The great empires which succeeded each other in Western Asia annihilated all the hopes of the Jewish race for a terrestial kingdom, and cast it back on religious dreams, which it cherished with a kind of sombre passion.  The establishment of the Roman empire exalted men’s imaginations, and the great era of peace on which the world was entering gave birth to illimitable hopes.  This confused medley of dreams found at length an interpretation in the peerless man to whom the universal conscience has decreed the title of the Son of God, and that with justice, since he gave religion an impetus greater than that which any other man has been capable of giving—­an impetus with which, in all probability, no further advance will be comparable.

YOUTH AND EDUCATION

Jesus was born at Nazareth, a small town in Galilee, which before his time was not known to fame.  The precise date of his birth is unknown.  It took place in the reign of Augustus, probably some years before the year one of the era which all civilised peoples date from the day of his birth.  Jesus came from the ranks of the common folk.  His father, Joseph, and his mother, Mary, were people in humble circumstances, artisans living by their handiwork in the state, so usual in the East, which is neither ease nor poverty.  The family was somewhat large.  Jesus had brothers and sisters who seem to have been younger than he.  They all remained obscure.  The four men who were called his brothers, and among whom one at least, James, became of great importance in the early years of the development of Christianity, were his cousins-german.  The sisters of Jesus were married at Nazareth, and there he spent the early years of his youth.

The town must have presented the poverty-stricken aspect still characteristic of villages in the East.  We see to-day the streets where Jesus played as a child in the stony paths or little lanes which separate the dwellings from each other.  No doubt the house of Joseph much resembled these poor domiciles, lighted only by the doorway, serving at once as workshop, kitchen, and bedroom, and having for furniture a mat, some cushions on the ground, one or two clay pots, and a painted chest.  But the surroundings are charming, and no place in the world could be so well adapted for dreams of perfect happiness.  If we ascend to the plateau, swept by a perpetual breeze, above the highest houses, the landscape is magnificent.  An enchanted circle, cradle of the Kingdom of God, was for years the horizon of Jesus, and indeed during his whole life he went but little beyond these, the familiar bounds of his childhood.