of trepidation, and those habits of servile humility, which rendered the Middle Ages so inferior to ancient and modern times.[1] A profound change had also taken place in the mode of regarding the coming of Christ.  When it was first announced to mankind that the end of the world was about to come, like the infant which receives death with a smile, it experienced the greatest access of joy that it has ever felt.  But in growing old, the world became attached to life.  The day of grace, so long expected by the simple souls of Galilee, became to these iron ages a day of wrath:  Dies irae, dies illa! But, even in the midst of barbarism, the idea of the kingdom of God continued fruitful.  In spite of the feudal church, of sects, and of religious orders, holy persons continued to protest, in the name of the Gospel, against the iniquity of the world.  Even in our days, troubled days, in which Jesus has no more authentic followers than those who seem to deny him, the dreams of an ideal organization of society, which have so much analogy with the aspirations of the primitive Christian sects, are only in one sense the blossoming of the same idea.  They are one of the branches of that immense tree in which germinates all thought of a future, and of which the “kingdom of God” will be eternally the root and stem.  All the social revolutions of humanity will be grafted on this phrase.  But, tainted by a coarse materialism, and aspiring to the impossible, that is to say, to found universal happiness upon political and economical measures, the “socialist” attempts of our time will remain unfruitful until they take as their rule the true spirit of Jesus, I mean absolute idealism—­the principle that, in order to possess the world, we must renounce it.

[Footnote 1:  See, for example, the prologue of Gregory of Tours to his Histoire Ecclesiastique des Francs, and the numerous documents of the first half of the Middle Ages, beginning by the formula, “On the approach of the night of the world....”]

The phrase, “kingdom of God,” expresses also, very happily, the want which the soul experiences of a supplementary destiny, of a compensation for the present life.  Those who do not accept the definition of man as a compound of two substances, and who regard the Deistical dogma of the immortality of the soul as in contradiction with physiology, love to fall back upon the hope of a final reparation, which under an unknown form shall satisfy the wants of the heart of man.  Who knows if the highest term of progress after millions of ages may not evoke the absolute conscience of the universe, and in this conscience the awakening of all that has lived?  A sleep of a million of years is not longer than the sleep of an hour.  St. Paul, on this hypothesis, was right in saying, In ictu oculi![1] It is certain that moral and virtuous humanity will have its reward, that one day the ideas of the poor but honest man will judge the world, and that on that day the ideal figure of Jesus will be the confusion of the frivolous who have not believed in virtue, and of the selfish who have not been able to attain to it.  The favorite phrase of Jesus continues, therefore, full of an eternal beauty.  A kind of exalted divination seems to have maintained it in a vague sublimity, embracing at the same time various orders of truths.