Jesus were never after separated.  To possess nothing was the truly evangelical state; mendicancy became a virtue, a holy condition.  The great Umbrian movement of the thirteenth century, which, among all the attempts at religious construction, most resembles the Galilean movement, took place entirely in the name of poverty.  Francis d’Assisi, the man who, more than any other, by his exquisite goodness, by his delicate, pure, and tender intercourse with universal life, most resembled Jesus, was a poor man.  The mendicant orders, the innumerable communistic sects of the middle ages (Pauvres de Lyon, Begards, Bons-Hommes, Fratricelles, Humilies, Pauvres evangeliques, &c.) grouped under the banner of the “Everlasting Gospel,” pretended to be, and in fact were, the true disciples of Jesus.  But even in this case the most impracticable dreams of the new religion were fruitful in results.  Pious mendicity, so impatiently borne by our industrial and well-organized communities, was in its day, and in a suitable climate, full of charm.  It offered to a multitude of mild and contemplative souls the only condition suited to them.  To have made poverty an object of love and desire, to have raised the beggar to the altar, and to have sanctified the coat of the poor man, was a master-stroke which political economy may not appreciate, but in the presence of which the true moralist cannot remain indifferent.  Humanity, in order to bear its burdens, needs to believe that it is not paid entirely by wages.  The greatest service which can be rendered to it is to repeat often that it lives not by bread alone.

[Footnote 1:  Epiph., Adv.  Haer., xix., xxix., and xxx., especially xxix. 9.]

Like all great men, Jesus loved the people, and felt himself at home with them.  The Gospel, in his idea, is made for the poor; it is to them he brings the glad tidings of salvation.[1] All the despised ones of orthodox Judaism were his favorites.  Love of the people, and pity for its weakness (the sentiment of the democratic chief, who feels the spirit of the multitude live in him, and recognize him as its natural interpreter), shine forth at each moment in his acts and discourses.[2]

[Footnote 1:  Matt. xi. 5; Luke vi. 20, 21.]

[Footnote 2:  Matt. ix. 36; Mark vi. 34.]

The chosen flock presented, in fact, a very mixed character, and one likely to astonish rigorous moralists.  It counted in its fold men with whom a Jew, respecting himself, would not have associated.[1] Perhaps Jesus found in this society, unrestrained by ordinary rules, more mind and heart than in a pedantic and formal middle-class, proud of its apparent morality.  The Pharisees, exaggerating the Mosaic prescriptions, had come to believe themselves defiled by contact with men less strict than themselves; in their meals they almost rivalled the puerile distinctions of caste in India.  Despising these miserable aberrations