And let us not say that this is a benevolent interpretation, imagined in order to clear the honor of our great master from the cruel contradiction inflicted on his dreams by reality.  No, no:  this true kingdom of God, this kingdom of the spirit, which makes each one king and priest; this kingdom which, like the grain of mustard-seed, has become a tree which overshadows the world, and amidst whose branches the birds have their nests, was understood, wished for, and founded by Jesus.  By the side of the false, cold, and impossible idea of an ostentatious advent, he conceived the real city of God, the true “palingenesis,” the Sermon on the Mount, the apotheosis of the weak, the love of the people, regard for the poor, and the re-establishment of all that is humble, true, and simple.  This re-establishment he has depicted as an incomparable artist, by features which will last eternally.  Each of us owes that which is best in himself to him.  Let us pardon him his hope of a vain apocalypse, and of a second coming in great triumph upon the clouds of heaven.  Perhaps these were the errors of others rather than his own; and if it be true that he himself shared the general illusion, what matters it, since his dream rendered him strong against death, and sustained him in a struggle, to which he might otherwise have been unequal?

We must, then, attach several meanings to the divine city conceived by Jesus.  If his only thought had been that the end of time was near, and that we must prepare for it, he would not have surpassed John the Baptist.  To renounce a world ready to crumble, to detach one’s self little by little from the present life, and to aspire to the kingdom about to come, would have formed the gist of his preaching.  The teaching of Jesus had always a much larger scope.  He proposed to himself to create a new state of humanity, and not merely to prepare the end of that which was in existence.  Elias or Jeremiah, reappearing in order to prepare men for the supreme crisis, would not have preached as he did.  This is so true that this morality, attributed to the latter days, is found to be the eternal morality, that which has saved humanity.  Jesus himself in many cases makes use of modes of speech which do not accord with the apocalyptic theory.  He often declares that the kingdom of God has already commenced; that every man bears it within himself; and can, if he be worthy, partake of it; that each one silently creates this kingdom by the true conversion of the heart.[1] The kingdom of God at such times is only the highest form of good.[2] A better order of things than that which exists, the reign of justice, which the faithful, according to their ability, ought to help in establishing; or, again, the liberty of the soul, something analogous to the Buddhist “deliverance,” the fruit of the soul’s separation from matter and absorption in the divine essence.  These truths, which are purely abstract to us, were living realities to Jesus.  Everything in his mind was concrete and substantial.  Jesus, of all men, believed most thoroughly in the reality of the ideal.