published in 1838, and appeared in a second edition in 1841. In the latter
year the book was read by Marian Evans, after a faithful perusal of the
Bible as a preparation for it, and quickly re-read, and with great interest
and delight. She then pronounced it "the most interesting book she had ever
read," dating from it a new birth to her mind. The book was translated into
German, Strauss writing a preface for it, and that interpreter of
Christianity praised it highly. Hennell rejected all supernaturalism and
the miraculous, regarding Christianity as a slow and natural development
out of Judaism, aided by Platonism and other outside influences. He finds
the sources of Jesus' teachings in the Jewish tendencies of the time, while
the cause of the supremacy of the man Jesus was laid in a long course of
events which had swelled to a crisis at the time of his appearance, and
bore him aloft to a height whence his personal qualities told with a power
derived from the accumulated force of many generations. Jesus was an
enthusiast who believed himself the predicted king of the Jews, and he was
a revolutionist expecting to establish an earthly kingdom for the supremacy
of Judaism. Jesus was largely influenced by the Essenes, but he rejected
their austerity. Hennell found a mixture of truth and error in the Gospels,
and believed that many mythical elements entered into the accounts given of
Jesus. A thorough rationalist, he claimed to accept the spiritual essence
of Christianity, and to value highly the moral teachings of Jesus. In a
later work on _Christian Theism_ he finds an argument for belief in God
mainly in nature. In his conclusions he is not far from F.W. Newman and
Theodore Parker; but he does not give the credit to intuition and the
religious faculty they do, though he is an earnest believer in God, and
inclined to accept Christianity as the highest expression of religion.

Sara S. Hennell early published _An Essay on the Skeptical Tendency of
Butler's Analogy_, and a Baillie prize essay on _Christianity and
Infidelity: An Exposition of the Arguments on Both Sides_. A work of much