so consoling, in the teaching and the precepts of the sages?  Was that not truly a revelation in the midst of human morals; and if there be joined to it, what cannot be separated from it, the totality of such a life, spent in doing good, and that predication of about three years, crowned by the crucifixion, have we not a right to say that here was a ’new ideal of a soul perfectly heroic,’ which, under this half Jewish, Galilean form was set before all coming generations?

“Who talks to us of myth, of the realization, more or less instinctive or philosophical, of the human conscience reflecting itself in a being who only supplied the pretext and who hardly existed.  What! do you not feel the reality, the living, vibrating, bleeding, compassionate personality, which, independently of what belief and enthusiasm may have added, exists and throbs behind such words?  What more convincing demonstration of the beauty and truth of the entirely historic personage, Jesus, than the Sermon on the Mount?”

Alluding, then, to the denial of originality in the moral doctrines of Christianity, M. Sainte-Beuve, after citing from Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and others, passages wherein is recommended “charity toward the human race,” declares that all these examples and precepts, all that makes a fine body of social and philosophical morality, is not Christianity itself as beheld at its source and in its spirit.  “What characterizes,” he proceeds, “the discourse on the mount and the other sayings and parables of Jesus, is not the charity that relates to equity and strict justice, to which, with a sound heart and upright spirit, one attains; it is something unknown to flesh and blood and to simple reason, it is a kind of innocent and pure exaltation, freed from rule and superior to law, holily improvident, a stranger to all calculation, to all positive prevision, unreservedly reliant on Him who sees and knows all things, and as a last reward counting on the coming of that kingdom of God, the promise of which cannot fail:—­

    But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil:  but whosoever
    shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other
    also.

    And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy
    coat, let him have thy cloak also....

    Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow
    of thee turn not thou away....

    No man can serve two masters:  for either he will hate the one,
    and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
    despise the other.  Ye cannot serve God and mammon.

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.  Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?...

“Nothing of this is to be found in the ancient sages and moralists, not in Hesiod, nor in the maxims