end of the Mediterrancan; and of all the millions of humanity only in the million or two of his Chosen People.  I say at once that, considering their history, and the universal decline of the Mysteries, and the gathering darkness of the age, there is nothing surprising in their attitude.  Much oppression, many conquests,—­never accepted by themselves,—­had driven them in on themselves and kept their racial self-consciousness at a perpetual boiling-point; and it all went into their religion, which compensated them with unearthly dignities for the indignities they suffered on earth .... them.... the Chosen People of the Lord!  It bred in them scorn of the Gentiles, for which there was no solvent in the Roman polity, the Roman citizenship, the Roman peace.—­There must have been always noble protest-ants among them.  The common people,—­as the picture in the Gospels shows,—­were ready enough to fraternize humanly with Gentiles and Romans; but the fact remains that at the time Judaism gave birth to Christianity, this narrow fierce antagonism to all other religions was the official attitude of the Jewish church.  It was, perhaps, the darkest moment in Jewish spiritual history; and it was the moment chosen by a Teacher as that in which he should be born a Jew.

The story in the Gospels cannot, I suppose, be taken as au pied de lettre historical; but no doubt it gives a general picture which is true enough.  And the picture it gives shows the Jewish proletariat in very favorable contrast with the officials heads of the church and state.  They, the common people, received the Teacher well; to them, he was a gracious figure whom they came in multitudes to hear.  He was in fierce opposition to the hierarchic aristocracy,—­the “scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” as he called them:  the body that nourished the tradition of exclusiveness and intolerance.  He preached pure ethics to the people, and they loved him for it.  He gathered round him disciples,—­men eager to learn from him that which it would have been ridiculous to have tried to teach the mob:  the Secret Wisdom, without which to keep them sweet, ethics become sentimentalism, and philosophy a cold corpse.  It is a law in the Schools of this Wisdom that seven years of training are necessary before the disciple can reach that grade of insight and self-mastery which will enable him in turn to become a Teacher:  seven years at the very least.  Within four years of the beginning of his mission, before, in the nature of things, one single disciple could have been more than half-trained, the hierarchic aristrocracy had had this Teacher crucified.