilde and Sudermann; and Rostand's Jesus, "æsthetically" comparing the lines of the Samaritan woman's figure with the jug which she rests on the well-curb; and Oscar Wilde in "De Profundis," hymning Jesus as the exquisite esthete, the romantic artist, and setting the tragic story of the passion to the flute and oboe music of that period of life when he snatched at vice as an enlargement of experience, a lifting of the horizon—and then at repentance, as another enlargement of experience, a fresh lifting of the horizon.
You may argue all day and perhaps prove by sunset that the Jesus of Wilde and of Rostand was utterly inconsistent with the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; but it would be rather vain to attempt proving that the esthetic sensibility of these poets and their period was utterly inconsistent with the Son of God. Instinctively as I resent the intrusion of fin-de-siècle estheticism between me and the conception of the Holy Land and its characters, which I inherited from Puritan interpreters, I am constrained to admit that my
