CHAPTER XXVI.

JESUS IN THE TOMB.

It was about three o'clock in the afternoon, according to our manner of reckoning,[1] when Jesus expired. A Jewish law[2] forbade a corpse suspended on the cross to be left beyond the evening of the day of the execution. It is not probable that in the executions performed by the Romans this rule was observed; but as the next day was the Sabbath, and a Sabbath of peculiar solemnity, the Jews expressed to the Roman authorities[3] their desire that this holy day should not be profaned by such a spectacle.[4] Their request was granted; orders were given to hasten the death of the three condemned ones, and to remove them from the cross. The soldiers executed this order by applying to the two thieves a second punishment much more speedy than that of the cross, the crurifragium, or breaking of the legs,[5] the usual punishment of slaves and of prisoners of war. As to Jesus, they found him dead, and did not think it necessary to break his legs. But one of them, to remove all doubt as to the real death of the third victim, and to complete it, if any breath remained in him, pierced his side with a spear. They thought they saw water and blood flow, which was regarded as a sign of the cessation of life.

[Footnote 1: Matt. xxvii. 46; Mark xv. 37; Luke xxiii. 44. Comp. John xix. 14.]

[Footnote 2: Deut. xxi. 22, 23; Josh. viii. 29, x. 26, and following. Cf. Jos., B.J., IV. v. 2; Mishnah, Sanhedrim, vi. 5.]

[Footnote 3: John says, "To Pilate"; but that cannot be, for Mark (xv. 44, 45) states that at night Pilate was still ignorant of the death of Jesus.]

[Footnote 4: Compare Philo, In Flaccum, Sec. 10.]

[Footnote 5: There is no other example of the crurifragium applied after crucifixion. But often, in order to shorten the tortures of the sufferer, a finishing stroke was given him. See the passage from Ibn-Hischam, translated in the Zeitschrift fuer die Kunde des Morgenlandes, i. p. 99, 100.]

John, who professes to have seen it,[1] insists strongly on this circumstance. It is evident, in fact, that doubts arose as to the reality of the death of Jesus. A few hours of suspension on the cross appeared to persons accustomed to see crucifixions entirely insufficient to lead to such a result. They cited many instances of persons crucified, who, removed in time, had been brought to life again by powerful remedies.[2] Origen afterward thought it needful to invoke miracle in order to explain so sudden an end.[3] The same astonishment is found in the narrative of Mark.[4] To speak truly, the best guarantee that the historian possesses upon a point of this nature is the suspicious hatred of the enemies of Jesus. It is doubtful whether the Jews were at that time preoccupied with the fear that Jesus might pass for resuscitated; but, in any case, they must have made sure that he was really dead. Whatever, at certain periods, may have been the neglect of the ancients in all that belonged to legal proof and the strict conduct of affairs, we cannot but believe that those interested here had taken some precautions in this respect.[5]

[Footnote 1: John xix. 31-35.]

[Footnote 2: Herodotus, vii. 194; Jos., Vita, 75.]

[Footnote 3: In Matt. Comment. series, 140.]

[Footnote 4: Mark xv. 44, 45.]

[Footnote 5: The necessities of Christian controversy afterward led to the exaggeration of these precautions, especially when the Jews had systematically begun to maintain that the body of Jesus had been stolen. Matt. xxvii. 62, and following, xxviii. 11-15.]

According to the Roman custom, the corpse of Jesus ought to have remained suspended in order to become the prey of birds.[1] According to the Jewish law, it would have been removed in the evening, and deposited in the place of infamy set apart for the burial of those who were executed.[2] If Jesus had had for disciples only his poor Galileans, timid and without influence, the latter course would have been adopted. But we have seen that, in spite of his small success at Jerusalem, Jesus had gained the sympathy of some important persons who expected the kingdom of God, and who, without confessing themselves his disciples, were strongly attached to him. One of these persons, Joseph, of the small town of Arimathea (Ha-ramathaim[3]), went in the evening to ask the body from the procurator.[4] Joseph was a rich and honorable man, a member of the Sanhedrim. The Roman law, at this period, commanded, moreover, that the body of the person executed should be delivered to those who claimed it.[5] Pilate, who was ignorant of the circumstance of the crurifragium, was astonished that Jesus was so soon dead, and summoned the centurion who had superintended the execution, in order to know how this was. Pilate, after having received the assurances of the centurion, granted to Joseph the object of his request. The body probably had already been removed from the cross. They delivered it to Joseph, that he might do with it as he pleased.

[Footnote 1: Horace, Epistles, I. xvi. 48; Juvenal, xiv. 77; Lucan., vii. 544; Plautus, Miles glor., II. iv. 19; Artemidorus, Onir., ii. 53; Pliny, xxxvi. 24; Plutarch, Life of Cleomenes, 39; Petronius, Sat., cxi.-cxii.]

[Footnote 2: Mishnah, Sanhedrim, vi. 5.]

[Footnote 3: Probably identical with the ancient Rama of Samuel, in the tribe of Ephraim.]

[Footnote 4: Matt. xxvii. 57, and following; Mark xv. 42, and following; Luke xxiii. 50, and following; John xix. 38, and following.]

[Footnote 5: Dig. XLVIII. xxiv., De cadaveribus puntorum.]

Another secret friend, Nicodemus,[1] whom we have already seen employing his influence more than once in favor of Jesus, came forward at this moment. He arrived, bearing ample provision of the materials necessary for embalming. Joseph and Nicodemus interred Jesus according to the Jewish custom—that is to say, they wrapped him in a sheet with myrrh and aloes. The Galilean women were present,[2] and no doubt accompanied the scene with piercing cries and tears.

[Footnote 1: John xix. 39, and following.]

[Footnote 2: Matt. xxvii. 61; Mark xv. 47; Luke xxiii. 55.]

It was late, and all this was done in great haste. The place had not yet been chosen where the body would be finally deposited. The carrying of the body, moreover, might have been delayed to a late hour, and have involved a violation of the Sabbath—now the disciples still conscientiously observed the prescriptions of the Jewish law. A temporary interment was determined upon.[1] There was at hand, in the garden, a tomb recently dug out in the rock, which had never been used. It belonged, probably, to one of the believers.[2] The funeral caves, when they were destined for a single body, were composed of a small room, at the bottom of which the place for the body was marked by a trough or couch let into the wall, and surmounted by an arch.[3] As these caves were dug out of the sides of sloping rocks, they were entered by the floor; the door was shut by a stone very difficult to move. Jesus was deposited in the cave, and the stone was rolled to the door, as it was intended to return in order to give him a more complete burial. But the next day being a solemn Sabbath, the labor was postponed till the day following.[4]

[Footnote 1: John xix. 41, 42.]

[Footnote 2: One tradition (Matt. xxvii. 60) designates Joseph of Arimathea himself as owner of the cave.]

[Footnote 3: The cave which, at the period of Constantine, was considered as the tomb of Christ, was of this shape, as may be gathered from the description of Arculphus (in Mabillon, Acta SS. Ord. S. Bened., sec. iii., pars ii., p. 504), and from the vague traditions which still exist at Jerusalem among the Greek clergy on the state of the rock now concealed by the little chapel of the Holy Sepulchre. But the indications by which, under Constantine, it was sought to identify this tomb with that of Christ, were feeble or worthless (see especially Sozomen, H.E., ii. 1.) Even if we were to admit the position of Golgotha as nearly exact, the Holy Sepulchre would still have no very reliable character of authenticity. At all events, the aspect of the places has been totally modified.]

[Footnote 4: Luke xxiii. 56.]

The women retired after having carefully noticed how the body was laid. They employed the hours of the evening which remained to them in making new preparations for the embalming. On the Saturday all rested.[1]

[Footnote 1: Luke xxiii. 54-56.]

On the Sunday morning, the women, Mary Magdalen the first, came very early to the tomb.[1] The stone was displaced from the opening, and the body was no longer in the place where they had laid it. At the same time, the strangest rumors were spread in the Christian community. The cry, "He is risen!" quickly spread amongst the disciples. Love caused it to find ready credence everywhere. What had taken place? In treating of the history of the apostles we shall have to examine this point and to make inquiry into the origin of the legends relative to the resurrection. For the historian, the life of Jesus finishes with his last sigh. But such was the impression he had left in the heart of his disciples and of a few devoted women, that during some weeks more it was as if he were living and consoling them. Had his body been taken away,[2] or did enthusiasm, always credulous, create afterward the group of narratives by which it was sought to establish faith in the resurrection? In the absence of opposing documents this can never be ascertained. Let us say, however, that the strong imagination of Mary Magdalen[3] played an important part in this circumstance.[4] Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God!

[Footnote 1: Matt. xxviii. 1; Mark xvi. 1; Luke xxiv. 1; John xx. 1.]

[Footnote 2: See Matt. xxviii. 15; John xx. 2.]

[Footnote 3: She had been possessed by seven demons (Mark xvi. 9; Luke viii. 2.)]

[Footnote 4: This is obvious, especially in the ninth and following verses of chap. xvi. of Mark. These verses form a conclusion of the second Gospel, different from the conclusion at xvi. 1-8, with which many manuscripts terminate. In the fourth Gospel (xx. 1, 2, 11, and following, 18), Mary Magdalen is also the only original witness of the resurrection.]



CHAPTER XXVII.

FATE OF THE ENEMIES OF JESUS.

According to the calculation we adopt, the death of Jesus happened in the year 33 of our era.[1] It could not, at all events, be either before the year 29, the preaching of John and Jesus having commenced in the year 28,[2] or after the year 35, since in the year 36, and probably before the passover, Pilate and Kaiapha both lost their offices.[3] The death of Jesus appears, moreover, to have had no connection whatever with these two removals.[4] In his retirement, Pilate probably never dreamt for a moment of the forgotten episode, which was to transmit his pitiful renown to the most distant posterity. As to Kaiapha, he was succeeded by Jonathan, his brother-in-law, son of the same Hanan who had played the principal part in the trial of Jesus. The Sadducean family of Hanan retained the pontificate a long time, and more powerful than ever, continued to wage against the disciples and the family of Jesus, the implacable war which they had commenced against the Founder. Christianity, which owed to him the definitive act of its foundation, owed to him also its first martyrs. Hanan passed for one of the happiest men of his age.[5] He who was truly guilty of the death of Jesus ended his life full of honors and respect, never having doubted for an instant that he had rendered a great service to the nation. His sons continued to reign around the temple, kept down with difficulty by the procurators,[6] ofttimes dispensing with the consent of the latter in order to gratify their haughty and violent instincts.

[Footnote 1: The year 33 corresponds well with one of the data of the problem, namely, that the 14th of Nisan was a Friday. If we reject the year 33, in order to find a year which fulfils the above condition, we must at least go back to the year 29, or go forward to the year 36.]

[Footnote 2: Luke iii. 1.]

[Footnote 3: Jos., Ant., XVIII. iv. 2 and 3.]

[Footnote 4: The contrary assertion of Tertullian and Eusebius arises from a worthless apocryphal writing (See Philo, Cod. Apocr., N.T., p. 813, and following.) The suicide of Pilate (Eusebius, H.E., ii. 7; Chron. ad annl. Caii) appears also to be derived from legendary records.]

[Footnote 5: Jos., Ant., XX. ix. 1.]

[Footnote 6: Jos., l.c.]

Antipas and Herodias soon disappeared also from the political scene. Herod Agrippa having been raised to the dignity of king by Caligula, the jealous Herodias swore that she also would be queen. Pressed incessantly by this ambitious woman, who treated him as a coward, because he suffered a superior in his family, Antipas overcame his natural indolence, and went to Rome to solicit the title which his nephew had just obtained (the year 39 of our era). But the affair turned out in the worst possible manner. Injured in the eyes of the emperor by Herod Agrippa, Antipas was removed, and dragged out the rest of his life in exile at Lyons and in Spain. Herodias followed him in his misfortunes.[1] A hundred years, at least, were to elapse before the name of their obscure subject, now become deified, should appear in these remote countries to brand upon their tombs the murder of John the Baptist.

[Footnote 1: Jos., Ant., XVIII. vii. 1, 2; B.J., II. ix. 6.]

As to the wretched Judas of Kerioth, terrible legends were current about his death. It was maintained that he had bought a field in the neighborhood of Jerusalem with the price of his perfidy. There was, indeed, on the south of Mount Zion, a place named Hakeldama (the field of blood[1]). It was supposed that this was the property acquired by the traitor.[2] According to one tradition,[3] he killed himself. According to another, he had a fall in his field, in consequence of which his bowels gushed out.[4] According to others, he died of a kind of dropsy, accompanied by repulsive circumstances, which were regarded as a punishment from heaven.[5] The desire of showing in Judas the accomplishment of the menaces which the Psalmist pronounces against the perfidious friend[6] may have given rise to these legends. Perhaps, in the retirement of his field of Hakeldama, Judas led a quiet and obscure life; while his former friends conquered the world, and spread his infamy abroad. Perhaps, also, the terrible hatred which was concentrated on his head, drove him to violent acts, in which were seen the finger of heaven.

[Footnote 1: St. Jerome, De situ et nom. loc. hebr. at the word Acheldama. Eusebius (ibid.) says to the north. But the Itineraries confirm the reading of St. Jerome. The tradition which styles the necropolis situated at the foot of the valley of Hinnom Haceldama, dates back, at least, to the time of Constantine.]

[Footnote 2: Acts i. 18, 19. Matthew, or rather his interpolator, has here given a less satisfactory turn to the tradition, in order to connect with it the circumstance of a cemetery for strangers, which was found near there.]

[Footnote 3: Matt. xxvii. 5.]

[Footnote 4: Acts, l.c.; Papias, in Oecumenius, Enarr. in Act. Apost., ii., and in Fr. Muenter, Fragm. Patrum Graec. (Hafniae, 1788), fasc. i. p. 17, and following; Theophylactus, in Matt. xxvii. 5.]

[Footnote 5: Papias, in Muenter, l.c.; Theophylactus, l.c.]

[Footnote 6: Psalms lxix. and cix.]

The time of the great Christian revenge was, moreover, far distant. The new sect had no part whatever in the catastrophe which Judaism was soon to undergo. The synagogue did not understand till much later to what it exposed itself in practising laws of intolerance. The empire was certainly still further from suspecting that its future destroyer was born. During nearly three hundred years it pursued its path without suspecting that at its side principles were growing destined to subject the world to a complete transformation. At once theocratic and democratic, the idea thrown by Jesus into the world was, together with the invasion of the Germans, the most active cause of the dissolution of the empire of the Caesars. On the one hand, the right of all men to participate in the kingdom of God was proclaimed. On the other, religion was henceforth separated in principle from the state. The rights of conscience, withdrawn from political law, resulted in the constitution of a new power—the "spiritual power." This power has more than once belied its origin. For ages the bishops have been princes, and the Pope has been a king. The pretended empire of souls has shown itself at various times as a frightful tyranny, employing the rack and the stake in order to maintain itself. But the day will come when the separation will bear its fruits, when the domain of things spiritual will cease to be called a "power," that it may be called a "liberty." Sprung from the conscience of a man of the people, formed in the presence of the people, beloved and admired first by the people, Christianity was impressed with an original character which will never be effaced. It was the first triumph of revolution, the victory of the popular idea, the advent of the simple in heart, the inauguration of the beautiful as understood by the people. Jesus thus, in the aristocratic societies of antiquity, opened the breach through which all will pass.

The civil power, in fact, although innocent of the death of Jesus (it only countersigned the sentence, and even in spite of itself), ought to bear a great share of the responsibility. In presiding at the scene of Calvary, the state gave itself a serious blow. A legend full of all kinds of disrespect prevailed, and became universally known—a legend in which the constituted authorities played a hateful part, in which it was the accused that was right, and in which the judges and the guards were leagued against the truth. Seditious in the highest degree, the history of the Passion, spread by a thousand popular images, displayed the Roman eagles as sanctioning the most iniquitous of executions, soldiers executing it, and a prefect commanding it. What a blow for all established powers! They have never entirely recovered from it. How can they assume infallibility in respect to poor men, when they have on their conscience the great mistake of Gethsemane?[1]

[Footnote 1: This popular sentiment existed in Brittany in the time of my childhood. The gendarme was there regarded, like the Jew elsewhere, with a kind of pious aversion, for it was he who arrested Jesus!]



CHAPTER XXVIII.

ESSENTIAL CHARACTER OF THE WORK OF JESUS.

Jesus, it will be seen, limited his action entirely to the Jews. Although his sympathy for those despised by orthodoxy led him to admit pagans into the kingdom of God—although he had resided more than once in a pagan country, and once or twice we surprise him in kindly relations with unbelievers[1]—it may be said that his life was passed entirely in the very restricted world in which he was born. He was never heard of in Greek or Roman countries; his name appears only in profane authors of a hundred years later, and then in an indirect manner, in connection with seditious movements provoked by his doctrine, or persecutions of which his disciples were the object.[2] Even on Judaism, Jesus made no very durable impression. Philo, who died about the year 50, had not the slightest knowledge of him. Josephus, born in the year 37, and writing in the last years of the century, mentions his execution in a few lines,[3] as an event of secondary importance, and in the enumeration of the sects of his time, he omits the Christians altogether.[4] In the Mishnah, also, there is no trace of the new school; the passages in the two Gemaras in which the founder of Christianity is named, do not go further back than the fourth or fifth century.[5] The essential work of Jesus was to create around him a circle of disciples, whom he inspired with boundless affection, and amongst whom he deposited the germ of his doctrine. To have made himself beloved, "to the degree that after his death they ceased not to love him," was the great work of Jesus, and that which most struck his contemporaries.[6] His doctrine was so little dogmatic, that he never thought of writing it or of causing it to be written. Men did not become his disciples by believing this thing or that thing, but in being attached to his person and in loving him. A few sentences collected from memory, and especially the type of character he set forth, and the impression it had left, were what remained of him. Jesus was not a founder of dogmas, or a maker of creeds; he infused into the world a new spirit. The least Christian men were, on the one hand, the doctors of the Greek Church, who, beginning from the fourth century, entangled Christianity in a path of puerile metaphysical discussions, and, on the other, the scholastics of the Latin Middle Ages, who wished to draw from the Gospel the thousands of articles of a colossal system. To follow Jesus in expectation of the kingdom of God, was all that at first was implied by being Christian.

[Footnote 1: Matt. viii. 5, and following; Luke vii. 1, and following; John xii. 20, and following. Comp. Jos., Ant., XVIII. iii. 3.]

[Footnote 2: Tacitus, Ann., xv. 45; Suetonius, Claudius, 25.]

[Footnote 3: Ant., XVIII. iii. 3. This passage has been altered by a Christian hand.]

[Footnote 4: Ant., XVIII. i.; B.J., II. viii.; Vita, 2.]

[Footnote 5: Talm. of Jerusalem, Sanhedrim, xiv. 16; Aboda zara, ii. 2; Shabbath, xiv. 4; Talm. of Babylon, Sanhedrim, 43 a, 67 a; Shabbath, 104 b, 116 b. Comp. Chagigah, 4 b; Gittin, 57 a, 90 a. The two Gemaras derive the greater part of their data respecting Jesus from a burlesque and obscene legend, invented by the adversaries of Christianity, and of no historical value.]

[Footnote 6: Jos., Ant., XVIII. iii. 3.]

It will thus be understood how, by an exceptional destiny, pure Christianity still preserves, after eighteen centuries, the character of a universal and eternal religion. It is, in fact, because the religion of Jesus is in some respects the final religion. Produced by a perfectly spontaneous movement of souls, freed at its birth from all dogmatic restraint, having struggled three hundred years for liberty of conscience, Christianity, in spite of its failures, still reaps the results of its glorious origin. To renew itself, it has but to return to the Gospel. The kingdom of God, as we conceive it, differs notably from the supernatural apparition which the first Christians hoped to see appear in the clouds. But the sentiment introduced by Jesus into the world is indeed ours. His perfect idealism is the highest rule of the unblemished and virtuous life. He has created the heaven of pure souls, where is found what we ask for in vain on earth, the perfect nobility of the children of God, absolute purity, the total removal of the stains of the world; in fine, liberty, which society excludes as an impossibility, and which exists in all its amplitude only in the domain of thought. The great Master of those who take refuge in this ideal kingdom of God is still Jesus. He was the first to proclaim the royalty of the mind; the first to say, at least by his actions, "My kingdom is not of this world." The foundation of true religion is indeed his work: after him, all that remains is to develop it and render it fruitful.

"Christianity" has thus become almost a synonym of "religion." All that is done outside of this great and good Christian tradition is barren. Jesus gave religion to humanity, as Socrates gave it philosophy, and Aristotle science. There was philosophy before Socrates and science before Aristotle. Since Socrates and since Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress; but all has been built upon the foundation which they laid. In the same way, before Jesus, religious thought had passed through many revolutions; since Jesus, it has made great conquests: but no one has improved, and no one will improve upon the essential principle Jesus has created; he has fixed forever the idea of pure worship. The religion of Jesus in this sense is not limited. The Church has had its epochs and its phases; it has shut itself up in creeds which are, or will be but temporary: but Jesus has founded the absolute religion, excluding nothing, and determining nothing unless it be the spirit. His creeds are not fixed dogmas, but images susceptible of indefinite interpretations. We should seek in vain for a theological proposition in the Gospel. All confessions of faith are travesties of the idea of Jesus, just as the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming Aristotle the sole master of a completed science, perverted the thought of Aristotle. Aristotle, if he had been present in the debates of the schools, would have repudiated this narrow doctrine; he would have been of the party of progressive science against the routine which shielded itself under his authority; he would have applauded his opponents. In the same way, if Jesus were to return among us, he would recognize as disciples, not those who pretend to enclose him entirely in a few catechismal phrases, but those who labor to carry on his work. The eternal glory, in all great things, is to have laid the first stone. It may be that in the "Physics," and in the "Meteorology" of modern times, we may not discover a word of the treatises of Aristotle which bear these titles; but Aristotle remains no less the founder of natural science. Whatever may be the transformations of dogma, Jesus will ever be the creator of the pure spirit of religion; the Sermon on the Mount will never be surpassed. Whatever revolution takes place will not prevent us attaching ourselves in religion to the grand intellectual and moral line at the head of which shines the name of Jesus. In this sense we are Christians, even when we separate ourselves on almost all points from the Christian tradition which has preceded us.

And this great foundation was indeed the personal work of Jesus. In order to make himself adored to this degree, he must have been adorable. Love is not enkindled except by an object worthy of it, and we should know nothing of Jesus, if it were not for the passion he inspired in those about him, which compels us still to affirm that he was great and pure. The faith, the enthusiasm, the constancy of the first Christian generation is not explicable, except by supposing at the origin of the whole movement, a man of surpassing greatness. At the sight of the marvellous creations of the ages of faith, two impressions equally fatal to good historical criticism arise in the mind. On the one hand we are led to think these creations too impersonal; we attribute to a collective action, that which has often been the work of one powerful will, and of one superior mind. On the other hand, we refuse to see men like ourselves in the authors of those extraordinary movements which have decided the fate of humanity. Let us have a larger idea of the powers which Nature conceals in her bosom. Our civilizations, governed by minute restrictions, cannot give us any idea of the power of man at periods in which the originality of each one had a freer field wherein to develop itself. Let us imagine a recluse dwelling in the mountains near our capitals, coming out from time to time in order to present himself at the palaces of sovereigns, compelling the sentinels to stand aside, and, with an imperious tone, announcing to kings the approach of revolutions of which he had been the promoter. The very idea provokes a smile. Such, however, was Elias; but Elias the Tishbite, in our days, would not be able to pass the gate of the Tuileries. The preaching of Jesus, and his free activity in Galilee, do not deviate less completely from the social conditions to which we are accustomed. Free from our polished conventionalities, exempt from the uniform education which refines us, but which so greatly dwarfs our individuality, these mighty souls carried a surprising energy into action. They appear to us like the giants of an heroic age, which could not have been real. Profound error! Those men were our brothers; they were of our stature, felt and thought as we do. But the breath of God was free in them; with us, it is restrained by the iron bonds of a mean society, and condemned to an irremediable mediocrity.

Let us place, then, the person of Jesus at the highest summit of human greatness. Let us not be misled by exaggerated doubts in the presence of a legend which keeps us always in a superhuman world. The life of Francis d'Assisi is also but a tissue of miracles. Has any one, however, doubted of the existence of Francis d'Assisi, and of the part played by him? Let us say no more that the glory of the foundation of Christianity belongs to the multitude of the first Christians, and not to him whom legend has deified. The inequality of men is much more marked in the East than with us. It is not rare to see arise there, in the midst of a general atmosphere of wickedness, characters whose greatness astonishes us. So far from Jesus having been created by his disciples, he appeared in everything as superior to his disciples. The latter, with the exception of St. Paul and St. John, were men without either invention or genius. St. Paul himself bears no comparison with Jesus, and as to St. John, I shall show hereafter, that the part he played, though very elevated in one sense, was far from being in all respects irreproachable. Hence the immense superiority of the Gospels among the writings of the New Testament. Hence the painful fall we experience in passing from the history of Jesus to that of the apostles. The evangelists themselves, who have bequeathed us the image of Jesus, are so much beneath him of whom they speak, that they constantly disfigure him, from their inability to attain to his height. Their writings are full of errors and misconceptions. We feel in each line a discourse of divine beauty, transcribed by narrators who do not understand it, and who substitute their own ideas for those which they have only half understood. On the whole, the character of Jesus, far from having been embellished by his biographers, has been lowered by them. Criticism, in order to find what he was, needs to discard a series of misconceptions, arising from the inferiority of the disciples. These painted him as they understood him, and often in thinking to raise him, they have in reality lowered him.

I know that our modern ideas have been offended more than once in this legend, conceived by another race, under another sky, and in the midst of other social wants. There are virtues which, in some respects, are more conformable to our taste. The virtuous and gentle Marcus Aurelius, the humble and gentle Spinoza, not having believed in miracles, have been free from some errors that Jesus shared. Spinoza, in his profound obscurity, had an advantage which Jesus did not seek. By our extreme delicacy in the use of means of conviction, by our absolute sincerity and our disinterested love of the pure idea, we have founded—all we who have devoted our lives to science—a new ideal of morality. But the judgment of general history ought not to be restricted to considerations of personal merit. Marcus Aurelius and his noble teachers have had no permanent influence on the world. Marcus Aurelius left behind him delightful books, an execrable son, and a decaying nation. Jesus remains an inexhaustible principle of moral regeneration for humanity. Philosophy does not suffice for the multitude. They must have sanctity. An Apollonius of Tyana, with his miraculous legend, is necessarily more successful than a Socrates with his cold reason. "Socrates," it was said, "leaves men on the earth, Apollonius transports them to heaven; Socrates is but a sage, Apollonius is a god."[1] Religion, so far, has not existed without a share of asceticism, of piety, and of the marvellous. When it was wished, after the Antonines, to make a religion of philosophy, it was requisite to transform the philosophers into saints, to write the "Edifying Life" of Pythagoras or Plotinus, to attribute to them a legend, virtues of abstinence, contemplation, and supernatural powers, without which neither credence nor authority were found in that age.

[Footnote 1: Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, i. 2, vii. 11, viii. 7; Unapius, Lives of the Sophists, pages 454, 500 (edition Didot).]

Preserve us, then, from mutilating history in order to satisfy our petty susceptibilities! Which of us, pigmies as we are, could do what the extravagant Francis d'Assisi, or the hysterical saint Theresa, has done? Let medicine have names to express these grand errors of human nature; let it maintain that genius is a disease of the brain; let it see, in a certain delicacy of morality, the commencement of consumption; let it class enthusiasm and love as nervous accidents—it matters little. The terms healthy and diseased are entirely relative. Who would not prefer to be diseased like Pascal, rather than healthy like the common herd? The narrow ideas which are spread in our times respecting madness, mislead our historical judgments in the most serious manner, in questions of this kind. A state in which a man says things of which he is not conscious, in which thought is produced without the summons and control of the will, exposes him to being confined as a lunatic. Formerly this was called prophecy and inspiration. The most beautiful things in the world are done in a state of fever; every great creation involves a breach of equilibrium, a violent state of the being which draws it forth.

We acknowledge, indeed, that Christianity is too complex to have been the work of a single man. In one sense, entire humanity has co-operated therein. There is no one so shut in, as not to receive some influence from without. The history of the human mind is full of strange coincidences, which cause very remote portions of the human species, without any communication with each other, to arrive at the same time at almost identical ideas and imaginations. In the thirteenth century, the Latins, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Jews, and the Mussulmans, adopted scholasticism, and very nearly the same scholasticism from York to Samarcand; in the fourteenth century every one in Italy, Persia, and India, yielded to the taste for mystical allegory; in the sixteenth, art was developed in a very similar manner in Italy, at Mount Athos, and at the court of the Great Moguls, without St. Thomas, Barhebraeus, the Rabbis of Narbonne, or the Motecallemin of Bagdad, having known each other, without Dante and Petrarch having seen any sofi, without any pupil of the schools of Perouse or of Florence having been at Delhi. We should say there are great moral influences running through the world like epidemics, without distinction of frontier and of race. The interchange of ideas in the human species does not take place only by books or by direct instruction. Jesus was ignorant of the very name of Buddha, of Zoroaster, and of Plato; he had read no Greek book, no Buddhist Sudra; nevertheless, there was in him more than one element, which, without his suspecting it, came from Buddhism, Parseeism, or from the Greek wisdom. All this was done through secret channels and by that kind of sympathy which exists among the various portions of humanity. The great man, on the one hand, receives everything from his age; on the other, he governs his age. To show that the religion founded by Jesus was the natural consequence of that which had gone before, does not diminish its excellence; but only proves that it had a reason for its existence that it was legitimate, that is to say, conformable to the instinct and wants of the heart in a given age.

Is it more just to say that Jesus owes all to Judaism, and that his greatness is only that of the Jewish people? No one is more disposed than myself to place high this unique people, whose particular gift seems to have been to contain in its midst the extremes of good and evil. No doubt, Jesus proceeded from Judaism; but he proceeded from it as Socrates proceeded from the schools of the Sophists, as Luther proceeded from the Middle Ages, as Lamennais from Catholicism, as Rousseau from the eighteenth century. A man is of his age and his race even when he reacts against his age and his race. Far from Jesus having continued Judaism, he represents the rupture with the Jewish spirit. The general direction of Christianity after him does not permit the supposition that his idea in this respect could lead to any misunderstanding. The general march of Christianity has been to remove itself more and more from Judaism. It will become perfect in returning to Jesus, but certainly not in returning to Judaism. The great originality of the founder remains then undiminished; his glory admits no legitimate sharer.

Doubtless, circumstances much aided the success of this marvellous revolution; but circumstances only second that which is just and true. Each branch of the development of humanity has its privileged epoch, in which it attains perfection by a sort of spontaneous instinct, and without effort. No labor of reflection would succeed in producing afterward the masterpieces which Nature creates at those moments by inspired geniuses. That which the golden age of Greece was for arts and literature, the age of Jesus was for religion. Jewish society exhibited the most extraordinary moral and intellectual state which the human species has ever passed through. It was truly one of those divine hours in which the sublime is produced by combinations of a thousand hidden forces, in which great souls find a flood of admiration and sympathy to sustain them. The world, delivered from the very narrow tyranny of small municipal republics, enjoyed great liberty. Roman despotism did not make itself felt in a disastrous manner until much later, and it was, moreover, always less oppressive in those distant provinces than in the centre of the empire. Our petty preventive interferences (far more destructive than death to things of the spirit) did not exist. Jesus, during three years, could lead a life which, in our societies, would have brought him twenty times before the magistrates. Our laws upon the illegal exercise of medicine would alone have sufficed to cut short his career. The unbelieving dynasty of the Herods, on the other hand, occupied itself little with religious movements; under the Asmoneans, Jesus would probably have been arrested at his first step. An innovator, in such a state of society, only risked death, and death is a gain to those who labor for the future. Imagine Jesus reduced to bear the burden of his divinity until his sixtieth or seventieth year, losing his celestial fire, wearing out little by little under the burden of an unparalleled mission! Everything favors those who have a special destiny; they become glorious by a sort of invincible impulse and command of fate.

This sublime person, who each day still presides over the destiny of the world, we may call divine, not in the sense that Jesus has absorbed all the divine, or has been adequate to it (to employ an expression of the schoolmen), but in the sense that Jesus is the one who has caused his fellow-men to make the greatest step toward the divine. Mankind in its totality offers an assemblage of low beings, selfish, and superior to the animal only in that its selfishness is more reflective. From the midst of this uniform mediocrity, there are pillars that rise toward the sky, and bear witness to a nobler destiny. Jesus is the highest of these pillars which show to man whence he comes, and whither he ought to tend. In him was condensed all that is good and elevated in our nature. He was not sinless; he has conquered the same passions that we combat; no angel of God comforted him, except his good conscience; no Satan tempted him, except that which each one bears in his heart. In the same way that many of his great qualities are lost to us, through the fault of his disciples, it is also probable that many of his faults have been concealed. But never has any one so much as he made the interests of humanity predominate in his life over the littlenesses of self-love. Unreservedly devoted to his mission, he subordinated everything to it to such a degree that, toward the end of his life, the universe no longer existed for him. It was by this access of heroic will that he conquered heaven. There never was a man, Cakya-Mouni perhaps excepted, who has to this degree trampled under foot, family, the joys of this world, and all temporal care. Jesus only lived for his Father and the divine mission which he believed himself destined to fulfill.

As to us, eternal children, powerless as we are, we who labor without reaping, and who will never see the fruit of that which we have sown, let us bow before these demi-gods. They were able to do that which we cannot do: to create, to affirm, to act. Will great originality be born again, or will the world content itself henceforth by following the ways opened by the bold creators of the ancient ages? We know not. But whatever may be the unexpected phenomena of the future, Jesus will not be surpassed. His worship will constantly renew its youth, the tale of his life will cause ceaseless tears, his sufferings will soften the best hearts; all the ages will proclaim that among the sons of men, there is none born who is greater than Jesus.

[THE END.]



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ADAMS, HENRY The Education of Henry Adams 76 AIKEN, CONRAD A Comprehensive Anthology of American Poetry 101 AIKEN, CONRAD 20th-Century American Poetry 127 ANDERSON, SHERWOOD Winesburg, Ohio 104 AQUINAS, ST. THOMAS Introduction to St. Thomas Aquinas 259 ARISTOTLE Introduction to Aristotle 248 ARISTOTLE Politics 228 BALZAC Droll Stories 193 BALZAC Pere Goriot and Eugenie Grandet 245 BEERBOHM, MAX Zuleika Dobson 116 BELLAMY, EDWARD Looking Backward 22 BENNETT, ARNOLD The Old Wives' Tale 184 BERGSON, HENRI Creative Evolution 231 BIERCE, AMBROSE In the Midst of Life 133 BOCCACCIO The Decameron 71 BRONTE, CHARLOTTE Jane Eyre 64 BRONTE, EMILY Wuthering Heights 106 BUCK, PEARL The Good Earth 15 BURK, JOHN N. 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SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM Histories, 3 } Histories, Poems, 3A } complete, 2 vols. SHEEAN, VINCENT Personal History 32 SMOLLETT, TOBIAS Humphry Clinker 159 SNOW, EDGAR Red Star Over China 126 SPINOZA The Philosophy of Spinoza 60 STEINBECK, JOHN In Dubious Battle 115 STEINBECK, JOHN Of Mice and Men 29 STEINBECK, JOHN The Grapes of Wrath 148 STEINBECK, JOHN Tortilla Flat 216 STENDHAL The Red and the Black 157 STERNE, LAURENCE Tristram Shandy 147 STEWART, GEORGE R. Storm 254 STOKER, BRAM Dracula 31 STONE, IRVING Lust for Life 11 STOWE, HARRIET BEECHER Uncle Tom's Cabin 261 STRACHEY, LYTTON Eminent Victorians 212 SUETONIUS Lives of the Twelve Caesars 188 SWIFT, JONATHAN Gulliver's Travels, A Tale of a Tub, The Battle of the Books 100 SWINBURNE, CHARLES Poems 23 SYMONDS, JOHN A. The Life of Michelangelo 49 TACITUS The Complete Works of 222 TCHEKOV, ANTON Short Stories 50 TCHEKOV, ANTON Sea Gull, Cherry Orchard, Three Sisters, etc. 171 THACKERAY, WILLIAM Henry Esmond 80 THACKERAY, WILLIAM Vanity Fair 131 THOMPSON, FRANCIS Complete Poems 38 THOREAU, HENRY DAVID Walden and Other Writings 155 THUCYDIDES The Complete Writings of 58 TOLSTOY, LEO Anna Karenina 37 TOMLINSON, H.M. The Sea and the Jungle 99 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY Barchester Towers and The Warden 41 TROLLOPE, ANTHONY The Eustace Diamonds 251 TURGENEV, IVAN Fathers and Sons 21 VAN LOON, HENDRIK W. Ancient Man 105 VEBLEN, THORSTEIN The Theory of the Leisure Class 63 VIRGIL'S WORKS Including The Aeneid, Eclogues, and Georgics 75 VOLTAIRE Candide 47 WALPOLE, HUGH Fortitude 178 WALTON, IZAAK The Compleat Angler 26 WEBB, MARY Precious Bane 219 WELLS, H.G. Tono Bungay 197 WHARTON, EDITH The Age of Innocence 229 WHITMAN, WALT Leaves of Grass 97 WILDE, OSCAR Dorian Gray, De Profundis 125 WILDE, OSCAR Poems and Fairy Tales 84 WILDE, OSCAR The Plays of Oscar Wilde 83 WOOLF, VIRGINIA Mrs. Dalloway 96 WOOLF, VIRGINIA To the Lighthouse 217 WRIGHT, RICHARD Native Son 221 YEATS, W.B. Irish Fairy and Folk Tales 44 YOUNG, G.F. The Medici 179 ZOLA, EMILE Nana 142 ZWEIG, STEFAN Amok (In Collected German Stories 108)



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