We acknowledge, indeed, that Christianity is too complex to have been the work of a single man.  In one sense, entire humanity has co-operated therein.  There is no one so shut in, as not to receive some influence from without.  The history of the human mind is full of strange coincidences, which cause very remote portions of the human species, without any communication with each other, to arrive at the same time at almost identical ideas and imaginations.  In the thirteenth century, the Latins, the Greeks, the Syrians, the Jews, and the Mussulmans, adopted scholasticism, and very nearly the same scholasticism from York to Samarcand; in the fourteenth century every one in Italy, Persia, and India, yielded to the taste for mystical allegory; in the sixteenth, art was developed in a very similar manner in Italy, at Mount Athos, and at the court of the Great Moguls, without St. Thomas, Barhebraeus, the Rabbis of Narbonne, or the Motecallemin of Bagdad, having known each other, without Dante and Petrarch having seen any sofi, without any pupil of the schools of Perouse or of Florence having been at Delhi.  We should say there are great moral influences running through the world like epidemics, without distinction of frontier and of race.  The interchange of ideas in the human species does not take place only by books or by direct instruction.  Jesus was ignorant of the very name of Buddha, of Zoroaster, and of Plato; he had read no Greek book, no Buddhist Sudra; nevertheless, there was in him more than one element, which, without his suspecting it, came from Buddhism, Parseeism, or from the Greek wisdom.  All this was done through secret channels and by that kind of sympathy which exists among the various portions of humanity.  The great man, on the one hand, receives everything from his age; on the other, he governs his age.  To show that the religion founded by Jesus was the natural consequence of that which had gone before, does not diminish its excellence; but only proves that it had a reason for its existence that it was legitimate, that is to say, conformable to the instinct and wants of the heart in a given age.

Is it more just to say that Jesus owes all to Judaism, and that his greatness is only that of the Jewish people?  No one is more disposed than myself to place high this unique people, whose particular gift seems to have been to contain in its midst the extremes of good and evil.  No doubt, Jesus proceeded from Judaism; but he proceeded from it as Socrates proceeded from the schools of the Sophists, as Luther proceeded from the Middle Ages, as Lamennais from Catholicism, as Rousseau from the eighteenth century.  A man is of his age and his race even when he reacts against his age and his race.  Far from Jesus having continued Judaism, he represents the rupture with the Jewish spirit.  The general direction of Christianity after him does not permit the supposition that his idea in this respect could lead to any misunderstanding.  The general march of Christianity has been to remove itself more and more from Judaism.  It will become perfect in returning to Jesus, but certainly not in returning to Judaism.  The great originality of the founder remains then undiminished; his glory admits no legitimate sharer.