and other places where prayer is wont to be made. Rembrandt has seized all the features of his own time, and those immediately preceding it, with various representations of Jesus among the doctors. First we behold the boy standing before a group of ministers, who sit in a certain degree of state. He has risen from one of the front benches to ask a question. They have replied, and he is stating his thoughts. With what attention all listen; it is not with anger, but with a certain admiration, not unmingled with fear lest the boy may be one who thinks himself wiser than his elders. Every pose, every action is just what one might expect, and as indeed it must have been. In another etching two or three doctors have taken the boy apart, and are examining him; the chief rabbi is seated at a table engrossed in a great folio he is studying. But the most interesting of the series, and the most characteristic of the times, is the ardent boy discussing with, or rather instructing, a group of popular teachers, whose council-chamber is the stall of a cobbler in the Breed-straat of Amsterdam. The chief rabbi here is the cobbler himself, a puffy, thoughtful man, with all the making in him of a fanatic; he, too, listens with the same critical attention to the words of the child as did the reverend pastors. Grouped on both sides are the representatives of the popular religions of the day,-the men who would follow the frenzies of Munzer or Mathyszoon, others who would rather sit at the feet and become apostles of the milder Menno Simonis. There is a type in the child, the same as we observe in the Joseph, a type indeed which follows us everywhere and under every form, except in that of the consecrated Christ. This type we should, were we dilating simply on Rembrandt's art, have abundant opportunity to show is no other than Rembrandt himself,-new proof that his designs were evolved from his own inner consciousness, from that storehouse of images gathered up in his brain, the treasures of generations, and of his own immense genius and observation. II. It is suggestive to notice that Rembrandt not only avoids those favourite subjects with the painters of the Renaissance, the baptism of Jesus and the Lord's Supper, but all mysterious circumstances which have not a strong human element in them; thus he has never treated the subject of the Temptation, and has only depicted three of the miracles. These, however, are among the most stupendous, since they involve the raising of the dead, and the quelling of a storm at sea. In the raising of the daughter of Jairus, we see that the soul of the people was not yet so embittered but what it could sympathize with the sorrows of the rich. The scene takes place in the com fortably furnished home of a wealthy Amsterdam merchant. The life of the young girl has just left her, her mother is weeping. Jairus, with evident faith, has brought Jesus to the bedside, exactly as a father would the physician in whom he trusts. The room is suffused with a beautiful warm light, which concentrates itself on the bed of death, as if in harmony with Christ's words: "The child is not dead, but sleepeth." The poor Teacher is approaching the bedside about to say the words, Talitha cumi: "Damsel, I say unto thee, Arise." There are periods in the history of men, periods in the history of nations, when they are in love with death, when to cease to be is the one great boon they desire. It was not so with Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. The world in fact was just born again, and never in human history had its life been fuller or more vigorous. The cessation of earthly existence was indeed a horror which needed the consolation of a great hope. This the popular mind found in the raising of Lazarus. That touching history, the most human account of a supernatural event ever penned, had their fullest belief. Jesus must have come to save men from the jaws of that horrible, insatiate grave. Yet here Rembrandt has instinctively shown that this hope in the popular mind was the most indefinite possible, that it bordered on the essence of poetry; the stretch of the soul into the invisible, the unknowable. The Christ, both in the little and the greater etchings of the "Raising of Lazarus," has the aspect of an enchanter, his figure has grown some cubits in height, he rises weird-like before the open tomb. At the edge of the grave he calls on the dead to arise, and forthwith a burst of light springs from the cold, damp shades of the tomb, spectators fall back with amazement, and the dead, without joy, but with a look inexpressibly touching, is seen trying to free himself from the bonds of his prison. In the smaller etching, Jesus stands in the full light. In the larger his gigantic figure is made to seem more lofty by the fact that we see chiefly his back in deep shadow. The real life which animates the great soul of this people's painter is seen in the fact that whereas he can be at times absolutely revolting, here in this picture of an open grave is nothing ghastly, nothing but what is attractive. Never did painter choose a sweeter or more romantic spot for a tomb. Death seems almost enchanting when one can find repose in circumstances so picturesque as those surrounding the grave of Lazarus; one almost sympathizes with the sacrifice it must have been to be called back to the pettiness of a mundane existence. Rembrandt was certainly chary in illustrating the miracles. The fact that he was a contemporary of Spinoza, who was a native of Amsterdam, has been remarked, but it is impossible that that "pious, virtuous, God-intoxicated" philosopher, as Schleiermacher calls him, could have had any share in forming Rembrandt's opinions, since the latter was already twenty-three years old, and established as a painter in Amsterdam, before Spinoza was born; moreover the work, "Tractatus Theologico-politicus," which contains the dissertation on miracles, was not published until after Rembrandt's death. Nevertheless, intensely original as both were, Spinoza and Rembrandt were the product of their time. The thoughts which the former threw at last into a definite system must have long been in the air, and Rembrandt, who had Jewish friends like Ephraim Bonus and the learned rabbin, Manasseh-ben-Israel, could not fail to hear of the sensation made in the synagogue by the heresies of the young Spinoza. It is said that in illustrating a work for Manasseh, Rembrandt has represented God according to the conception of Spinoza. Whatever Rembrandt thought concerning the miracles of the Gospel, there cannot be a doubt that he entered with his whole soul into their essential meaning. When he comes to tell the story of the Man who went about doing good, healing all that were oppressed of the devil, he works not only con amore, but it is clear that he has perceived the truth as no other painter ever has done. Rembrandt's Christ is, indeed, the Divine Man who emptied Himself of His original glory that He might take upon Himself the form of the most oppressed among mankind-the servile class. As M. de Ronchaud has said, the Christ of Rembrandt is the Christus inglorius, ignobilis, inhonorabilis of Tertullian. With him the semi-pagan ideal of the Italian Renaissance has given place to another ideal more truly Christian, in that it is made universal and more human, the ideal expressing what comes of the depths of the soul. Kolloff, Charles Blanc, and the younger Coquerel, have all remarked on the singular knowledge Rembrandt shows of the text of the Scriptures. It is evident, says the latter, that he did not read the Bible according to the official, authoritative, dependent tradition, but in all liberty; thus he avoided many errors common to painters, and of this he gives some interesting proofs. If we consider this in connection with the fact that Rembrandt was no lover of books, scarcely any being mentioned in the inventory of his goods when the great sale took place, have we not exactly the man educated according to the independent religious ideas springing from the working classes? Such men are to be found constantly in the present day, men with a profound knowledge of Scripture, supposed by the conventionally cultured to be an individual peculiarity, whereas it is only a concentrated form of a learning widely spread among classes ignored by society. Rembrandt, notwithstanding his marriage with and admiration of Saskia Ulenburgh, was a man of the people, and returned more and more after her death into the society of the class from whence he had sprung. If, then, he had such a true insight into the real character of the person and gospel of Jesus Christ, it was because he concentrated in his soul the thoughts of this heterodox people, who for two or three generations had refused clerical guidance, and had formed from their own reading of the Scriptures an ideal for themselves. How precious ought this ideal to be, emanating from the unsophisticated and disinterested masses, and expressed in a universal language by a man of the highest order of genius. I have looked at the impressions of Rembrandt's rare and precious etching of "Christ Healing the Sick," to be seen in the print-room of the British Museum, and in the Cabinet des Estampes at Paris, and I can find no words more suitable to describe it than those of Charles Blanc, who has made so perfect and loving a study of Rembrandt's work :*— "The theatre of the action is exactly what it ought to be. Jesus Christ is followed by a crowd of the poor, the unhappy, the sick, the afflicted. They enter with their Master into an old building, perhaps a ruin. Mingling with the multitude are some Pharisees, teachers of the law, more than one of whom appears half-converted. "In the midst of the crowd Jesus preserves all the serenity of the just man, the earnestness and involuntary majesty of a God. His figure in the centre of the composition stands out powerfully against the dark wall; all the lines of the picture lead to it, every look, every action point to Him. His head is irradiated, but not with a dazzling light; it is, so to speak, entirely moral, an aureole of goodness and virtue. His features bear at once the stamp of reality and of nobility, for if Jesus comes from the ranks of the people, He also belongs to the race of David. That gentle countenance, that sad and tender look, those thin hands, that falling hair, belong to a man who suffers and loves. "Around him press all the disinherited of the world: the lame, the leprous, the blind, the paralytic; and the dismal concert of lamentations and complaints coming up from the midst of the throng seems almost audible. Some implore with groans, others with hope. A woman, stretched on a mat, makes an effort to touch the feet of Jesus, whilst her mother and sister intercede for her; a paralytic has been brought on a sort of a wheelbarrow; he waits the divine look which is to give him motion and life; a robust man points out to the Lord his aged father, who, with the help of his wife, is trying to drag himself, but has scarcely power left either to move or to hope. "The most fervent believers are those who are nearest the person of Christ; in the degree the groups are removed from the centre of the composition the manifestations of faith become less vivid. What delicacy and what truth in these different shades of faith; language can scarcely render them! however the artist makes them felt. "Look at the old woman with her lean arms and wrinkled hands, who with all her soul implores the Master to cure her daughter lying at His feet. Mark how differently faith displays itself in the men and in the women, in the old people and in the children; look at that mother who carries an infant in her arms; her little son, a lad of ten years, pulling her by the dress, and showing her the Christ, seems to say, 'There is the Man who will make baby well.' "But the artist has not forgotten the men in easy circumstances who have * "L'Euvre de Rembrandt reproduit par la photographie," in folio, 1853-7. come through sympathy or curiosity. In the foreground stands a corpulent Pharisee, his hands behind his back, looking contemptuously at the credulous crowd of miserable wretches who follow the Christ; while on a sort of gallery on the ruins a group of other Pharisees are discussing the work of the great Teacher, but the drawing here is but slightly put in, as if the artist wished to reserve all the delicacies of his clare-obscure, all the varieties of tone, all the charm of his subterranean light, for the people to whom alone he is attracted the poor." From healing to preaching, from showing forth the Kingdom of Heaven in works to showing it forth in words-this Rembrandt has done in another etching, called "Jesus Preaching to the People." The scene appears to be taking place in the granary of some inn. The preacher stands on what seems to be the mill-stone. His benign and earnest countenance is the same as that seen in the former picture, and here again all leads to him. Every face in the crowd tells its own tale, and he who chooses to study them might easily imagine the story. A woman, evidently one of those unhappy ones whose touch the Pharisee thought polluting, is crouching at the feet of the Saviour; near her, leaning against the stone, his face agonized, is a poor wretch, suffering the intolerable conviction of sin; close to him, with her back to the spectator, but meekly squatting on the ground, sits a well-dressed mother, her babe in her arms; an elderly man, drawn as by some fascination, has left his seat, and is approaching nearer and nearer to the preacher; on the bench against the wall sits a row of men, in each of whom conviction reveals itself. The old man in the foreground preserves a certain outward calm, but the next is evidently afraid that in a few moments his life of hypocrisy will be revealed, and he and all his neighbours will know him to be what he really is; beside him, in deep dejection, sits a man with a shadow over his face. All these are hearers who listen for themselves, but opposite are the critics and the curious. Just in front of the preacher, a clever, sharp, little man balances himself on the stone, a man of the people, but evidently a theologian, who has come to consider the doctrine of the new teacher. Another behind, with a very intelligent head, a thinker, his hands crossed, his thin lips compressed, meditates. Then come men clad in rich apparel, one alone appears to have any sympathy; on the faces of the others is written stolid wonder or bloated pride, or learned and obstinate doubt, or bitter unbelief. Behind this group a monkishlooking figure in the dark seems watching for words that he may accuse the preacher of heresy and sedition. The light in this picture falls from Jesus on to the ground, the spot where he is standing is in full blaze, as if Rembrandt had thought of the words: "I will make the place of my feet glorious." What a reminiscence was this! Rembrandt represented had blessed How many among the souls that |