in amiable pleasantries.  Thus he journeyed through Galilee in the midst of continual festivities.  When he entered a house, it was considered a joy and a blessing.  Children and women adored him.  The children, indeed, were like a young guard about him, for the inauguration of his innocent kingship, and gave him little ovations.  It was childhood, in fact, in its divine spontaneity, in its simple bewilderment of joy, that took possession of the earth.

How long did this intoxication last?  We cannot tell.  But whether it filled years or months, the dream was so beautiful that humanity has lived upon it ever since.  Happy he to whom it has been granted to behold with his own eyes this divine blossoming, and to share, if but for a day, the incomparable illusion!  But yet more happy, Jesus would tell us, shall he be who, by the uprightness of his will, and the poetry of his soul, shall be able to create anew in his own heart the true Kingdom of God!

THE PRIEST IN THE PATH

Nearly every year Jesus went to Jerusalem for the feast of the Passover.  It was, it appears, in the year 31 that the most important of these visits took place.  Jesus felt that to play a leading part he must leave Galilee and attack Judaism in its stronghold, Jerusalem.  There the little Galilean community was far from feeling at home.  Jerusalem was a city of pedantry, acrimony, disputation, hatreds, and pettiness of mind.  Its fanaticism was extreme.  All the religious discussions of the Jewish schools, all the canonical instruction, even the legal business and civil actions—­in a word, all form of national activity, were concentrated in the temple.  The Romans refrained from entering the sactuary; the surveillance of the Temple was in the hands of the Jews.  It was in the Temple that Jesus spent his days during his sojourn at Jerusalem, and all that he saw aroused his aversion.  These old Jewish institutions displeased him, and the necessity of conforming to them gave him pain.  He who gave forgiveness to all men, provided they loved him, could find nothing congenial in vain disputations and obsolete sacrifices, and apparently he brought from Jerusalem one idea thenceforth rooted in his mind—­that there was no understanding possible between him and the ancient Jewish religion.  He no longer took his stand as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism.  In other words, Jesus is no longer a Jew.  He is, in the highest degree, a revolutionary; he calls all men to a worship founded solely on the ground of their being children of God.  Love of God, charity, and mutual forgiveness—­in these consisted his whole law.  Nothing could be less sacerdotal.  It was on his return from Jerusalem, as he passed near Shechem, and when talking with a Samaritan woman, that Jesus gave utterance to the saying upon which will rest the edifice of eternal religion—­Believe me, the hour cometh when neither in this mountain nor in Jerusalem shall ye worship the Father ... but the hour cometh, and now is, when the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth.  On the day when he said these words he was truly Son of God.