[Footnote 1:  Matt. vi. 10, 33; Mark xii. 34; Luke xi. 2, xii. 31, xvii. 20, 21, and following.]

[Footnote 2:  See especially Mark xii. 34.]

In accepting the Utopias of his time and his race, Jesus thus was able to make high truths of them, thanks to the fruitful misconceptions of their import.  His kingdom of God was no doubt the approaching apocalypse, which was about to be unfolded in the heavens.  But it was still, and probably above all the kingdom of the soul, founded on liberty and on the filial sentiment which the virtuous man feels when resting on the bosom of his Father.  It was a pure religion, without forms, without temple, and without priest; it was the moral judgment of the world, delegated to the conscience of the just man, and to the arm of the people.  This is what was destined to live; this is what has lived.  When, at the end of a century of vain expectation, the materialistic hope of a near end of the world was exhausted, the true kingdom of God became apparent.  Accommodating explanations threw a veil over the material kingdom, which was then seen to be incapable of realization.  The Apocalypse of John, the chief canonical book of the New Testament,[1] being too formally tied to the idea of an immediate catastrophe, became of secondary importance, was held to be unintelligible, tortured in a thousand ways and almost rejected.  At least, its accomplishment was adjourned to an indefinite future.  Some poor benighted ones who, in a fully enlightened age, still preserved the hopes of the first disciples, became heretics (Ebionites, Millenarians), lost in the shallows of Christianity.  Mankind had passed to another kingdom of God.  The degree of truth contained in the thought of Jesus had prevailed over the chimera which obscured it.

[Footnote 1:  Justin, Dial. cum Tryph., 81.]

Let us not, however, despise this chimera, which has been the thick rind of the sacred fruit on which we live.  This fantastic kingdom of heaven, this endless pursuit after a city of God, which has constantly preoccupied Christianity during its long career, has been the principle of that great instinct of futurity which has animated all reformers, persistent believers in the Apocalypse, from Joachim of Flora down to the Protestant sectary of our days.  This impotent effort to establish a perfect society has been the source of the extraordinary tension which has always made the true Christian an athlete struggling against the existing order of things.  The idea of the “kingdom of God,” and the Apocalypse, which is the complete image of it, are thus, in a sense, the highest and most poetic expressions of human progress.  But they have necessarily given rise to great errors.  The end of the world, suspended as a perpetual menace over mankind, was, by the periodical panics which it caused during centuries, a great hindrance to all secular development.  Society being no longer certain of its existence, contracted therefrom a degree