tastrophe which Judaism was soon to experience. The synagogue did not understand till long after to what it exposed itself in enforcing laws of intolerance. The Empire was certainly still further from suspecting that its future destroyer had been born. For nearly three hundred years it pursued its path without suspecting that by its side principles were growing which would subject humanity to a complete transformation. At once theocratic and democratic, the idea cast forth by Jesus into the world was, together with the invasion of northern tribes, the most active cause of dissolution to the work of the Cæsars. On the one hand, the right of all men to share in the kingdom of God was proclaimed. On the other, religion was henceforth separated in principle from the State. The rights of conscience, unprotected by political law, resulted in creating a new power, the "spiritual power." This power has more than once belied its origin. For ages bishops have been princes, and the Pope has been a king. What claims to be an empire of souls has shown itself again and again as a frightful tyranny, employing torture and the stake to maintain itself. But the day will come when the separation will bear its fruits; when the domain of things spiritual will cease to call itself a "power," and will claim to be a "liberty." Proceeding from the bold affirmation of a man of the people, ushered into life in full view of the people, beloved and admired first of all by the people, Christianity was stamped by an original character which will never be effaced. It was the first triumph of the Revolution, the victory of popular sentiment, the advent of the simple in heart, the inauguration of what the common people can apprehend as right and true. Jesus thus opened that

breach in the aristocratic societies of antiquity through which all privilege must pass away.

The civil power, in fact, though innocent of the death of Jesus (it only countersigned the sentence, and that against its will), had to bear its heavy responsibility. In presiding at the scene of Calvary, the State gave itself the most deadly blow. A legend prevailed and became known to everybody, irreverent to every higher power, legend in which the constituted authorities play a hateful part, where the accused is in the right, while the judges and guardians of the peace are leagued against the truth. The story of the Passion, spread by innumerable popular images, and to the last degree seditious, represents the Roman eagles as sanctioning the most unjust of executions, soldiers as the executioners, and a provincial governor as lending it his authority. What a blow for all established powers! They have never fully recovered from it. How can they assume an air of infallibility towards the ignorant and weak, when they have on their conscience the monstrous blunder of Gethsemane ?1

1 This popular feeling was still alive in Brittany when I was a child. The armed police was there regarded - as the Jew was elsewhere with a certain pious repugnance; for that was the power which arrested Jesus!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

HIS WORK.

JESUS, as we see, never extended his action beyond the circle of Judaism. Though his sympathy for all outcasts of orthodoxy led him to admit Pagans into the kingdom of God, though he had more than once resided on pagan soil, and though once or twice we surprise him in kindly relations with unbelievers,1— it may be said that his life was passed entirely in the small and very restricted world in which he was born. In Greek or Roman countries he was never heard of; his name appears in profane authors not till a hundred years later, and then indirectly, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his doctrine, or persecutions suffered by his disciples. Even within the sphere of Judaism Jesus made no very durable impression. Philo, who died about the year 50, never suspected his existence. Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing at the close of the century, mentions his execution in a few lines, as an event of secondary importance; while in the enumeration of the sects of his time he omits the Christians altogether. Justus of Tiberias, an historian of the same period, does not

1 Matt. viii. 5-10; Luke vii. 1-10; John xii. 20-23: comp. Josephus, Antiq. XVIII. iii. 3.

2 Tacitus, Ann. xv. 45; Suetonius, Claudius, 25.

• Antiq. XVIII. iii. 3 (the passage is altered by some Christian hand). Antiq. XVIII. i.; Wars, II. viii.; Life, 2.

mention the name of Jesus.1 The Mishna, too, affords no trace of the new school. The passages in the two Gemaras in which the founder of Christianity is named were not composed earlier than the fourth or fifth century.2

The one essential work of Jesus was to gather round him a circle of disciples, whom he inspired with boundless affection, and in whose hearts he planted the germ of his doctrine. To have made himself beloved, "to the extent that after his death they ceased not to love him," was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries. His doctrine was a thing so little dogmatic, that he never thought of writing it or of having it written. Men became his disciples not by believing this or that, but by attaching themselves to his person and by loving him. A few sentences gathered from the memory of his hearers, and especially his type of character and the impression he had left, were what remained of him. Jesus is not a founder of dogmas, or a deviser of symbols; he is the world's guide into a new spirit. The least Christian of men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who, from the fourth century on, entangled Christianity in a labyrinth of puerile metaphysical debates; and, on the other hand, the scholastics of the Latin Middle Age, who sought to draw from the Gospel

1 Photius, Bibl. cod. 33.

2 Jerusalem Talmud, Sanhedrin, xiv. 16; Aboda zara, ii. 2; Schabbath, xiv. 4. Babylonian Talmud, Sanh. 43 a, 67 a; Schab. 104 b, 116 h: comp. Chagiga. 4 b; Gittin, 57 a, 90 a. The two Gemaras borrow the greater part of their data respecting Jesus from a burlesque and vulgar legend invented by the enemies of Christianity, without historical value: comp. Origen, Contra Celsum, i. 28, 32.

8 Josephus, Antiq. XVIII. iii. 3.

the thousands of articles of a colossal Summa. To cling to Jesus, with the kingdom of God in prospect, this is what at first was called being a Christian.

It will thus be understood how, by an exceptional destiny, pure Christianity still presents itself, after eighteen centuries, in the character of a universal and eternal religion. In truth, the religion of Jesus is, in some respects, the final religion. Christianity was the product of a perfectly spontaneous movement of the human soul. Emancipated at her birth from all dogmatic restraint, she struggled three hundred years for liberty of conscience; and now, in spite of the failures that have followed, she still reaps the fruits of her illustrious origin. To renew herself, she has only to return to the Gospel. The kingdom of God, as we conceive it, differs utterly from the supernatural apparition which early Christians hoped to see flash out in the clouds; but the sentiment which Jesus introduced into the world is surely ours. His perfect idealism is the loftiest rule of a pure and virtuous life. He created the heaven of pure souls, where are found what we seek for in vain on earth, the perfect nobility of the children of God, absolute holiness, complete cleansing from the stains of earth; in a word, liberty, which actual society discards as an impossibility, and which can find its fulness only in the domain of thought. Jesus is still the great Master of those who take refuge in this ideal paradise. He first proclaimed the sovereignty of the mind; he first said, at least through his acts, "My kingdom is not of this world." The foundation of true religion is verily his work. Since him, it only remains to unfold it and make it fruitful.