in the twenty or thirty years which followed the death of Jesus, and imposed upon his biography the peculiarities of an ideal legend.  Death adds perfection to the most perfect man; it frees him from all defect in the eyes of those who have loved him.  With the wish to paint the Master, there was also the desire to explain him.  Many anecdotes were conceived to prove that in him the prophecies regarded as Messianic had had their accomplishment.  But this procedure, of which we must not deny the importance, would not suffice to explain everything.  No Jewish work of the time gives a series of prophecies exactly declaring what the Messiah should accomplish.  Many Messianic allusions quoted by the evangelists are so subtle, so indirect, that one cannot believe they all responded to a generally admitted doctrine.  Sometimes they reasoned thus:  “The Messiah ought to do such a thing; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore Jesus has done such a thing.”  At other times, by an inverse process, it was said:  “Such a thing has happened to Jesus; now Jesus is the Messiah; therefore such a thing was to happen to the Messiah."[1] Too simple explanations are always false when analyzing those profound creations of popular sentiment which baffle all systems by their fullness and infinite variety.  It is scarcely necessary to say that, with such documents, in order to present only what is indisputable, we must limit ourselves to general features.  In almost all ancient histories, even in those which are much less legendary than these, details open up innumerable doubts.  When we have two accounts of the same fact, it is extremely rare that the two accounts agree.  Is not this a reason for anticipating many difficulties when we have but one?  We may say that amongst the anecdotes, the discourses, the celebrated sayings which have been given us by the historians, there is not one strictly authentic.  Were there stenographers to fix these fleeting words?  Was there an analyst always present to note the gestures, the manners, the sentiments of the actors?  Let any one endeavor to get at the truth as to the way in which such or such contemporary fact has happened; he will not succeed.  Two accounts of the same event given by different eye-witnesses differ essentially.  Must we, therefore, reject all the coloring of the narratives, and limit ourselves to the bare facts only?  That would be to suppress history.  Certainly, I think that if we except certain short and almost mnemonic axioms, none of the discourses reported by Matthew are textual; even our stenographic reports are scarcely so.  I freely admit that the admirable account of the Passion contains many trifling inaccuracies.  Would it, however, be writing the history of Jesus to omit those sermons which give to us in such a vivid manner the character of his discourses, and to limit ourselves to saying, with Josephus and Tacitus, “that he was put to death by the order of Pilate at the instigation of the priests”?  That would be, in my opinion, a kind of inexactitude worse than that to which we are exposed in admitting the details supplied by the texts.  These details are not true to the letter, but they are true with a superior truth, they are more true than the naked truth, in the sense that they are truth rendered expressive and articulate—­truth idealized.