History of Israel
Renan was a great worker. At sixty years of age, having finished the "Origins of Christianity", he began his "History of Israel", based on a lifelong study of the "Old Testament" and on the "Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum", published by the Académie des Inscriptions under Renan's direction from the year 1881 till the end of his life. The first volume of the "History of Israel" appeared in 1887; the third, in 1891; the last two posthumously. As a history of facts and theories, the book has many faults; as an essay on the evolution of the religious idea, it is (despite some passages of frivolity, irony, or incoherence) of extraordinary importance; as a reflection of the mind of Renan, it is the most lifelike of images. In a volume of collected essays, "Feuilles Détachées", published also in 1891, we find the same mental attitude, an affirmation of the necessity of piety independent of dogma. During his last years, he received many honors, and was made an administrator of the Collège de France and grand officer of the Legion of Honor. Two volumes of the "History of Israel", his correspondence with his sister Henriette, his "Letters to M. Berthelot", and the "History of the Religious Policy of Philippe-le-Bel", which he wrote in the years immediately before his marriage, all appeared during the last eight years of the 19th century.